Update: My War, Over and Out

Those of you who began reading this blog with my review of CBFTW's My War--Fear and Loathing in Iraq (CBFTW is a Hunter Thompson fan) and got thoroughly hooked on it in the days and weeks afterward most likely already know this, but for those of you who may be tuning in late, My War has been shut down--maybe by CBFTW himself, but maybe by the Army, and for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Ron Brynaert at Why Are We Back in Iraq? has done a nice job summarizing the story, some of which I didn't know.

[O]ne day he posted a story which claimed that he just fought a battle with Al Qaeda...bad enough...but he also claimed (mostly based upon the word of one of his Commanding Officers) that the enemies were Al Qaeda that had come into Iraq from Iran.

That seems to have been the beginning of his difficulties (although Ron mentions that right-wing commenters had begun using My War as a platform for supporting the SGW and attacking anyone who didn't or whose support was less than enthusiastic), though why it should have been is a mystery. The battle was reported in the press, as was the participation of AQ which came straight from official Army statements; C was merely repeating what we already knew. The Army also didn't seem to have a problem with it since they left it up. They did, however, decide that from then on they wanted to see what he wrote before he posted it. And they wanted some changes.

The first noticable change was that the title was shortened to "My War." I guess the Military don't do irony. Then he started to become annoyed with the myriad of posters on his blog. He was trying to sanitize his site for the brass...but posters were copy-and-pasting and resubmitting some of his posts.

No, Ron, the military doesn't do 'irony'. They don't know what it is but they're pretty sure it must be a way of making fun of them.

If the commenters were a drag, he could have shut them off. He was running a new Blogger template and all he had to do was go to the comments settings and click 'No'. From that point on, no comments would have been allowed. A lot of bloggers whose comments sections are becoming wastelands of right-wing troll excess have been forced to do that--or threaten to. C must have known that--maybe he isn't a techie but he had to turn them on when he set up the blog, so he knew he could turn them off. He could even delete the ones that had already been posted. That wasn't the real problem. Here's the real problem (Ron again):

Then he became famous.

He began getting write-ups here and there throughout the land. One day, the Wall Street Journal ran a story which carried his name, and while it didn't mention his blog, it pretty much told the same story as one of his posts (I'm not going to give the exact link...because his name is in it). Then NPR ran a piece on him. Yet, they (stupidly...though they later corrected it by deleting it) made a direct connection to his name and blog.

On August 19th, CB's only post was the text to the 1st Amendment, which created a ton of wild speculation. He returned briefly to the blog warning his fans again not to copy-and-paste. But most wouldn't listen.

There's more to this story (read Ron's whole post) but that, I think, is the heart of it.

The Army is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to the media--any media. After the Viet Nam War, they began treating the press as if it were as much an enemy as the enemy. The reason was simple: the press of that day told the truth about what was happening in Viet Nam, and that truth was not necessarily complimentary to the military. Their arrogance, bad decisions, and total misunderstanding of both the enemy they were fighting and the kind of war it was were paraded nightly on television. The massive exaggeration of the number of enemy killed and the orders to exaggerate were reported in full. Westmoreland's blunt style wasn't a good fit for tv but that wasn't what did him in. His downfall--and to some extent the Army's with him--came from his own mouth: he insisted that things were true that we could see for ourselves were not. His credibility at the end of his tenure was below that of a used-car salesman or Scott McClellan.

And then there were the pictures--of a South Vietnamese intelligence officer shooting a suspected VC in the head at point-blank range; of a naked Vietnamese woman running down the road, screaming, from her napalmed village; of a platoon of Special Forces commandos posing with their collection of VC body parts--ears, teeth, noses, fingers--and smiling for the camera. Americans began to ask themselves, 'What kind of war is this? What's it doing to our boys?', and once they started asking, the war was as good as over. For the answers were not satisfactory.

The Domino Theory--that the Soviets intended to take over the world one country at a time and so we had to stop them in Viet Nam or they'd be invading Santa Monica--had by 1970 been so thoroughly discredited that not even the hard-liners used it as an excuse any more. The next line--that we were bringing democracy to Viet Nam and saving it from a dictatorial takeover--began to fall apart when we saw the destruction and havoc we were wreaking on that country in the name of saving it--a doctrine forever emblazoned in our minds by the phrase, 'We had to destroy the village in order to save it' uttered by an unnamed Army Colonel. Eventually, it was just too hard to see what we saw and believe that there would be much country left to democratize when we got done with it.

The third excuse--that we were protecting the people of South Viet Nam from the revenge the Communist North Vietnamese would undoubtedly take on the South--was so weak it never got any traction. The South Vietnamese wanted us gone worse than the insurgents; by then, they were more frightened of us than of anything their blood-cousins would be likely to do to them.

None of this was really the military's fault. They were, to the best of their ability, trying to carry out their orders--orders from civilian commanders who knew even less than they did about the war they were being asked to fight; who had lots of theories and beliefs but no real experience; who were operating from a premise so profoundly false that there was no way it could ever have been brought into the real world. Viet Nam was their mistake, not the military's.

But the military did make mistakes, some of them irretrievable. There was Tiger Force, there was My Lai, there was fragging because untrained looeys were being put in positions of authority and getting men killed unnecessarily, there were the inflated body-counts and the inflated 'victories', and on and on. In the end, the military, particularly the Army, was blamed for both its own mistakes and the mistakes of its civilian commanders, and the way they saw it, it was the press that was doing the blaming.

They reacted at first by over-reacting: they began to shut the press out entirely. During the First Gulf War, they controlled the press with an iron fist. No reporter was allowed to go anywhere near the actual fighting; most were ordered into far-away enclaves--hotels in Kuwait and Cairo--where they were totally dependent on military press officers for information. No tv, no radio, no photographers. The shut-down worked so well that it was years before we even heard about the Highway of Death much less saw pictures of it. The Army had used silence and secrecy to rehabilitate its reputation. It liked the result.

During the invasion of Iraq, it was so confident in its ability to control the press that it allowed some reporters to ride with certain selected units, 'embedded' with them. It was a brilliant strategy. Not only could they control everything the 'embeds' saw or heard, but the embeds began to identify themselves with the units with which they rode, becoming cheerleaders rather than reporters.

Then the Army set up CentCom with the help of Republican PR strategist and dirty-tricks specialist Jim Wilkenson, a Hollywood-style set faked to look like a military HQ but miles from the action, and herded the giant press corps into it like cows, feeding them pre-digested pap that everybody had to pretend was 'information'. The results must have been beyond their wildest expectations--glowing reports filled the nation's tv screens, the military was all but worshipped, dissenters and questioners were--and still are--shouted down with calls of 'Traitor!', often accompanied by vocal and colorfully detailed threats.

In other words, they learned that absolute control works. The Viet Nam lesson was, "Show them only what you want them to see and prevent them at all costs from seeing anything else.' It is a dictum they have lived by in the years since and it has served them well.

It is not too much to infer that that strict control has been or is being extended to soldier-blogs like C's. Until the plug got pulled on My War, it frankly never occurred to me that anyone would care what he wrote as long as he wasn't doing dumb things like giving away their position or plans in advance, which he wasn't. He's a smart kid, and he was always careful to include only general information that the enemy would already know or personal details that would be of no interest or value to them.

But I was wrong. They did care. It wasn't the comments and it wasn't that he was giving away military secrets, which he wasn't. It was the potential notoriety and, more importantly, the possibility that C might say something that wasn't completely flattering to the military, the president, his commanders or those who commanded them. Look at the evidence as they must have seen it: he had a b & w copy of the most famous anti-war picture ever painted--Picasso's Guernica--on his header; he was a fan of the most notorious and undisciplined gonzo journalist of all time, infamous for ferocious independence, a dogged refusal to write what was expected, and insisting that nothing--NOTHING--was 'off the record'; and he was getting noticed by the media. The WSJ was alright, but that bastion of Communists, fellow-travelers, and military-bashers, NPR? Not acceptable. And NPR didn't help, although I can't see that publishing his name should have been a huge problem--Sgt Chris Missick has his name all over A Line in the Sand and nobody is terribly concerned about him. But then, Sgt Missick isn't a potential dissenter.

