perfidy

Schizophrenic helicopter pilot Murdoc and I share alot of things: our love for fresh-cut tulips; a respect for raw, naked force; appreciation for the smell of diesel fuel; and the friendly staff of a certain Bangkok "spa". All good stuff, and well worth sharing.

One bad thing we share though is the ignorance of journalists regarding military matters. And like Murdoc, it's usually enough to set my teeth on edge and maybe bitch for a minute, but that's about it. It doesn't help when reporters are actually in the field with operational units and they still get it wrong, mixing up unit designations or vehicle models, but it rarely detracts from the overall point.

That's where the Zarqawi tape comes in, and Jamie McIntyre's effort to make excuses for the guy's poor weapons handling.

Murdoc, Confederate Yankee, and Counter Column all take McIntyre to task for appearing not only an apologist, but stupid too. Their tripartite Fisking covers all the pioints well, and any leftovers are sopped up by their commenters.

I will only add this bit of advice for Mr. McIntyre: the military has an idea of what a "heavy" weapon is. It's probably different from your idea; best not to assume it's the same. Given the man already knew it was a SAW he was looking at, there's just no reason for him to be so wrong about it, let alone cut Iraqi terrorist #1 some slack over it.

A final exercise for other Google-impaired journalists:

You may be afraid of it, but Google is your friend. Try it. Do a search for "heavy machine gun". Go ahead. And what's the first hit?

Browning M2. If you read the accompanying article, you'll find that the thing weighs about 80 lbs, sans tripod. Yeah, that's heavy. It also fires a big round, .50, which is also heavy. Altogether, it's NOT a SAW.

Now try "medium machine gun". What do you get? Why, M240. It weighs in at around 24-odd lbs, depending on trim package and options. Not so very heavy, but it throws a beefy round. It's also not a SAW. Although it IS manufactured by fat bastard Belgians, as is the SAW, it is NOT, again, a SAW.

Just for the fun of it, let's try "light machine gun". Guess what you get about five hits down? Why it's an M249 SAW. Gosh all, and a "light" machine gun...how about that? It only weighs about 25lbs, even with 200 rounds hanging underneath it. Oh, and it fires a varmint cartridge, little different from what you plink moles out of your garden with. See, light.

That takes about 30 seconds. No deadline is that tight.

I have now taken the same quiz as my compatriots, and it is clear that, far from dying peacefully in my sleep well into my second century of life, surrounded by loved ones, I'm destined for a grisly and chillingly newsworthy end.

You scored as Gunshot. Your death will be by gunshot, probably because you are some important person or whatever. Possibly a sniper, nice, quick, clean shot to the head. Just beautiful.

What the hell? Where'd I get so many enemies?!? Guess I'd better start sitting with my back to the wall down at the local Thai/sushi joint and tiki bar that is my usual watering hole. Don't wanna die with a tall glass of Singha and a plate of o-toro sashimi in front of me. I mean, there's worse ways to go, I guess, than enjoying a plate of fatty tuna belly. I could die at MacDonald's. At least bomb or bullet is quick, right? Mebbe I better start looking for that land in the woods of Nova Scotia I've always wanted. Big fence. Mean dogs. A moat.

As if it were needed. You reach a point in your life where you're so boring that you get quiz results like those below. Which, by the way, were totally predictable in my case.

You scored as Natural Causes. Your death will be by natural causes, though not by any diseaese, because that is another option on this test. You will probably just silently pass away in the night from old age, and people you love won't realize until the next morning, when you are all purple and cold and icky. So be happy, you won't be murdered.

[wik] Entire contents of table above are [sic]. I'm not one of those whose raison d'etre is to edit other peoples' sloppy spelling. Or my own, for that matter.

Curious, I took the test GeekLethal linked in the previous post. It seems I am fated to just disappear. Hopefully, I will do it with less spelling errors than the author of the test.

You scored as Disappear. Your death will be by disappearing, probably a camping trip gone wrong or an evening hike you never returned from. Always remember that one guy who was hiking alone and got in a rock slide. He could have died, but he cut his own hand off to save himself. Don't end up like him (or worse, dead).

Very interesting. I can think of a dozen people off the top of my head who might agree that I could use a nice tall glass of shut up, but would probably stop short of plotting to kill me. For my part, gentle reader, fret not. The suicide clause in my life insurance policy absolutely precludes auto-darwinating in any form. I'm just gonna have to stick around and suck it like everyone else. Hat tip to Lysander, latest in this chain of quizzery.

You scored as Poison. Your death will be by poison, probably because you are a glutton and are around so many people that it would be easy to get away with it. Several important people in history share your fate.

