Iraq

So, future self, there's no propaganda here, just a note about how it is now. The war is the lead item on every newscast. Since the election the Democrats have been emboldened to fight with Bush about the war, and there are big protests (again) today about bringing troops home.

The enemy also has a new tactic - they just showed up at an American base wearing American uniforms and speaking English and they grab soldiers, take them off and kill them.

The mood seems to be that of resignation. No one but Bush and his cronies are talking about winning (in terms of defeating al-Queda) any more; now it's about how to turn this mess over to the Iraqis, who are locked in civil war.

So there are no good options. I think that the war was a crime and an abomination and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Chalabi should be tried and imprisoned for what they did to get us to this place. I have given up on the Catholic church for some of the stuff they did around this war, as well as blowing off friends I really cared about because I just can't accept their enthusiastic approval of what we're doing. I'm too old and fat and defective to fight so I never joined the service and can't be part of that conversation.

That said, for whatever reasons, the fact is that we invaded that country and destroyed its government. We dawdled and mismanaged and allowed the forces of chaos to sprout there. If we just leave, or talk about leaving to the point where everyone just assumes we're going to leave, we leave the civilians - the ones the peace protestors claim to be so concerned about - to the tender mercies of people like those who ran the torture house discovered by the MN NG. A lot of Iraqis have put their lives on the line - literally their lives - to help us and if we disengage and leave them, well, "The Killing Fields" pretty much summed the next part of that story up.

We are not obligated to keep putting brave kids in the meat grinder for an incompetent execution of a war based on a lie. But we are morally obligated to take responsibility for what we did, what we created over there and I'm getting worried that a lot of the perennial peace organizations are making hay with the "Out Now!" line to promulgate their own influence without concern or regard for the situation for the people we were ostensibly saving.

I don't know how it will turn out. I hope we find a way, either with our military or someone else's help, to stablize the country and give those people their lives back without creating an al-Queda state, an Iranian satellite or Taliban Afghanistan with easy access to the oil fields.

Another note for you - the yellow ribbons are gone from all the SUVs now and have been for a long time. They started disappearing around the time of Abu Ghraib. There's a poem Mark Bowden reprinted in his Black Hawk Down series, go find it.

What happened, future self? How did we get out of this one? Whichever way it went down, we should be ashamed, and the people who should be most ashamed are likely to feel no shame at all. They never do. Maybe it's how they get to be those kind of people in the first place.

Note to Older Self - The Diet Thing

So, older self, let's talk about the diet thing for a minute. You are sitting somewhere in the future and you're either fatter or thinner than me as I write this (262.0). I would like to get to 249 this year.

Do you remember this time (LIFE, March 2006 - January 2007 and beyond) as the beginning of something great or just a false dawn? My motto these days is "these are tomorrow's good old days." I am sick of nostalgia because those times were not perfect, and so I am trying to do things now so I will enjoy having done them later. Like the LIFE thing.

Remember the mirror at Italianni's and how that felt. Remember it and if you don't I'll remind you. You caught yourself in the mirror and you didn't recognize you for a minute, you just saw a ridiculously fat guy who looked like a freak. Then you recognized the freak was you.

Now you're doing the thing and you weigh yourself every day and you try to act like your food intake is coming from a budget of calories, not that you're tired or you're sad or that it tastes good or that your mind is racing on some ridiculous idea and the eating like chewing your nails but with food.

Did you give up on that? Was it easier to go back? These days you tell yourself that the chocolate/fat/sugar/salt tastes good for about 10 seconds, but being able to buy clothes off the rack that doesn't have some integer XL multiplier tastes good for ever and ever.

Did that work? Did any of it stick? I hope to God it did. I hope, I hope, I hope. Because I am kind of doing this for me, but mainly I am doing it for you. And I hope you will do it for your future self.

You are not doing as well on the activity part but I am trying to blame that on the winter. It's cold, dammit. I am hoping to start a weightlifting program that I can actually follow. How did that go? Did you accomplish anything, and stick with what you accomplished?

Did you quit on me? I can believe you did, and I can believe you didn't. Please don't let me down, future self. For this one thing, this one time, don't let me down.

I don't care if you don't get back to 190 or whatever unrealistic thing. I'd like to get into the 230s but that's a bonus. I will never be disappointed in you unless you just totally give up and go back to the old stuff. That's all. If you keep trying, really trying, even if you're not successful I will be proud of you.

