Memorial Day photos

Subtitle: A Day Late and a Buck Short.

Anyhow, here are two shots I took over the Memorial Day weekend.



A 21-gun salute battery was fired during Fort Knox's Memorial Day ceremony Monday.



The local VFW left a wreath at Louisville's WWII memorial.

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UPDATE: Open Post at Mudville.

Summer's here

I'm sitting in my room under a ceiling fan that's on full blast. It's 11:20 p.m., and I'm still sweating.

Earlier this week, my roommate and I found a notice on our garage. It seems the Vine Grove natives are unhappy with our rainforest project (they call it a "lawn," and they want it mowed). We've been working to fix that problem for the past few days, and with nearly two and a half acres of three-foot grass to take care of, it's taking us longer than we had expected.

I went out around noon today to do a segment, and after an hour I was drenched. I hate summer.

This, of course, is peanuts compared to the 100-plus degree weather my comrades are suffering through in the Sand Box. I can't imagine that's much fun. A year of constant heat, dust storms, and sniper fire.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and I'll be shooting the Fort Knox ceremony. More later. I'll be here, sweating profusely.

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Terri Blair wins by knockout

I snapped these photos from one of the white corners during the Terri Blair win tonight.



I probably won't use this one because of the blur, but the action is intense -- punctuated by the sweat flying off the left fighter. Since my flash sucks, I was betting that there would be little to no chance that I'd be able to get it to fire at the right time, so I used available light and the fastest lens I could manage. Naturally, a lot of the photos came out pretty blurry.



Here's Terri -- I think this was during the first round. I was seriously unsure of how things were going up until around the seventh, when Blair definitely had her opponent reeling.



Strangely, while I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to get my own ancient flash to fire in time, I did somehow manage to snap one in sync with a different photographer's flash. The effect is neat.

The ninth round was brutal -- it started off with Blair's opponent lunging forward and losing her balance, hitting the mat. She got up and decided she was still in the fight, but trying to regain lost ground with sheer ferocity wound up costing her. Blair kept her at a distance, and when she'd lunge, Blair would come in for a crushing left. Here, she's down for the third and final time.



Here's another one I won't be able to use in the paper... but again, the effect is nice. Basically, this was an instance where I tried to make my resentful flash work, but it didn't go off. The highlight from the spotlight creates another neat image. It sort of says "Million Dollar Baby," doesn't it?



I'll have to go over my hastily-scribbled notes for more details on the fight. But the most important facts are that Terri Blair defended her title, winning by three knockouts in the ninth round.

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Thursday night musings

My roommate drives a beat up old Chevy pickup. It has a new engine, but the driver's side windshield wiper falls off regularly, the front end has been hit by something large, and the tailgate is missing.

We were heading up to a place called TK's Bar in Louisville. It had just finished storming, so the streets were slick with hot rain. I had rolled the passenger window down so I could smoke, and I watched the lightning flash in the angry clouds headed east. We passed by the Dixie Highway's usual suspects -- low-rent strip clubs, redneck bars, abandoned used car dealerships, bait shops, body shops, fast food joints, and other monuments to dreams gone sour.

The bar was a nice place -- apparently, a happening joint, as the DJ pumped up some popular club anthems once the karaoke requests dried up. I ordered a beer and leaned on the bar, sipping the familiar Newcastle.

Lately, it's been hard not to think of things here as transitory pieces of scenery. I've finally reached the point where the light at the end of the tunnel is visible, even if it's still more than a year distant. "This too shall pass," I've heard. It makes sense now.

I joined the Army because I thought it would offer a unique first experience in journalism, which it most definitely has. But now, as I head into the final leg of my military tour, I wonder what the indelible mark it leaves on me will look like. Have I grown overly resentful of the U.S. government? Have I developed an undue contempt for people in general, thanks to being an enlisted soldier? Was it my joining the Army that has so radically altered my perceptions, or was it the times I've lived in? Does it matter?

The girl my roommate drove to TK's to meet finally showed up. She was beautiful, but hammered, and 19 years old. I looked at her, with her tight black shirt hiked up over her belly showing off the bejeweled navel piercing and thought about how she was two years older than my little sister. I turned back to the bar and ordered a Bass.

Jeffrey Gettlemen is two years older than I am. He works for the New York Times. Where will I be in two years? Where will my little sisters be? I've missed out on seeing them grow into young adults already.

It's like being part of a big entropy experiment... the elements of my life I thought I'd never be without have continuously spread apart just as I've drifted away from our original point.

