Well, I’m back to the Lou for the festivities tonight. Gotta make a few stops and I should be in around 6. Heading straight Maj-ward, unless I make good enough time that I can stop by PSS to help Jeffro with supplies.

From my referral logs, surprisingly not from my narcissism, I found out that I’m on the second return page for a google search for “liam.” See! That makes me far, far more famous than someone who’s never done anything particularly useful deserves to be. But I try my best to be handy. For instance, I’ll link to VDH’s new column. That was sorta useful, since it’s a Tuesday and he usually writes on Friday. You might have missed it, otherwise.

I had a great time last night. Chris and I met up with C-Bot for some cold ones, and many of them. We threw some darts with a drunk dude. He was on the Bot’s team, and since Caleb is rather skilled at dart-throwing, they managed to split the two games. After closing time, we went to the local diner for some greasy breakfast food. While waiting for the hostess to seat us, I noticed some kid’s placemats in the hostess station. She let us have one and a few crayons. It took me quite a while to solve the puzzle, and I’m not quite finished coloring in the picture. I thought I’d still had a box of crayons at home that I’d stolen from my friend Lauren, but apparently they were returned. Now I’m in a pickle. In the crossword puzzle on the placemat, we were both stumped by one of the questions. The kid’s placemat has a cast of characters and we were to identify what one of them, named Kelli, was supposed to be. The rest of the puzzle was solved, so I knew the first letter was a C and the fourth a K. I was sure she was a Hush Puppy, but obviously that didn’t fit. Chris thought she was a sausage patty, I think. The hostess didn’t know what she was, but eventually the waitress correctly identified Kelli as a cookie. Never would have occurred to me. I still haven’t seen ROTK, maybe I’ll go watch it tonight after doing a little much needed shopping.

HFP put up their Saddam version of the Big Collared Shirt of Shame, and it truly fails to disappoint. By clicking on the picture, you can even change the logo on the t-shirt. Where do they get such wonderful toys?

On Jason’s suggestion, I checked out the U.S.M.C. doctrine manual called “Warfighting” from the library today. Haven’t had much time to read it, just a few pages while walking back from the library and home. Even though campus is dead right now due to the vacation, it’s still not all that easy to read while walking. Translating Clausewitz, writer Gen. A.M. Gray defines friction as “the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.” He then goes on to describe different kinds of friction, of the external, like terrain obstacles and enemy fire, and the internal, like lack of coordination or complicated command relationships. Here’s a sound piece of advice: “While we should attempt to minimize self-induced friction, the greater requirement is to fight effectively despite the existence of friction.” Maybe I can take that to heart and overcome the paralyzing writer’s block I’ve had for a few months now, very devastating to someone who reads and writes academic papers as one’s primary pursuit.

Got back from my Christmas vacation in St. Louis today. It was a fantastic time, and lots of good news was shared. Christmas was great, I got lots of neat toys and some new shirts and stuff. Also got to see my old friend Jim last night. He spent the summer rebuilding Mosul and the surrounding area attached to the 101st. We had a good time catching up. He showed me a picture of him and R. Lee Ermey he had taken in Kuwait. I attacked Nick‘s tree, air assault style, by leaping off the edge of his deck at it. I think we tied, since the tree is still standing, albeit crookedly, and I’ve got a bit of a ding on my shin. Also got to see comedian Nick, Jess, and C-Flat a bit. A fine vacation. I’ll be spending the next few days around home, setting up classrooms at work and writing papers, then I’m back to the Lou for Pete’s massive New Year’s fest at the Majestic.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch has a story up about a bus driver at the airport who fled Iraq in the nineties and is becoming a US citizen. He hopes to go back to Karbala to meet his son.

In case you haven’t already heard, longtime friend Pete asked his longtime girlfriend Megan to marry him last night beneath the Jefferson Memorial a long flight of steps overlooking the mighty Mississippi. This is fantastic news. Pete’s bro congratulates the two here. The tourists snapping photos thing he mentions is really nice, since the couple who were discreet and on-the-ball enough to take the pictures without disturbing the event are going to mail the pictures to them, so they’ll have evidence. In case you’re keeping track, I think this is the fourth of my friends to become engaged. First was Hansen and Joy, a very bad thing; then Crutch and Julia, a very good thing; recently Nick and Erin; and now Pete n’ Megan. I think I’m missing someone in there, but it didn’t last.

