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

SUBURBAN MAN GIVES 1/2 ACRE OF LAND BACK TO AMERICAN INDIANS

American Burt Smink heard the song "Beds Are Burning" by Australian band Midnight Oil and passionately agreed, "The time has come to say fair's fair, to pay the rent to pay our share. The time has come, a fact's a fact, it belongs to them let's give it back. (Even though they meant Aborigines)."

Entire tribe relocates to freshly mowed lawn and parties like its 1399.

Neighbors pissed.

MJW

"THERE IS SIMPLY THE ROSE"

There comes a time in ones life when you realize you're not as young as you once were. And when you hit that point in life, you also realize that there's no going back. You can be surrounded by young people and feel their energy and become so entranced by it and part of it that you feel you are as young as them. But you're not. They know it and see it but you don't. You'll look in the mirror and see you, and you see what you've always seen, though maybe you acknowledge, reluctantly, that you've changed and continue to. And seem to faster these days.

If I could say anything about life after 35 is that aging speeds up. I feel from 25 to 35 I didn't change that much. Weight would go up or down sometimes, but "I" stayed the same physically. But that's changing now. And how do I feel about that?

Well, I guess I realize I can't be lazy anymore if I want to take care of myself. And I have been lazy. I have been blessed (thank goodness) with a pretty healthy existence here on planet earth. (knock on wood) I have heard SO many horrible stories of bad health problems assaulting people and laying them low. I know people who have been killed by them.

There's a girl in the summer theater camp where I work who's mother passed away years ago from some crazy brain issue. I don't remember what. Some kind of growth or disease that withered her and put her in her grave in a short amount of time. A rare thing. Out of the blue.

I performed with her mother two times in my life, in the musicals Camelot and West Side Story with a local community theater group. I always liked her. She was always sweet, funny and friendly, and was a talented actress, dancer and singer. Her husband, a man I've performed with in the same shows, and who has been my director in another show, has never remarried. Their daughter is now 10 or so and I met her today for the first time and she said her father told her about me. She seemed to like that I knew him. I don't know why but I felt some kind of connection with her. Or felt one from her to me.

I didn't know if I should mention her mother or not. That I knew her too. She was 3 or so when her mother died and so I guess she doesn't even remember her, though I know full well she's been well informed about her. I eventually told her I performed with her mother. I'm guessing I'm not the first person she's met in our area who's said that to her. Her mother performed with so many people. She didn't seem saddened by that and just nodded her head with a smile. For some reason I wanted her to know I knew her mom and enjoyed spending time with her. I guess as she grows older and maybe wants to know more about her as she becomes a woman herself, the number of people who knew and spent time with her mom will grow smaller and smaller.

And it brings me back to the overall passage of time and of life in general. How this woman I knew had a daughter and not long after, was taken from her. And now here is her child, growing up fast and heading towards her own adulthood. The connection and thread of life continuing. They also have a son who was 5 when it happened. And life goes on. Its amazing. Maria, her mother, is gone but they are not. She's part of her son and daughter. And always will be.

I don't know why I went down this road. But it makes me think of my own life and how I'm getting older and I have no 10 year old daughter of my own. I have no children, no thread I'm leaving behind. I have an older brother and a younger sister that have children. My amazingly cute and (also) quickly aging nephews. The oldest is two. They carry the family genes in them and so on that front I spoze my biological duties have been fulfilled by my siblings. I could have another nephew who comes out looking and acting like me. With my quick wit, amazing good looks and unlimited athletic ability. (cue barf)

I guess at the end of the day there comes a time in ones life when you realize you're not as young as you once were. And when you hit that point in life, you also realize that there's no going back. And its an interesting feeling is all. Makes you wonder where you've been and why. Where you're going and why. And how you maybe never thought about it as clearly before. Never noticed. Or didn't want to. Thinking you were still as young as the youth around you. Choosing to see what you wanted.

But I don't mind appreciating the process. Taking time to smell and observe the roses. For they're beautiful in the end. Always beautiful.

"These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower, there is no more; in the leafless root, there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

MJW

WORDS OF FIRST ESKIMO SETTLER

"Oh yeah. This is it."

MJW

GENERAL SEATING

MJW

NO HELMET NO BRAINS

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A bare-headed motorcyclist riding in protest of New York state's helmet law crashed, struck his head on the roadway and died from his injuries, state police said on Sunday. 

Philip Contos, 55, was riding among a large group of motorcyclists staging an organized protest ride in western New York near Syracuse against the state law requiring all motorcyclists to wear helmets. 