And that, I think, was the real issue: C wanted to tell the truth and the Army didn't want to take the chance that he would. The Army did not want to risk losing control of the official message, the only message the media was allowed to get. They didn't want any loose cannons. Whether they shut down C's site because it was one, or C shut it down himself rather than be told what he could or couldn't write, I don't know. At this point, only C does. If the latter, I can understand why and I support his decision; if the former, it was a mistake.

C had grown enormously as a writer in the short months he had his blog. While I disagree with Ron's characterization that C's early posts 'weren't well-written'--they may have been short on grammar and badly organized, but as I said in my review, there was a raw but undeniable talent there struggling to get out, and that was clear from the git-go--there's no argument that the more he wrote, the better he got. Even his grammar improved (he was concerned about that), and the way he organized his posts, while still scattershot, was beginning to show the earmarks of a subtle and sophisticated coherence--throughlines based on hidden connections and not-immediately-obvious resonances that would have escaped a casual eye. He was seeing more and seeing more deeply, and he was proving that he could write what he saw.

If the Army shut him down, they shouldn't have. He was a forceful voice for their presence in Iraq and he wasn't doing it with the PR jargon that many of us now dismiss as soon as we read it. He was doing it by letting us see what was really going on and how it affected both sides. Ultimately, it's in the military's best interest that we know those things, and their strongest argument lies in our understanding and support. Whether he knew it or not, intended it or not, C's writing was explaining and defining that role from ground-level.

C had the distinction of being that truly rare bird, a non-partisan. He wasn't for the war and he wasn't against it, he was just a grunt doing a job and telling us about it as plainly and as honestly as he could. As he said in an email to Ron, 'I'm not a republican or a democrat, I'm just a skater from SF who's packin a machine gun in iraq at the moment.' My War let us connect with him and others just like him in a direct way that isn't available from any other source. In the long run, the military could only benefit from such a connection. In the long run, they can only suffer because it was broken.

The Wooden O--Bard-Blogging

Ever wonder what William Shakespeare would have to say about today's world? No, me neither, but that's an oversight that can be repaired with a single click. Through the miracle of cyberspace (which appears to have more dimensions than we thought), Master Shakespeare has returned to us--sort of--in the form of a disembodied voice at The Wooden O, his own personal blog.

I kid you not.

Will isn't exactly a prolific blogger. There have been as few as two entries in a whole month, and long lags between them (as I write this, there hasn't been a post since July 20--nearly a month). Yet what they lack in frequency, they make up in piquancy.

Master Will seems incredibly well-informed on current events, despite the excessive time he spends carousing at The Staggering Seraph--'for those who would know, 'tis an inn on the borders of this world and the next, whither the best brewers of strong drink do repair on their death'--with the likes of Ben Jonson, Kit Marlowe, Larry Olivier, Peter Ustinov, and many other famous theatrical personages who have shuffled off this mortal coil. (As we shall see in a moment, Will is an inveterate and positively shameless name-dropper.) For instance, in 'The Most Lamentable Comedy of King George II', Master Will ruminates on what a fine--if dark--comedy Bush's ascension to power would make.

[T]his same great fool of America maketh me much to wish that old Will Kempe were yet here to play him.

Think on it, gentles: Bottom, in his dream, made an emperor! Or Dogberry, from police constable, become a great man, prince of a nation. Such a play I could make! Being no longer living, I need fear no Master of the Revels to stay me: but alas, being dead, my playmaking days are done.

Perchance it is for the best. For though this same Prince Shrublet is himself excellent matter for a comedy, yet 'twould be a marvellous dark one, and some years must pass before the tragedies he hath wrought be not felt so near.

He even shares his thoughts on the Gay Marriage Amendment.

Now for love of this colour, I myself did write many a woeful sonnet; and the thing itself goeth back, so we read, to the noble Greeks and yet further.

Yet in my time, we did never think to wed; for though our Church of England was begun to give old King Harry leave to wed with all the dames he pleased, yet holy wedlock could not extend to such pairings as I and my superb youth (ye shall pardon me his name) even had I not been contracted to my good Anne.

'Twixt that time and this, many hundreds of years lie now cold in their graves. And this I say, gentles, in this new world to which I am awakened, of this sort of wedding: though to my sense it be strange, yet I can see no harm in it. And though it would quite have undone the plots of my As You Like It and of my What You Will too, yet there is matter in this theme for new plays, and marvellous merry ones.

And to those who say that the act itself be damnable: here I stand to give them the lie. Even poor Kit Marlowe, who spent his life believing himself damn'd and labouring to make himself more so, was quite put out of countenance at his hour of reckoning, when ugly Hell failed to gape nor Lucifer came not.

But, as you might expect of any artist, Will's most intimate knowledge shows up in an encyclopedic awareness of where his plays are being performed--and of those in them.

Faith, I am much put in heart by a learned dispute that took place amongst the great and good of Washington DC, there at my Theatre where the honest players do know me right well. A dispute it was of the rights and wrongs of the invasion of one country by another: in specific, that of France by King Harry the Fifth in the year of our lord 1415. And the arbiter was that august lady Dame Judi Dench, whom I esteem full high, and who late made such noble work of my Countess in All’s Well that Ends Well.

Nor is he at all shy about letting us know of the great and the near-great with whom he hobnobs on a daily basis. After a previous absence of about a month, he can't help supplying the guest list to the latest 'celestial event' that kept him away for so long.

Od's my life, hath a whole moon waxed and waned since last I writ here? Your pardon, good gentles, I humbly crave: matters superlunary did entreat my attention. To wit, I was bidden unto a celestial revel whereat my masters Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Liszt and Ray Charles were the musick, and they did play together extempore in concords so sweet that they made the spheres to echo back the sound, and it seemed the welkin itself did dance a sprightly cinquepace. Brief, gentles, I was enchanted, and the sense of time did leave me.

Faith, but our revels were prodigious! There did I drown a merry hour in golden nectar with Kit Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke came thither, and young Beaumont and Fletcher arm-in-arm. Webster, Middleton and Marston were drinking wine with other tragedians of King James' age, clad all in black; I saw, too, Racine and Corneille sharing a table and speaking to none. I spoke, though, to Master Moliere, who was drinking deep with Carlo Goldoni and Edmond Rostand; they were arguing over Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, new-rendered into English by master Barry Kornhauser, and to be seen at mine own namesake theatre in the capital of the American nation.

Still, it's hard to be too hard on a famous guy who cheerfully and humbly answers questions from mere groundlings as if they were commands from the nobility.

[T]wo most merry maidens [hath writ]:

"We give thee good day, Master Shakespeare. We are two humble sisters of the order of the Interfaith Nunnery, come to peruse thine epistles from the green world. Iris desireth to know whether it might please thee to enter the nunnery's broom closet, where thou two might disport thyselves."

O sweet sister, whose name doth well befit the bright messenger of Jove: alas that I no longer possess a body corporeal wherewith to do thee right! Else would I be full fain of thine offer, I promise thee. Also, I am on a sudden consumed with regret that I writ no play involving sportful nuns in a broom closet. A most pregnant matter, i'faith.

"Andrea, who oft has thought Silvia most ill-used in not winning the hand of fair Rosalind, is not so inclined to share the broom closet with thee. She would, however, gladly converse with thee on plays and players. Couldst tell us, good sir, about Isabella of Measure for Measure? We have been much disturbed by the Duke's o'erweening pride in assuming that the lady, having spent the course of the play protecting her maidenhead, would then desire the hand of a man only slightly greater in power than the man she so recently refused."

Marry, well said, mistress Andrea. 'Tis true, I grant ye, that the ending of Measure for Measure is but a patch'd affair. And the Duke, as thou say'st, is a prideful man: else why let all Vienna suffer to entrap one parasite, a man he knew to be corrupt? Yet one of the things on which he prides himself is justice.

