One of the cool things about living in DC is all of the monuments. The Lincoln Monument is probably my favorite. There’s just something about it that’s awe-inspiring, especially at night. (Although I have to say I find it hard to settle on just one monument as my favorite. For instance, when it’s snowing at night the Korean War Memorial is absolutely majestic and you feel that the statues are real. At sunset when the mall is empty the Vietnam War Memorial is beautiful and ominous. For right now though I’ll stick with the Lincoln Memorial.) Now back to Lincoln.
If you are a nerd you will know that three weekends ago was the anniversary of the Lincoln assassination. So two Saturday’s ago we went on a Ford’s Theatre Walking Tour that I had stumbled upon earlier this month. I have been seriously excited for it (because I am a huuuge nerd) but I wasn’t sure if it would live up to my expectations. Thankfully it not only lived up to them but it surpassed my expectations. The tour–if you’re too lazy to click the link above and read the short description–places you in the role of a deputy police officer reviewing the leads that the police followed in the hours and days that followed the assassination. What makes it great–besides learning and getting to see the city in a new way–is that the historical actor played the inspector, and all the other roles. Through out the tour he would assume various other people–men and women–who were witness to the various parts of the assassination. For each one he had a unique accent and personality. It added another layer of fun/nerdiness to the tour. The tour takes you from Ford’s Theatre to the White House and along the way you visit various sites around the city where important events took place. Living and working in this city it’s easy to forget the amount of history that happened all over the place. I visit Chinatown all the time and didn’t know that half of the places we visited and that I walk by all the time were the sites for many of these pivotal events.
On Sunday we went back to Ford’s Theatre to take a tour of it and to check out the box where it all happened–unfortunately you can go in or even walk by it. Afterwards we went to see The Conspirator, which turned out to be a good movie despite the bad reviews it has been getting. Me thinks that the reviewers aren’t much into historical court room dramas. Next up I’ll be taking some time out from novels to check out Eric Foner’s newest book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.
So I have been hard at work on my paper this entire weekend. Actually, I was supposed to be working on this paper all weekend. However, instead of doing actual work I have been procrastinating, well, like it’s my job. So Sunday I turned on my XBOX 360 so I could listen to some music whilst writing, but before I started playing my writing music, I started looking at some of the new arcade games. One game in particular caught my eye, The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (and also check the developers blog). I decided to check out the demo, and damn I was hooked with a quickness. Although $10 can be a steep price for a broke ass student like myself I didn’t think twice about buying it. This game is amazing and I spent the better part of my Sunday afternoon furiously killing some fools.
The game is about some dude who washes dishes–amazingly I don’t think he is Mexican haha–who dies or something and somehow lives and wants revenge. Someone also kidnaps his sister and he needs to save her. The cut scenes are done as comic strips and the whole style of the game is very comic booky. The game does a very good job of feeling like a comic book come to life. Each level feels like individual frames of a comic book that you are slowly progressing through. Obviously this is all part of the design, but the fact that it comes through so clearly, and works so well, speaks highly of the designer not dropping the ball on his vision. The actual gameplay though is kick ass and the closest approximation for it is Ninja Gaiden. If you like Ninja Gaiden you’re going to like this game. If you like the action of Ninja Gaiden, but your fingers aren’t nimble enough to hit the combos (coughneverbesocialcough), you will most likely enjoy this game. It has all the cool action without the mind-numbing and finger contorting combos of Ninja Gaiden (although if you play for long enough your hands will cramp up like the caretakers). Oh yah by the way did I mention that there are zombie in the game? No? Well there are, so bonus points for the zombie slayage, and you even get a chainsaw in the game to slash those zombies back to hell. Also of note there are sweet executions that you can perform to finish off your enemies. One of my favs is when the Dishwasher grabs the psuedo-FBI agents gun and uses it to splatter said agents brains onto the wall.
