Knotty but Nice

The casual reader of PODM might think, based on recent postings, that the site was some sort snarky military misinformation center for dummies which in fact it is. We at PODM like to think we embrace the whole spectrum of human ignorance, the triumph of stupidity over the obvious and the agony of watching stunningly straight forward and easy concepts going down in flames. We don’t limit our selves to misstatements of fact, callous mockery of the wretched or flamboyant flourishes of rhetorical wreckage, sometimes we just cop a squat and crap allover something good, sound and sensible.

That said, I know nothing about military things, unless you count the Civil War, (Currently I am in a conundrum over why Lee had to be informed about the unmarked road that lead to a point on the Eleventh Corps’ right flank at Chancellorsville. They had been occupying the ground since Fredericksburg and Jackson had Jedidiah Hotchkiss mapping the Shenandoah Valley since spring 1862. Was Lee remiss in not having a thorough topographical survey done of the area behind the Rapidan River fords and does this hint at the sloppy staff work that characterized Lee’s performance at Gettysburg?.) British Naval strategy of the War of 1812 (The British severely underestimated the difficulty of maintaining sailing ships on blockade station when their bases in Bermuda and Halifax were so widely separated.) and Custer’s Last Stand (Don’t get me started). It is also clear I know nothing of composition because if I did I wouldn’t have put three lengthy parenthetical thoughts in such a short sentence.

At least that’s settled and now for sex.

The respected thespian David Carradine passed recently under circumstances that can best be described as awkward. It appears that Mr. Carradine was done in by and has done for auto erotic asphyxia what Clinton and Lewinsky did for the blow job and Anderson Cooper did for tea bagging, thrusting (perhaps an inappropriate term) an unexpected, unwanted and unnecessary subject onto the public forum for discussion.

I know nothing about auto erotic asphyxia except that Albert Dekker, also died while enjoying its lethal pleasures as did Michael Hutchence the lead singer of INXS. It is notable that these three were performers, the various authors and politicians that died in the throes of Eros had the courtesy to die while another person was present.

I for one applaud our celebrities when they pause in their effort to demonstrate the drab banality of our tepid little lives by pursuing outlandish forms of public sybaritic debauchery. By spending a quiet evening enjoying a session of vigorous masturbation that went disastrously wrong Mr. Carradine has once again confirmed to me how sheltered a life I‘ve led. I don’t know why he would do so in Bangkok where if you have American money the prime minister will bring a girl to your room but if we have learned one thing from this tragedy it’s that auto erotic asphyxia requires a spotter.

Know your knots.

Several of the Blogs I read are exorcised of the David Letterman/Sarah Palin imbroglio most contending that political family members should be off limits where smutty lewd comments are concerned. I’d like to point how much fun these folks are to ridicule. Billy Carter, Margret Truman, Lou Hoover, Lemonade Lucy Hayes and Nell, the late wife of Chester A. Arthur all provided the humorist of their time with filthy off color material. Who can forget Wilson Mizner’s immortal jibe, “That Florence Harding... What a slut!” which brought down the house where ever he played. Aren’t we risking the rich national tradition of calling our leaders’ spouses skanks, sluts and round heeled pigs that would blow a poodle for a quarter and give ten cents change?(Too much?)

Are we to forgo the hours of risible fun the Kennedy’s provide with all their associated wives, mistresses, children, cousins, in-laws and organized crime connections? How about Pat Nixon, Betty Ford or Martha Mitchell? Nancy Reagan took a few for the team and Barbra Bush was a stand up gal, even if her husband did put her portrait on the one dollar bill.

Bill Clinton of course kept the focus off Chelsea with his unprecedented string of howlers but even he gave us a stupider brother we could all laugh at. One of the Bush girls got up-skirted by the paparazzi, we haven’t seen that kind of thing since Hustler printed those shots of Jackie Onassis.

I suppose it seems unfair to go after Sarah Palin because she is so much like ourselves and unlike the pompous, self important royal families we coronate every four years. You can imagine her leaning over the back seat to give Bristol and Willow a couple of whacks when they won’t stop fighting. It’s hard to picture Lady Bird doing the same to Luci and Lynda. Also Palin has achieved the impossible, successfully balancing the demands of a career, a husband and a family, something feminism promised but couldn’t deliver. To jibe her about her family’s idiosyncrasies is a little like teasing Lance Armstrong about his testicles.