But remember this, because it's pretty obvious to me right now - it's not all at once. You fail or succeed a little bit at a time and like Einstein said it's the compound interest that's the miracle. Watch the scale. The scale is objective. It doesn't care if you're lonely or sad or Mommy didn't love you enough or whatever. It doesn't care. The laws of physics do not make an exception for you.

Dawn of the Dead unreleased soundtrack

Came today. The Gonk, Mask of Death, etc...

So you, future self, might be in Alzheimer's-induced fog and wondering what you saw in DOTD and why you went to ZombieCon and wrote A-137 and collected memorabilia.

Well, all I can say is that this younger self still finds even the music of Dawn of the Dead powerfully inspiring for dark visions of...being outnumbered and fighting a losing battle against the forces of chaos or impartiality.

You remember what the commercials did to you when you were a kid, the nightmares they caused. By the time you saw the movie there wasn't anything in it that could scare you anymore. And the violence is not like "Saw" or any of that grand guglinol sjoy where the evil is enjoying its role. It's the sleeping giant, Cthulu crushing by simply rolling over in its sleep. It's something that is doing what naturally comes to it, and that's what's always terrified you - that the natural world, whether a shark, global warming or a risen army of the undead is just living its nature and gobbling us up.

Like a truck. But that's not for public consumption. At dinner the other night someone talked about that and we had a little Q&A where you learned something about it. I was surprised at how much it still affects me. I can't even remember that much about the person, a few things, but I remember how much I liked him and how completely unfair it was and that's when I realized it didn't matter who you were, the world rolls on like a big rock and it crushes (or eats) us without fear or favor. Or reason. Or justice.

So DOTD still moves you, but not for the reason it moves most people. It's the rising inexorable tide, plus Romero's talent and just the fact it's a great movie.

But the dreams remain. And sometimes you wake up and your arm is numb again, or they're climbing up the sides of the skyscraper and you're at the top with a nuke, but maybe you wired the detonator right and maybe you didn't. But that's nothing new.

Do you still have those dreams, older self? Or do you dream about eating soup now, like Bob Newhart?

Calories

Weight is driven by physics and chemistry. They don't care about how sad you are or if you're tired or if your back hurts.

That heart attack/stroke/TIA you're now having is a demonstrable outcome of the choices I am making today and tomorrow. You could have prevented them by just doing a little more, trying a little harder, making do with some pain today to avoid the pain tomorrow.

Meyers-Briggs: Today I am an INTP

Your Type is
INTP

Introverted	Intuitive	Thinking	Perceiving
Strength of the preferences %
44	25	12	33

INTP type description by D.Keirsey
INTP type description by J. Butt


Qualitative analysis of your type formula
You are:

• moderately expressed introvert
  
• moderately expressed intuitive personality
  
• slightly expressed thinking personality
  
• moderately expressed perceiving personality

Star Trek meets Monty Python

Yes, I did have a little nerdgasm when I saw this. Very creative use of clipping.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc

39 Monty Python sketches (from Clipmarks)

Yes, Python lives on on YouTube, where apparently every single image ever shown on television anywhere has gone home to roost.

BUT

before I post the Python link, here's a link to a xkcd cartoon about Python that gives one pause to reflect.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/monty_python.jpg


Here's the links to the Python shows.

http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/2217AD94-AAB8-42B5-83BD-C9BCB9275948/

Exoparasitism

The Ampulex wasp traps its prey (common cockroaches) by paralyzing the roach and modifying its cerebral cortex, after which the roach becomes completely docile. The wasp then leads the roach into a cavern and attaches an egg to the roach, who sits there calmly while the egg hatches, the larva eats its way into and gestates inside the roach and then eats its way out.

Not science fiction - reality: http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/02/02/the_wisdom_of_parasites.php

So...natural selection at work here? How many wasps had to sting how many cockroaches for that right neural cluster to be hit?

Ok, so...design? What entity that represented any sort of good would deliberately engineer something so horrific?

One of These Days...

I hear this Pink Floyd song and I think of a friend of mine from back in the day. Let's call her Jules. She worked at Pizza Hut, and she was friends/kind of a flame with one of my best friends, and I went in there one day with him and she's written on the white board (where they put the specials) "One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces!". The customers thought it was a pizza slogan but not so much, no. I liked her from that day on.

Haven't seen her in 10 years but whenever I hear that song I think of her, and that whiteboard, and it makes me smile. I know I hang on to these memories for too long and nobody remembers me like that, so it's kind of embarrassing but this is a blog and nobody's reading anyway and it's something I think about, so there.

What a waste of time is a blog.