“Actually, Anybody Who Thinks They Can Change The World By Blogging Is Deluded”

Well this just sucks, because I so wanted to change the world. And off the top of my head, my changes would have included:

1. No long-haul truckers would ever be allowed on the Interstate. In fact, we would do away with them and go back to rail and only short-haul trucking. Driving would then become pleasurable again, not to mention that we would be less dependent on foreign oil.

2. All attractive women with nice hooters would be required to wear low-cut tops and no-bra.

That’s it. I’m easy to please.

Eight Things

1. Global Warming Could Stop Naturally In Ten Years - but don’t let that inconvenient news keep you from going green and starving a third-worlder.

2. I never had sexual relations with that Pastor.

3. Eight essential gadgets for the secret agent.

4. Ten worst job interview questions.

5. Facebook in real life. I’ve never tried it so I have no clue if this is funny or not. On the other hand, British accents always make things funny.

6. Today, (April 30th) is French No-Spank Day. Fortunately it was about spanking children, for the moment spanking brunette women on the bum is still allowed. Dodges a bullet there I tell ya.

7. “Youthful passion is really quite tedious.” Most of the tedious passion he is speaking about is the liberal kind, thank goodness.

8. Fort Bragg soldier receives Distinguished Service Cross - the second highest honor our nation offers its brave warriors. Another American hero mostly ignored by the liberal press.

PLUS ONE:

This blogger is very upset that a Macy’s buyer didn’t know what she meant when she asked about Macy’s “green policy.” I do find it amusing that the buyer didn’t know she meant environmental policies, but other than that I have the exact opposite reaction. I love that Macy’s isn’t concerned about green policy. In fact, while I have never shopped at Macy’s before, I am going to go out of my way to shop there from now on. Green policies are sometimes doing more bad than good. Yeah, yeah, I want to protect the environment (and do more than my share actually - if you only knew), but this type of obsession is not a good thing; obsessions rarely are.

Michael Yon Reporting

From Iraq. Well, it’s an Op-Ed piece, but based on his fantastic reporting.

It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today.

I may well have spent more time embedded with combat units in Iraq than any other journalist alive. I have seen this war – and our part in it – at its brutal worst. And I say the transformation over the last 14 months is little short of miraculous. . . .

This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights.

We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can’t do it from inside a jet or a tank.

Read the rest here. He has a new book, too.

Via Instapundit.

Linkage

1. The state of the US economy, like many things, is relative. In this case relative to whichever party is holding the presidency at the time (1996 versus 200 .

2. The good Reverend Wright, Obama’s spiritual advisor for 20 years, was originally a Muslim?

After many lectures like this, Obama decided to take a second look at Wright’s church. Older pastors warned him that Trinity was for “Buppies”–black urban professionals–and didn’t have enough street cred. But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity’s guiding principles–what the church calls the “Black Value System”–included a “Disavowal of the Pursuit of ‘Middleclassness.’”

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a Muslim. The racist “black nationalist” thing kinda bugs me though. Just another one of those things that is going to make it hard for him in the general election.

3. I found this site called Mom Logic which describes itself as a site for “thinking moms who don’t have time to think.” Nothing special that I haven’t seen on a dozen other mommy blogs out there, but I did find this “guess which celebrity mom is wearing that shoe” game a little weird. Who knew moms harbored “foot in show” fetishes?

4. Katie Couric is leaving CBS News early? I never watched her. Along with a lot of other people I hear.

5. The 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time.

6. Zombie Strippers.

Now that’s high-quality theatre.

Catholicism Well Written

I’m not a very good Catholic. It’s not something I am proud of, but at the same time it’s not something that bothers me very much. I guess that even after all these years I am still trying to figure things out in this regard. I can’t explain it any better than that, so for the moment you are just going to have to be satisfied with that explanation. If you care at all, which you probably don’t.

Anyway, while I am not a very good Catholic, I do appreciate and respect those who are. There are some good “Catholic” blogs out there that I read now and again and when I do I always leave them better educated, more enlightened, and very entertained.

The Anchoress is one of those good Catholic blogs written by someone who is a very good Catholic. She’s also a very good writer. Extraordinarily good, really.

I haven’t been reading her long so I missed this wonderful essay about the funeral of John Paul II when she first posted it, but she is so enlightening as to the Catholic faith and so entertaining in the way she tells it, that I thought I would link to it so you could enjoy it too.

Check it out.

UPDATE:

See, this is the kind of bad Catholic I am. This cracks me up.

 

Via The Curt Jester who I found by linking from Southern Appeal.

Cha-Cha-Cha Changes

Let’s take a ride on the “Wacky Way-Back Machine” to early 2004.  I was very interested in the upcoming election and, unhappy with the information I was getting from the newspaper and TV, I started searching the Internet for more.  I checked out all the standard news websites - FOX, CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, various main stream newspapers, etc. - but they didn’t really provide me any more or better than I was getting from the papers and TV. 