For Isabella herself, in the play she speaks not of virginity but of chastity, and a wife may be as chaste as may a maid: the luckless Lucrece was one such. To be chaste may, if you will, mean for one's body to be at the disposal of one's mind. Isabella's chastity, then, may mean her power not only to refuse such as the lustful Angelo, but to choose where (and whether) to bestow her favour, should she find one deserving. Perchance I chop logic: 'tis true that she most earnestly desires to become a nun, with all that that entails.

The Wooden O is a very clever pastiche, and fun to read if you have any love for either Shakespeare or his works. Whoever the author is, the voice is remarkably like Shakespeare's actual voice as we know it from the plays and poems, and it isn't hard to imagine that if Will were actually around he'd sound exactly like the Will of Wooden O. To appreciate this blog, it will help if you know something about Shakespeare, but if you don't, don't worry--Will has thoughtfully provided a ton of links to his plays, to biographies of his contemporaries like Robert Armin and Will Kempe (he's seems particularly fond of the comics) as well as to histories of those well-met since they passed: Ustinov, Olivier, Ray Charles, and so on. You'll catch up in no time.

In fact, I'll leave you with a quote from his obituary of Charles, whom he holds in high esteem.

God be with his soul. 'A was a merry man

The living world hath lost a great soul in honest master Ray Charles, whose playing did cheer the hearts of many. Now what prodigious music shall he make among the spheres? That, gentles, is for my hearing and your awaiting.

Yet when he is minded to play, sure the aery region will so ring with it that the green world shall not escape some echo of it. When thou art of a humour to smile for no reason, or when on a lowering and doleful day thy disposition on a sudden turns from sour to merry, be certain that at that hour brother Ray maketh music to delight the heavens.

For this time, if that thou hast a tailfeather, let it be shaken. Yea, and mightily.

And the same for you, Will. The same for you.

PS Will loves getting email. Ask him a question or make a comment on some issue of the day (or one of his plays) and you might well goose him into blogging again. Just click 'Mail thou me' on the Main page.

Nonsense Verse--Very Little Verse But Some Inspired Nonsense

Jennifer Balderama is a professional journalist on the business beat, but she's also a real writer. Real writers are rarely satisfied with developing only a single aspect of their talent, which is why I assume this one created Nonsense Verse--to have a place to ply her comic skills. They don't give you much chance to be funny in business journalism, and Jennifer is a very funny writer when she wants to be, although she is more likely to provoke sly, behind-the-hand chuckles of recognition than outright belly-laughs. Not that she won't get those too, but Jennifer--or 'J', as she refers to herself--specializes in a kind of humor we might call 'oblique'.

To get belly-laughs, you usually have to come straight at your reader, like Wodehouse or Fafblog. Jennifer doesn't often do that. Her humor comes more from the odd angle, the surprising POV. It's almost like she's sneaking up on it--and you--from behind some trees, and if she doesn't play it soft she'll scare you both away. That approach requires a lot of understatement, and understatement is usually the enemy of B-L's. B-L's come from slapstick, from overstatement (but not too over--a fine line), from direct confrontation. Jennifer's style is not to confront but to slip up on her subject when it's not looking. Like this:

That's 'The Boy', as Jennifer unfailingly refers to her Significant Other, caught at a moment he would probably rather not have been. There you have a graphic depiction of Jennifer's thang--Do what they're not expecting, and do it when they're not expecting it. In the matter of the cicadas, for instance. A confrontational comic writer would have made the most of the squishing crunch when you stepped on them, perhaps used the word 'invasion' and compared them to hordes of tiny green aliens plotting to take over the earth for its alfalfa. Not Jennifer. Jennifer is underwhelmed.

Yes, bugs were scattered here and there on the ground, in various stages between still-kickin' and squished-to-death. And yes, they were big and stupid-looking and icky, and just thinking about them makes the bile in my stomach churn. But the whole thing wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. I could still step outside my house and walk to the bus stop relatively unscathed. A smattering of splattered carcasses created something of an obstacle course, but life did not become something out of the Twilight Zone or X-Files. (Granted, I mostly stayed away from the green places, where I know it was much worse. I visited a greenish place near the end of the cicadas' mighty run, where a handful of bugs ran into me in their misguided, look-at-me-flying-like-a-drunk-bug way. It was not pleasant.)

'A smattering of splattered carcasses..' It's almost poetry, isn't it? And you get one of those, if not more, in every post, like decoder rings in boxes of Cracker Jacks--a reader's reward. Unfortunately, you also usually get at least one clinker in every post, and it usually arises out of that implacable Enemy of Comedy: Good Grammar. In a post bemoaning the death of the penny, she's rolling along very nicely until the moment we slam head-on into the 'W' word like a zippy, remote-controlled car surprised by a wall.

Now, if I find myself 5 or 10 cents short, I'm going to have to ask for a nickel or a dime. Couch-diving is going to be much less fruitful. And shiny pennies glinting up at me from the sidewalk are going to be--well--rather meaningless.

This cannot mean the end of the penny!

No. I must find other ways to use them. Next pack of gum I buy, I may have to plop down 119 pennies. I'm going to be that little old lady you get behind in the grocery store and whom you hate for counting out her exact change and rifling through her pile of coupons, to boot. Except that I won't be little and old. I will be average-sized and 27. And for that, you will hate me even more.

In the Comedy-Writing Handbook, page 267, under the picture of Fatty Arbuckle being swallowed whole by a Bolivian boa constrictor (on loan from the San Diego Zoo), is Comedy Rule X9-dash-417, and I quote: ' "Whom" must NEVER, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, be used in comedic writing unless it IS the joke.' See, a lot of comedy is timing, and 'whom' is one of those 'proper' words, so beloved by librarians and first-year freshman comp professors, that stops readers dead in their tracks. We have to think about it. 'It doesn't sound right. Is it right? Yes, it must be.' BANG! Timing gone, joke gone.

Luckily for us readers, J doesn't fall into the Grammar Trap too often. She is far more likely to make 'proper grammar' work for her--by turning it into a device, for instance, as in the delicious post called 'Dopey Monkey' wherein a lethal banana-flavored drink more or less addles her despite herself. Her grammar becomes stretched, pointlessly stretched, first like the drunk who overemphasizes every word and speaks slowly, distinctly, and with exceptionally good grammar meant to convince both her listeners and herself that she's not really drunk, and then, the next day, like the hungover ex-drunk whose pounding head makes all words seem...meaningless, and so that meaning must be forced into them--with a crowbar, if necessary.

Cut to two hours later. The scene: Me, sinking ever deeper into my high heels, stumbling about the poolside patio, saying my goodbyes so I could get the hell out of there and into a chair, somewhere, anywhere, and have a big platter of food plopped in front of my face.

The Dopey Monkeys were taking hold.

I guzzled a lot of water at dinner and ate plenty of food—two activities that, in general, are supposed to ease the effects of the drink. But this time, for some reason, these tactics didn't work. By the time I got home, around 10:30 p.m., I was, quite literally, passing out.

I tried to stay up to read some very important creative documents produced by my talented better half, but I was so overtaken by the aftermath of the monkey drinks that I found myself tipping over and apologizing, "I'm sorry, but I have to stop. I can't go on!" (BAD girlfriend, bad.)

My head could not hit my pillow soon enough. I vaguely remember some silly pillow talk ensuing, but alas, as of this evening, I can't remember what was said (a failure of the highest order).

---

What I do remember is waking up. And not being able to wake up. And muttering something nonsensical into my pillow to the effect of, "No get up. Stay home and break the rules. Okay. Okay."

Of course, I didn't stay home (or break any rules, I hope), because I'm too responsible to call in sick on a semi-deadline day. I did, however, vow this morning that it would be a long, long time before I would consume a Dopey Monkey again—a vow I proceeded to semi-break this afternoon, when I agreed to hit the same poolside bar at a date to be determined with a pal who did not have the pleasure of attending the happy hour last night and therefore missed out on the banana-flavored trauma I was lucky enough to endure.