My roommate's drunk young friend left us for another table of her friends, and we headed out to the parking lot and climbed back into the beat-up old truck.

It's time to focus. I'm not old, yet. But I'm not getting any younger.

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I always thought this was a stupid slogan

We really walked straight into this one:



Mike Peters, Dayton Daily News.

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Hamsters

Television advertising campaigns are generally shaped not only by the product being pushed, but also by the whims of small groups of shaved monkeys who corporations keep in locked rooms called "focus groups."

Focus groups are shown numerous ideas, which are generated by teams of lobotomized writers who work deep within the musty bowels of advertising agencies. The ideas the monkeys react most positively to (the formula is: [feces throwing + screaming] * time) are processed into sitcoms, new products, and advertisements.

Evidently, this month the monkeys have determined that we will buy things when companies appeal to our desire to be masculine. At least four companies have adopted campaigns that reflect this:

Burger King: "I Am Man, Hear Me Roar." A musical number that depicts men everywhere shuffling off the coils of feminine oppression by, among other things, throwing a minivan off an overpass and into a large dump truck, which is being pulled by a strongman in a unitard who is struggling to reach a cheeseburger dangling at the end of a fishing pole -- which is held by a busty model wearing pink. This is to the tune of something called the "Manthem."

Miller Lite: "Man Laws." Comedian Eddie Griffin leads the "Men of the Square Table," whose number includes the likes of Burt Reynolds (too bad Charles Bronson couldn't have made it) and ex-Steelers running back Jerome Bettis. The men hammer out the details of various Man Laws, such as "It is forbidden to name any pet 'Fluffy,' 'Snowball,' or 'Mr. Whiskers.' "

TGI Friday's: Something along the lines of "We've got the meat you've been craving." Four dudes sit at a Friday's table and get their orders -- one screams, "BEEF!" Another chimes in, "PORK!" The third roars, "RIBS!" The fourth loser picks up some broccoli and sings "VEGETABLE MEDLEY!" The others look at him as if he just said he'd like to make out with Elton John. Realizing his mistake, the fourth picks up a different item from his plate. "SAUSAGE!" he screams, and everyone seems pleased.

Dodge: A fairy flies around a cityscape, trying to turn things into crap from Candyland. Everything transforms until she encounters the new Dodge Caliber, which resists her efforts at sissification. A hard-assed looking dude with a pitbull shows up and makes fun of her, and she zaps him with her wand, changing him into an effette Easter-season J.C. Penny model and his dog into a poodle.

It's weird that these ads have all come out around the same time. However, I for one am glad that the focus group monkeys have finally told me what products I need to purchase in order to be a true man. Pass the Mitchum!

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Pseudo-promotion

I've been promoted... sort of.

No rank has been gained -- I'm still a lowly specialist, which is Army for "shitbag." Instead, I've garnered some new real estate on the paper's masthead: "Section A Layout and Design Editor."

The other interesting fact is that the title comes with no new responsibilities; since our associate editor (colloquially referred to as the "ass ed") was sidelined after an automobile accident last Thanksgiving, I've been taking on her duties.

Those who read this space regularly know that I gripe a lot. I need you to suspend your disbelief for a moment and believe me when I tell you that I'm not a very complaintive person -- the last thing I want to do (other than, maybe, be covered in venomous tarantulas) is bitch about the recognition I get. I'm a pretty agreeable person in real life. No, seriously. Scout's honor.

Basically, it took six months of doing the job for me to wind up talking to the Boss about this title issue, and it only happened then when another staffer sort of forced my hand during lunch last Wednesday.

The end result of this is that I've got a new unwieldy title. The awkwardness of it comes from the fact that the people I work with are all GS-7s and GS-9s, and while I have only a vague notion of how civilians work out their rank structure, it seems pretty apparent that 9s don't tend to work for specialists.

Hence the invention of my new name.

Don't get me wrong, though. I used to work with this guy, who is now in Taji, Iraq, and will be for another 16 months. Like I said, the last thing I want to do is bitch about the place I work.

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'Tis the season

Take a deep breath. Can you smell that? Yes... it's the sweet aroma of Religious Boycott Season.

Not to be outdone by the Catholic Hierarchy's call for a boycott of Ron Howard's movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, the Church of England is calling for a boycott on Madonna's current tour. In her show, Madonna appears on a gigantic glam-rock cross to kick things off.

