Really, I should’ve sat down this afternoon and written this, but I literally spent five hours in my underwear (didn’t you know that today, in addition to being my birthday, is also underwear appreciation day? I didn’t, thanks for the head’s up, Charissa), and except for plugging in my non-functional laserdisc player, did very little of anything that could be considered productive. Well, I put together a small bookshelf, but that took like ten minutes, even if the directions were in Swedish.

So I was thinking about where I was last year, and where I’ll be next year. Predictions, or educated guesses? Hopefully wishing, probably.

Where I’ll Be:

* I will enjoy my West Virginia vacation so much I refuse to return to Maryland and live the rest of my life being sodomized by extras from Deliverance.

* I will have my college diploma.

* I will be gainfully employed at an entry-level professional white-collar job requiring me to wear a tie and work in a cubicle. I will be excited by this and will happily go out buying ties and collared shirts.

* I may continue delivering pizzas part time a few nights a week, to make ends meet.

* I will still be living in the same Timonium apartment, and will have bought more IKEA furniture and more DVDs. I may have painted my tiny wanna-be-closet-kitchen lime green.

* I may have gotten my Scrubs DVDs back from Zenchick … but probably not.

* I will still be single, although maybe I’ll have gotten lucky and/or entered a relationship only to completely destroy it by being overbearing without realizing it. (I’m stupid like that).

* I will still be driving my Celica, but the police will have had to be called to evict me from the local Jeep dealership’s showroom after I won’t stop drooling on the new & redesigned ‘07 and ‘08 Wranglers, which I won’t be able to afford to purchase.

* I will have purchased Battlefield 2 and will be a valuable member of Wombat’s online combat squad, fraggin’ friendlies and enemies alike as often as possible.

Well. In twelve months, it’ll be interesting to see where I’ll be. I’m not looking forward to reviewing this post, primarily because I’ll be less than a year from thirty at that point.

My laserdisc player isn’t dead.

However, the “open” function no longer, uh, functions. (So it might as well be).

This is probably what I get for leaving it alone for three years. I was finally motivated to hook it up and crawl behind the tv plugging in cords and brightly-colored red, yellow, and white plugs. The motivation was provided by finally buying a bookshelf — that Ikea EXPEDIT — which could accomodate my laserdiscs, which means I was able to drag them out of the closet.

Well.

Figures.

Sammy Jackson’ll prank call the friend of your choice to promote SNAKES ON A PLANE!

This is the most fun EVER.

World Trade Center opens today. I have no plans to see this movie. Not in theaters, not on DVD, not heavily-edited-for-TV.

Is it that it is too soon? Or that I find the movie about that day offensive? Maybe.

I think it’s probably, however, that the ad campaign — or at least the trailer I saw — describes the movie as “uplifting”, but my memories of that day weren’t very uplifiting or positive … I was scared, terrified, sick with sadness for those on those planes and in New York and in Alexandria.

And I’m afraid that if I see World Trade Center, I’ll replace my memories of my feelings that day with Oliver Stone’s movie. And I don’t want to remember September 11th in an “uplifting” way.

I wonder if those who lived through World War II or Vietnam, who go to see films set in those times, I wonder how they do it.

I think the Democrats are washing their hands of Joe Lieberman less because of his loss of his state’s Democratic primary, and more because his run as an independent threatens the two-party system. He’s already said that if elected as an independent, he’d vote with the Democrats in Congress. Such a high-profile independent, however, winning such an important state, might lead to a spike in interest in third party candidates for the ‘08 elections.

Not, mind you, that I’m holding my breath for ‘08. But just the possibility would make me want to vote for Joe.

A big thank you to Mr. & Mrs. Wombat for a birthday gift I should’ve suspected was in the works:

Blog drunk and never live it down.

Here’s my question: what were you peeing on, ACW? Your cats or your apparently hairy balls? Y’know, I don’t think I want to know.

On this day, sixty-one years ago, a US Bomber named Bockscar dropped a single, solitary bomb, on a city that was a secondary target. The primary target, Kokura, was obscured by clouds. The bomb’s name was “Fat Man”, and its ‘brother’, “Little Boy”, had been dropped on Hiroshima only three days earlier. In the explosion that followed, forty-thousand people died, and tens of thousands would later die from the resulting radiation poisoning.

This bombing, however, wasn’t anymore particularly brutal than that which had come before — conventional bombings had already reduced much of Japan to ash and killed hundreds of thousands. US Bomber Commander General Curtis LeMay, published a list of Japanese cities, the amount of each city destroyed, and then the names of comporably sized US cities so that the Allied Command could picture how many damage was being done. Kobe, which was listed as comporable in size to Baltimore, had been 55% destroyed. “These percentages refer not to area bombed or area damaged but to an area obliterated, gone, burned, turned to ash. This wasn’t artillery damage in which one wall crumbled and the family huddled in another room. These percentages referred to wastelands — flat, desolate ash deserts.” [James Bradley, Flyboys, 289].

Modern war, pioneered by General William Tecumseh Sherman during his “March to the Sea” as commander of a large force of Union Armies (they being the Army of the Cumberland, Army of the Tennessee, and Army of the Ohio), was the belief “that the [enemy's] strategic, economic, and psychological ability to wage further war had to be definitively crushed if the fighting were to end.” [Wikipedia]

It was the guiding principle in the fight against Japan, a war which was rapidly reaching the point where the armed invasion of the island nation would soon be at hand, and where estimates of losses on both sides were staggeringly high — Japanese troops were notorious for fighting to the death, and the civilian population was just as fanatic (was it Guam where Japanese civilians threw themselves off cliffs rather than surrender to advancing Marines?). Hitler had tried to commit genocide against the will of those he wanted eliminated, but what was being faced on the Japanese home islands was a warrior race prepared to commit self-genocide before admiting defeat.

Is it possible that the nuclear attacks on Japan which ended the war years earlier than anyone predicted also saved the Japanese people from extinction? I don’t know. I’m not going to speculate (except, of course, I already am). I heard a quote somewhere that I thought was great, but I can’t remember it, it’s something like, war is awful, but the reasons people fight are great. It was about the Second World War, and if ever there was a cause that was clearly defined, that was it.

***

Thirty-two years ago, Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment.