To the point.

I LOL'ed at this one word summation of Bill Ayers at Confederate Yankee.

iTunes, Part II

My brother gave me a $25 iTunes gift card for Christmas. WORD to your MOTHER.

Last night I decided to take a musical trip down memory lane and build up my 80s library. I loved the 80s. I attended both high school and college in the 80s, and that's where most of our best memories lie. Amid some ribbing from Mrs. Warpiper, who totally does not understand the greatest decade ever (for the same reasons I do not understand the 70s), I began surfing. Let me say that I put together a killer library of stuff that I haven't had since my last cassette player went the way of the dodo. It was a nostalgic stroll through a wonderland of Eurotrash big haired electronica. A Flock of Seagulls, The Fixx, The Police, Talk Talk, Echo and the Bunnymen, The B-52's, ABC, The Clash, and, well, you get it.

Anyhow, after downloading all the music, I decided to throw together a playlist. There is a new function on iTunes called "Genius" and it will automatically make playlists based on the selection of one song. So, I selected The B-52's "Rock Lobster". I hit the "Genius" button, and an entire playlist of 50 songs popped up. It was excellent. It included pretty much nothing but 80s music, with a pretty good representation of all the music I had downloaded, plus a bunch of stuff that was already in my library. Everything from Toad the Wet Sprocket (not quite 80s) to The Clash to Rush (yes, Rush- I love Rush) to Simple Minds.

I started playing the lineup as I did other things on the computer, and I must have zoned out for a while, because the playlist had been going for about 20 minutes when I was snapped out of my zone by something that sounded out of place. It was Dan Fogelberg. Not just any Dan Fogelberg, but one of his mellowest tunes: "Longer." Now, Dan Fogelberg (God rest his soul) put out some really cool stuff in his day, and he IS associated with the 1980s. However, how in the hell could anyone honestly build a playlist off of "Rock Lobster" and wind up with "Longer" on the dang list?? It's a buzz killer. It really busted up the marble game for me, I can tell you. So, the iTunes platform allows you to hit the Genius button as much as you want until you arrive at a playlist you like. I hit the button again. Another great playlist, with good ol' Dan Fogelberg stuck in the middle of it again. After five do-overs, I still had Dan in the lineup. The same song. I swear if I listened hard enough I could hear evil giggling from the same pencil necked geek up at iTunes headquarters who took "Dixie Chicken" off of Little Feat's "Waiting for Columbus." 

I swear I didn't even know I had Dan Fogelberg on my iPod. Mrs. Warpiper must have put it there. I feel like Austin Powers disavowing the Swedish sex toy.

Waiting, waiting.

The calls for the January 2009 FSO orientation class came and went a couple weeks ago. Now that the dust has settled, it looks like I am somewhere in the area of number 30 on the Consular list. The State Department has now given extensions to folks who were set to age off the list, so this makes it seem as if they expect that there will be more positions to offer than they will have candidates for. Current foreign service officers advise that during this time, one should just live one's life as usual and not get to worked up about the wait. I have been doing a pretty good job of that, I think.

It is getting harder to do now that the list continues to shrink and my rank gets higher.

Yes, blogging was nonexistent during the holidays. I like to unplug from time to time. A couple highlights from the last two weeks:

Redskins - Giants:

Also, when we got back to Chucktown, Tater decided that she did not want to wait for her bath, so when Mrs. Warpiper wasn't looking, she hopped into the tub as it was filling up.... fully clothed.

Two thousand year old credit crisis!

I have always been a history buff, particularly military history and the history of the ancient Celts. In regards to the latter, my interest in the Celts necessarily led to an interest in ancient Rome during the time of Julius Caesar, because he wrote one of the more definitive accounts of Celtic (Gaulish) society. Although much of Caesar's account of the Gauls has been disputed as the writings of a general seeking to belittle and dehumanize his foes, one cannot enjoy a history of Celtic society without also appreciating the history of the society that ultimately did them in.

That was an overly long preamble to my original intent in this post, which was to say that I am fascinated whenever someone points out a parallel between Roman history and the course of our own nation. Perhaps the parallels between our two societies are only natural given the fact that our governmental and financial systems are so similar. What is sometimes disheartening is that we do not seem to use history as a guide in this country. I am not saying that the Goths and Visigoths are knocking at our door just yet (though there ARE Goths and Visigoths who would LIKE to be knocking at our door). However, the only society in history that most closely matches our own is the ancient Roman republic. I think that careful study of where the Romans went wrong can be instructive for our present endeavors. That is not to say that making the same mistakes will lead us down the same road, but that we might at least incorporate the lessons of the ancient past into the endeavors of the present.

Whew. Anyhow, Tigerhawk has found a fascinating reference from Tacitus' Annales pertaining to a little credit crunch in Rome during the time of Tiberius. Read the whole thing. Regardless of who we hold responsible for our current woes, nobody can deny the parallels.

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.....

So a couple nights ago the Warpiper was on patrol on the mean streets of Chucktown and rode up on a couple guys beating the crap out of a third guy. They had him down in the middle of the street and were stomping on him. After jumping out of the patrol car, detaining the beaters and questioning the beatee, it turned out that this was a robbery in progress that ol' Sarge had thwarted. I think that the two perps didn't run because they thought I had a Taser in my hand, but in actuality I had my pepper spray in my hand. Why they didn't run I will never know, because I would have only caught one of them.

I think that one of these days I will chronicle a whole shift. Half my family thinks I sit at a desk or something. I guess the reason I have not done this before is because 1) after 16 years it just isn't as interesting or surprising as it used to be, and 2) a typical day or night on the streets might not be all that believable to the un-annointed.

I promise that one of these days sometime soon I will actually do this. With pictures.

Happy Birthday USMC.

In the age of sail, fighting ships employed men to climb up in the rigging and fire muskets down into enemy ships. These men were called marines. History will show that it was the United States that put the capital "M" in Marines. No military unit in any country in the world possesses the high reputation held by the U.S. Marine Corps.

In a world where organizations like Code Pink can slander the name and history of the Corps, it is important for those of us who know the true sources of liberty to pause for a moment or a few on 10 November and remember the men of Tripoli, Chapultepec, Belleau Woods, Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, Hue, Grenada, Panama, Beirut, Kuwait, Kandahar and Fallujah.

To all my family and classmates who "claim the title,"

Happy Birthday and Semper Fidelis.

More good sportsmanship from the right.... or can I call it Patriotism?

Tigerhawk has removed his McCain-Palin bumper sticker. I agree with him; come January Barack Obama will be my President, too.

There is also a link to Screedblog in the post, and the quote obviously puts my thoughts out there with much more economy than I was able to muster. Here it is:

"Right or wrong - and I hope for more of the former, obviously - he’s my President now, dammit, and I’m not going to spend four years treating him with the contempt the Kos side heaped on Chimpy McPretzelchoker."