Brilliant grammar-use--you can almost hear the suppressed slurring in her voice.

But I don't want to leave you with the impression that Nonsense Verse is all sly, sidewinder humor and technical virtuosity. It isn't. When J wants to go for the jugular, there's a machete in her hand. Like a lot of female writers, it seems, J can be devastatingly funny when she's pissed. In a post with the gripping title (pun intended) 'And now, it's time to play 'Hide the Penis', J is less than thrilled with the reasons given by a 'source' for cutting the scenes when Colin Farrell goes full-frontal in his new film. They were cut, it would seem, because 'the women got over-excited.' (Apparently, the sheer size of him was the 'issue'.)

But there was one thing that irked me about this item, and that is this: What is the big freaking deal about women having something to get over-excited about? Let them be excited, I say. And let the damn blokes be uncomfortable. How do you think women feel, honestly, when they're sitting in a theater, next to their man of the moment, while scarfing down Super Value Buckets of popcorn, and some ultimate babe on screen, like Angelina Jolie or Halle Berry or Salma Hayek or any other big-titted, skinny-waisted, slim-thighed goddess you can think of, takes off all her clothes, hoo-ah, for all to see?

I'll tell you what the usual reaction is:

The men get over-excited.

The women feel uncomfortable.* Very uncomfortable. Insecure. Small-breasted. And FAT.

But you don't see studio execs gettin' antsy about that, do ya? No, no.

"It's good that the guys are excited," the studio boss says. "Excited men are happy men. And happy men buy things. Including return tickets. And DVDs--hoping for exxxtra-special bare-breasted footage." [Nudge nudge, wink wink.]

And the women?

"The women?"

Yes, the women, sir.

"What about the women?"

What do you say to the women's reaction to that double-D cup on the big screen up there? What if the women seem a little uncomfortable?

"Well, that's easy: Let 'em squirm."

Right? So just this time--and especially in light of all this extra publicity the Farrell film is now getting (it's called "A Home at the End of the World," btw)--I say come on, studio executive guys: Bring on the penis!

Or, perhaps more appropriate: Throw us a bone!

I can't top that.

Nonsense Verse is fun, clever, and occasionally inspired by sublime goofiness (check out "Gulliver the Travel Monkey--

Gulliver was born in Chicago, Ill., on Aug. 6, 2004. His owner rescued him from a throwaway $1 toy bin at a hip urban clothing/home store, and into the world he hatched—a fully formed jet-setting primate.

Gulliver's travels began just hours after his liberation, when he boarded a sleek, 36-foot sailing vessel and set out on the Great Lakes to take in his great fortune. The fresh air! The spectacular views! The bird doo-doo on the poop deck! Ah, freedom smelled so sweet.

--see what I mean?) Perfect for summer--or anytime your blues get so old they start turning green. Her titles alone (as you could probably tell from some of the above examples) are worth a visit. Jennifer herself is worth many.

She'll be worth a few more if only she'll relax about the grammar 'thang'.

Cyclopatra--Milking the Moment

Cyclopatra is one of those blogs where everything is on the table, from family news to complaints about her work to politics to philosophy to-- Well, you get the idea. I've seen dozens like this but rarely are they as well-written, as honest, as funny, or as perceptive as this one.

Cyclopatra (the blogger's handle is the same as the name of her site) is a free-lance programmer with a client-list that is from Hell, and some of my favorite posts are the ones where she vents on this or that management style/technique/ploy designed to drive her nuts and give them an excuse for not paying her at the same time. Perhaps that's because it warms the cockles of my working-class heart to know that these bozos don't treat the professionals they deal with any better than they treat us, but it might also be because Cyclopatra is rarely in better form than when she's ripping their entrails out by the roots and stomping all over them.

He disapproved of my database design, despite not knowing what it is or how to design a database, and despite my assurances that I could report on the data therein in any format he pleased, if he would only deign to whisper that format to my eager ears. He rejected one almost-invisbly-changed screen as too ugly, despite the fact that he designed it himself and demanded the change that I made. And he accused me of not testing my code (for the 15 millionth time; you would think this man had never enountered Windows before, considering his expectation that he should never encounter so much as a hiccup in his software usage, even of beta software) without ever describing a single bug he had enountered - apparently I was too breezy in my description of moving new code to the beta site. Now, I'll grant that 'let's hope nothing explodes' was a fanciful construction, and that my intended joshing tone was probably not adequately conveyed by the too, too stark screen-text that it was printed in, but is it too much to ask that he wait until he actually finds a bug before he excoriates me for failing to test the code that I write?

Sarcasm as beautifully placed as the knife of an expert between the fourth and fifth ribs at an upward angle is always a pleasure to read, let's face it; we can dream about saying such things to our own private Nemesis and watching them wilt. It's as satisfying as a hot fudge sundae on a hot summer day, and one settles into the fantasy with a long, happy sigh. 'If only I could say that and get away with it....'

But her talent and her interests go further than slicing her enemies up in pieces so small you could feed them to Japanese tourists on a bed of brown rice, pleasant as that is to behold. She is remarkably candid in discussing her life and relationships, even for an anonymous blog. In a post titled 'Everything is catching, yes, everything is catching on fire', she gives a riveting account of her grandmother's recent injury.

Last week my grandmother had to take a letter down to the mailbox. She's eighty-six, but she's healthy, and while she doesn't drive anymore, she's still fairly spry - she gets tired easily, but she can get around and take care of herself, and she can still cook dinner for the whole family when she gets a yen to.

But my dad had had the dogs out last weekend, tied to a lead that gave them plenty of room to run and frolic around while he mowed the lawn. And he didn't roll up the lead and put it away when he brought the dogs back in. And my grandmother tripped on that lead, and tumbled down the driveway. She broke both her wrists - not just broke them, but fell to the concrete with bloody, white shards of bone poking out just under each hand.

My mother heard her scream as she went down, and she dropped the load of laundry she had been carrying out to the laundry room, and ran out to find out what had happened to my grandmother.

As much of a bad grandchild as it makes me feel, I am glad I wasn't there at that point - I don't deal well with other people's blood and injuries, and I probably would have had hysterics or fainted. My grandmother was trying to sit up, nearly passing out from the pain, with her hands dangling at the ends of her wrists, the bone poking up over the unnatural angles her limbs were making. I know this because my mother told me the story later, in a tone of quiet horror that made it obvious, even over the phone, that she was still seeing the woman who gave birth to her and raised her greying out on the driveway with blood running down her wrists and her skeleton exposed to the air.

This is vivid writing that has you standing on the driveway next to a badly wounded woman, wondering what to do. And even when you've finished reading, you find yourself thinking later on: 'What would I have done if it were my grandmother? Would I have been able to keep it together?'

That kind of ability as a storyteller is a gift, and Cyclopatra is good enough to bring it to subjects not ordinarily thought of as 'stories'. Sometimes it seems she can make a compelling story out of no more material than what's inside her head at any given moment. In a post called 'Epiphany', she brings that skill to one of those small moments in life when the curtains part and the Wizard is revealed to be in the one place we weren't looking. One night, while dealing with a coding problem, she had such a moment.

And then it hit me. It was exactly like every description of epiphany you've ever read. A sudden blinding light going on in your brain. Being hit upside the head with a hammer you can't feel. A feeling like the ground shifting underneath my feet: I had been going about it all wrong the entire time.

In retrospect, it seemed unbelievably simple. I was trapped in my own assumptions. I was receiving points, therefore I was storing points. But the points themselves didn't matter - they were just a way of receiving user input. What mattered were the boundaries of the square I was drawing. Once I started to think of it as four lines instead of two points, everything fell into place. I have to rewrite half my code now, but it'll be easy, because half the mucking around I was doing before was to translate points into lines.

