Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

Curves

The gudwife just popped into Blog Station Alpha to notify me she is off to Curves, her place of exercise. I was typing a comment on Random Nuclear Strikes, my fave blog, so I tossed an air-smooch over my shoulder and kept pounding the keyboard.

Then I had a twinge of remorse, and I actually turned to look at the gudwife. She was wearing a nifty new workout outfit, very stylish in the new capri-pants look. I'd noted several of these in the laundry room lately.

The gym outfit didn't strike me as anything you'd really want to exert yourself in though (reminded me more of AFTER-workout togs), so I asked her what happens if she were to work up a sweat (she doesn't even carry a do-rag). Her reply was that women don't sweat (I'd heard this before, and knew where it was heading, a comparison of men to ANIMALS which DO sweat, such as PIGS), so I shut up.

So, she pays about $30/month to belong to this little gym, which has no sports courts of any kind, no steam rooms, no sauna, not even SHOWERS!

A "gym" without showers!

It's a new world, and I'm not sure I understand it.

Discovery Channel's "Wild West Tech"

The occasional TV program, which comments on the introduction of technologies and what that did for life in the Old West, had a sterling example last night in the area of gunfighting. Several sterling examples, actually, but the best one involved a sheriff who went to arrest an outlaw known as "The Human Wildcat, because he was so quick, violent and unpredictable"

The fight started in a saloon (or house, I couldn't be sure), and was unremarkable as most of these gunfights go, with inaccurate shooting leaving both parties untouched. The sheriff decided to unass the saloon, where he was outnumbered, and continue the fight outside, where he had a horse and a rifle waiting ("Your pistol is there to get you to your rifle", remember that nugget of wisdom?). The outlaw pursued the sheriff, trying to end the fight on HIS terms. He was shooting an early Colt open-frame percussion revolver, and these had the tendency to shed their spent percussion caps down into the space between the cylinder and the frame when recocked, thereby jamming the cylinder. The solution for this was to raise the revolver to the vertical when recocking, allowing the spent cap to fall away from the cyclinder and out of the gun. The delay in the outlaw's shooting allowed by this ritual allowed the sheriff to get to his horse, retrieve his Henry rifle, and kill the outlaw at long range.

A handgun MAY start and end a gunfight, but a rifle ALWAYS ends a gunfight.

Carl Levin, idiot, MI

Yesterday, Michigan Senator Carl Levin called for Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Maliki to step down. This kind of ugly interference in a foreign nation's internal politics is what earned the US the sobriquet "The Ugly Americans" a generation ago.

Carl Levin has been in the Senate for a generation or so, and seems to have outlived his usefulness. Astute readers will recall that Levin's main job was selling his influence to the Detroit automakers and having stupid anti-competition laws passed to try to bolster US auto sales, at a time when the US made the worst cars in the world, cars that no one wanted to buy.

I asked Carl Levin for help when I was a citizen of his state and had been RIFed by the USAF, had tried and failed to get my former civilian job back. He didn't even give me the courtesy of a reply to my call and letter.

So now Carl Levin, part of the Moonbat Anti-Bush League, sometimes known as the (D)emocrats, tries to make a counterpoint to Bush's speech yesterday in Canada where Bush supported Al-Maliki, but also warned the Iraqi PM that our patience is wearing thin.

Then it hit me: Levin just cut the nose off his own face. Michigan hosts the largest Iraqi-American contingent living anywhere in the US.

What Levin just did was perfectly characteristic: he just told citizens of his state, AGAIN, to piss up a rope.

Michiganders, you can do better than Carl Levin. You don't have to elect a GOP pol, but do yourselves a favor and dump the idiot Levin at your next opportunity.

Fox News Storm Screamers, the sequel

As I noted here, Fox News tried to scream up a few more viewers by lying about the weather forecast for Texas two days ago. If you're very generous, you might have forgiven them then, because there was a very tiny possibility that Hurricane Dean could take a hard right turn and hit the Texas coast. Not likely, but possible.

However, today they outdid themselves. Hurricane Dean, which made landfall hundreds of miles south of Texas, did NOT destroy the oil field in the Bay of Campeche as Fox stongly hinted it would, hasn't even killed a single victim in Mexico, is a non-event, but Fox News is determined to get some mileage out of the underachieving hurricane anyway. This time, a different news babe seriously intones (not a quote, but a close approximation), "Hurricane Dean will not affect the US, as it travels across Mexico, but heavy rains associated with it could be devastating to Texas."

Hmmm, the general upper air pattern does NOT look favorable for that, so I turned immediately to the Weather Channel, which was just cranking up it's Tropical Update. The forecaster at the Weather Channel immediately put the lie to Fox News by declaring that moisture from the remnants of Dean is too far south to bother Texas.

There must be one news director at Fox who is determined to bump viewership with these weather lies.

Fox News: Fair, Balanced, Inaccurate. To say the least. The management there needs to ferret out this lying chump and show him or her the door, and apologize to viewers for the now-obvious deceptions.

Diet Report

The Great Diabetes Diet of 2007 is well underweigh. After 3 weeks, I have lost 14 pounds, and driven the blood sugar numbers down from highs over 200 three weeks ago to a high of 134 in the last two weeks, and an average for the last two weeks of 100! The annoyance of measuring everything and eating 4 or 5 mini-meals is overcome by the results I have achieved.

Yesterday, I put it to the test by walking home, uphill, 2 1/2 miles, in a driving rain, from my auto repair shop. I made the walk in 43 minutes and didn't faint, despite consuming only 300 calories before I set out and 1300 the previous day.