Here’s an informative article about Iraqi tribes, and Lt. Col. King’s work in bringing them into the coalition. It was featured in the Winds of Change roundup.

The videos from NASA’s new deep space telescope are freaking awesome! They’re at the bottom of the page, click the thumbnail and in the yellow box you can open a Windows Media or QuickTime video.

Go to this page and type in BTWOMB, if you know what that stands for, and go through all the women’s voices. Doesn’t Claire sound demanding? Oooh, I like it. Obviously, I’m having a hard time staying focussed. I found that from this index full of fun stuff, and found that from the Church Sign generator that Fro:boy found.

You can count out Kevin Millwood.

Speaking of Robert Fisk, check out what Instapundit had to say about his piece reacting to Saddam’s capture. Very funny.

We’re two games away from my prediction coming to fruition. There’ve been a lot of close calls in the run, and Detroit has come alive big time. Tonight is the Sharks game and Saturday we play Phoenix. Assuming we win both games and Detroit beats the Blackhawks and Predators this weekend, a win over Detroit would bring us within a point of them having played 6 fewer games.

Added a new link in the Blogs column on the left for our reading enjoyment, after this post had me a’ laughin’. Tis a fine group blog and I recommend you check out Common Sense and Wonder. Found it from Emily.

Hey Chris, you ever hear of Bum Wines? I imagine that’s the hot commodity in your neck of the woods.

Took a new quiz.

Your Results:

1.	Aquinas   (100%)  Click here for info
2.	John Stuart Mill   (95%)  Click here for info
3.	Ayn Rand   (92%)  Click here for info
4.	Jean-Paul Sartre   (83%)  Click here for info
5.	Aristotle   (76%)  Click here for info
6.	Jeremy Bentham   (74%)  Click here for info
7.	Kant   (74%)  Click here for info
8.	Epicureans   (67%)  Click here for info
9.	St. Augustine   (65%)  Click here for info
10.	Cynics   (64%)  Click here for info
11.	Prescriptivism   (61%)  Click here for info
12.	Nietzsche   (58%)  Click here for info
13.	Ockham   (58%)  Click here for info
14.	Spinoza   (58%)  Click here for info
15.	Stoics   (53%)  Click here for info
16.	David Hume   (50%)  Click here for info
17.	Thomas Hobbes   (50%)  Click here for info
18.	Plato   (49%)  Click here for info
19.	Nel Noddings   (43%)  Click here for info

Found it at Attila Girl’s. Kind of surprising results. I’ve never read Sir Thomas Aquinas, but we studied him briefly in Tenholder’s class. I read Mill’s “On Utilitarianism,” and don’t consider myself of his breed. Rand is pretty cool, but I don’t act like one of her anti-heroes. Sartre, that sounds French. I know Aristotle and dig ‘im. Kant rocks the casbah. I always thought I was more of a stoic. At least that Nel Noddings didn’t come up very high. Never heard of her

To you fellers that are new at blogging, I must define a few terms for you. First is the TROLL. You might be familiar with it from chatroom lingo, you kids are pretty sharp these days. But the term derives from the fishing usage of the term “trolling.” The main engine in a motorboat makes too much noise to move with while you’re trying to fish, so there’s an auxiliary motor on the front of every small fishing boat called a trolling motor. It’s an electric motor with a prop geared and pinioned to a propeller at the end of a shaft. When you find a nice lagoon or quay that looks fishable, you cut your main engine, toss in your lures, and silently move around the area using the trolling motor, you are “trolling for fish.” In the internet world, trolling is dumping crap into random websites comments sections (usually) trying to get people to check out your own crappy website, trolling for hits. It’s a very nice term, because there’s the whole noun form of troll, and so it’s usage caught on big.

The other term I’d like to offer a brief exogesis of is “fisking.” Robert Fisk is an extraordinarily anti-Western (new-Western?) journalist who was in Afghanistan trying to find stories of Afghans who would bolster his views when his car broke down and the locals beat him senseless. Since then, a “fisking” has loosely been applied to any line-by-line deconstruction of a biased piece of written media.