I don't think I've ever experienced this sort of instantaneous paradigm shift before, where the whole world just sort of moves a few inches to the left and shows you a new picture. I think I'm glad, because as helpful as it was, it was unsettling. Most of the time I like the earth to stay right where it is when I'm standing on it.

Don't we all? But how many of us recognize the moment when it's on us? And how many of those would be able to stand their ground with the earth spinning around them and recognize it as ultimately a Good Thing? Cyclopatra is one of those rare humans who can not only see these small moments and recognize their significance, she can describe them in such lively terms that she takes you right into the heart of them--physically, almost. Take the little post she wrote about frozen grapes.

[A] deathly stillness has settled over the city, bringing with it heat and humidity. We haven't hit the godawful 100+ temperatures of last summer (yet, knock on wood), but we're all wilting, opening every window and sliding door in the house, praying for a breeze, and trying to find out how much it would cost to get central A/C (more than we can afford).

In the midst of our tribulations, though, L has brought us frozen grapes. A memory from her childhood prompted her to place a bag of seedless red grapes in the freezer, and she brings out little bowls of them in the evenings, when the heat refuses to disappear with the sun. Each one is like a miniature popsicle, bursting with sweetness and an icy bite of refreshment. We're eating them like popcorn.

Heat or no, she almost makes you wish you were there with her.

That's the charm and the magic of Cyclopatra. Anybody can make lemonade out of lemons; it takes a real master to make a whole summer come alive with a little thing like frozen grapes.

Note: I have only one small complaint about Cyclopatra, and that is its total lack of visual distinction. She's not only using one of the earliest and least pleasing of Blogger's templates, she's done nothing to individualize it. Perhaps a programmer who specializes in making other people's sites look good is like the carpenter who never fixes his own house--when the long workday is over, the last thing she wants to do is more of the same.

I can understand that but she's doing her site and her talent a disservice. A blog this good deserves a look that matches its uniqueness, its depth, and its iconoclastic, highly personal flavor.

PS. Be sure to check out her 'Kossack Blogroll' (did she spell it wrong intentionally?). It is one of the longest and most eclectic collections of links I've ever seen.

Cross-posted at Omnium

Update: In Comments, Cyclopatra explains that 'Kossack' starts with a K because everybody on it is a dailyKos regular. Makes sense to me.

.Mused--PhotoBlogs Take a Step Up

Most of the photo-blogs I've seen have been little more than glorified family albums. There's nothing wrong with that, but photography is more than just a memory-saver. Years ago, when I had a little money for a while, I took pictures as a hobby and discovered how difficult it was to get what you were looking for: the right composition, the right colorization, the right texture, the right light. It was relatively easy to succeed at one or the other, a little harder to get a two or three combo going, but practically impossible to capture it all. Great photographers seem to do this routinely, but for the rest of us it's a struggle that can take years to develop (no pun intended).

I did grow to love photography and appreciate the people who can take great pictures, however rare. Photoblogs has lots of good ones on its list, but one in particular caught my eye because unlike most of the others, it seems to be dedicated to art photos alone.

.Mused (that's (dot) Mused) is an elegant blend of beautifully rendered photographs that have absolutely nothing in common except their perfection. A B&W of a musician--

--lives next door to a color-symphony of a laboratory.

Photoblogger 'pixelflake' isn't interested in photo-essays or documenting places and/or people; s/he's only interested in great pictures and can apparently produce them effortlessly--at least s/he makes it look effortless. From the almost startling abstraction of an alley--

--to the true abstraction of reflected light--

--to the amusing if unintended juxtaposition of colliding messages--

--to the deceptively simple color-study of a palm tree framed against a blue sky--

--the only thing these images have in common is pixelflake's extraordinary eye for the telling detail, the accidental complimentation of form with texture, the sudden surprise of a graceful line where you'd least expect it. S/he seems particularly drawn to abstract lines, as here--

--and to incomplete, naked forms, as in the picture of reflected light above. S/he doesn't try to impose form on them--s/he's more courageous than that; s/he revels in them as they are, for what they are, and in the process draws from them an unexpected strength and the meaning at the core of each.

I spent more than an hour surfing .Mused and found only one shot I thought didn't work--an astonishing success rate, to me, because I'm usually really quirky when it comes to photos--I nit-pick them to death: this should have been cropped, that should have been framed differently, the other one should have been in color instead of b&w (or vice versa). But surfing pixelflake's photographs engendered almost none of that. I could flip from picture-to-picture, lingering on many (I find the picture of the guitar player haunting on a lot of different levels), without that nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right, that there was something either I was missing or the photographer had missed.

'pixelflake' missed zip. Do yourself a favor--if you like photography, don't miss .Mused.

I am Eating My Husband's Soul--Rank, Rude, and Hysterical

eRobin at Fact-esque turned me on to this one, and after reading it I have to wonder--was she trying to tell me something?

I am Eating My Husband's Soul...and it isn't my first--one of the great blog-titles of all time--is rude, raucous, scatalogical, and unrepentant about any or all of it. Think Erma Bombeck meets Tank Girl. Katy, the author, goes out on limbs I never knew existed and then uses them as platforms from which to launch water balloons filled with--well, NOT water. Or, you might say, water filtered through the human body. OK? And she wants to do it when you're looking up--straight at her. And she gets away with it.

'Eating My Husband's Soul' can be hysterically funny even as it challenges the whole notion of laughter--what it is, why we do it, and the kinds of things that provoke it. By rights, a lot of what she writes shouldn't be funny; at least, you wonder why you're laughing even as you're rolling on the carpet ruining your new sweater with fur-balls and cat hair. I hope this is fiction--in fact, I'm putting it in the fiction category because I just can't believe shit like this actually happened: it's the 4th of July and the fireworks are about to start....

I had distinctly told Eric that I wanted this 4th of July to be Traditional: Only people we barely knew, especially from envious or hostile foreign countries. I invited all Jesus’ family and friends from Mexico, the Canadian family from down the street, and anyone browner than I like my toast with an accent. Sadly, we ended up with a yard crawling with Basques and their large entourage. Still, we didn’t know them and my dogs and I are truly sheep enthusiasts, so we had much in common.

---

The highlight was literally moments away, when we’d begin lighting fireworks.

Eric doesn’t like his parents to see him naked with sparklers up his ass. Never has.

“NO, katy!” he pleaded.

The Canadian said, “I’ll do it! I don’t mind!”

“Sorry, this is an AMERICAN holiday, David.” I told him, not breaking eye contact with Eric who continued to back away.

“Katy! No! I’m Serious!” he hissed.

“Do you think the Native Americans wanted what they got?” I asked him, unwrapping a box of extra long burning Sparkle Plentys; some cones, a few fountains.

The Canadian was beside himself with envy. “He doesn’t want to, though. I’m fine with it. I’ve lived in the states for 10 years now…”

“How about the buffalo? And Malibu Stacy?” I said to Eric.

I softly approached him, speaking in soothing tones, Pablo’s peppy accordion backing me up.

Eric tried to run, but he fell over the drunken sheep and Basque, landing with his perfect round rump in the air atop the pile.

I placed the Indian Uprising Rocket and the Freedom Fountain gently in between his unfortunately hairy butt cheeks and lit them.

What transpired for the next 60 seconds was truly breathtaking, followed by 5-10 minutes of jaw-dropping action.

Who could have predicted that “36 whistling whirl comets, aerial spinners and crackling colored pearls all flying like arrows towards the heavens” would meet up with gas from that sluggish burrito Eric had for dinner and start a war for independence that this time would not be won until David came to the rescue with my soaker hose. Slow but effective, the flames died down and left us all in silent reflection.

This has to be fiction. Doesn't it?

Katy has the Calvin-esque, Bart-ish trait of not being the least bit apologetic about stunts like that. No, she revels in them. She preens, she struts, she points to the burnt and upended ass and says, "Look what I did! Ain't I cool?" She is divinely, meta-ecstatically sure of herself and her actions. She never questions, she never hesitates: when a victim presents itself, she treats it like one. When the pompous go pomp, she sets fire to their panty hose. In her blog, she is a one-woman revenge squad, remorseless and crude, and there is no escape from her justice.

