Marmot Monday

We're All Gonna Die!

I feel a need to call a flag on the play. I came across this steaming pile of an article the other day and laughed out loud. “Midwestern levees are bursting. Polar bears are adrift. Gas prices are skyrocketing. Home values are abysmal. Air fares, college tuition, and healthcare border on unaffordable. Wars without end rage….” Yadda yadda yadda. They forgot killer bees and a new global ice age. The authors go to great lengths to beclown themselves. I have so many literal problems with this piece and conceptual problems with what they’re pushing that I don’t know where to begin.

We’ll just skip the literal issues with the piece and slap the conceptual a bit. Why don’t they just get it over with and plaster WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! in 68 size font. This is the angle behind just about everything that gets shoved in front of us these days. I’ve been harboring the hypothesis for some time that we’re going to look back a generation from now on the ’00 decade and cringe. No context, no insight, just a big pack of people bouncing from panic to panic. There is no mistaking that we’ve got some large issues in front of us. But this has always been the case and will always be the case. I think a short trip down memory lane is in order to provide some scope. Let’s journey all the way back to the mid 1970’s.

Athena was a precocious pre-teen. I was a paste-eating elementary school nose picker. The price of gas was irrelevant because it was hard to come by. What gas there was had lead in it so it was only a matter of time before it killed you. The president had been self-deposed over criminal doings to get re-elected. The vice president had done a perp walk in ’73. America had just finished laying 58,000 servicemen in the ground over the previous decade. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered upwards of 2 million people (out of 7 million in the country) and nobody lifted a finger. An earthquake in Tangshan, China, killed over 200,000 people in July of 1976. Earlier that year another quake killed 23,000 in Guatemala. Somewhere around 200,000 people died when Typhoon Nina hit China in 1975. Over a 24 hour period in April of 1974 148 tornadoes struck 13 states, killing over 300 people & doing a few billion dollars in damage. Millions of troops were still squared off in Eastern Europe, backed by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, 30 years after the end of a war that nobody called a quagmire. Speaking of nuclear weapons, tens of thousands of them were poised to launch on warning. (“Guaranteed to end civilization in 30 minutes or less or your money back.”) Over 30,000 troops remained in Korea on war footing over 20 years after the shooting stopped in war that is still officially under way. Curiously, nobody’s called that one a quagmire either. Food shortages were very real, and the world’s three largest countries couldn’t feed themselves through domestic production. Paul Ehrlich was trying to convince us we’d all die via the population bomb. While we were waiting to starve to death we’d freeze to death because the new ice age was galloping towards us. Oh, and the Fed had interest rates in the teens.

Do I need to go on? We look like ass clowns when we quail about the price of airline tickets, professional sports, polar bear peril. Memo to all media: STFU and get back to work. We’ve got things to fix and stuff to build and you’re not helping.

Ares

Vermonted

Mrs. Ares and I went to the Green Mountain State last weekend. Let me start by giving a big-brained shout out to whoever decided Vermont should be known as the Green Mountain State. This is a branding genius on par with calling Georgia the Red Dirt State. All marketing labels aside, it really is a beautiful state.

As I told Athena, it's as though western Washington and Ohio had a kid named Vermont. Mountains, open spaces and water akin to the Pacific Northwest. Old houses and streets like you'd find in the mid-west.

Burlington, where we encamped for the duration, seemed rather overrun with hippies. I'm sure some of that had to do with the proximity of UVM. Still, there was an organic, if I may use the term in this context, sense of hippieness. The kids were a bit funny to my approaching-middle-age outlook. Lots of recreational facial hair, metal in various parts of the face, and lots of tattoos. Mrs. Ares referred to them as 'trust fund hippies'.

We also spent some time at the most-excellent Shelburne Farms. Shelburne is beautiful and probably what I'd like my farm to look like if money was no object.

Mind you, this is just the barn/animal area. We never even made it to the main house or any of the other features of the farm. Anyway, at the farm Mrs. Ares met Arthur, where it was love at first sight.

We may have to find a house with a bigger yard. I think there are cows in our future. Arthur was very good-natured considering he gets poked and pulled at all day by ankle biters that don't know any better. Aside from the hippies and bovines we ate a lot of great cheese, drank a lot of great local brew, and generally soaked in the place. (And for reasons to lengthly to expound upon in this space we didn't go near Ben & Jerry's.) As weekend getaways go we recommend the joint.

Ares

Cave Days

It's been too hot to leave the cave lately.

Sorry, working my way through a bunch of marmot pictures.

Ares

Marmot Monday

I got nothing, just been wanting to throw up this picture for a while.

