Dispatches since 2005
The journal
Announcements, new editions, travel, diving, cooking and the working life of a novelist — 3,175 entries, all of them here in full.
March 8, 2008 · 2,171 words
Tests
I spent Friday at the karate school, doing stuff. Doing lots of stuff. It was the quarterly organizational meeting, so the school was full of school owners and managers from New Mexico, Arizona, and elsewhere. So we started out with all the self-defense techniques, of which I have heard there are 749 (I haven’t counted
Read entry →March 6, 2008 · 162 words
War for the New Century
So. Heard of Henry Okah?Probably not. But he’s invented a new paradigm for waging war, straight out of a science fiction novel.The guy puts his army together from another country by cellphone, as if it were a flash mob. He has his own merchant marine to carry off his hijacked bunker crude, his own arms […]
Read entry →March 5, 2008 · 100 words
Brassieres of the Ancient Vikings!
According to the Scotsman, a recent archaeological dig has turned up evidence that Viking women wore metal brassieres. Apparently this ingenious technological advance was suppressed for a millennium or so by the Church. Archaeologist Annika Larsson sez: “The garments had an aesthetic lingerie effect as well as providin
Read entry →March 5, 2008 · 70 words
Lei Feng Day
To all you Maoists out there, have a happy Lei Feng Day!For all you Brits, I hope you had a good Mothering Sunday!For those of you in Western Australia, have a great Labour Day! (Those of you in Eastern Australia have to wait till October, apparently.)Those of us in the States will have to make […]
Read entry →March 4, 2008 · 603 words
Turkey: Two Revolutions
Our friends in Turkey are living through interesting times.Firstly, members of the “Deep State” have been arrested for, among other things, conspiring to assassinate the Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk. Supposedly this killing was the beginning of a series of bombings and assassinations that would lead to a mili
Read entry →March 3, 2008 · 1,124 words
Lots of Zeroes
So— the Iraq War has cost three trillion dollars so far. That’s $3,000,000,000,000.00, if I have counted all the zeroes correctly.That’s the conclusion reached by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and Linda Bilmes, in their new book. Some interesting factoids:. . . they have produced a picture of
Read entry →February 28, 2008 · 353 words
If You’re Air Force, You Can’t Read This!
The U.S. Air Force’s new Cyber Command has blocked servicemen from viewing this blog. Though I can sympathize with the brass in their quest to prevent their people from viewing my morale-sapping essays, they didn’t stop with just this blog. No sir. They’ve blocked any blog that has “blog” in its URL, which would mean [
Read entry →February 26, 2008 · 135 words
Battle Company
Did anyone see Elizabeth Rubin’s wonderful, heartbreaking article in this week’s New York Times Magazine? It deals with the Airborne fighting in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, trying to do a job that has already defeated the Marines and the 10th Mountain Division. It’s got every element of military tragedy you can imag
Read entry →February 26, 2008 · 473 words
Eagle vs. Crane
No, this isn’t a post about competing kung-fu styles. This is about the natural world. On Sunday morning we awoke to the sound of cranes passing overhead. Thousands of them. It was the day they’d all picked to migrate north. When we got outside to begin our yearly task of burning last summer’s dried-out weeds, [&hellip
Read entry →February 23, 2008 · 361 words
Cloacal Obsession
My current audio book is The Religion by Tim Willocks, a big sprawling action/romance set in and around the siege of Malta in 1565. If you haven’t read it, you might think of it as a sort of overlarge Bernard Cornwell book with a better vocabulary and a wider fictional range. There’s a lot of […]
Read entry →February 23, 2008 · 53 words
Leningrad Cowboys
Red Army Chorus + rock band Leningrad Cowboys + folk dancers in costume + big Tom Jones hit = OMFG!!!The Red Army Chorus has come a far distance since they mainly sang stuff like “Katyusha.” (A song so great they named a rocket launcher after it.) (courtesy of Greg Frost)
Read entry →