Of course, one can understand how she feels. She has a lot to put up with. Eric's Family, for instance (Eric being the husband of the slowly-eaten soul in question).

Since Spanky’s father ‘passed’, we have to include the new mix of relatives brought to the stew through his estate; primarily Spanky’s sister and Spanky’s father’s cat, both named Denise. Secondarily, the cat Denise’s entourage: her personal trainer, Douglas, and her chef Raoul, both of whom share the main house with her, as well as some ‘hangers on’ who come and go.

Cripple Denise shares the ‘carriage house’ with Christx and Sir Spanky.

Thanks to the terms of the enormous estate, we don’t see much of them. They are busy taking care of their chores ala the terms of said will. Someday, when the cat Denise dies they hope to be very rich, (unless somehow that cat has kittens, which I’m all for; she’d make a great mother.)

That still isn’t fully clear, though, as the attorneys are only 1/3 of the way through the will. Some days the lawyers call with good news: ‘You can drive the Bentley if Denise, feline, doesn’t need it.’ Other days, ‘Don’t touch the Bentley. Denise’s need is defined as ‘possibility of desire.’

One thing is certain for now: That old man’s cat knew what she was doing when she went scratching on his screen door several years ago and anyone who even thinks of crossing her had better remember that.

His parents she finds particularly...trying. For instance, they came to the 4th of July party. With their luggage.

Late in the evening, Eric’s parents showed up uninvited; decked out like a red, white and blue plague. His father, Leo, wore spangled socks with plastic sandals, skinny iridescent blue/white legs forming parenthesis around a pair of wheeled red suitcases. Those suitcases with their bungee cord fastener and Shriner’s decals protested our happiness.

Meanwhile, in Leo’s hand was a limp American flag, waving half heartedly in front of his unzipped fly.

Eric’s mother, Dottie, had flag barrettes in her crispy blonde hair the size of cat heads. Crammed onto her chubby feet, white vinyl moccasins embossed with crazy glitter and sequins warned: ‘Did I Leave The Coffee Pot On? I’ve Shit Myself’.

Despite the 85+degree temps, Dottie was ensconced in an American Flag sweatshirt that played the national anthem from twin star-studded nipple speakers. In front of her expansive groin she clutched either a worn suede purse or her uterus was finally falling out, which-ever being cursed to rot outside her body with a Bush/Cheney pin stuck through it’s leathery hide.

I was keeping my eye on those suitcases.

Nothing and no one is spared this relentless Eye of Truth, not parents, not family, not friends, certainly not her husband, and not even the harmless waiter who only wants to take her order, little knowing what awaits him at the hands of this militant vegetarian.

Eric and his father ordered steak, which we saw being wheeled by on a gurney to the people at the next table where it took 2 waiters to hoist it onto the table in front of the slavering gluttons. The slabs glistened with blood and made me cough gently into Eric’s mother’s napkin.

Dottie ordered Shrimp Scampi and a new napkin. I couldn’t decide what to order.

“What do you have that is vegetarian?” I asked the waiter, Ian.

“We have a variety of tasty fish and chicken dishes, as well as pasta.”

“When you say ‘fish’ and ‘chicken,’ are you somehow implying these are not the standard animal variety, but a genetically modified plant product?”

“Nooo…” he said, dully referencing his high school biology. “We have pasta and an assortment of salads,” he turned my menu right side up and pointed to these sections. I closed my menu and sat on it. It was cool beneath my pantiless bottom.

“Hmmmmm. I don’t like reading menus, it’s so impersonal.” I told him, thinking it would bring us closer together. “Tell me, Ian, what sort of salads do you have?”

“House. Garden. Chef’s. Waldorf, Chick…uh…pasta.” He recited, staring unhappily at the menu beneath my ass.

“Are there any other vegetarian entrees?” I tried, shifting as my flesh stuck to the cold leather cover.

“No, but you could pick the meat out of something.”

“Like the chicken?” I asked.

“I’ll check back,” he said leaving.

I smiled at Eric and his parents. “Let’s get a bottle of something nice,”

Eric and his parents exchanged looks like they were the wrong Christmas gifts.

“She means gin,” Eric clarified as his father reluctantly picked up and put down the wine list.

Her eventual 'lesson' is still being worked out (his name is 'Tyrone'), and while it is, I don't want to give away too much. Actually, I can't give away too much because I have no idea what she's going to do next--or to whom. One of the attractions of Katy's writing is that everything is so wide open--no possibility, no matter how bizarre, implausible, or arcane is ever off the table (ever taken a monkey shopping?)--there's no way to predict where it's going next. Even when you think you can, even when you think it's obvious, you can't and it's not.

The only thing you can be sure of is that you'll laugh your ass off--with or without benefit of sparklers.

A Writing Program for Marines

I've been roundly criticized for treating blogs written by soldiers from Iraq as if they were writing exercises. The responses ranged from a kind of motherly concern ('Don't you know what they've been going through? We don't care how well they write! We're just glad to hear from them.') to freeper-style attacks ('You disgust me. You're a traitor to your country and I hope your server crashes.')

Most of this criticism arose from a review I did of a blog called A Line in the Sand (good title, by the way; I didn't say that before but it is) which, having a healthy suspicion of the internet, I suspected from the way it was written was an Army PR stunt. It wouldn't be unprecedented. Not long ago I ran across a website run by an Air Force major that was aimed at getting adolescent boys interested in aviation. It was a charming site in many ways, and there's certainly nothing wrong with engaging the enthusiasm of kids in a career, but in order to do that without setting up the wall that would inevitably be built between him and his audience if they knew what he was, the major pretends that he's a 13-year-old boy (and does a pretty good job of it, too).

Well, A Line in the Sand turned out NOT to be a PR stunt but a genuine blog written by a Sgt Chris Missick, who wrote an amusing, tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to my suspicions. I answered by apologizing for the mistake and trying to explain why I had made it: that he relied on pat phrases and PR-style cliches to such a degree that the genuine point he was making was largely lost in a blizzard of standardized slogans. I also praised him for the passion and conviction in his writing and suggested it was much more persuasive on its own when he left out the sloganeering.

The response to that was bewildering. His defenders were far angrier than he was, and seemed to confuse a criticism of his writing style with a criticism of his service. I tried to make the point in my replies that these blogs were providing a real service, and that if their authors had the time and the inclination, getting better as writers would serve their cause and their purpose in writing their blogs. Sgt Missick, for example, had some excellent points to make in the post I criticized about the media charge that the people who go into the military do so because they have no other options open to them, saying, rather, that many have chosen their service deliberately despite the dangers and the disruption to their careers and home lives. But he had buried that important observation under a mountain of slogans and cliches that made the post hard to read and his point hard to get at.

There can be, if the authors want to pursue it, a much higher purpose for military writing than simply letting your friends and family know what's going on where you are and how you're doing. Sgt Missick had clearly aimed his blog at one of those higher purposes. There's nothing wrong with using blogs as a sort of 'letter home' (see A Sailor's Journey for a neat example of such a blog) but they have other uses: bringing a wider audience closer to their actual experiences, giving us a clearer understanding of the war from ground level, explaining for us what's actually happening as opposed to what the media feeds us. MY WAR, for instance, takes us into the heart of what it's like to serve in Iraq in a combat zone, while Iraq calling shows us the day-to-day details of military life in a war zone. Both are valuable if for different reasons, and both are well-written. Those are not separate values: they would each be less valuable if they were badly written.

The military, it would seem, agrees. The Marines, with the help of the National Endowment for the Arts, has begun sponsoring writing seminars at Camp Lejeune.

[I]ts new writing program...seeks to address a seeming cultural paradox. War stories, after all, occupy one of literature's longest, weightiest shelves, and American fighting men, from Ulysses S. Grant to Anthony Swofford, have set down their battle-forged memoirs, but these days the military and literary worlds barely overlap.