If you listen closely, you can hear human brains all over the world liquefying. Frontal lobes are collapsing into pools of grey goo and oozing into the sinus cavities of people everywhere.

This must be the case, because no other phenomenon could possibly explain why people need to be told that, say, not everything you read in popular books is true, or that maybe a pop artist who calls herself "Madonna" is going to do something to piss off Christians. This is the same artist, many of you might recall, who pantomimed sex on a stage to her tune "Like A Virgin" and later released a photo album (mostly of herself) titled "Sex." This latest caper is not exactly jaw-dropping.

And the call for a boycott is probably so much wasted hot air. I think it's probably safe to say that anyone who's willing to take the Church of England's advice on what to boycott probably wouldn't be interested in going to a Madonna show, anyway.

Speaking of English, how's about this current debate over the effort to make English America's "National Language?" This is where stupid political compromises get entertaining. Our nation's senators have a capability for mental gymnastics that is second only to the supporting cast of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Colo.) said the idea of English as the national language is "needlessly divisive."

Senate minority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) agreed and added that it is "mean-spirited." Oh, and also "racist."

In the face of this faultless logic, a deal was struck. Instead of calling English the "national language," we're going to call it the "common and unifying language." What's next? A referendum on whether or not it sucks to step in dog poop on the way to a job interview?

The really amusing thing here is that the differentiation between "official, national" and "common and unifying" as regards the language is almost a non sequitur. Arguing for one side or the other is just that absurd. Calling the prevalence of English "racist" or "divisive" is basically just an advertisement to the rest of the world that you are insane, and have no grasp of the language you're talking about.

On a third note, also unrelated from my initial subject, Glenn Reynolds has penned a paper examining the dearth of libel litigation in the Blogosphere (which the Instapundit deems capitalizeable). Take heart, those of you who gravitate toward the ad hominem! Chances are, you won't be prosecuted.

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Photo

I shot this Saturday morning at the 5K run I had to help out with. It had just rained, and the clouds were breaking over the sunrise.



I was wicked ticked to have gotten robbed of Friday night revelry, but at least some good came out of it.

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Beginnings

I was just reading through my first blog, which I started on LiveJournal August 11, 2003. I was a pretty major shitbag in Korea, but hey -- at that point, I was just a year into the Army and the idea of someday being finished with it was too far distant to be real.

Now I've got about 14 months left, and I've calmed down a lot. It's been good to be here at Fort Knox, where things are at least a bit more like normal life than they were in Uijeongbu. It's Sunday, which means the Simpsons are on. The episode is interspersed with advertisements for the upcoming finale of "American Idol," where the last two contestants will face off in a sword battle to the death, where the victor will decapitate the loser and absorb the power they've been amassing over the untold ages... wait, no... that's "Highlander." I always get those two mixed up.


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DA VINCI CODE REVEALED

Hey, I have some advice for everyone who's talking about The Da Vinci Code:

Shut the fuck up.
It's not news, so keep it out of the damn papers and off the networks. And for all you people at the Vatican -- you would have done a better job of keeping people from seeing the movie if you'd just followed my advice from day one.

Yeah, now I'm talking about it too, but here's the thing: just like the whole circus that was Tom Cruise's spawn coming into the world, there's no way to avoid this story. It's everywhere. And every knuckle-dragging dittohead manager on television is perpetuating the plague.

This is why I don't bother voting. You people who pick up the latest copy of Time just because there's a close-up of the Mona Lisa on the cover or a back issue of Us Weekly for ANY reason at all are the same morons who are lining up at the polls. There's not much I can do in the face of that, except to drag you by the hair over to a map of the world and smash your face into the general area of Iraq.

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Postscript: I thought of this while on a four-mile run this morning -- this whole thing reminds me of the historical docu-drama that came out about 20 years ago called Raiders of the Lost Ark, where we learned that the Ark of the Covenant, in which the Jews stored the two tablets containing the Ten Commandments, also has the capability of melting the faces off of Nazis. It is now stored in a secret government warehouse.

You know what? No one thought that story was true (with the possible exception of Jerry Falwell). That means humanity in general has gotten measurably stupider over the course of my lifetime.

How the magic happens

Many of you have written in asking, "Ian, just how do you manage to put together such a top-notch newspaper every week, and still have time for such scintillating blogs?"

Well, even though no one has ever actually asked me that, I'll answer the second question first: I blog by dictation. My Norwegian secretary Ingrid writes down my thoughts and musings, which she then types while I get back to doing all the Important Stuff that fills my days. This explains any and all typographical errors that may (or may not) appear in this space.