The Parish, New York, resident crashed on Saturday on Route 11 in Onondaga, New York, and was pronounced dead later at a local hospital, state Trooper Robert Jureller said. 

"The doctor felt that the death could have been prevented if he simply had been wearing a helmet," Jureller said. "He hit the brakes, lost control, was ejected and struck his head on the road. He suffered a skull fracture."  

(Reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by David Bailey)

If this wasn't so tragic, it would be friggin' hilarious.

I understand the desire to not have state or federal government require you to do anything. But why wouldn't you WANT to wear a helmet? How does his being dead give him the upper hand in the argument? Are people at his wake going yeah, he's dead and gone, but damn it, no one told HIM what to do!

I could see wanting it repealed, and then when it is, wear one anyway. So this way people know its a CHOICE you're wearing it, not a LAW. Whatever. Absolutely ridiculous.
 

MJW

FROM 13 STRIPES TO 50 STARS TO...

My nations birthday on July 4th. Happy belated birthday, America.

235 years old. A lot has happened since the Founding Fathers said "UP YOURS!" to the British Empire. That took a lot of cajones. (bawls) For when you rebel against the empire, the empire WILL kill you if you fail. They'll cut you up in pieces and put your head atop a wall for all to see and for you to see all.

Our nations history is one of immense, rapid change. From thirteen colonies throwing off the shackles of a global empire to becoming a global empire in just 169 years. (1776 Declaration of Independence to the end of  World War II in 1945, though the U.S. established a global presence much earlier, in particular during the Spanish-American war in 1898, and many gains have been made between 45' and 2011 - see map below). Not surprising if you realize America is the bastard child of the Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires.

And by empire I don't just mean a military presence. I prefer Norwegian Sociologist Johan Galtung's definition of empire: "an unequal exchange of resources" (even within its own borders). A "tetrapus" with four  tentacles;  economic (economic extraction), political (political submission-repression - using the U.N., NATO, IMF, World Bank etc...), military (military intervention), and cultural (cultural cloning).

I feel at present our imperial "tetrapus" is on the rocks, rocks of our own making, and we'll go down in history as one of the quickest in and out of global power in world history. Not out of power or influence completely, just out of global hegemony. That's just my take. Happened to the Romans. Mongols. Byzantines. Holy Roman Empire. The Raj's of India. Chinese dynasties. Japanese Shoguns. The Spanish, French, British empires. All dominant in their known worlds.

Insane to think it won't happen to us. And its happening now.

But not to fear, my fellow Americans! A period of internal blossoming is around the corner. A time for the Republic to flourish. (Galtung predicts the transition in 2020). If you look at more recent former world empires Britain and France and Germany (well, not globally for the Germans, but they expanded well beyond their borders last century), they're all holding their own and prospering for the most part.

Sure you'll lose some GDP (Gross Domestic Product) lacking the direct acquisition of foreign resources you had when entrenched across the sea, (militarily or economically), but with WAY WAY less money needed to upkeep foreign bases and forces, that's more loot to spend coast to coast. ( Hawaii and Alaska too)

Change is a'comin'! But then, it always is. For us, for them, for we all. Change is the one constant. We spend so much of our time trying to fight it. Hold it off. Wear blinders to it. But its there. Might as well go with the flow.

We're not corks bobbing helplessly on the river of life.

We ARE the river.

Happy birthday America. Every precious current, falls and eddy.

MJW

NO JEOPARDY IN "JEOPARDY!"

I enjoy the game show "Jeopardy!" but lets be honest. No one's ever in jeopardy.

I understand that if you answer a question wrong you lose the amount that question was worth. That sucks, but hardly constitutes jeopardy. They even use an exclamation point in the title: JEOPARDY! What for? To trick us to watch? Make it sound exciting? As soon as the show starts and someone answers questions about the periodic table, Mongolian history or the Peer Gynt Suite, we know no one's in danger.

Maybe when Merv Griffin created the show he had each contestant stand on trap doors that plunged them straight into a pool of abused alligators if they lost. Or had them launched through the air by catapults or slid through a tube into a gladiatorial ring where they had to wrestle tigers. Now that would be JEOPARDY! But the studio over-ruled him and the advertising was already done so the title stuck.

(Alligators! Tigers! Trebeks! Oh my!)

P.S. - Why is it that people on Jeopardy! are super smart and know things like how many times the Czar of Russia pooped in a day, and yet they leave the show with winnings in the low thousands while complete idiots on other game shows where you just jump up and down screaming and pick brief-cases at random (Deal or No Deal) or stack a few apples on top of each other (Minute to Win It) allow you to win a MILLION?

