On the radio again

Between returning from vacation last week and killing / reanimating my entire website, it’s been a busy week. But now there is icing on the cake of busy-ness.

I am guest hosting the Glen Biegel Half Hour Show on KBYR AM700 tonight from 5:30-6 pm AKST ,that’s 9:30-10pm EST.  That’s also 0230-0300 GMT…I won’t be hurt if my UK listeners wait for the podcast version.

Then I will be doing Hometown Talk on the same station tomorrow morning from 0800-1000 am (Noon-2 EST, 1700-1900 GMT). that one will longer therefore funner.

I promise to be witty, intelligent and not pick my nose in front of the camera.  Tune in via the web at www.kbyr.com and click the ‘listen live” link or check out the podcast archive on the site in a few days and let me know what you think.

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Retribution of a sort

Monday I posted a blog about terrorists getting their due. Then it would seem that the terrorists got back at me.

Half an hour before going home for the day my wife calls and says the washing machine is not spinning, can I take a look at it. I take the look. Then I grab some tools and proceed to figure out what the problem is. It has to do with the brakes, they won’t release the drum. No problem I just take the motor out, pull out the gear box, reseat the brake pads and replace whatever part is bad right?

Well, in an ideal world that is what I would have done. In the real world I loosened the screws on the gear box and it suddenly dropped two inches then the brakes fully deployed and locked in the cylinder. I could not get it out, or in, or even jiggle it in place. I was two hours into the repair and my bum shoulder was killing me. At that point calling in a professional would have ended up costing more than a new washing machine. And I did not want to explain how it had ended up in so many pieces and then deal with the inevitable sneering and “You should’ve called us from the beginning, we could have fixed it in half an hour.

Depression set in. In the back of my mind I think of the harsh words I had for Megrahi and his ilk and wonder if they had something to do with the death of my washing machine. For what may well be the first time in my adult life, I gave up and said “Forget it!”

I determined to just replace the whole machine the next day. After a night of sleep and nearly forgetting the turmoil and depression of the night before I go to Home Depot and get a really good deal on a nice cherry red washer and dryer set with no interest financing and free delivery and setup. I’m in a good mood again.

Then I go to dinner at one of my favourite restaurants with a friend last night. Apparently the Libyans were not happy that I fixed the machine the night before and they decided to poison my dinner with salmonella or some such vile evil. By the time I get home I am starting to experience waves of dizziness and freezing chills coupled with a compelling urge to stay very near the toilet all night. At one point the dizziness over came me and between episodes of liquid rapidly evacuating all intestinally connected portals on my body I passed out for at least ten minutes. When I awoke blood was smeared across my hand and nose from what I assume to be a spontaneous medieval bleeding performed by my subconscious.

I spent the night in a daze of quasi-hallucinogenic dreams wondering if I should wake my wife to take me to the hospital but choosing instead to continue my conversation with the blue rabbit and the pancake bush.

By this morning I pulled out of the haze and now weakly sit in my comfy chair debating on eating this delicious smelling squash gruel my wife made to help settle my stomach.

I don’t know though…she doesn’t look Libyan…but maybe they’ve replaced her.

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Mickey Moss Chapter 4

Basil’s Tweet Book, Mickey Moss, has been updated. Check it out at @basilstweetbook

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Mickey Moss Chapter 4

Basil’s Tweet Book, Mickey Moss, has been updated. Check it out at @basilstweetbook

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Lockerbie/Pan Am 103 bombing mastermind still lives

Despite being released from a Scottish prison on a “mercy ruling” due to terminal cancer that was supposed to have claimed his life within three months Abdelbaset al Megrahi, sent to his home country of Lybia for what was supposed to be his final few weeks of life, is still alive.

For that matter, he is not only still alive, but has ‘miraculously’ improved and recovered enough to be discharged from the hospital and sent home to his family. While the families of those 270 souls on Pan Am flight 103 still mourn their dead more than twenty years later.

This really pisses me off for several reasons.

1. The dude was convicted of planning and supervising the execution of the actions that took the lives of 270 Britons, Americans, and folks from many other nations in 1988. He is a murderer. Murderers should not go free, ever.

2. He is a coward. He and his people rejoiced in their victory over an undefended airliner full of unarmed civilians half of whom were women and children.

3. He will do it again if the chance arises. Of this I have no proof, it is just a gut feeling. But it is a gut feeling based on facts of what is known about terrorist cowards.

And the government and nation of Lybia is complicit with Megrahi for they, in spite of Ghadaffi’s promises that he would be dealt with in a ‘low key fashion’, gave the murderer a hero’s welcome when he was returned to Lybia in August.

There is at least this one consolation from the prophet Isaiah ( CH.5:22-24 paraphrased)

       Woe to those … who acquit the guilty for a bribe, 
       but deny justice to the innocent.

       Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw
       and as dry grass sinks down in the flames,
       so their roots will decay
       and their flowers blow away like dust…
    

Let it be known the prophet’s curse fall on Megrahi and those who follow his path, not by the hand of man, but by the hand of God himself.

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Mickey Moss, Chapter 3

Online now on @basilstweetbook , check out the Twitter novel experiment.

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An Experiment: Tweetbooks

I am trying out a new experiment in literature. A tweet  book.

That’s right.  Tweetbook. As in a book done Twitter style.

I am going to see whether people would actually read a short serialized story in tweets. Everyday I will feed 15 - 20 tweets into BasilsTweetBook until it is all on the page.

