When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes!
Usually when I get hit with comment spam, it’s like a guy walks into my website’s living room and starts pumping spam lead into my archives with his spam Tommygun. (Or Chicago Typewriter, for those of you who know what that is.) I end up having to click through 3 or 4 pages of spam on my moderation list.
Lately, though, it’s been been more like a spam sniper. Only one or two comments will come in at a time, and they’ll only have one link, and none of my “blacklist” words. The link will be to a redirect. No crazy post name or anything to indicate that the comment is spam, except that it makes no sense, is totally off-topic and is usually posted on something pretty deep in the archives.
Anyone else seen this new species of comment spam?
I’ve finally decided to jump on the Asides bandwagon. You’ll notice this entry’s title is a little bit different. An Aside is a post that doesn’t really deserve a Big Title, like normal posts. It’s like a quick note, something off the cuff, something I didn’t spend very long coming up with. Often, it’s just to call attention to something cool. I’m not sure this is a good solution for this type of post, but the technology is there, so why not use it?
What is Google.com/ig? I’m not sure yet, but I like it. It’s not the first product to do what it does. It’s an aggregator. But not like most aggregators. It can aggregate a lot of things, including your Gmail inbox, weather, any RSS or Atom feed, and tons of other things that probably don’t have feeds. It’s not perfect, yet. Right now it’s just links. But this is exactly what I’ve been looking for.
See, I use three computers every day. I also use news aggregators. But what happens is I have to click through every post at each place. Recently I switched over entirely to Gmail, because I decided web-based email is at a point where trying to synchronize with a desktop client is simply redundant. If I only access my accounts through a browser, it’s always the same. I never have to worry whether Mail.app is going to stall trying to send a message, or if it’s going to “forget” to fetch my new mail. I kind of miss the sleak Apple-ness of using Mail.app, but not enough to go back to being tied to one computer.
So along comes the personalized Google frontpage, and I now have a mobile aggregator that will always be the same wherever I log into it. It will always reflect any changes I have made, and I’ll never have to sync it up with anything else. Not to mention, it’s interactive. It lets you drag things around in a WYSIWYG manner. It’s another Dashboard, but this one can follow you anywhere there is a browser.
I’m frightened of Google. What they’re trying to do with information is very big, and very scary. But damn if they don’t know how to make solutions for modern living.
I’ve never claimed any love for the military. In some ways, I despise that militaries are a necessity in this modern world. On the other hand, a consistent percentage of every generation of humans grow up to be warriors, so obviously they need an outlet.
I also have a morbid fascination with soldiers and soldiering. I believe conflict can and has inspired the majority of art that matters. I’ve quoted this before, but I believe what Orson Welle’s character in The Third Man said is relavent:
Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love — they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
That’s not to say that I believe all wars are good, or even that most wars are good. In fact, I believe most wars are bad. Powered by evil and greedy intentions. I loathe the fact that the warmakers are not the warriors. But some warriors return from the battlefield with powerful tales of both hope and hopelessness, and I can’t help myself for respecting and even admiring their literary accomplishments. Ernie Pyle, Tim O’Brien and now Anthony Swofford.
I read Jarhead partly in anticipation of the upcoming film adaptation — directed by Sam Mendes of American Beauty fame and set to be released in November — and partly because I was drawn in by an excerpt of the memoir I read for a class on the history of war in Vietnam. (We were talking about combat and the legacy of Vietnam.) But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Jarhead is Swofford’s memoir of being a Marine who fought in the brief but undeniably important ground battle during Desert Storm. He was a member of the Sniper/Target Acquisition platoon (called STA and pronounced “stay”). As such, he was still a rotten, drunken whoring grunt, but was also a member of a more elite outfit. Don’t take that to mean that he liked he. He, and many other Marines, refer to the Corps as “the Suck,” and the book explains why this is for good reason, so I won’t elaborate here.
The book is subtitled “A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles.” In my opinion, most of the other battles are the ones Swofford fought in his own mind, between what he thought he was supposed to do with his life and what he later decided was a bad idea.
He’s not exactly ashamed of what he was involved with, but he’s not proud of it, either. He was was a frightened, angry and proud youth, and his retellings of combat and of the soldiering life are positively O’Brienian:
We are not only better equiped but we seem also to have the combat luck, an abstract currency you can neither buy nor steal but that you might lose if you’re not careful and grateful. #
In the end, Swofford speaks out against the war he fought in and the price paid by Americans like him. He acknowledges the real reasons he and others were sent to fight and maybe die in what he calls “the Desert.”
…because the war has been mine to fight but not mine to win or lose, and I know that none of the rewards of victory will come my way, because there are no rewards, not on the field of battle, not for the man who fights the battle — the rewards accrue in places like Washington, D.C., and Riyadh and Houston and Manhattan, south of 125th Street, and Kuwait City. #
And although he doesn’t say specifically, I get the impression he didn’t care much for the Commander in Chief at the time, nor is it likely he cares for the Commander in Chief now. He mourns the loss of life and loss of innocence of those who go to war, and discredits those who celebrate false heroism and patriotism. He blames those in the military who never fought for the ease with which they are willing to send your children off to fight for questionable causes.
…I’m sorry the men are dead, for many reasons I am sorry, and chief among my reasons is that the men who go to war and live are spared for the single purpose of spreading bad news when they return, the bad news about the way war is fought and why, and by whom for whom, and the more men who survive the war, the higher the number of men who might speak.
Unfortunately, many of the men who live though the war don’t understand why they were spared. They think they are still alive in order to return home and make money and fuck their wife and get drunk and wave the flag.
These men spread what they call good news, the good news about war and warriors. Some of the men who spread good news have never fought — so what could they have to say about the purity of war and warriors? These men are liars and cheats and they gamble with your freedom and your life and the lives of your sons and daughters and the reputation of your country. #
These excerpts mostly speak for themselves, so I won’t crowd them with an overabundance of my words, words which come from a mouth that has never tasted the sand of the Desert, words which are typed with fingers that have never pulled the trigger of a .50 caliber sniper rifle, words thought up by a brain that has never been in combat.
I recommend this book.
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