We are gambling with our entertainment future here. If we don’t want people to make fun of the relatives of the clowns we elect, maybe we shouldn’t vote for people that come from circus families.

"Non, je ne regrette rien" pas de deux

Whew! Sometimes the gainful employment thing just gets in the way of regular blogging, I hear some people do it for a living but I know that's crazy talk.

I showed my daughter a video send up on Bonnie Tyler's immortal classic "Total Eclipse of the Heart"on Write Enough. I thought it was hip, funny and original but her reaction served as an convenient update of how out of date and passe I really am.

At any rate some days the fish just jump into the barrel and invite you to go dynamite fishing, that would be the case of this item of interest. The French it seems have ventured out side their borders and set up their first new military base in fifty years. I imagine their last one was on some unfortunate Pacific atoll as they've been reducing island paradises in that region to radioactive rubble since about then.

Their new base for La Force Frappe is in Abu Dhabi which I am reliably informed is named after what Fred Flintstone said when he started his car, it will increase their presence off the pirate ridden Horn of African at least until some Somali buccaneers capture their navy. This action begs the question why would such a risk averse military ( And lets face it they have very good reasons to keep their army and navy away from potential adversaries.) venture so far from the protection of Belgian Army?

With the French emphasis on speed and flexible response, I believe that by pre-positioning their men and material at, as it were, the sharp end of the spear, they serve as a force multiplier for bulky conventional arms mixes that can be called up from allies or even Metropolitan France. By maneuvering in tandem they can advance on multiple axis until they are cut off, left without supplies and forced into a degrading, humiliating surrender. In other words it keeps them from having to wait for some Persian Panzer column to make its way from Tehran so they can rollover.

The outcome of this effort will probably be either they sink one of our ships accidentally or we sink one of theirs not so accidentally, having the French as an ally is a lot like having Barney Fife for a deputy, he has a badge but you don't want to give him more than one bullet.

Passages

We here at PODM would like to pause for a moment to mark the passing of a man of the people, a man of vision, a man that will be missed. I refer of course to Velupillai Prabhakaran, seen here in happier days in his official portrait for 26th annual Tamil Tiger smörgåsbord, golf tournament and pointless violence awards banquet brochure.

Prabhakaran was a shy, quiet and unassuming murderous thug as a child and didn't commit his first murder/assassination until1975 when he was twenty one. He founded the LTTE ( Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) to establish a socialist state for ethnic minority Tamils and like every good socialist immediately started killing anybody he could get his hands on. He piled up an estimated 100, 000 bodies during the course of his war for the liberation of disinterested Tamils and turned a once prosperous island paradise into a humanitarian catastrophe.

Liberal ball washers have noted his many innovations in the field of terrorism, female suicide bombers, forced conscription of teenagers into his army and the air, sea and land capability of his liberation army. The L.A. Times described him as "innovative and ruthless" a description usually reserved for the founder of a successful business empire based on a clever kitchen utensil. I guess the headline, "World well rid of Maniac" is reserved for Dick Cheney. The Christian Science Monitor wonders whether the the LTTE can continue with out a sadistic charismatic mad man to lead them. The Guardian laments that Prabhakaran's vision of an earthly socialist heaven was "tantalizingly close" but holds out hope that overseas Sinhalese will support some other psychotic megalomaniac and keep the good times rolling.

Adios Velupillai Prabhakaran, you never missed a meal but your obsession with a socialist home land for Tamils impoverished them, killed off their best hope for the future and guaranteed a generation of repression in retribution for your "liberation" army's excesses. You sowed the whirlwind baby and got for it precisely nothing.

Bulletin: CVA needs new lunatic to run asylum

In news that reinforces my conviction that the left is playing with a deck that has less than the usual compliment of cards, prominent member of Iraq Veterans against the War and Colorado Veterans Alliance (CVA) founder Rick Duncan, nee, Richard Glen Strandlof apparently made a few trifling additions to his resume. He claimed to be a USMC Captain and graduate of the Naval Academy who was in the Pentagon on 9/11 then severely wounded in Iraq.

The good people at The Gazette in Colorado Springs noted these discrepancies:

The U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said the school has no record of a 1997 graduate named Rick Duncan.

Marine Corps spokeswoman Capt. Amy Malugani found no record of Strandlof or his alias Duncan serving in the Corps, and that the unit Strandlof claimed to have served with in Iraq doesn't exist.

