Alleluia

By lex, on April 24th, 2011

He is risen.

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Good Friday

By lex, on April 22nd, 2011

From the Book of Common Prayer, today’s Collect seems especially apt:

Lá Fhéile Pádraig

Posted by Lex, on March 17th, 2008

I hope you’re wearing the green and preparing to drink of the brown once the sun goes over the yardarm. Somewhere. Because it’s Saint Patrick’s Day precious and we are all, all of us Irish today.

Our quotidian labors being done – sufficient to the day the evils thereof – herself and  your correspondent have every intention of taking the trolley into the Gaslamp this e’en for to partake of the festivities:

This year’s musical block party at Sixth and Market streets has Irish rock legends the Young Dubliners, DJ Marc Thrasher, DJ Brent Bartel, local Celtic bands, and traditional Irish dancers.

And I know what you’re asking yourself, constant reader: You’re wondering whether it might be possible to buy your humble scribe a Guinness on this most sacred day of the season.

The answer is yes. Yes of course you can.

Update: Thought for the day – “Work is the curse of the drinking class.”

Name Tags

By lex, on July 7th, 2010

Pinch * put me in mind of a story.

Was a time in the Old Navy where it was fashionable at certain points to wear hemi- semi- demi- quasi-humorous name patches on the flight suits of America’s Finest. There were any number of “Roger Ball” name tags at the O’Club on a Friday night. When things got late, there were even raunchier monikers attached by Velcro: “Hugh Jardon” was but the least offensive. There might even have been a “Heywood Jablome.”

I can’t say.

65 Years Ago Today

By lex, on February 23rd, 2010

“The raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.” — James Forrestal

Semper Fi.

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Valentine’s Day 02/14/2007

By lex, on February 14th, 2007

Which it might be an post-solstice echo of consumerist culture foisted on unsuspecting masses of sheeple by a ruthlessly bottom line-driven consortium of jewellers, greeting card manufacturers and chocolateers, but there’s also a chance that it isn’t – a possibility that the wise man ignores at his peril while performing risk/reward calculus.

Which in our case meant three single red roses (each with a spray of baby’s breath), three greeting cards and one little trifling jewel box with an itty-bitty necklace in it.

By the numbers

By lex, on June 2nd, 2008

As promised in their political campaign last year, Oz packs it for combat forces ashore, taking 550 diggers – men you’d want alongside in a fight – along with. We’ll miss ‘em:

Australian troops ended their main combat mission in Iraq on Sunday, handing over their responsibilities in southern Iraq to U.S. forces.

An estimated 550 Australian troops, who served in a training and backup role to Iraqi forces in the provinces of Dhi Qar and Muthanna, made the transfer in a ceremony at Camp Talil outside Nasiriya, said Capt. Chris Ford, a British military spokesman in southern Iraq.

In the Af, a 44-year old British brigadier claims 7000 Taliban heads over the last two years, along with a great many senior leadership in recent months:

The new “precise, surgical” tactics have killed scores of insurgent leaders and made it extremely difficult for Pakistan-based Taliban leaders to prosecute the campaign, according to Brig Mark Carleton-Smith.

In the past two years an estimated 7,000 Taliban have been killed, the majority in southern and eastern Afghanistan. But it is the “very effective targeted decapitation operations” that have removed “several echelons of commanders”.

Some of those strikes were executed by SOF, including the SBS raid on Mullah Dadullah. Others have been executed by the Brits using American-made MQ-9 Reapers. Hundreds of which occupy the airspace over Iraq and Afghanistan over the course of a day.

We may or may not be able to win the war on terror just by killing bad guys. From Tom Rick’s Inbox (WaPo):

The numbers here, sent to me at my request by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Iraq, pretty much speak for themselves. This chart shows a major improvement in the safety of driving around Iraq with the U.S. Army. In January 2007, about 1 in 5 convoys in Iraq was attacked. By the end of last year, that ratio had fallen to 1 in 33. By April, it was just 1 in 100…

Al-Qaeda in Iraq ** has come under severe and prolonged attack over the last 12 months, with many of its leaders killed or captured. Finally, the redeployment of U.S. troops out into the Iraqi population, along with a rise in the quality of Iraqi forces, has helped produce better intelligence on the people carrying out roadside bombings.

It’s a good start.

** 08-21-2018 Original link gone; replacement found – Ed.

 

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