So I kept looking and that’s when I stumbled upon my first blog.

I don’t remember which one it was, but I was immediately hooked by the novelty,  honesty, and immediateness of the thing.

And what was even more interesting was that it provided links to other blogs which had even more links to other blogs.  It was never-ending.  A virtual roller-coaster ride along an information highway that I did not know existed.  Which most people did not know existed. (And still don’t despite the millions of blogs out there.)

It was so exciting. 

So I started reading them voraciously. The first blog I read took me to another which took me to another and pretty soon I was surfing to mililtary blogs, personal blogs, cooking blogs, entertainment blogs, porn blogs, mommy blogs, religious blogs, humor blogs, and political blogs. You name the topic and there was a blog, or a hundred, that had it or a slightly different version of it.

I found big blogs who enjoyed thousands of hits a day, and little blogs (like mine) that are lucky to get a dozen a day.

I found guys blogging about cars and women, and women blogging about babies and men. 

I found old bloggers and young bloggers; funny bloggers and sad bloggers. 

I found friendly bloggers and no-so friendly bloggers. Famous bloggers and anonymous bloggers.  Real bloggers and fake bloggers.

And while reading all these blogs it slowly dawned on me that, hey, if they could blog so could I. 

So I did.  I wasn’t sure what I was doing exactly.  I didn’t have real goal in mind.  I just sort of scattershotted it.  Posts on my life, TV shows, politics, current events, sex, etc.  And when I look back over the few posts I can still find from my first blog the only consistent thing I can see is a) my raging hard-on fondness for brunettes, and b) a seemingly endless energy and enthusiasm for blogging.

It was palpable. 

Now.  Not so much.

I suppose it’s the natural course of things.  Like marriage, at first it’s one big honeymoon with hourly calls to each other from work, romantic weekend getaways, wanton kitchen-table love-making, and snuggling-in close to sleep on a twin-sized mattress (all you could afford when you first got married) to “See ya later/Hi,honey I’m home,” heating-up a DiGiornos, buying that California King mattress so you don’t wake each other up when you fart move, the obligatory anniversary dinner, and mandatory monthly sex.

Things change.  Slow down.  Mature.  It’s not that they aren’t as good, they’re just different.

Blogging is that way.  For me, anyway.

And here we are, four years later in another election year.  And while I am deeply interested in this race - maybe more so than the last one - I just can’t make myself write about it as much.

I’ve tried.  Various posts on the GOP guys and the Dem guys, slowing narrowing down to Obama and McCain, but really my heart isn’t in it.

It’s just too big to deal with.  There are too many voices out there, better voices, that are already saying so much about it that mine simply isn’t original or insightful or interesting.

To sum up my feelings - Obama very bad, McCain not so bad.

You, my dear readers, either believe that or you don’t and nothing I say is going to change it.  Just like nothing anyone says is going to change the vast majority of people’s minds when it comes to those two guys.

I mean I could point out that Obama used to hang with terrorists, and it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to you if you have already bought into Obamamania.  A true Obamamaniac might just say that was a plus since one of Obama’s goals is to sit down and chat with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, himself a guy who used to hang with hostage takers in his college days and supports terrorists now.

I could also point out that Obama’s little debate anecdote about our military having to steal ammunition and split-up platoons to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan was at best an exaggeration and at worst total rubbish, which I knew as soon as I heard it, but again, if you are in love with him and his cha-cha-cha-changes you aren’t going to believe it.

So what’s the point?

There is none.

Anyway, that brings me back to today where I am trying to find my way back to that early enthusiasm of blogging. 

And the sad fact is I am not sure I can reinvent that feeling. It’s like trying to regain that new car smell by spraying that stuff from the car-wash onto your ten year old car’s carpet.

Doesn’t work. Usually makes it smell worse. The smell of desperation.

But what I can do is just keep at it.  Yeah, maybe most of my posts will be ugly mutts, but occasionally I might just find an Uno that is worth reading.

So, if you have nothing better to do - and really, if you are reading me you probably don’t - stick around.

Ya never know what you might find.

Things Some Of My Blog Friends Are Talking About

1. A Marine Wife had a baby.  He’s very cute for a Marine kid.

2. Another Marine is channeling Barry Manilow - at least in this picture. Ten bucks says the Marine recruiter never saw this or he would have been in the Coast Guard.

3.  Ginger keeps reminding us how nippley it is in Montana.

4. Memphis Steve is telling a fascinating, yet repelling story about his family. I don’t know them, but I get so pissed at them reading his posts I would gladly to beat them senseless for him if he asked.

5. That’s What She Blogged is playing a Doublemint twin. I’m a brunette man, but it does make a guy want to make a sandwich buy some gum.

6.  Neil is having trouble keeping it up. (Sorry man, it was just too easy.)