Pinwheels and Orange Peels

Testing

Good evening. I'm remote blogging for two reasons: 1) The comm folks here shut down my access to typepad, and 2) I'm too cheap to pay $75/month for unreliable wifi I can't even get in my tent. So my lovely wife set my moblogging features up and I'm posting blind. I can read any comments the two of you might leave. And I'll have to figure out some way of posting photos without the tools available on typepad.

Anyway, I'm still here in Baghdad. The weather has cooled off quite a bit. We've got the whole desert mood swing going on right now--mid 40s at night and nearly 70 during the day. I bundle up to go to work, run in shorts and a tee shirt around 1500, and then bundle up again when it's time to turn in. I have yet to see a live camel spider or scorpion, and that's OK with me. One gal up in Tikrit was stung by a scorpion and had to be revived twice before they could get the anti venom in her. Ugh.

My wing lost an F-16 a couple of days ago. Still no word on what caused it, although I know from growing up in the Air Force that we lose them fairly regularly even during peacetime. You don't get far in a single-engine jet when you lose that engine. Please keep the family and friends of the pilot in your thoughts and prayers.

More to come...it's time for chow, and if I don't go soon there won't be any hot stuff left.

A little peace

It's been said there are no atheists in foxholes.  I don't know how true that may be, but we had the opportunity to observe a baptism in our "emergency water supply" a couple of weeks ago.  God continues to move even in an all-Muslim country halfway around the world from home:

Published, but not answered

Out here in the desert we get free copies of the "Stars and Stripes" newspaper, and I usually pick one up for the comics, if nothing else.  I'm not much of a newspaper person, preferring the immediacy of the web and broadcast news, but when you're stuck out here (no thanks to my Master's degree, JK) you take what you can get.

Now, according to their Information page,

Stars and Stripes is a Department of Defense-authorized daily newspaper distributed overseas for the U.S. military community. Editorially independent of interference from outside its editorial chain-of-command, it provides commercially available U.S. and world news and objective staff-produced stories relevant to the military community in a balanced, fair, and accurate manner.

Focus on that last statement "stories relevant to the military community."  Then ask yourself why the 24 Oct issue featured a story by the San Francisco Chronicle titled "Programs surfacing to help meet needs of aging gay population."  You won't find it on the Stripes page, but here's a link for you.  I had to go on the SF Chronicles "Gay and Lesbian" news portal just to find the article.

So I'm sitting here in the sand and mud of Iraq reading a newspaper with the stated purpose of providing relevant news articles, and I get this instead.  I see no point in informing the military population that gays are getting older and having problems finding support.  So I fire off an email to the editor.  And it gets published a few days later.  Yay, I'm in the paper.  Big deal.  I want an answer to my question:

Good afternoon,

I’ve been deployed to the CENTAF AOR for a couple of months now and always enjoy my daily read of Stars and Stripes.  I’ve found it has a good mix of local stories as well as those that help us keep in touch with events around the world.  However, I have to take issue with Wyatt Buchanan’s article on page 8 of the 24 Oct 2006 issue, titled “Programs surfacing to help meet needs of aging gay population.”  As I’m sure you’re aware, homosexual behavior is incompatible with military service and the article, which I read completely, did not address anything even remotely military.  Frankly, I am offended and view it as an attempt to push the homosexual agenda on the military population.  I fail to see why such an article was included in your publication.  Perhaps you could enlighten me?

Respectfully,
Capt Ian Hester

I thought I was pretty nice in the letter.  If the article had addressed some new development in the gays in the military argument, then there would have been no reason to challenge it.  But it didn't, so I protested.  And I got no enlightenment, either.  I'd threaten to stop reading but it's free here so that won't exactly hurt them.

I think running the article was a mistake, and the space it used up could have been put to much better use, such as an empty square to cut out and use as toilet paper.