Via an opinion piece in today's WSJ, Peggy Noonan gives us this:

The president has taken, those around him say, great comfort in biographies of previous presidents. All presidents do this. They all take comfort in the fact that former presidents now seen as great were, in their time, derided, misunderstood, underestimated. No one took the measure of their greatness until later. This is all very moving, but: Message to all biography-reading presidents, past present and future: Just because they call you a jackass doesn't mean you're Lincoln.

I couldn't help but share.

Via Fark I find this list of things a man should never do past the age of 30.

Some are perfectly sound:

Ask a policeman, "You ever shoot anybody with that thing?"

Ask a woman, "Hey, you got a license for that ass?"

Skip.

Take a camera to a nude beach.

Let his father do his taxes.

Tap on the glass.

Use the word collated on his resume.

But others make no sense to me. For example, why not

Hold his lighter up at a concert.

Shout out a response to "Are you ready to rock?"

Name pets after Middle Earth characters.

Publicly greet friends by shouting, "What's up, you whore?"

Call "shotgun" before getting in a car.

Dispute someone else's call of "shotgun."

Purchase fireworks.

Say "two points" every time he throws something in the trash.

Purchase home-brewing paraphernalia.

Request extra sprinkles.

Air drum.

Choose 69 as his jersey number.

Eat Oreo cookies in stages.

The John Travolta point-to-the-ceiling-point-to-the-floor dance move; also that one from Pulp Fiction.

Refer to his girlfriend's breasts as "the twins."

Own a vanity plate.

Well... I have many, many, many very good reasons not to refer to my significant other's, erm, chestal region, as "the twins," and I would never do so, but as a theoretical notion divorced from any reference to actual chestal appurtanances belonging to any person either real or fictional, the joke still makes me, um... titter. As for a vanity plate, I think that Buckethead, who is even further from 30 than I am, would argue that a well chosen vanity plate can really hit the spot. Also, I have air drummed, purchased homebrewing paraphenelia, made 69 jokes, disco danced, and done the "two points" and "shotgun" routines all within the last month. And what's wrong with that, really?

What kind of a world are we living in if a grown man can't write the name "Heywood Jablome" on a petition, or make the same old funny-every-time joke whenever someone says they live in "Bangor"? Isn't this America? And isn't our crass brashness as much a part of our heritage as is the British stiff upper lip, German punctiliousness, French superiority, or the way Canadians think they're being funny all the time?

I tell you what... every time you don't slap a "kick me" sign on your buddy, belch the alphabet, bump chests after a touchdown, urinate on someone's hedges, wear a backwards baseball cap in the Sistine Chapel, or loudly proclaim "yeah, I'd hit that" when looking at the Venus de Milo, you're hurting America. Why do you hate our freedom?

Last night was almost perfect. I met up with a couple good friends at a legendary Boston watering hole, enjoyed a couple micro-micro-brews and a bloody piece of meat, and then took in a game at the lyric little bandbox down the street. I sat in the bleachers with the Fenway Faithful, ate a Fenway Frank and drank a macro-brew from a plastic cup, and watched Manny Ramirez be Manny, playing around in the outfield and smacking huge doubles. I watched beefy Kevin Youkilis prove why he's worthy of the majors. I watched Matt Clement pitch a not-bad game into the sixth. I waited in vain for the big foam finger guy to come around so I could buy myself a big foam finger. In short, I relaxed and had an all-around ball.

When I left at the seventh inning stretch to catch the train home (I live far enough away that to stay the whole game would've meant getting home at midnight, and my old ass just can't cut that), the score was 1-1. Half an hour later, the score was 7-4 Red Sox.

I shoulda stayed the whole game.

I have spent most of my life among the Yankee nekulturny. I know my way around a trailer park. I've made art...of a sort...out of carefully peeled beer bottle labels. I am as defensive about being uncultured as I am ashamed of it.

And yet, I can't imagine there are enough tacky people in all of America to buy enough of these to show a profit.

"Repeat after me. I, state your name,"

I, state your name,

"Do hereby swear and affirm,"

Do hereby swear and affirm,

"That you'll post a lit'l som'n som'n real soon now."

Amen.

Everyone knows wikipedia. While at times its accuracy is less than gold standard, it is typically the most useful place to begin research on a topic. The least you can expect from wikipedia is a cogent summary and a selection of good links. At best, you have a detailed and thorough introduction. Until recently, I was only vaguely aware that there was such a thing as other wikis. Today, I spent my valuable lunch time spinning through some of it.