Ares

Save Ferris?

U.S. Marine 1st Lt. Kathryne B. Schilling coaches a woman as she prepares to shoot a pistol during her training to become a Sister of Ferris, June 4, 2008, Ferris, Iraq. The Sisters of Ferris will inspect women for weapons, suicide vests, large amounts of cash and contraband at entry control points. Schilling is assigned to Combat Logistics Battalion 1, 1st Marine Logistics Group. U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Cindy G. Alejandrez

Who knew Bueller had sisters in Iraq? I gotta dig into Wikipedia more often. I need find out who this Ferris character was and how they made it okay for women to have guns in an Arab society. Today its Sisters of Ferris, tomorrow its Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Wonder how long that burqa's gonna be around once Fatima there gets to take her gun home? Also gotta wonder how many women are gonna say no mas to a male-dominated culture after spending some time around American female warriors? All benchmarks on the road to creating a functional society. By the way, Sister, you're holding that Glock wrong.

Ares

Hell is Other People

Far and away my favorite existentialist quote. Sartre was a pissy, moody whining bitch (who boxed several intellectual weight classes below Simone de Beauvoir), but that single nugget of wisdom redeems him in my eyes.

Nothing like a day of wading neck-deep in your coworkers' neurosis to make you wanna take a mallet to the soft spot on the side of your skill. As I wrote previously in this space, even the a******* in your life have something to teach you. Today I was using my inside voice to yell at the heavens "WHAT IS THIS A****** TEACHING ME!" I felt a bit like George Costanza yelling "SERENITY NOW!", but with my inside voice. Old Siggy Fraud said "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar". I think that translate across into "sometimes an a****** is just an a******".

The detached, internal intellectual that usually won't roll around in the stink posed a question in the midst of bashing my head against ramparts of stupidity. In your late teens and early 20s you crave sex and respect. By your late 20's you crave credibility in your chosen profession. In your 30's you crave competence and recognition of such. Anymore, I crave a Dick Proenneke life, spent in a self-crafted seclusion. A great number of people in my profession spend a large portion of their professional life constructing the Dick Proenneke exit of some fashion. While I acknowledge this very idea is occupying a larger portion of my psyche with the passage of time, I wonder what comes after this. Or will this be the defining obsession henceforth? I don't see an exit or an alternative. As you can tell, it was a long, hot day and the beer isn't doing anything for me.

Ares

Athena Caveat

Slight difference of opinion here at A&A: I happen to like Christa, and especially snarky Jordan.

Sorry to be MIA for so long, but between walking four miles a day (stress management, anyone?) and then catching the world's nastiest summer cold (I felt like an extra from Stephen King's The Stand) I just haven't been feeling the blogging spirit.

Meanwhile, here's one I've been enjoying lately...

Love ya, miss ya, mean it...

Athena

Andromeda Strained

Michael you whore. Mrs. Ares and I just donated three hours of our lives we’ll never get back to a ‘reimagination’ of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. This thing left no short cut uncut and no cliché undisturbed. And before I forget, here’s a little tip to the producers from Jake Jackass in Snotbubble, Georgia: If you want me to take your scientists seriously then don’t cast the girl that played Kate on Drew Carey as a surgeon. I can’t unthink her decade’s worth of penis jokes and toilet humor.

This thing is poorly designed to play on all your fears. It’s got a little something for everyone. There’s the terrorism angle, the black helicopters tease, the pandemic monster under the bed, the monolithic-omnipotent government and its associated goons, the mother-earth-is-our-god-and-technology-is-evil meme, and finally that soaring X-Files tent that has taught two generations of Americans to distrust government in all its forms. Evil, dark, ubiquitous cabals are the recurrent theme and the parting visual.

The original (book) was a brilliantly conceived story. Crichton had a gift for taking complex, scientifically-laden ideas and presenting them in an accessible and entertaining format. Remember this is the guy that brought us Jurassic Park and was the original father of E.R. Not a single DNA strand of his storytelling craft was evident on this festering piece of crap. Please, to all that have seen the latest incarnation of this production, please check yourselves into detox by at least renting the original movie. Or, if you prefer cold turkey, read the book.

The new version of Andromeda Strain reminded me of the difference between original Star Trek and The Next Generation. The original, for all its cheese, was fairly tightly written. TNG ‘ran home to momma’ in the form of computer generated graphics and special effects. The original story stood perfectly well on its own. Not content to let a classic stand, this new version became a message movie. Next they’re going to remake Congo where the apes that aren’t killed by global warming are going to become mutants that kill all humans.

Ares