They’re called “budweisers”

Posted by lex, on July 9, 2008

And they don’t come cheap.

During the service, as (Petty Officer Michael) Monsoor’s coffin was taken from the hearse to the gravesite, Navy SEALs lined up in two columns. As the coffin passed, video shows each SEAL slapping down the gold Trident from his uniform and deeply embedding it in Monsoor’s wooden coffin.

The slaps were reportedly heard across the cemetery.

The symbolic display moved many, included Bush, who during his speech in April’s Medal of Honor ceremony spoke about the incident.

“The procession went on nearly half an hour,” Bush said. “And when it was all over, the simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero who will never be forgotten.”

(H/T to the Salamander)

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Erin go bragh!

Posted by lex, on July 10, 2006

Another reason why Ireland – having already saved civilization twice – will eventually rule the world:

(Author Steven) Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

Posted by lex, on July 10, 2008

Huh.

GOODBYE air pollution and smoky chimneys, hello brighter days. That’s been the trend in Europe for the past three decades – but unfortunately cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun’s rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred.

Cleaner air or a hotter earth: You pays your money and you takes your pick.

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Nanny state

Posted by lex, on July 10, 2008

Teenage kids push away from Grand Theft Auto games and create a Wiffle ball diamond on what had been, well: Poison ivy.**

After three weeks of clearing brush and poison ivy, scrounging up plywood and green paint, digging holes and pouring concrete, Vincent, Justin and about a dozen friends did manage to build it — a tree-shaded Wiffle ball version of Fenway Park complete with a 12-foot-tall green monster in center field, American flag by the left-field foul pole and colorful signs for Taco Bell Frutista Freezes.

Greenwich neighbors react in dismay, no doubt believing that anything not compulsory ought to be forbidden. Lawyers are summoned.

Don’t hold your breath

Posted by lex, on July 1, 2008

Waiting for this pic to show up on mass media outlets.

Doesn’t fit the narrative.

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Another reason to blog on WordPress

Posted by lex, on July 1, 2008

The crazies can’t shut you down:

Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

Code is poetry.

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The company you keep

Posted by lex, on June 29, 2008

I believe I am well within the fairway – in the purely naval sense – to remark that military enthusiasts of General Wesley Clark are notable by their scarcity. Nevertheless, no doubt banking on the fact that the public understands less of how the good general found his way to the top – nor, significantly, how he found himself nudged off stage – he appears to be using his military service as platform from whence to denigrate John McCain’s military service. Playing beard, if you will, for the Obama campaign.

Out of pure, disinterested conviction, I’m sure.

Autres réves

Posted by lex, on June 30, 2008

Conscientious readers will remember that your correspondent has a mild case of the hankerin’s for an Aviat Husky all tricked out with mudders, the better for to land on creek beds out back. They may not realize, however, that he’s also entranced with another GA design built for entirely different applications, the Cirrus SR-22.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted by lex, on November 23, 2006

Thanksgiving is, I think, my favorite holiday. It is just enough time off work to seem sufficient without seeming excessive – there’s only so much can pile up over two days. There is always a log on the fire and usually football on TV. I also have what are only memories now, living on this coast, of the brittle snap of fall in the air, the whisper of winter to come, the smell of the harvest, the sound of the frosted long grass crunching under my boots with the weight of a side-by-side on my shoulder and a dog ranging out ahead, questing with her nose, looking for the birds.

The return of the Angry White Man

Posted by lex, on February 15, 2008

When Newt Gingrich led the Republican Party to leadership of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 42 years, many pundits credited the revolution to the rise of “angry white men.” I can’t recollect what it was that they were angry about – I was stationed overseas and blooming at the time personally – but I do remember that was the handle sympathetic elites fashioned to what must have been an unsettling moment.