Chapomatic

We know what you are; we’re now just haggling on price.

Geldof may be a singer, but he has paid his dues doing his thinking too. He writes about hanging with the President in Africa.

I mention this also because things are moving quick for AFRICOM militarily. Billets are being “rip and filled” to meet a fiscal year deadline; this means that I almost got yanked from here to go somewhere last month and several of my comrades are now going to AFRICOM billets after training pipelines intended for somewhere else. This isn’t just Navy, either; DoD has been scrambling.

This should be interesting.

So said the OIC once. Tough question.

I saw this over at Lex’s place yesterday but didn’t get to it until now. Sometimes you forget that there are stories out there we don’t know, and good men die in hard circumstances with no recognition sometimes.

I knew the name because the guys I was supporting back in the day knew the name. It may be quiet, but his accomplishments live on where it counts. (Example: this pdf, page 2.)

But they should have publicly honored LT Melvin Spence Dry before this, and they should have been more forthcoming about it. Needs of the Nation: we need to know about those who dared for our sake, if only for the example set.

W.F. Buckley has passed on. Here’s his inside baseball on how he cleaned house.

I used to work in a place where I’d ask questions like “Are you thinking about how to deter someone who isn’t deterred the way we could in the Cold War?”

Someone else has been thinking about it.

This could be nothing…or it could be huge. Stand by for heavy rolls.

Like a polar bear eating vanilla ice cream in a blizzard, this one is. It’s like the opposite of the Spinal Tap album cover. It’s…oh, just click.

(h/t Sondra K)

I can do better than this with tunes on hand in about five minutes. Who the heck are they supposedly talking to, VVAW?

Apparently some TV show had a lot of famous people in it. Sample snark:

Here’s the teeth-clenchingly annoying 29 year old, Katherine Heigl, looking like the 45 year old chain smoker she is. She smokes American Spirit, the only 100% organic tobacco cigarette, because I guess she thinks that inhaling natural smoke is better than other smoke. Here’s a hint: It’s smoke. I’m sure when the fireman tells you to crawl on your stomach it isn’t because of the additives.

Skippy’s got it. Send your condolences at the link.

Just a bit of sad. Hollywood and teh troopz last night in some show I didn’t watch.

How many veterans were in that building, I wonder? How many less than forty?

Didn’t this guy have hip trouble since about 1984 or so?

Get well soon, Unpronounceable One.

And this best selling author in the NYT is writing differently how from a D-list blogger?

Every once in a while I get a tune lodged in my head and I have to play it until the groove wears deep into my memory.

Setting the scene: New Year’s 2008. About fifteen minutes before the ball drops; wife and kids went to bed. I’m looking at Moroccan TV from a cheap satellite dish pointed at the trees, occasionally letting some Arabic programming break through the weather. I see a cheezily hip Arabic/French Coke commercial, and then a flamenco group shows up.

The name of this group is Troupe Librejano. Nothing on Google. Never heard of them. One dancer looks like Judy Collins about to rumble in a dive bar on Saturday night.

So. Might as well make some Googlebait so maybe I can figure out how to buy one of their records.

Blackfive has more info about that MRAP article.

Somehow I get the feeling that the apologies here might not be genuine…

A few photos from Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan back in the day.

Congratulations to the new XO for joining a ship that knows how to succeed.

Scandal!

Lots of people with nascent plans as to what do do if we lose Houston.

Looks as though somebody finally figured out that we might not know who nuked it. Science Daily reports that improvement in a subfield of forensics can help but it’s not as though we’re going to care that much about studying isotope variations for weeks when the nation will be howling for blood.

And to add fun to the festivities, let’s note the advantages of making it look like actor A nuked us instead of actor B, from the perspective of A, B or C…