Waking up is a strange reason to diiiiiiiiiiie

I first saw "Auto-Tune the News" in installment #2 a couple of months ago on Razib's blog and found it brilliant in parts, but uneven. Now the series has gotten positive mention on Slate so I thought I'd revisit it. Whoa! #5 and #6 are much more consistently brilliant.

Inadvertent utopias

Troy Patterson invents Remote Roulette and makes me laugh:

81 IFC. RoboCop! Director Paul Verhoeven was clearly looking through rose-colored glasses when peering at the future of Detroit, but the film otherwise holds up well as a story of crime and vengeance—at least the stretch between Leeza Gibbons' cameo and the initial firing of the Cobra Assault Cannon.

The shortest path

As of today US forces are not permitted in Iraqi cities except under certain extremely limited circumstances that bear very little in common with the assumptions my brigade commander has been laboring under for a very long time. Shockingly enough, Maliki actually meant what he's been unambiguously shouting for months on television.

So I shouldn't be going into Mosul ever again, barring some truly extraordinary circumstances. This is a good thing. Alas, the Army is not going to let me sit on my ass for a month or send me home earlier than planned, so I will be operating somewhere else, just outside Mosul. The most direct route, passing through the city, would get me there in just over an hour, and would take perhaps half an hour with good roads, better suspensions, or no traffic.

The indirect route, which is the one we have to take, is estimated to require something very close to and quite possibly exceeding five hours. I will be ascertaining the exact time quite soon.

But it's not as bad as it seems, because I expect the return journey to be much faster. Medical evacuations are one of the exceptions allowing one to drive through the city, so my platoon sergeant and I have agreed we'll just shoot one of our guys in the arm or leg at the end of each mission so we can trim four hours off the trip home.

We'd always hoped you two kids would get together. Who is she?

Gadzooks! I finally realized today that Christina Hendricks, the red-headed office slut of Mad Men, was also Saffron in Firefly.

I was not hugely disappointed with the cancellation of the latter show, but I do remember thinking after the two episodes she appeared in that it was a huge crime such a ridiculously beautiful woman who showed every sign of real acting ability wasn't a star. Alas, my relief that she finally got a break is mixed with sadness at realizing it was semi-reasonable that I didn't instantly recognize her - as gorgeous as the 2007 (and beyond) version is, something sublime was squandered in the intervening years she was making single appearances in nonsense like "Cold Case" and "Tru Calling."

See also Meester, Leighton, who should be better known as Carrie Bishop. Still, someday I'll break down and watch an episode of Gossip Girl just for her.

And you're not happy, but you're funny

Boy, this deployment is getting tedious. The car bomber was a nice break, but it has been dead boring around here for some time.

For a while I had hope that my grenade baiting patrols through the most dangerous intersection in our part of town were going to pay off, but our idiot engineers who inspired me with their incompetence the last time they ate an RKG there actually managed to identify and shoot at the most predictable and dumb terrorists in Mosul on their last outing...without hitting anyone. I got to clean up their mess and wait for EOD to blow up the harmlessly dropped grenade, and they got to waste three rifle rounds and the most perfect opportunity to safely and predictably hose down those surprisingly effective fools with .50 cal machine gun fire. My chance at glory for bagging those guys on my own initiative (...or further infamy if one my gunners missed by 30m and drilled several holes clear through an innocent's house) is almost certainly blown.

On the domestic front, I did have a good 48 hour run where I pissed off our most dangerous platoon sergeant, received a really amusing attempt at an ass chewing from our semi-autistic infantry-brainwashed company executive officer, and then inadvertently revealed the laziness and/or incompetence of two captains (plus two innocent bystanders who also got blamed) to our battalion commander, but I seem to have stalled on the enemy development front since then. And while one of the innocent bystanders did threaten to eat my unborn children in the future, the rest have been disappointingly passive in their enmity.

I did come awesomely close to the greatest Army social fuckup of all time, but as usual disaster will flirt with me, but the bitch never puts out.

Me: So, why did Sergeant X [creepy, psychologically questionable guy] get his weapon confiscated this time?

[incoherent mumbling from the crowd that presumes I already know or doesn't hear my question]

1SG: And you know what? He says the doctor is going to sign off on him going home, but that's not what the doc told me.

Me: If he goes home, what about his wife? [He got married 6 months ago on leave to a 19 year old soldier a decade his junior who is deployed with the rest of our brigade elsewhere in Iraq.]

1SG: [somewhat condescendingly] The Army will always send her home in that situation, sir.

Me: What, if her husband goes crazy [-er] and gets sent back for treatment she's exempt from the rest of the deployment? That seems odd.

SSG T: No, you can't be in a combat zone if you're pregnant.

Me: [still not getting it, and deploying my standard joke] That's great! Does he know who the father is?

SSG T: Well, not him.

Me: Uh, what? Didn't it happen on leave?

1SG: He went on leave in January. She's six weeks pregnant. [It is clear all five people in the room think I'm an idiot and that I'd known this all along.]

Me: Oooooooh. [Later:] You know, there's a really funny alternate reality where I didn't ask enough questions to get through your collective assumption that I wasn't the last person to find out about this. In that world I'm going up to the most unstable soldier in the company and saying, "congratulations, I hear you're having a baby!" And then having no idea why my teeth are on the floor.

Them: [Stunned expressions, followed by laughter. Disappointed laughter, the bastards.]

Real Men of Genius

I wonder how long this will stay up.

Somebody set up us the bomb

My second media mention in a week:

An Iraqi police official says a suicide car bomb exploded near a checkpoint in the troubled northern city of Mosul, killing one person and wounding 38 others.

The official says the bomb exploded at about 11:15 a.m. local time as an American convoy passed by the checkpoint.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. David Doherty says there are no reports of American casualties.

It collided with the truck behind me, blew up right next to the truck behind him. My battalion lead in incidents requiring either 15-6 investigations or narrative PowerPoint storyboards continues to grow.

All of my guys are or will be ok, although I did get into a sexy argument about it with a hot captain at the hospital. I know what my smirk meant as I was being playfully snide with her, and I refuse to believe despite other eyewitness accounts that she wasn't giving it back.

I find that both during and after such incidents I'm only really happy over here when someone is trying to kill me. This marks my fourth device that is exploding close enough to matter, and I'm thrilled every time.