But wait there's more:

The group said it found that Strandlof had been a patient in a mental hospital in Washoe County, Nev., at the time of the roadside bombing in Fallujah, Iraq, that he claimed left him severely wounded.

The blog This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here noticed that besides claiming to be the gay commander of a Marine Battalion Rick said an Iraqi IED was responsible for a plate in his head, his hip replacement and the loss of a finger. They also observed that Mr. Duncan, nee, Strandlof still had ten fingers left despite the loss.

It appears that Mr. Strandlof's transparent deception was either a desperate plea for help by a troubled individual or he was just plain stupid.

Members of CVA did contact the FBI when they noticed the discrepancies in his story I wonder if it was the fingers that tipped them off. The guy's history was a complete fabrication that he parlayed into fund raising and lots of news coverage, it seems the "Main Stream Press" was completely gulled by this charlatan, you would think due diligence would require fact checking, like maybe just a little, like some maybe. It couldn't be that his anti-war narrative dovetailed with their preconceived notions about the war, could it?

Here's a summary of his lies according to The Gazette:

Graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in 1997
Commissioned as an officer in the Marine Corps, attained the rank of captain.
Survived the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon.
Served three combat tours in Iraq.
Severely wounded in a roadside bombing in Fallujah.
War injuries resulted in his having a plate in his head, synthetic ribs and a hip replacement.

Oh yeah, and they're investigating if he embezzled $25000 in funds he raised to send packages to soldiers in Iraq.

Vatican Mafia

Sorry to be so tardy posting, I’m in a Fijian Strap Match with the jack booted Scientologists at Earthlink over my Internet service. I believed the money I sent them was supposed to allow me to get on the Internet occasionally. They disagree and think I sent it because they are nice people. It appears that Earthlink is winning.

That said I am gratified that Hollywood has broken its creative drought as far as villains go, I am of course referring to the Vatican in the movie extracted from the Dan Brown masterpiece “Angels and Demons”. With all the talk about fire, air, water and earth I thought perhaps an eighties Funk band Earth, Wind and Fire had taken over the Holy See but I was wrong , it was just some bullshit to put into the mouths of the Illuminati, the dark masters that control our lives and are doing such a splendid job of running the world.

It’s understandable why Hollywood latched onto the Catholic Clerics as arch enemies of good, they wear a bewildering variety of hats, they swish around in menacing floor length cassocks while behaving like Roman Polanski and Woody Allen.

I love baddies, when Anthony Hopkins growls “Oh Senator… Love your dress…" to Diane Baker in "Silence of the Lambs" I get all fertumlt. For a long time baddies have been rogues; rogue cops, rogue CIA, rogue businessmen, even rogue terrorist as in Alan Rickman’s remarkable slice of ham in "Die Hard". Of course that franchise hosted a remarkable bunch of rogues; rogue mercenaries in "Die Harder" , Alan Rickman’s rogue Euro-trash brother Jeremy Irons in "Die Hard 3" and finally a rogue computer geek in "Die Hard 4".

I am not referring to “The Rogues” a fine piece of televised fare starring Gig Young, Charles Boyer and David Niven, so shut up.

It’s been a while since Hollywood cast a member of a readily recognizable denomination as evil incarnate, usually it’s limited to rogue priests bent on blowing smoke up Damien’s ass prior to the Apocalypse, crazy Protestants like Carrie’s mom or bigoted fundamentalist that don’t understand that kids gotta dance. I am okay with that if it keeps them from making the movies they want to make.

Hollywood treads delicately around the racial character of baddies as well. Over the years whole categories of baddies have vanished like Indians as in Native Americans that ambushed the wagon trains and India Indians that ambushed Victor McLaglen, Cary Grant and David Niven in “Gunga Din”. If you don’t count WW2 era movies involving Key Luke there hasn’t been a decent purely Asian baddy since Fu Manchu. Modern war movies make the Japanese seem like bumbling allies that accidentally bombed the Arizona and we over reacted when we declared war on them.

Terrorist are okay baddies as long as they are Irish or vaguely European with just a hint of German because they’re all Hitler loving, bat shit crazy, militarists, but an Arab terrorist is verboten, that’s a word I heard Euro-terrorist use. As far as Hollywood is concerned the guys that hijacked the planes on 9/11 may as well have been members of the Skagerrak Liberation Army.