But maybe you all would be interested in learning how the Turret is put together anyway. It's the job I do for the Army, and while it's not quite as sexy as, say, "Infantry Squad leader" or "G.I. Jane," it still has its place.

Our newscycle begins Thursday, which happens to be when each week's Turret is printed and distributed. We start off by trolling our vast network of informants, tipsters, experts, and analysts, who keep us abreast of what's happening in the Greater Fort Knox region.

Actually, all this means is that we check our e-mail.

Once our Editor in Chief (He Whose Name We Dare Not Speak, or HWNWDNS, for short) determines what new assignments need to be doled out, he gives the list to yours truly, who diligently updates the assignments list from the week before. This sounds like a lot of responsibility, since basically it involves distributing assignments to our crack team of expert journalists. Who'd be best cut out to handle the upcoming court-martial? Will so-and-so's photography skills be up to the task of shooting a general making a speech at a podium?

Actually, using my own management philosophy (which is a combination of "hands-on" management and "not managing at all"), I usually read each story idea aloud at high volume from my post in the newsroom. I listen for a response, and if I don't get one, I give the story to a staffer who's not around.

Just kidding. Right?

Truthfully, it's a collaboration. If someone's interested in one of the stories we've got for the week, they'll usually speak up, and by the time we've gone around the room once or twice, all the assignments have been snapped up. I'll update the weekly story list to reflect the changes and send a copy to all the writers, stringers, and of course, the bosses.

After that, it's off to the races. Notepads, pens, cameras, and tape recorders in hand (although this last, I feel, is for rank amateurs -- okay, yeah, I use one too, sometimes), we'll cross the breadth and width of Fort Knox, digging up interviews, photographs, and breathless descriptions of traffic patterns.

Friday through Tuesday morning are normally solely devoted to the process of generating content. We also routinely receive submissions from overseas, and we use services such as ARNEWS and DefenseLink as our version of the Associated Press/Reuters wire services (which we are not, by Defense Department mandate, allowed to use).

By Tuesday, we've got a pretty good idea of what exactly will be running. Stories will sometimes fall through, others will crop up late, but Tuesday afternoon is the cutoff. Around 3 p.m., I'll get a phone call from our publisher in Elizabethtown, and one of their advertising staff will tell give me the "ad lengths" -- how much space is devoted to advertisement, as well as where they all go. These lengths I'll copy onto blank dummy sheets. The remaining space is where our content will go.

HWNWDNS then hands me the content list, which has all the stories we've collected that week, divided into various categories -- "must run," "editorial," "page one," etc. Staffers will have placed all their photographs into a shared hard drive, so I'll have a list of those as well. Once I know how long each story is (another call to the publisher), I can start laying the paper out.

The toughest pages are the open ones -- Page 1, of course, but also our regular photo pages, such as "Spectrum." They're tough, yeah, but they also offer the best opportunities for creativity. The vast majority of the rest of the paper is dictated by adspace, and often, there aren't many options as to how text is going to flow on the page. It's just a matter of figuring out what goes where. For covers, I usually head over to the Newseum for inspiration.

Once the dummies are done, I send them by FAX down to the publisher's layout team. They have a Quark expert down there who's been working on the Turret since long before computers were used in pagination, so she's able to get things done pretty quickly. I'll make sure she's got as much content as I can possibly send her before leaving Tuesday night, which usually ends around 7 or 8 p.m.

Wednesday morning we convoy down to the publisher, where we make tweaks to the layout and correct errors by reading proof sheets -- smaller print-offs of pages as they're being assembled. Wednesday is also headline-writing day. HWNWDNS will eventually determine each page to be either "good" or "COS," which means "Correct On Screen." A COS page can have whatever errors that remain fixed on the computer screen and then sent to the plate machine; no further proofs need to be printed.

Once all the pages are proofed, corrected, approved, and sent to the plate machine, we've got a paper. It rolls through the presses that night, and we have a new edition on our desks the next morning.

So now you know how I justify my consumption of your tax dollars. Aren't you happy I told you?

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Immigration? Nah, how about nun-chucks

I was going to watch the president's speech on immigration last night, but I opted instead for crazy ninja head-chopping action courtesy of my dusty old Xbox. For those who are interested, Xboxes are even more sensitive to second-hand cigarette smoke than the average Denny's waitress, so I haven't been using mine much lately -- it seems to have developed the digital equivalent of black lung.