I'm going to try some mountain biking now, just a couple miles at first, but hopefully increase that rapidly. The unknown quantity will be my lumbar spine, which ALWAYS lets me know when it has been abused. I'm going to start beating Mr. Spine into shape with the Williams Exercises, effective immediately.

I can now fit into my BDUs again (I haven't since 1996), and will shrink out of them, hopefully, in about another month. I have to use suspenders on my current trousers as they look like hand-me-downs when I wear them with a belt. I think my new "fightin' weight" is going to be 175, down from 201 (which is down from 220 a year ago). I'm now at 187, half-way to the 175 goal. I will have to put on 12-15# of lean muscle mass, so it really means I have to get down to 160, then gun back up to 175.

I can see these goals now, couldn't a month ago.

PTSD and the Iraq war

Something tells me that the eventual tally of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from th Iraq war could top that of the Vietnam war, on a per-man basis.

I have a theory.

In the 'Nam, most everyone had three forms of stress relief available: booze, pot and beaver (bald beavers!). When you finally got some some time off, from humping the trail and/or fighting in the jungle, or flying the unfriendly skies of North Vietnam, you usually went to the Class Six (liquor) store, got a bottle of Jim Beam for $0.90 (that's right, ninety cents) and proceeded to get wasted. Or you went just outside the main gate and scored a shopping bag full of good Thai pot for $3.00. Potheads didn't drink as much, because they had to find a secure place, and clean that bagful of pot, removing stems and seeds, and cleaning was a labor-intense job and you couldn't be wasted doing it.

After the first few shots, or that first joint, you were ready to go "downtown" to the whorehouse district, and survey the merchandise (or just go to your favorite cathouse and wait for your favorite girl to be free). This wasn't expensive, so many GIs took advantage of the "local economy".

Of course, that meant exposing yourself to the local STDs, also. In Thailand, where I flew most of my war sorties, the military and the locals came to an understanding. The local political chief was paid a bribe to have doctors administer simple tests (which the US military medical lab processed, probably) to all the girls every week, each girl being registered by the government (no, none of them ever said to me "I'm a government agent, GI, even my twat is registered") and had a number which YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO WRITE DOWN AND RETAIN, EITHER BEFORE OR AFTER THE ACTION. Then, the numbers of the girls with STDs were posted on the bulletin board or even read aloud on the base (post) radio station. This was known as the "numbers game" or even "the lottery". If your number came up, you were screwed, if your Top Kick or the doctor you had to see for the shots were hard-ass. It was a UCMJ (Universal Code of Military Justice) violation to abuse your own body, since it belonged to Uncle Sam. You could get an Article 15 (Captain's Mast for Navy types) and lose a stripe or get fined up to a month's pay, but few did. You could say that it was the screwing you got for the screwing you'd had.

So, there was stress relief for the troops. According to my sources, none of that is available in the Iraq theater of war.

Gonna be some FUBAR heads on some of those boys and girls when they come home...or maybe I'm wrong, and the military has taught them how to manage their stress better than they taught us (with zero instruction).

Time will tell.

Fox News storm screamers

And the Ridiculous Storm Screamer Award goes to...Fox News! At about 0900 PDT, their news babe teased the Hurricane Dean story with "headed for Texas", just as NOAA was plotting (and broadcasting) an ever-more southerly track that will actually take the hurricane well south of Cancun, then across the fattest part of the Yucatan Peninsula, into the Bay of Campeche, and ashore hundreds of miles south of the border at Browsville, TX (the border city). Brownsville might get wet, but they get a lot of rain there and know how to handle it.

You are all idiots at Fox News. Every time you cry "wolf" like this, people believe the real warnings even less, and YOU idiots are then responsible for un-necessary deaths and injuries.

Boneheads!

Monday Boobage

OK, OK, they ain't often bare, so sue me. There ain't many bigger, though. You can sue me again because they are fake. Better get 20 lawyers, she's had at least that may enhancement surgeries.

Check her out

Hmmmm. a fighter pilot's wet dream, right, HunDriver John? Navigators, of course, being the more mathematical types, believe that anything more than a cubic mouthful is a waste...

Sunday Humor

A female patrol officer arrests a man for drunk driving, and advises him in the usual manner, "Sir, you have the right to remain silent, and anything you say can and will be held against you."

The drunk replies, "Tits"

*******************************************************************************

Two blondes are doing their good deed by working for Habitat for Humanity building a new house. One blonde is nailing up siding, and the other blonde comes over to watch her.

The nailer reaches in to her pouch for a nail, looks at it, throws it over her shoulder, reaches in again, gets another nail, puts it up on the siding board and drives it. This goes on for a while, and finally the second blonde can't take it any longer. She asks,"Why are you throwing away every other nail?"

The first blonde replies, "Well, DUH, half of them have the heads on the wrong end and you can't use them."

The other blonde comes back, "You moron, those nails are for the other side of the house!"

One blonde joke, two punchlines. Doesn't get better than that.

News from the front

Some recent news from units at war in Baghdad: the hajis have a new type of hand grenade that they just started using against mounted patrols. It is an armor-piercing type, that has a direction-stabilizing parachute on it, so that it's shaped charge always points towards the target thrown at. They have already taken out HumVees, even the latest uparmored models.

No one makes these except Russia, and in that part of the world, Iran is their biggest customer.

IRG depot-bombing mission required, IMHO.

Hat Tip to Roxy.