If villains belong to an obvious racial group, they are immediately branded a Mafia, as in Jamaican Mafia, Russian Mafia and Japanese Mafia. In Movies like The God Father and The Sopranos the actual Mafia, the one with Italians in it, the Mafiosi are complex characters, usually likable and not evil cut outs with one dimensional motivation. Tony Soprano was a concerned father as well as a murderous thug when he dispatched Big Pussy, whereas the Russian Mob would be just as soon send Viggo Mortensen over to gut you like a cat fish in front of the kids. This is possibly because the real Mafia does business in Hollywood and one doesn’t bite the hand that is stuffing money into your pocket.

You have to go back to Murder Incorporated to find a really reprehensible Jewish baddy and even then Peter Falk played Abe Reles. It's hard to picture our beloved Lt. Columbo as a soulless psychotic even knowing as much as we do about him now. Of course Jewish actors managed to play baddies by impersonating other ethnic groups that they shared an affinity, like Abner Biberman as Chota in the afore mentioned Gunga Din. It's similar to the shared affinity Hollywood recognised between the Chinese and Swedes when they cast Warner Oland as Charlie Chan.

Black people got to be the best of baddies first in that racist peon “Birth of a Nation” Woodrow Wilson adored, except that all the black baddies were white guys in black face which seems like an insult and a jip. There weren’t any good black baddies after Melanie got ambiguously bothered in Gone With The Wind until Danny Glover played a serial killer on a train and Densel Washington played a rogue cop.

Oh yeah and Candyman. And the five or less players in those Dirty Harry movies and something Robert Hooks did in the seventies, without IMDB I’m screwed. Damn you Earthlink!

Aloha Akbar

Good news for Religion of Peace fans but especially those in Hawaii, the lickspittle state legislature in an outstanding case of toadying for potential tourist dollars has declared September 24th "Islam Day". At least I hope its old fashioned toadying, I pray they don't actually believe the justifications put forth.

The bill seeks to recognize "the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions" that Islam and the Islamic world have made.

Aside from creative beheading, spontaneous spousal abuse, IEDs, suicide bombings and Cat Stevens I'm stumped. I know they invented alcohol and Hashish, for which a grateful world applauds them, but its been a millennium or so since they've wowed us with anything. I hope they get on their horse and come up with something soon because if Vince is right about those ShamWows the era of invention is drawing to a close. I don't hold out much hope, if it weren't for Brits and Americans showing them where (and how) to suck oil out of the sand, they'd mostly be remembered for having some great beach front property and buggering TE Lawrence.

I suggest we go nation wide with this "Islam Day" thing its way too much fun for Hawaii alone. We could hold parades where they can deplore the Great Satan, behead their female kin and blow up national monuments. I think its been a long time coming since we have days where we honor Christians and Jews for "the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions" they made to a little thing I like to call Western Civilization.

Oops! I've just been informed we don't have any Christian or Jewish days, something about the ACLU and the separation of church and state.

Apparently Christmas is OK because it is devoid of Christian content, and Easter squeaks by because commemorates the miracle where our Savior made a bunny lay eggs to call attention to global warming.

I always thought religion was a matter of personal conscience but thanks to the Hawaii state legislature I realize just how wrong I have been. I am glad to stand behind people that consume a diet based on legumes then kneel down and pray five times a day facing Mecca, and not just because I enjoy bashing sincerely held religious views, they are the only folks I know that take more breaks a day than UAW workers and Obama is putting an end to that.

Of course I kid, I send up these prayers for tolerance in the hope that the boobs who don't get it will see the title of this Blog and understand it is satire, and the ones that do get it will realize I mean every snarky, sarcastic word.

Ling Carter

The long time editor in chief of Interesting News Items, Ling Carter, has left a comment on our article that gave a long term perspective on Swine Flu, Pirates and Torture, titled We're All Dead. We at PODM appreciate that he took time out of his busy schedule to give us his opinion, we know that with his interest in professional badminton, jurying numismatic competitions and his on going work looking for a cure for gingivitis he has little discretionary time especially for a publication like PODM which is generally considered unfit to lick the boots of anyone on the Internet.

The firm that audits our circulation cites Ling for increasing our readership by 25%, it rocketed from 4 to 5 readers when he commented. Perhaps more worrisome, while the audit does count several of the voices I hear in my head it doesn't include the dog I got from David Berkowitz that tells me what to write about. I assume he's a regular reader.