Please take part in the project and give it a whirl. Just go to Twitter and follow  @basilstweetbook and see how the story unfolds.

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Liberty is to Faction as Air is to Fire

 

Freedom and free thinking. Two things on which America was founded. The ability to pursue life, liberty and happiness all of our days.

But what is freedom? What does it mean to be free? Does it mean doing whatever you want whenever you want to? Is it some sort of system where everyone makes their own path as long as we don’t hurt anyone else? The sad truth is that such a freedom cannot and will not ever exist. Because each different person has a different idea of what happiness might be. Therefore what is one man’s happiness may well be another man’s horror.

No, such total freedom would only lead to anarchy of a sort not seen since the dark ages. For there are those whose idea of freedom involves taking everything you have and spreading it around to their friends…or just keeping it for themselves. I am sure the Viking raiders of the 800’s or the Muslim invaders of the 1200’s or the Mongol Horde of the 1400’s, or the Communist revolutionaries of the 1900’s all felt they were advancing their version of happiness, their ideal of freedom. But to those on whom it was being advanced, those on whom the single ideology of a foreign invader was being forced, it was most certainly not a recipe for joy. With their lands laid waste and their peoples slaughtered or enslaved, the other man’s idea of happiness was nothing like that which they had hoped to pursue. The destruction came when the other side was too weak to defend its ideals, or its borders. And those conquerors in time found themselves on the receiving end of the same fate they dealt to the previous inhabitants.

Whether you are conservative or liberal, always be aware that it is not in the destruction of the other side that you will find your peace. Happiness will not be discovered in enforcing your ideal way of living on your neighbors. It is rather in the balance of ideas, the place in between where the best of both sides come together not to make a compromise, but to make a society based on the what is best of both worlds.

There will always be at least two sides to every issue, usually many more sides than that. Be careful not to invest yourself too deeply in one side to the destruction or damage of the other. For it is in the balance of opposites that a boat stays afloat.

But there is a type of joy that every person can experience in a same way, and at the same time. The joy we find in being with people we love, in a place we call home, a place we feel at peace.

Of course if the other simply refuses to meet on common ground, or worse they just plain lied when they said they wanted to parley then the old warrior’s credo comes into play.

Pray for Peace, Prepare for War and only fight to win.

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Success!

My nerdiness / geekhood has been confirmed! I spent nearly twenty hours figuring out/debugging my websites Drupal php files to find out why i could not upload pictures to my website blog. And in the end, it was a combination of resetting lines of code and flipping on a switch i didn’t know existed until I flipped it.

I love it when things work the way they’re supposed to.

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New Windows Live Writer Thingy

i am trying out this new windows live writer doo-hicky to see if it

works for both my website and my blogger site. If it does, great if not …well then I will have to keep trying until I can find something that does work.

On way or another, it will fit.

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Letter from a Recon Marine

A great eye opener to what our warriors are doing in the War on Terror.
This is a letter I saw posted in the LinkedIn USMC mailing list posted by http://www.gatheringofeagles.org/ . Go to their site and support the troops.


From a Recon Marine in Afghanistan

From the Sand Pit. It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard, cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains, along the Dar 'yoi Pomir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but them scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware. We bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.

It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.

I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit into his face and plunge my nickel-plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. But you know me, I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs.

Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtuns, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns... actual, living Huns. They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines..They are sneaky and ruthless, and when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.

They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go) and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.

OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.
Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here, because you have no idea what we're doing, and really, you don't want to know. We are your military, and we are doing what you sent us here to do.

You wanna help? Buy Bonds, America.

Saucy Jack
Recon Marine in Afghanistan

Semper Fi"Freedom is not free... but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share."

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Has email been killed by IM'ing?

The Wall Street Journal posted an article last week stating that Email is moving towards the grave. Replaced by instant messaging (IM) and services like Twitter and Facebook, even cell phone texting. While IM is certainly growing in popularity, especially among the younger folks out there, I do not necessarily agree that email will leave the world anytime soon anymore than I believe eating oatmeal with a spoon will be replaced by sucking it out of a toothpaste tube. The latter is certainly faster, but the spoon method is definitely more enjoyable.

I have used email since 1989, two years before the internet went public. I still use it all day, everyday. Best for business as it is a great way to keep a digital record of forms and correspondence. It'll be a long time before it is gone, just because of the easy archival of emails, and the attachment of documents, images, etc.

I also use Twitter, and Facebook almost everyday. They are a great way to chat and have conversation. I recently got back into MSN messenger (I usually shorten the pronounciation to 'messin')because relatives in far off countries wanted to video chat for free rather than call long distance for a $1 a minute. Once in a while I use Myspace as well.

With all of these different applications I have decided to create a single application that will combine MSN with Myspace, Twitter, and Facebook into one easy interface on my blackberry.

I am calling the new app

"MessinWithMyTwitFace"

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Aging toward deliciousness

I felt perpetually 25 until my oldest graduated high school last year. At the same time I realized that my middle son was having serious discussions about marine biology and my youngest knows a surprising amount about musculo-skeletal anatomy and uses words like endocrine and genetic anomolies in sentences without blinking.

I am still only 4.1 decades old, but suddenly feel as if I have grown up. I'm no longer a kid. For that matter, if my oldest suffers a foolish indiscretion I could easily become a grandparent.The thing is, having completed the first third I relish the idea of the next third of my life.

Yeah, I'm going to live to 120. And like the anticipation of enjoying a fine aged wine, I'm really looking foward to it.

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