Books Lying Open
¤ A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
¤ A Clash of Kings, George R. R. Martin
¤ Shelters of Stone, Jean M. Auel
¤ The Complete Tales and Poems, Edgar Allen Poe
¤ Abarat, Clive Barker
¤ Hearts in Atlantis, Steven King
¤ Everything's Eventual, Steven King

Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ May your reading list forever need updating.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your sweetie easily qualify for a second career as a drug sniffing dog, providing the only drug that needs to be sniffed is a burning cigarette.

Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "mostly".
¤ Usage: "They mostly come out at night.  Mostly."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Deviations: Most any qualifying word you can use in a sentence, and then repeat afterwards for extra emphasis.  Eg: "probably," "sometimes," and so on.
¤ Origin: Newt's famous line in Aliens.
¤ Notes: Cribbed from Cartman who cribbed it from Aliens, this word and it's deviations spice up most any conversation.  Malaya and I have developed it to a science, where one of us will speak a viable sentence, and then after a momentary pause we'll both repeat the repeatable word in almost perfect harmony.  Yes, we realize how sickeningly cutesy this is. 

The best usage yet? When I said, after we saw the results of this boxing match: "Who kicked Oscar de la Hoya's ass tonight?
*pause*
*M and F speak together*
"Mosley." -- September 18, 2003

¤ Depressing article about the clusterfuck the Iraqi occupation is becoming.  The US troops keep getting fired on or hit by remote control bombs planted by the side of the road, as they tool around in their hummers and transports and tanks.  It's no real surprise; there are a lot of people there who hate the occupiers, most of them have easy access to weapons, there is no real security in the country on a personal level, and the US troops are very easy targets.  So every few days another couple of American soldiers die or get wounded, and the troops there are compounding the problem by freaking out when they are fired on, and shooting at anything moving.

It's an understandable reaction; someone is shooting at you, you want to shoot back.  But the attackers aren't so stupid as to stand right there and make themselves a target, so pretty much every attack turns into a bloodbath of innocent civilians, which of course just makes more Iraqis hate the US troops, which makes more of them willing to attack the US troops, and so on.  The vicious cycle is pretty damn easy to see.

The first attack occurred when a roadside bomb exploded as a military convoy passed on Khaldiyah's main street, then gunmen opened fire from unknown positions at the Americans. Initially, the U.s. soldiers shot back with no obvious targets — often at anything they felt threatening — as they waited for reinforcements, a witness said.

An Associated Press reporter and photographer covering the incident were fired on, though neither was hurt.

Photographer Karim Kadim and his driver ran to safety from their car after an American tank trained its machine on the vehicle. It was subsequently hit about 20 times, blowing out the windshield and flattening all the tires. The reporter ran around the corner of a building as a tank fired three rounds from its 50-caliber machine gun in his direction.

Man, you have got to have balls a lot bigger than mine to be hanging around US troops in Iraq now, since you know it's just a matter of time until some are attacked, and you know they are hella trigger happy.

A resident, Adel Hmood, said the Americans opened fire 360 degrees around themselves. The dead boy, Sufyan Daoud al-Kubaisi, was on his way to buy cigarettes when he was killed, Hmood said.

Bullet holes in homes and buildings in the area, about two blocks off the main street in Fallujah, suggested heavy firing by the Americans.

The bloodshed came after American soldiers mistakenly killed eight U.S.-allied Iraqi police officers outside the town in a friendly fire incident. The military has apologized for the incident and opened an investigation.

I'm not saying I'd have a great deal more self control than they do; if I were there and being shot at, I would probably fire pretty damn wildly myself.  It's just human nature, and if you are going to assign blame, you have to go higher up to the people who put the troops into that situation.

That being said, there are some dumb grunts out there.

In the nearby town of Fallujah, witnesses said an American patrol opened fire on guests at a wedding, killing a 14-year-old boy and wounding six people, after mistaking celebratory gunfire for an attack. 

¤ I'd also been wondering when we'd see some point by point comparisons of the Iraq War to Vietnam, and today here's an editorial that does a pretty good job of that.

Based on faulty intelligence, cherry-picked information is fed to Congress and the American people. The president goes on national television to make the case for war, using as part of the rationale an incident that never happened. Congress buys the bait -- hook, line and sinker -- and passes a resolution giving the president the authority to use "all necessary means" to prosecute the war.

The war is started with an air and ground attack. Initially there is optimism. The president says we are winning. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense says we are winning. As a matter of fact, the secretary of defense promises the troops will be home soon.

However, the truth on the ground that the soldiers face in the war is different than the political policy that sent them there. They face increased opposition from a determined enemy. They are surprised by terrorist attacks, village assassinations, increasing casualties and growing anti-American sentiment. They find themselves bogged down in a guerrilla land war, unable to move forward and unable to disengage because there are no allies to turn the war over to.