I did catch a little bit of the speech, however, and I plan to read the transcript. First reports seem... well, pretty lukewarm. Seems as if Bush is working to try to broker a compromise between the two sides (side one being mass deportation, and side two being "let 'em all stay as long as they want.")

One of the biggest developments, it seems, is the planned mobilization of 6,000 National Guard soldiers to the Mexican border. Evidently, they'll be freeing up border security agents by providing security, surveillance, and administration.

I was pretty unimpressed by the one of the figures -- something to the effect of, "We've increased the number of border security agents from 9,000 to 12,000." Like that's the problem. And even if it was, would a 33 percent increase really do all that much to stave off the flow of illegal immigration?

Hang on, let me check the Magic Eight-Ball... "Signs point to no."

It's hard to avoid thinking about the fact that this is still an election year, which means that every issue that's discussed on a national level is colored by partisan politics. Even the choice of issues addressed is political... election years are when we rehash issues such as flag-burning and gay marriage. I imagine even the fact that we're talking so much about domestic espionage is a product of partisan bickering.

Just remember, folks -- there's still a war going on.

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Spy vs. Spy

After a rather lengthy vacation from the public spotlight, our nation's intelligence community has been the star of the show for the last couple years, thanks to stories like the New York Times' expose on the National Security Agency's warrantless electronic surveillance program President Bush instigated after 9/11, and, more lately, because of the newly-discovered "data-mining" program whereby the NSA collects telephone records of millions of Americans with the cooperation of the major telecom networks.

My initial reaction to the entire works was negative. The whole idea of "warrantless wiretapping" seemed to me to fly in the face of the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unlawful search and seizure, since American citizens are constitutionally guaranteed privacy except when law enforcement (or another government agency) has "probable cause" and obtains a warrant.

Using the ongoing "War on Terror" as grounds for disallowing congress from "hampering intelligence collection," the NSA's domestic spying program no longer requires a warrant from a FISA judge -- since, many will argue, obtaining a warrant takes too long in today's age of lightning-fast communications.

This also, at first glance, seems to violate the constitutional separation of powers America was founded upon. If the NSA, an arm of the Defense Department, is allowed to determine on its own who is and who isn't worthy of surveillance, then we've lost the judicial oversight that was put into place to protect citizens' right to privacy.

The more recent data-mining operation, whereby the phone records of millions of Americans are monitored electronically to purportedly search for patterns in phone usage, seems to invade privacy less. But does the fact that only phone numbers and the calls associated with them -- not the content of calls, nor the names attached to the numbers, necessarily -- mean that the program doesn't invade privacy at all?

My dad and I frequently butt heads about this on the phone. We'll catch up on the latest events, but we'll wind up talking national policy and civil rights almost invariably. It's great to talk with him, especially since we both hold such opposing viewpoints on the issue.

If I understand him correctly, he says he believes that regular Americans have nothing to worry about from the surveillance program, and that if the government decides to listen in on his phone call (after a computer at NSA headquarters raises a red flag after "hearing" the word jihad, for example), then such is the price of safety, and it doesn't bother him at all.

Me, I'm not so sure I'm comfortable with the idea that any communication of mine is potentially subject to monitoring. It's not that I'm worried about being prosecuted for having been caught, but more the fact that the decision is left in the hands of a government agency whose mission is basically the equivalent of a national-level District Attorney: the NSA has no vested interest in presuming anyone to be innocent.

But maybe Nineteen-Eighty-Four is too fresh in my mind. It seems, after doing a little reading, that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program is not automatically directed at domestic communication; rather, the system searches international calls and calls from known al-Qaeda sympathizers, then determines from the content of those calls whose domestic communication should be monitored. This, however, goes on without the need for a FISA judge to issue any warrants.

So where do you strike the balance? Does the lack of judicial oversight of the program make it sufficiently unconstitutional to justify resistance? Or do the threat of terrorism and the ongoing war provide sufficient grounds to cooperate?

I initially intended to use a Benjamin Franklin quote -- "Those that would sacrifice essential liberty to purchase temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" -- but as it turns out, this quote is very likely misattributed. Such are the ways of the Internet.

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P.S.: Dad, please feel free to chime in here and straighten me out if I'm misrepresented your stance on this thing. I know you drop by here every so often.

Voice from the past

An old friend of mine called tonight. I hadn't spoken with him for a long while.

"I miss you, man," he said. "When are we going to get together and ram our heads into walls again?"

Next August still seems a long way off.

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