chairman of the bored.

It's been a while since I've posted, and for the usual reasons: busy at home (house renovations, child, life in general) and busy at work (network management stuff, switch code upgrades, yadda yadda yadda).

Speaking of renovations, we finally have a contractor penciled in to help us with our kitchen (that should read 'kitsch-in'), and a plumber to help us with the kitchen and basement. I personally can't think of a better way to part with about ten grand, can you? :-P

Speaking of which, I must get Max's 529 plan up and running.

Nadine and I have been doing some demolition work (called 'demo' in the biz) in our kitchen, which, due to financial and logistical reasons, will remain in flux for some time. If you look up 'entropy' in the dictionary, there may well be a photo of our house in it. Just what we didn't want: a fixer-upper. Uppers, indeed...

Work has been really busy, which is mostly good. Unfortunately it's been just this side of reeeally busy (OK, wicked busy, as they say here in Bahston), which drives me a little batty. Nothing super compelling, nor terribly intellectually taxing (always a mixed blessing), but I need to get off my ass and seriously study for that fucking CCIE.

My parents are visiting for a few days around Max's first birthday. That will be nice. They've only seen him twice, with nearly 8 months separating the two visits. I think our trek to Buffalo for Easter really made them miss their grandson (oh yeah, and their grandson's parents too), thereby inspiring them to want to visit him again soon. At any rate, it'll be good to see them. My sister will be hanging out too (she lives about a mile or so away in Cambridge), as well as my in-laws. I'm looking forward to it. And to the boundless criticism that will no doubt ensue regarding the entropic state of the house! ;-)

Max is now sort of sitting up on his own, and when he does sit, he's pretty stable for long stretches. He's been able to pull himself up from a reclining position in his little "bouncy seat," and he does well pulling himself up from the floor to a standing position with only a little help from an adult. He's probably lagging a bit, physical-development,wise, compared to other little kids his age (about a year), but I don't think it's a big deal. He's otherwise very expressive, sturdy (he's about 26 pounds already!), and cute as a button. And him gots 4 toofies. :-) Egads, I love that little boy. There must be a dozen different pictures of him in my cubicle at work, including backgrounds of all 4 of my computers (2 at work, 2 at home).

If I were fifty, there'd be a similar number of... I dunno, boat pictures or Harleys or something? :-) Around this office, that'd probably be the case. I work across from a guy who has one 3x5 photo of himself and his wife (and IMHO I think she's gorgeous), and several pictures of his freaking 22' used motorboat, which he has yet to put into the water himself. Priorities, priorities...

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I'm troubled by the fact that Pat Robertson thinks "activist judges" are a bigger threat to the United States than, say, al-Qaeda. It's one of those "you've got to be shitting me" moments.

Why doesn't anyone have a sound bite of George Bush talking about the Senate filibuster nonsense, referring to the Republecchicans' "nukular" option? ;-) Ah hell, I'll bet Jon Stewart has mentioned it already...

I'm using Google's Gmail primarily for blogversations. I have about 20 messages in my inbox, which is swell. At this rate, I should be good for about 150 years. :-D

OK, back to the paprika groves...

we're gonna put the 'BS' in PBS

One of the few bastions of the so-called 'liberal media,' PBS, is slowly moving over to the Dark Side: the new Chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a GOP lackey. This really means, for good, no more family-values-threatening lesbian dairy farmers on otherwise animated kids' shows, and Rush Limbaugh as the new narrator of a re-vamped, war-is-good, investigative-journalism-as-we-know-it-is-dead Frontline. I mean, the guy hired someone to keep track of the political leanings of Bill Moyers' guests. WTF?!

Lord, deliver us unto the bosom of the CBC and the Beeb...

On a somewhat related note, one of my film professors in college once referred (somewhat truthfully, if you watch on Sunday nights) to PBS as the "Petroleum Broadcasting Service," to which I just had to chuckle.

home of the... brave?

I have to be honest: stories like this one, noting the arrogant, ignorant thuggery on the part of many American troops, makes me want to place a footnote on those disingenuous, jingoistic "Support the Troops" bumper stickers. This stuff sickens me.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html?hp

May 2, 2005

OP-ED COLUMNIST

From 'Gook' to 'Raghead'

By BOB HERBERT

I spent some time recently with Aidan Delgado, a 23-year-old religion major at New College of Florida, a small, highly selective school in Sarasota.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, before hearing anything about the terror attacks that would change the direction of American history, Mr. Delgado enlisted as a private in the Army Reserve. Suddenly, in ways he had never anticipated, the military took over his life. He was trained as a mechanic and assigned to the 320th Military Police Company in St. Petersburg. By the spring of 2003, he was in Iraq. Eventually he would be stationed at the prison compound in Abu Ghraib.
Mr. Delgado's background is unusual. He is an American citizen, but because his father was in the diplomatic corps, he grew up overseas. He spent eight years in Egypt, speaks Arabic and knows a great deal about the various cultures of the Middle East. He wasn't happy when, even before his unit left the states, a top officer made wisecracks about the soldiers heading off to Iraq to kill some ragheads and burn some turbans.
"He laughed," Mr. Delgado said, "and everybody in the unit laughed with him."
The officer's comment was a harbinger of the gratuitous violence that, according to Mr. Delgado, is routinely inflicted by American soldiers on ordinary Iraqis. He said: "Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "
"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.
Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.
He said he believes that the absence of any real understanding of Arab or Muslim culture by most G.I.'s, combined with a lack of proper training and the unrelieved tension of life in a war zone, contributes to levels of fear and rage that lead to frequent instances of unnecessary violence.
Mr. Delgado, an extremely thoughtful and serious young man, balked at the entire scene. "It drove me into a moral quagmire," he said. "I walked up to my commander and gave him my weapon. I said: 'I'm not going to fight. I'm not going to kill anyone. This war is wrong. I'll stay. I'll finish my job as a mechanic. But I'm not going to hurt anyone. And I want to be processed as a conscientious objector.' "
He stayed with his unit and endured a fair amount of ostracism. "People would say I was a traitor or a coward," he said. "The stuff you would expect."
In November 2003, after several months in Nasiriya in southern Iraq, the 320th was redeployed to Abu Ghraib. The violence there was sickening, Mr. Delgado said. Some inmates were beaten nearly to death. The G.I.'s at Abu Ghraib lived in cells while most of the detainees were housed in large overcrowded tents set up in outdoor compounds that were vulnerable to mortars fired by insurgents. The Army acknowledges that at least 32 Abu Ghraib detainees were killed by mortar fire.
Mr. Delgado, who eventually got conscientious objector status and was honorably discharged last January, recalled a disturbance that occurred while he was working in the Abu Ghraib motor pool. Detainees who had been demonstrating over a variety of grievances began throwing rocks at the guards. As the disturbance grew, the Army authorized lethal force. Four detainees were shot to death.
Mr. Delgado confronted a sergeant who, he said, had fired on the detainees. "I asked him," said Mr. Delgado, "if he was proud that he had shot unarmed men behind barbed wire for throwing stones. He didn't get mad at all. He was, like, 'Well, I saw them bloody my buddy's nose, so I knelt down. I said a prayer. I stood up, and I shot them down.' "