There is no plan B. There is no exit strategy. Military morale declines. The president's popularity sinks and the American people are increasingly frustrated by the cost of blood and treasure poured into a never-ending war.

Sound familiar? It does to me.

The president was Lyndon Johnson. The cocky, self-assured secretary of defense was Robert McNamara. The congressional resolution was the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The war was the war that I, U.S. Sens. John Kerry, Chuck Hagel and John McCain and 3 1/2 million other Americans of our generation were caught up in. It was the scene of America's longest war. It was also the locale of the most frustrating outcome of any war this nation has ever fought.

The first mail is from Stu, commenting on the CotD.

hi flux
just a lil warning / something for ya

never say you don't get much email. a friend did this at the start of an ict lesson. by the end of it he was signed up for nearly every mailing list on the planet. his account was pretty much filling up as fast as he could delete them.
and then he tried the unsubscribe links..... bwa ha ha ha haaa!

edit: have just read your curse of the day (curse bitch hehehe) again and realized that it doesn't have anything to do with not getting any spam email (i didn't see the second N in non) but i think i shall send you this anyways. 

The "no one loves me" thing in the CotD is a long-standing private joke between Malaya and me.  She started it, when with every unsuccessful email check (she has a lot of email accounts, here and there) she would sadly say, "No one loves me."

It's gone from there to be our regular thing, where we both get online in the morning and ask each other if anyone loves us, or report that no one does.  That and asking each other if Scorch killed himself yet is part of our daily online routine. And lately we've each been getting fewer real emails, (spam is not real), so the lack of love spilled over into a Curse.

Speaking of email, something I'd been meaning to bring up for a while was about the mystery of SoBig mails.  For a couple of weeks, I was getting literally 500+ mails a day to BlackChampagne, mostly due to the excessive amount of flux@, feedback@, god@, dog@, mailbag@, dirty-slang@, and so on, all of them @blackchampagne.com, and all of them pulling into one central account.  I set it up that way so that I'd have some idea what page someone was mailing to comment about, since people quite often send 3 or 4 paragraph mails about some page, while never actually saying which page it is.  It might seem silly, but I do not know my website by heart, and especially if the person is mailing about an older daily blog, I generally have no more than a faint recollection of writing whatever they are talking about.

Of course the daily blogs don't have any sort of _____@blackchampagne.com that would tip me off to when they wrote in, so that's not a very good example, but you know what I mean.  Anyway, I was initially going to put a different name for every feedback page, all of the articles, all of the mailbags, the band names pages, and so on.  And I did for a while, but I wasn't getting enough mails to justify keeping at it, plus I had no recollection of what page had what email, so half the time it wasn't of any use to me anyway.  Which is why I've just been using flux@ on most every page for some time.

So as it turns out, the only real legacy of all of my different blahblah@ emails on this site is that I get 25x more mails when the newest MS/AOL email client worm/virus breaks loose.  It's nice to know that my efforts didn't go entirely to waste, eh?

Oh yeah, and what I was going to say is that after getting 500 or more mails every day, of which 80% were worm-generated virus mails and 14.5% were spam, the onslaught ended just a few days ago, and I've been getting just 40 or 50 mails a day since then, of which 85% are spam and 12% are misc Nigerian email scams.  Since the options are 1) everyone out there who was infected finally got good anti-virus software and cleaned up their machine, or 2) my hosts finally put some sobig eating filter on the server, I think it's pretty clear that #2 was my salvation.

The other mail was from Jim, who comments on the exhaustively-lengthy discussion I engaged in over the weird and nearly unreadable email from CanisMortis in the just-posted May mailbag.

Up until I read through the May mailbag today, I had been under the impression that the guest-article-writer who had written the long, rambling e-mail was me. I remember sending in some damn thing that same day; in fact, you mention my donation in the first or second paragraph on May 31, right before talking about Canis' e-mail. I'm glad I didn't write in to defend my all-precious honor, since it ended up not being mine that was besmirched. I'd have felt like an ass.

Needless to say, Canis is a prick, and be glad he dropped off the face of the earth. Poking and prodding at his peculiar mentality would have been fascinating, no doubt, but hardly worthwhile at the end of the day.

Malaya read that one today and cracked up, and later on while she was surfing she saw some incoherent screed, and said, "It's like that mail from Canine Mortician." Which cracked me up.  She wasn't trying to be funny, she just couldn't remember his awkward handle.  And came close enough for our purposes, I think.

And I have to disagree with Jim here.  It thought that poking and prodding at his peculiar mentality was well worth it, at least since the extent of my poking and prodding was contained in the mailbag.  I wouldn't want to get into an actual conversation or email debate or anything like that though.  Life's too short for humoring tools.

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