"These are two parts of society that don't ordinarily talk to each other," said Dana Gioia, the endowment chairman. "And we thought, what would happen if we got them in a conversation?"

The program, called "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience," is aimed at preserving stories from the battlegrounds of Iraq and Afghanistan. The endowment expects to hold 20 or so workshops at American military installations between now and next spring (Camp Lejeune was the second stop; the first was Fort Drum in upstate New York in June), with a formidable roster of participating writers selected by an independent panel of editors appointed by the endowment. It includes military thriller heavyweights like Jeff Shaara and Tom Clancy, as well as prominent literary lights like Tobias Wolff and Richard Bausch.

---

"I think the program is stupendous," said Maj. Gen. Douglas V. O'Dell, the commanding general of the Marines' antiterrorist brigade, who addressed one of the workshops here and who said he wrote poetry himself, though he didn't volunteer to recite any. "It's extremely valuable for its cathartic possibilities, and I hope it will give a voice to what's going to be, in my opinion, a greater generation than the one Tom Brokaw wrote about."

At Camp Lejeune, a sprawling base that is home to 40,000 marines, the workshops were taught by Ms. [Bobbie Ann] Mason; another novelist, Erin McGraw; and a poet, Andrew Hudgins. They partly conformed to the image of the visiting-writer workshop that traumatizes visiting writers at colleges, Kiwanis Clubs and bookstore talk-backs....[T]he writers dispensed the tried-and-true advice that has been dispensed to fledgling writers since time immemorial: Be specific. Write every day.

"If you all go home thinking, `Journals and details, journals and details,' we've done our job," Ms. McGraw said.

There are higher purposes for the writers themselves, as well. Writing down what has happened to you gives you perspective and helps you to understand your own experiences and your responses to them. The more you work on the writing, the closer you get to the truth. For many writers, the act of writing is a kind of therapy that helps them to penetrate the mysteries of who they are and why they did what they did and what would have happened if they'd done it differently. If you learn to express your anger and confusion, you're less angry and confused. A sort of clarity begins to emerge from the fog; you can begin to see where you came from, how you got here, or even--if you're lucky--where you're going.

Many of the fledgling writers encountered here are despairing and angry, they said, that their stories are being told, inadequately and inaccurately, only by the news media and civilian authors. One is Staff Sgt. José Torres, 27, from Lorain, Ohio, who was dreadfully injured in Nasiriya, Iraq, shortly after the war began and who has written, he said, some 200 pages describing the day that changed his life and its aftermath.

Staff Sergeant Torres is not a literary type; he relates the details of his ordeal evenly and undramatically, without the pace or practice of an accomplished storyteller but with an evident eagerness to make himself heard.

"I suffered a broken femur, shattered pelvis, my left buttock was blown completely off, I had open abdominal wounds," he said in an interview, adding that it took 22 operations to put him back together.

---

Another aspiring author is Julia Adams, a freelance journalist and a former marine herself, whose husband, Maj. Jim Adams — his nickname is Rainman — is a fighter pilot in Afghanistan. She's hoping to help him write about his experiences, she said.

"One thing we talk a lot about is the ability to live with killing," she said. "It's something he grapples with, and he's been writing a journal. But there's a lot of stuff he didn't want to share with me while he was there."

"Pilots compartmentalize," she continued. "If a pilot opens up all those compartments, he can't fly. So what I want to know is, `How can they delve into those feelings at a healthy level?'"

Writing is hardly a cure-all but it can help someone who's been through a terrible experience come to grips with it and perhaps even find a kind of peace. What's wrong with that?

Fafblog!--Insanity With a Purpose

I first heard of Fafblog a few weeks ago when Jeff at Notes on the Atrocities featured it as his 'Daily Link'. He called it the funniest blog he had ever read, which is a challenge, as far as I'm concerned. The funniest? Funnier than The Mermaid Tavern? That was hard to believe, so of course I had to check it out so I could call him on it when he proved to be wrong. Only I couldn't because he wasn't.

If The Mermaid Tavern is Benchley, Fafblog is the Marx Brothers. There's even three of them: Fafnir, named after one of the giants in The Ring of the Nibelungen, is the confused, muddled, inoffensive Everyman who can barely remember who he is most of the time and who seems to face existence as if he were its mirror, reflecting back anything that chances to stand in front of him; Giblets is Fafnir's feisty, combative, antipodean alter-ego who sees life as a war you can only win if you're on the right side to begin with and who approaches that war with all the subtlety of a demanding 2-year-old in mid-tantrum; and The Medium Lobster, who is described on the sidebar as 'a higher being with superior knowledge from beyond space and time. To your limited perception, he appears to be just another medium lobster. To your limited perception' but rarely appears these days. If he is such a superior being, he probably has better things to do with his time, knowing full well that trying to straighten out one of these two, never mind both, would be a monumental waste of it--and a criminal act besides. After all, sanity isn't nearly as funny.

In the same way that the Marx Brothers brought silliness-for-its-own-sake to movies and then, in their best, turned it to the service of satire, Fafblog is part inspired insanity with no other apparent purpose and part political skewering from which no one, least of all them, is safe. Here they are blogging from the convention floor in Boston right after Kerry's speech.

Well here we are live speech bloggin again. Just like last time I will talk in regular talk an Giblets will talk in italics talk.

Wow what a reception with the clappin. First of all what do you think of the music Giblets? I know it goes with the Vietnam theme but is "Holiday in Cambodia" inappropriate?

No Fafnir "Holiday in Cambodia" is not inappropriate. It is approriate cause it rocks.

Also you will recall that a number of people suggested Kerry make reference to Ronald Reagan in this speech an this is the first allusion. Remember that in 1980 Reagan walked out to the Dead Kennedy's "Kill the Poor."

Very true Giblets very true. Now I like this autobiographical stuff about goin over to East Germany on his bike an attackin the Nazis with it as a kid.

Yeah it's a little slice of life you dont get that often.

"We have it in our power to change the world but only if we hold true to our ideals." That is an excellent phrase. An excellent powerful beautiful phrase.

Especially when he finishes it with "with thousands of mighty robots." Plus it illuminates a lotta his foreign policy which a lot of voters have been waitin for.

Yes I am glad to see him get into the nitty-gritty of things. The mighty robots initiative seems like an amazin plan an I have no idea why nobody even thought of it before! They should be able to take care of terror AND supply universal health coverage all at once!

He's talkin about "I know what its like to walk around with an M-16 etc." I dont get it, is Kerry a big NRA freak or a gun collector or something?

No he was in Vietnam.

Really? Wow. Giblets had no idea. You'd think theyd play that up more.

Malapropisms, misunderstandings, and mayhem--it's all there, the MB staples, plus a healthy dose of cluelessness and an unerring instinct for 'accidentally' hitting below the belt. During their 'convention blogging', which went on all last week, Fafnir played the kind of generic tv anchor at a loss without his cue cards with which we are all so depressingly familiar, giving his 'interviews' of Giblets just the right touch of the ignorant know-it-all who breathlessly asks obvious questions as if no one had ever thought of them before, and automatically agreeing with everything Giblets asserts as fact no matter how patently false it is. Giblets, in turn, played the Guest Commentator role to perfection, pontificating pointlessly and occasionally at length on the trivial details he finds so significant despite the fact that they didn't happen, and offering opinions that unwittingly rip the mask of civility from political rhetoric. Here they are analyzing John Edwards' speech:

Well this speech is comin hot off the heels of a great introduction by John Edwards's wife Elizabeth who came across as very warm an carin an matronly in fact I believe she spontaneously birthed a child on stage an so Edwards is startin off with an acknowledgement of his wife.

It helps humanize his otherwise cold an distant trial-lawyerly demeanor which has been such a problem throughout this campaign.

Yes it has Giblets. What other kinds of problems is John Edwards goin to have tonight?

What I think Democrats should be careful about is the amount of "class warfare" in Edwards's speech. They might want to tone it down a bit an add some moderate lines like "It is good to tax poor people more" an "rich people get taxed too darn much" an "would you like more money rich people? I understand poor people have quite a lot just lyin around."

