NEW U.S. ARMY CAMOUFLAGE

New "Multi Cam" (left), old "Digital camo" (right)

New from the U.S. Military Industrial Complex: "MULTI CAM" CAMOUFLAGE.

An amazing new visual pattern for any terrain, any climate, designed to keep American personnel out of enemy sights. Check out these photos of Multi Cam in action!

U.S. Infantry fording jungle stream.

U.S. mortar squad scrambles up mountain trail.

U.S. troops assault Iraqi village.

 MJW

HAPPY 70th WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

Margie and Jean, August 3rd, 1941

Happy 70th wedding anniversary to my grandmother and grandfather. 

70 trips ago of the earth around the sun, my grandmother, Irish, and my grandfather, French, married in Manhattan without her step-mom and father present. They rejected their love and insisted she, Mary (went by Margie her whole life, I only knew Mary was her birth name when I read the direction sign at her wake), marry an Irishman. 

She said no, no, no and that she loved Jean, will marry Jean and that's that. 

So her parents disowned her. Didn't come to her wedding. Only when they had their first child, my Uncle Bobby, did they come see them and reconnect. Crazy to think in this day and age that European rivalries were that deep then. Most European-Americans today don't even know the nations their ancestors hail from.

But it was so. And their second child was my Aunt Jeanne, and their third and final was my mother Eileen. And she married my father and here I am. 

Lucky lucky lucky. So easy to not exist, if you think about it. "Yeah but you'd always have been, even if it was to different parents!" I don't believe that. Yes that suggests that life, all life, is potential merely. Forward motion and connections beyond number, beyond comprehension, writing its story as it goes. Not without intention, but not with predetermined results. (a philosophical discussion for another time)

The real kick of my mentioning this today is this:

At my parents house hangs the framed photo of my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day 70 years ago today. (above) At some time this morning, on said 70th anniversary, my brother and father were out front of the house looking at my brothers car when WHAM. They heard a big bang from inside the house. 

They entered to investigate and found this framed photo on the floor. 

Fallen from the wall.

Has this happened before? Not that I can recall. But if it has, not in recent memory. Do sometimes pictures fall? Sure. But the wedding photo of a couple married 70 years ago ON their wedding anniversary 70 years later? It happened. Happened today. 

Pure coincidence? Or their spirits combining energy to nudge it off the wall, saying they're with us? Demanding we raise a glass to an important day that led to my mother existing and my father then being in my mothers life, (hard to date a woman that doesn't exist, though I have dated some women like that) which led to MY existence, and to this blog and this very entry about my existence?

Doesn't matter. It happened. And I think its really cool. It DOES make me think of them. And their relationship. And their family. And how without that day, that moment, (and a million others) their sacrifices, their time spent together and with their children, how without all that, I would not be here, and you'd be doing something else instead of reading this right now. All things I'm most grateful for.

So raise a glass. Here's to my grandma and grandpa and the 70 years since they said "I do". 

CHEERS.

(or, "UP THE FIELD, MAYO!" as my French grandfather would toast, referencing the soccer team from county Mayo in Ireland where my grandmothers family was from) 

MJW

FIREWORK ARTILLERY SHELLS

New from the arsenal of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex:

FIREWORK ARTILLERY SHELLS!

 An old fashioned artillery barrage drives your enemy underground to escape the storm of steel, only to man their positions again when your infantry arrives to smoke'm out.

With FIREWORK ARTILLERY SHELLS, they'll come to YOU in four easy steps:

1) Fire the firework artillery shells.

2) Fireworks explode over enemy positions with color, pop and pizzazz.

3) When your entertained enemy "Ooh's!" and "Ahh's!" out from his defenses...

4) Blast'm at point blank range.

TRAGIC MAGIC

Amateur magician and time machine enthusiast Skip Scallion learns hundreds of magic tricks.

He builds a time machine to wow, then rule, medieval Europe.

He arrives. Wows them.

And is burned alive for witchcraft.

MJW

STRAIGHT UP

Ever see an elderly person who's spine is bent like a number "7" and you immediately straighten your posture?

(And then let it slack again?)

MJW

CIVILIZATION BASED ON FECES TRAVEL

I have a theory that you can judge a cultures level of civilization by how far human feces travels from it. Let me drop it to you like this:

In less civilized cultures, one defecates on the surface of the planet and leaves it. In slightly more civilized cultures one will bury it, thus increasing the distance between feces and human. Some cultures will both leave feces or bury it, but do so at a location distant from their homes. Even more civilized.

Water water everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Granted, it IS possible for uncivilized cultures to poop in a river and have it travel hundreds of miles on the Mississippi, Yangtze, Amazon, Nile or Danube. You would think this implies civilization. It does not. I must stipulate that the distance traveled by said feces must be facilitated by humans. Not nature. Pooping in a river is clever, but not civilized. (something the village down-river is bound to agree with)

That being said, some cultures have sewage systems that remove the feces from the home and channel it into a river. This is more civilized than just pooping directly in a river, but not the supreme measure of human civilization no matter how far away the waterway.

Now, I live in America in the year 2,011 AD and when I "go", I press a lever on a porcelain chair that sucks waste down a tube that passes under the floor, out of the house and under the front lawn to the street where it travels under traffic into a larger tube that takes it downhill, across town and toward larger and larger pipe systems that connect and connect and connect to sewage treatment plants that process and de-crapify it so that it can be disposed of properly.

Chart needed? Civilized.

Imagine the massive metropolis of New York, all the toilets in all the apartments, hotels, skyscrapers, on all the floors, depositing human waste down the spines of buildings then underground, gushing under the city as people walk blissfully above, channeled to massive pools at waste treatment facilities.

Truth is the system is so advanced I have no clear idea what they do or how they do it nor do I care. Everything is so worked out we don't NEED to know how the heck they do it. We pull a lever, push a button, or in some instances, a computer sensor does it for us, and we're back in business. No fuss no muss.

And our feces travels far. Kilometers. Miles. All engineered by man.

Signs of true civilization.

MJW