HBO has had quite a few shows lately dealing with the war in Iraq, and they have all been well done and even-handed. Taking Chance is the newest HBO film that revolves around the Iraq war, and like the others it is non-political and just tells the true story of one Marine escorting another Marine home. I don’t want to try and deconstruct this film like some film nerd, instead I will just say that it is well worth your time. I watched it last night–instead of the craptastic Oscars–and it was an emotional movie. If you can watch this film without tearing up then you must not have a soul or maybe you’re just a cynical hippie (or both). Anyways watch the trailer then check it out:
Over the last two days I have been engaged in an epic struggle for life and limb. In the course of two days my kids have been take by Child Protective Services–because I murdered my wife, how lame–my other two wives have divorced me, and taken my kids, and I have finally and fully capitulated to the dark impulses that have haunted me. I know that I have ostracized friends and family, but I don’t care because I am now a person with one singular purpose, evil. I want to spread pain and terror to as many people as I can. I care not for the living or the dead, the young or old, guilty or innocent. I am a killing machine that’s murders unflinchingly and in my wake I leave death and despair. I am the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse.
I found this blog today and I must say it is definitely one of the crazier blogs I have ever encounter. It’s a blog of some anonymous 23 year old girl who is recounting her experience from pregnancy to abortion. It’s a pretty dark subject to blog about, but it is fairly interesting and depressing at the same time. Far be it from me to be judgemental, but I wonder how it is she got pregnant. She doesn’t write about a boyfriend so it makes me think that maybe she is just a party girl that has been trolling the bars, and woke up one morning pregnant. Or maybe she didn’t give him a hand in the decision making process. Whatever side of the argument you fall on on the abortion issue it is compelling reading. Mostly because it is not a blog about trying to make a decision between birth and pregnancy, that decision has already been made, and the fate of the fetus is sealed. Anyways check it out here.
Last night I dreamt that I rejoined the Marine Corps and went back to Iraq for another tour. During my time there I ended up losing my right foot and arm in an RPG attack. Immediately after I lost my limbs I woke up, and I stayed awake for a long time thinking about how in the fuck I would play video games, jack off, throw a baseball, and many other daily tasks without the aide of my right arm. It’s weird I wasn’t too concerned about losing my right foot. I think I’d be fairly normal with a prosthetic foot, but losing my right arm really bugged me. It took me a bit to finally sort it all out in my head and go back to sleep, but now I wonder what the hell, if any, the dream meant. Most likely nothing, but I have been entertaining thoughts lately about going back to the Raq one more time. Maybe it’s a warning then. I did roll the dice once, and came back unscathed, maybe this is fate telling me not to push my luck.
After watching this superb mini-series on HBO I decided to pick up Generation Kill. I took it with me to Houston, and I was able to pretty much read the whole book in the airport because of all the delays that came from Tropical Storm Eduardo. As good as the mini-series is the book, for me, is even better. Evan Wright goes step-by-step in his journey with First Recon, and events that get cut short in the show are more fully explained in the book. The greatest strength of the book is the fact that Wright doesn’t try to turn the book into some treatise into why the war is bad, or good, or any other crap like that that usually gets in the way. Instead he makes it unpolitical, and just tries to relay to the reader what life is like for the these Marines in a war zone. He doesn’t hold back with the language or in any of the events that happen throughout the march to Baghdad. I really found it to be a fair and impartial account of life in the Marines during the invasion. This book is an incredibly smooth and easy read, and as long as you can handle reading a book with often times filthy language you should be able to cruise through it no problem.