Maybe when Jeopardy! started the values were a lot of money for that time, and they've stayed the same all these years and inflation has made them seem silly now. Hmmmm..... Have to investigate that.

If at present they made each question worth $10,000, $50,000, $250,000, and you LOST that much if you got it wrong? NOW THAT WOULD BE JEOPARDY! 

MJW

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHERE YA BEEN?

Had a debate with friends the other day in a bar after work about when and how someone can say they've been to a region or state or country on the planet earth if they just drove through it, flew over it or had a lay-over at an airport.

London's Heathrow Aerodrome

My friends said that driving through a state does not allow you to say that you've been there. That a lay-over in a city does not allow you to say you've been to that city.

I however, massively disagree.

You can't possibly tell me that if I, on my way to Paris, had a layover in London, no matter how short, that I have "not been" to London as much as someone who's never left their house. It is completely irrational.

Colorado, USA

If I drove through Colorado from border to border, never getting out to pee or eat, traversing the valleys, forests, mountains and passes, you're going to tell me that I've never BEEN to Colorado as much as someone who never left their house? Nonsense.

Can I say I've "been" to Colorado? Of COURSE I can. I was actually IN Colorado. I had the window down and SAW it with my own eyes.

I would go so far as to say, though it needs a different designation than "been there", that flying over a piece of earth in a jet constitutes a level of experience greater than someone who has never done such a thing.

Photo of Dubai neighborhood by me, who's never been

For example: I returned from India to the United States by flying to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where we had an hour layover and saw the city through the windows of the airport, and once more through the window of the plane. Does this mean I can't say I've "been" to Dubai?

THEN we flew over Iran from bottom to top. Now, while I can't say I've BEEN to Iran, I DID see it with my own eyes, with only a pane of glass between us. That certainly counts in some way more towards "having been", (though I can't say that term exactly) than someone who's never left their house. I'd say the same for Dubai. Landing and taking off revealed an even more amazing experience with that city than looking out the airport windows.

My photo of in-flight map from Dubai to Iran on Emirates airlines

Iran. (photo by me though apparently I've never been there)

I guess the question really should be clearer than have you "been there" or not. But have you "sight seen" there or not. In that case, no I have not sight seen in Iran. But I CAN say I've been there. Or "over it" anyway. Which is still infinitely more "there" than never having left home.

I took a night train from Vienna to Budapest that cut through the city of Bratislava in Slovakia. In the night I was awakened by a Slovak train conductor who asked for my passport, looked at it, looked at me, then stamped it. I went back to bed and woke in Hungary, but does this mean I have to say I've not "been" to Slovakia though my body WAS in the human territory called Slovakia? Have I NOT been to Slovakia as much as the friend I was talking to who's never been?
Insanity.

Did I SIGHT SEE in Slovakia? No. Other than seeing villages and tree silhouettes and stars at night from my window on a couple occasions, I did not walk its cities or meet its people. (other than the conductor) Fair enough. But when I tell people I hit 11 countries on my European backpacking adventure, I do include Slovakia. Get over it. When I go down the list of countries, I DO specify Slovakia was experienced at night on a train.

Know why? CAUSE IT HAPPENED. You know what country I don't include in the 11? Spain. Why? Cause I never crossed the border. Didn't hit Greece either. Thus I don't count it. Simple as that.

So, you can let me know where YOU stand on this issue, as I'm sure its come up in your own life or someone you know. How do you know where you've been?

MJW

RELATIONSHIPS: A DIALOGUE

I wrote the following dialogue based on an actual conversation I had with a high school freshman seeking romantic advice.

(Older character to a high school youth who asks about how to keep a relationship going over time, after wondering if a rough spot means its time to let it go.)

OLDER: Have you ever started a fire?

YOUNGER: Yeah. A camp fire.

OLDER: And when it was burning, did you sit back and let it go out?

YOUNGER: No.

OLDER: Why not?

YOUNGER: Duh. We were making a fire. You want it to get bigger.

OLDER: How'd you do that?

YOUNGER: We blew on it and added more wood and stuff.

OLDER: Did you leave after that to do something else, or did you stay to keep an eye on it?

YOUNGER: You don't leave fire unattended.

OLDER: So you added wood and then you sat and let it go out?

YOUNGER: No. You have to keep putting wood on. Move them around in case is starts going out. You get more sticks and branches from the forest. You make sure there's air flow underneath so it burns better. Stuff like that.

OLDER: Then you've answered your own question.

MJW