Maybe it was inappropriate to introduce Edwards with "Eat the Rich"?

It's never inappropriate to rock, Fafnir.

---

I almost feel like the speech is uneven at times like when John Edwards goes from talkin about big corporations gettin tax breaks for cuttin American jobs to talkin about feeding the strength of America's armies by drinking the blood of the terrorist's dead.

I think it just shows John Edwards's youth an inexperience. Everyone knows you eat the heart of your enemies to gain their strength. Drinkin the blood is useless. Now Dick Cheney is a vice president I trust to know about eating another man's still-beatin heart.

Overall I am not impressed with John Edwards's "two Americas"/"one America" speech. If there is only one America, how will Giblets aspire to get into a classy elite America where the rest of grimy smelly America is kept out?

But what about the big corporations who are always tryin to step on the little guy?

What little guy? Giblets an Fafnir ARE the little guy. We are short, man. We are really really short. Robert Reich almost squashed us at a buffet today.

Well then I believe we have two Americas Giblets. One for Fafnir an Giblets an one for very very big people who threaten to step on Fafnir an Giblets.

Too true Fafnir. Too true.

I also believe we have two Edwards speeches. One for the "two Americas" speech an one for the acceptance speech. I think they sorta tried to eat each other tonight.

Giblets, as you might be able to tell from that last excerpt, is a raging Republican with the short leash and the short-circuits between his perception and reality that you might expect from a zealot. In a diatribe on why he hates the Democratic Party, he first accuses it of hiding its real self--

You still fail to please Giblets, Democratic National Convention! Allow Giblets to enumerate the ways in which you have failed Giblets - and all of America by proxy!

# Hiding the "true face" of the Democratic Party! Oh sure the Democrats like to pretend they are all nice and sweet and moderate but inside they are all psychopathic Bush-hating socialist omnisexual reptiloids who hate Bush. Why is the party hiding its psychopathic Bush-hating socialist omnisexual reptiloids from the public? Why is it dressin them up an makin them talk like for example Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? Because it is runnin away from its psychopathic Bush-hating socialist omnisexual reptiloid identity that is why! Giblets finds you shameful and cowardly Democratic Party!

--then later--

# Revealing the "true face" of the Democratic Party! Giblets was deeply offended by the psychopathic Bush-hating socialism comin out of Al Sharpton tonight! Sure this is the loathsome face of the Democratic Party, but does Giblets really have to see it?

--blissfully unaware of the contradiction. By any measure, this is brilliant satire, but it is also achingly funny. Here's the end of Giblets' rant:

# No love for Giblets! All the other bloggers here I think are gettin invited to better parties than Giblets! I saw that TalkLeft guy headin to some party with supermodels or naked presidents or naked supermodel presidents. Damn you TalkLeft guy! Giblets is stuck here talkin to Robert Novak an all he can do is make gargling sounds with his venom sacs. "Ggllgglgl," says Novak. Shut the hell up Novak you annoy Giblets!

I defy you to suppress your giggling all the way through that. If you can, try their interview with Wolf Blitzer or their interview with the Family research Council's James Dobson:

FAFBLOG: Well Dr. James Dobson it has been a while since we had our last interview an in between the Ban Gay Marriage Amendment Amendment failed. How you been since then?
JAMES DOBSON: Just terrible, Fafnir. Because of the weakness and corruption of the United States Senate, I have been forced to become gay.
FB: Oh no!
JD: I'm afraid it's true, Fafnir. I now spend my nights in a ball gag and a chastity cage while Gary Bauer whips me from behind in his skintight leather bodice.
FB: That is terrible news Doctor James Dobson! Not only has gay marriage forced you to become gay, it has made you a bottom!
JD: And that's not the worst of it. Pat Robertson changed his name to "Trixie" and is giving handjobs in Tiajuana for five bucks a pop. Bill Bennet is a ponyboy in San Francisco. No one's seen Jerry Falwell since the FMA was killed, but there've been sightings of a heavy-set post-op tranny with three breasts, a chimpanzee sex slave, and a fiery Southern oratorial style along the backroads of Central Virginia.

But I don't want to get too carried away with the satirical aspect of Fafblog (I know, it's too late, that train done left the station) at the expense of its frantically warped whimsy and apolitical left-field looniness. There are Fafnir's and Giblets' evil twins from an alternate negaverse, Fat's-Lung and Mutton, who plague them on a regular basis by, for instance, 'replac[ing] half of all the furniture an appliances in [their] house with evil robots which look just like furniture!'; serious philosophical discussions such as 'Utilitarianism versus Deontology'--

FAFNIR: Why hello Giblets! I see you are almost fully immersed in a bowl of ham jello.
GIBLETS: Unnngh... Giblets is in such pain.
FAF.: Oh no Giblets! You have not been eatin pork to painful excess again have you?
GIBS.: Giblets does it... GLLGGLL... for national greatness. He stuffs himself with liquid ham... for the glory of the republic!
FAF.: But Giblets does the end always justify the means? For example say there is a man stuck in the opening of a mine shaft.
GIBS.: How would a man get stuck in a mine shaft? Mine shafts are huge.
FAF.: Well lets say he's a big fat man stuck in a mine shaft an there are like a dozen other people trapped in there because the fat man he is just so fat.
GIBS.: This is an improbably fat man we are talkin about.
FAF.: Maybe he has been eatin ham jello. For the glory of the republic.
GIBS.: Then he can stuff off. This is Giblets's ham jello.

--and day-to-day adventures like the time they broke the washing machine by loading it with marbles.

So me an Giblets an the bowl of frosted flakes an bananas are stuck sittin on top of the dryer talkin.

"Harrumph," says Giblets.
"Think Chris'll be mad?" says me.
"Why should he be?" says Giblets. "Not our fault the basement flooded. It's God's. He knew what was gonna happen when we put all those marbles in the washin machine an he didnt do squat."
"That's very true," says me. "Foreknowledge is fore-responsibility. For shame, God."
"I don't think Chris will believe it," says Giblets. "Chris does not believe in God."
"I don't understand why," says me. "There is plenty of anecdotal evidence like the Jesus tortilla."
"Does God really look like Jesus or does God really look like the tortilla?" says Giblets.
"The Catholic Church has informed me in numerous paintins that God is a really big ol man in the sky with a beard," says me.
"That is absurd," says Giblets. "Everyone knows that God is a really big ol rabbit in the sky with a beard."
"Very true," says me. "There is plenty of anecdotal evidence."

'Chris' is the more-or-less normal human Fafnir and Giblets live with and, I strongly suspect, the creator of Fafblog. Whoever he is, he's a fucking genius and I could fry him like an egg for writing funnier than me. With roots that connect to sources as disparate as SJ Perelman and The Goon Show, HG Wells and Superman comic books, Fafblog is at once something old dressed up in new clothes and something almost entirely original that has never been seen before, at least not by me, and if that sounds contradictory, you try describing that madhouse without the use of paradox.

Two final notes:

1) Do not fail to read the comments. The Fafblog community is wide, hip, and often as funny as the blog itself.

2) As with Lumpenblog, the Fafblog archives are a treasure-trove in which one can be easily and ecstatically lost for days--or at least until one's sides hurt so much that one has to quit for fear of breaking a rib. Don't skip them.

I will leave you, as I must, with some words of wisdom from a rare post by The Medium Lobster.

[A]s long as the United States grapples with the forces of terrorism, the shadow of Terror Itself will hang over the democratic process, infecting and poisoning it at the most fundamental levels. Can America allow itself to carry on any presidential election, knowing that its outcome may be influenced by the existence of terror, until Terror is, at long last, finally defeated? The answer, my friends, is a most resounding "no."

Remember, after all, that in these days it is the darkest enemies of democracy we face, and in the war to defeat them, we cannot let democracy stand in the way.

Amen.

"We had to destroy the village in order to save it."--Gen William Westmoreland