One of the best parts of this book was that my old battalion got a little shout out, and I found out something that I have been wondering about for a long time. This chapter was cut down a bit in the show, but in the book it goes more in depth. The set-up is that a Marine is killed, and his body is taken into the town of Ash Shatrah and mutilated by the populace. My company was called in, along with others, to look for his body. The CIA was also called in, because supposedly Ali Hassan al-Majid or “Chemical Ali” was hiding out in the town. Probably one of the most bittersweet moments of my life leading a patrol to find this Marine and getting complimented by the CIA, but yet not being able to find the Marine. We didn’t not find him for lack of looking though. We tore up the hospitals and other locations, and ended up finding intel on other terrorists, but not the missing Marine. We were told by some of the elders that his body was taken out to the desert, and given a Christian burial. However, we all knew this was bullshit. Unfortunately we didn’t get Chemical Ali either, and after looking for him, and looking for the lost Marine again we had to leave for another mission. I have often thought about the guy since then. Who was he? was he ever found? does his family know how hard we looked for him? Things like that, and then I read:
The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces. They find him buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.
Over six years later I finally find out what happened to the missing Marine. That alone makes the book worth the read for me. It feels good knowing that he was found, and that his body was brought back to the US to his family. It’s just too bad that it took six years for me to find this out.
The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.
1984 is the standard bearer for dystopian novels, and is one of my favorite books. I never fail to learn something new upon subsequent readings, and no matter what, it continues to scare me with its vision and scope. So I am going to be reading this blog regularly, and I’m sure that Orwell’s political writings will be particularly insightful. So head on over to the Orwell Diaries, check out the first post, and check back often for what I’m sure will be all kinds of awesome.
Ok so I have been trying to create a nickname for McCain, and today out of the blue, as I was thinking about this blog I wanted to write about him, it came to me, McKrang. I think it’s perfect as his sums up his personality, and his temperament, but you may disagree with me, which is ok. However if this nickname blows up, well then, I will be taking full credit for it, because I do not believe I have seen it anywhere.
Ok now onto the actual topic that I wanted to discuss. This week Obama canceled his trip to Landstuhl military base in Germany to go see wounded troops there. The McKrang camp contends that Obama would rather go to the gym or travel around sightseeing than actually visit wounded troops. The truth, however, is different than what McKrang states. Via The Daily Dish:
“A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn’t visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks. [...]”
We have longstanding Department of Defense policy in regards to political campaigns and elections,” Pentagon spokesperson Elizabeth Hibner told me. “We informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff.”
After being told this, the Obama campaign announced yesterday that it had decided it was “inappropriate” to make the visit as part of a campaign trip.
It’s unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon’s directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon’s directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.”
So it seems that the Obama camp, and the Pentagon had a little bit of a snafu. I am beginning to think, however, that no matter what went down Obama was going to be screwed regardless. It was a no-win situation, if he went McKrang would have attacked him for making the wounded troops part of his campaign, and since he didn’t McKrang attacks him for not having the time to visit the troops. Personally I understand where Obama is coming from on this one, but I would think that it would have been better for him to kick the media, and all his advisers to the curb, and just make a visit on his own.
So I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight the other day, and I’m not going to bore you with another cookie-cutter review. Besides this movie is all over the news, and it’s making money hand over fist, so you have to be living under a rock, under another rock, to not know that this movie is great. What I do want to talk about is how solid this movie was from top to bottom, and some of the themes that were weaved in that really impressed me. You can take any movie that has come out this year–whether a dramatic, action, or otherwise–and The Dark Knight will match up to any of them.
This has to be one of the top comic book movies that has ever been made, and I think what surprised me the most was how deep the movie ended up being. Comics have always been fairly deep, and have always been a form of social commentary. As of late this has been translated into the movies better. From here on out I’m going to talk about some of the specifics of the movie so if you haven’t seen it then don’t make the jump.
One of the cool things about living in DC is all of the monuments. The Lincoln Monument is probably my favorite. There’s just something about it that’s awe-inspiring, especially at night. (Although I have to say I find it hard to settle on just one monument as my favorite. For instance, when it’s snowing at night the Korean War Memorial is absolutely majestic and you feel that the statues are real. At sunset when the mall is empty the Vietnam War Memorial is beautiful and ominous. For right now though I’ll stick with the Lincoln Memorial.) Now back to Lincoln.