For some time now, wiki enthusiasts have been creating wikibooks, which takes the idea of the wikipedia to a new and greater level of depth. I was cruising around the site, and found a wikibook Movie Making Manual. While reasing this manual isn't the same as going to film school or an apprenticeship with Steven Spielberg, it does provide a great deal of insight into the movie making process for someone like your 'ol pal Buckethead who don't know movie making from shinola. Of especial interest to me, being the wordsmith that I is, was the section on screenwriting. While the level of information there is, as yet, still rather sparse, I could imagine that something like this crossed with MIT's OpenCourseWare could be a really cool thing indeed.

Also of use are the vasty deeps of wikiquote, where I found this charming little bit I had been trying to remember for ages:

Listen up maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are the all singing, all dancing crap of the world. We are all part of the same compost heap.

Also chock full of grist for your reading mill is wikisource, where you can find among other treasures, John Buchan's Greenmantle.

No shit, it's Angle Grinder Man. A real life super hero, defending an oppressed public from the evils of malicious traffic and parking enforcement officers.

[wik] Btw, follow the external links at the bottom of the wikipedia article. They are... interesting.

I've been looking for this forever. Finally! Airline seat pitches, around the world. They oughta be showing this when you're buying your ticket on Expedia, or whatever.

Tired of boring crucifixi? Potbellied Buddhas with goofy expressions leave you cold? Magen Davids and Green Crescents fail to inspire?

Well, you can now have your own physical manifestation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. With a few inexpensive items from the craft store, and whatever you remember from third grade elmers glue experiments, you can create a facsimile of FSM and his noodly appendages.

[wik] Hat Tip: Owlish, by way of Rocket Jones. Owlish also links to a crocheted FSM hat, a silver FSM brooch, and a plush FSM toy you can buy on eBay.

At Unfogged, Alameida notes something that I've been meaning to do for a while now. In fact, Chainsaw Mick and I often close our conversations in the exact same way.

Now I can never become President. (This is the one thing standing in my way.)

Not that this is a new thing, really. But today, my brain is especially aimless and distractable mush. There are too many thinks competing for lebensraum in my noggin; the result is confusion, befuddlement and anomie. My mind feels like the mud over which a demolition derby has been run. Once my brain was a stainless steel, jagged tooth bear trap quivering with barely restrained force; now it is a half century old rusty mouse trap with a broken spring.

...should you swallow anything evil, of course.

Hi.

I've been gone awhile, concentrating on working. And earning. You know, get the money, dolla dolla bill y'all. I just haven't been able to contribute anything here, mainly because of the job(s) schedule(s) but also because the precious few non-working moments were spent talking myself out of taking the ol' .38 taste test.

But I have been watching. And lurking. Mostly watching though, with a little lurking. Watching and/or lurking, light on the lurk.

I figure it's been about two months since I posted anything. Much longer than that since I posted anything good. I've had lyrics on my mind alot though, if you couldn't tell, and here's what I've come up with after 2 months of careful consideration:

Proposed lyrics for the A-Team theme:

Ahem.

"We're the A-Team,

the A-Team,

We're the A-Team,

the A-a-a-ay Team..."

I don't have a second verse yet, but that's where I'm at so far.

Despite our catchy moniker (Moniker... that's also how my Bay State neighors pronounce the name of GeekLethal's wife...), the Ministry of Minor Perfidy doesn't report much on actual acts of minor perfidy. That is because we are much busier behind the scenes actually perpetrating such, and preventing others, but the details of that we shall save for another time.

But it has recently come to our attention via Loyal Reader #0016, EDog, that Netflix are committing an actual act of petty betrayal. You see, they have structured their business so that their very best customers lose them money. When people use their service a lot, say returning 15 movies a month, the shipping costs eat up all the profit.

So Netflix did what any good perfidian would, and rigged the system. Now, heavy users are automatically bumped to the back of the line for access to the most popular titles, and the company will delay shipments in general for a day or few so as to put an involuntary cap on account activity.

That would be all well and good, I suppose, had the company put that in their policies from the start. But instead, people paying $18 a month for ostensibly unlimited rentals were getting in return shoddy service and prevarication if they liked the service too much. Although Neftlix now mentions this in their terms of use, I would have expected more (why? Because I'm stupid) from a company that has tried so hard to democratize and distribute their business model.

I guess we're all just lucky that Dick Cheney didn't have the rocket launcher or railgun power-up yet.

[wik] Ok. I'm done with the jokes now; Cheney has finally taken responsibility and apologized. Two days too late, but at least he did it. And, since we were all wondering, now we know exactly how drastic a situation has to be for a member of this administration to own up to something.

In a perfectly ironic twist for an author whose works tested the limits of perception, paranoia, and self-identity, an animatronic robot in the form of reclusive and visionary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick has disappeared.

The Ministry is happy to report that Mr. Dick's simulacrum is currently resting comfortably and snacking periodically on engine oil and madelines. It recently requested a word processor; our clinicians suspect it intends to begin writing once again.