Fisk’s flaw was that he truly believed Afghans saw the conflict the way he did, that he and the little brown men were on the same side against the evil white imperialists. But they beat the crap out of him. Badly. He’s lucky to be alive. So a good Fisking is when you find an article that is so blatantly preaching to the (leftist, anti-Western) choir that it makes egregious factual errors and you dissect it, line-by-line, and provide credible evidence to refute every silly rhetorical claim made. A Fiskable article is one so biased that it forgets it’s exposed. Good fiskings also tend to be snotty and full of foul language. Much like Fisk’s beating.

Emily’s got a good Fisking going on. I intend to do my first one in the next few days. And, remarkably, it’ll be of something hosted on my own website. Hopefully it’ll teach people not to leave really fucking stupid comments, especially of the long type. Gotta finish my papers first, though. You’ll know it when you see it.

Maybe a movie of Gollum rapping the tune Towers are the Players will cheer Jeff up, who’s suffering from influenza. Gotta get that vitamin C, bud. It’s moderately funny. U’ROCK Hai OUT…

The television in my bedroom has timers on it so that it turns on at 7:30 in the morning and when I go to sleep, I set it to turn off after ten minutes. It’s nice because it gradually dims the picture and turns the volume down as time goes on. Last night I had the Tonight Show with Jay Leno on, and his guest was Jimmy Carter. Jimmy said, and I have to paraphase becuase I was falling asleep, “I think the president, like any sensible politician, will try to get out of Iraq as soon as possible. I don’t want to leave a vacuum, but we shouldn’t be there in the first place. The biggest mistake was to go in unilaterally, on our own, with a few British tailing behind.” Don’t quote me directly on that, and naturally the emphasis is added by myself, but I swear by Krom, the god of steel and earth, that I do not exaggerate what he had to say. Which was a really stupid thing to say, not to mention condescending to the extreme. During a the question-answer session of a press briefing with president Bush the other day, reporters kept asking him about going to the UN and getting “the allies” on board, and whether Saddam’s capture signals that it’s time. I’d never heard anyone call them on it before, but Bush said (again, paraphrasing), “You’re not talking about our allies, we’ve got allies there. Over 70 countries have military force in Iraq, from Great Britain, Australia, and Italy to Fiji and Azerbaijan. You’re talking about France and Germany. We had a difference of opinion over the danger Iraq posed, and that’s fine. The Germans have force in Afghanistan, and…” I’ve always had a really hard time understanding the whole unilateral charge. We’ve had the British and the Aussies alongside us, and those are the two best militaries outside our own. The Polish military is still in its formative years recovering from Soviet occupation, and is no doubt learning a great deal from joint operations with us and the British. I’ve heard great things about the Danish contributions, both in Iraq and in Kosovo. The Italians and Spaniards are doing a great job winning hearts and minds in their areas. The British have been in control of Iraq’s second biggest city, Basra, since the start of the war. The British military’s experiences in pacifying Northern Ireland have doubtlessly been valuable in that effort and in training our soldiers and marines to do the same. Don’t characterize their contribution as a few soldiers tagging along or tailing behind, or whichever choice of terms Carter chose to employ. What contribution do we really need from the French or Germans? The German soldiers in Afghanistan deserve all the credit in the world for what they’re sacrificing there. It wasn’t politically possible for Germany to contribute to Iraq, and that’s fine. What could the French offer that we don’t already have in place from the coalition and that could conceivably leverage our advantage? Their carrier? Some of their pilots? It’s not politically possible in France to support the effort, and arguably not militarily possible. And that’s fine. Why are certain people making such a big deal out of it?

Just read a Jim Hoagland column about Saddam’s cowardice. Here’s the money shot:

“Why didn’t you fight?” one Governing Council member asked Hussein as their meeting ended. Hussein gestured toward the U.S. soldiers guarding him and asked his own question: “Would you fight them?”

Found that at Citizen Smash, whose BUI reminiscing on the capture of Saddam and his reasons for joining the military is more than worth your time. I’d even say you owe it to him.