Bam! Back from sunny/sandy South Carolina. Because I like lists let's breakdown the work week in percentages. It goes like this:
Running around military base documenting recruits experiences at basic training: 75%
Eating/Drinking: 7.5%
Sleeping: 7.5%

All in all it was a great time. We had an excellent public affairs officer escorting us around the base. And thank goodness, because Fort Jackson is one gigantic military base. Since we had a great escort we got to do mostly anything. Shadow a squad of soldiers on a simulated ambush? CHECK. Film from the top of Victory Tower? CHECK. Want to be in the soldiers bunk when the Drill Sergeants wake them up? CHECK.
We got it all, baby. And it was cool as shit.

Essentially, I got to experience what it would life would be like as a recruit in the Army, but without the yelling and the running. And I got paided. Good times!

Tonight the missus and I rented "Bulletproof Monk". However it scored low in the plausibility and acting areas so we turned it off. Which is about the worst thing I can say about a movie; this is the second movie I have ever seen that I felt was so bad I couldn't watch it. Still, seeing the fight choreography, all be it poor, put me in the mood for some martial arts. So we watched "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". Now, that is a movie. Top Notch!

Regardless, tis good to be home.

First Hurricane Isabel, now this. I'm off to the recently wrecked South Carolina for a week to film a reality-tv style documentary on new recruits in the National Guard. So this blog may seem a bit inactive after all my previous posts. Oh, wait....

The hurricane rolled into our part of town around 2pm. At 3pm the company I work for lost power, around 6pm our house lost power. Somewhere between 9pm and 6am our upstairs neighbor lost a shutter to her window that landed in our backyard. And our power was turned back on. Then, power was cut off around 9am Friday morning. It was restored at 2am Sunday morning. Long enough for everything in our fridge (including 30 frozen chickens and an ice cream cake) to rot, and long enough to force us to cancel our housewarming party.

So party will be rescheduled, shutter will be nailed back in place by maintenance guy and more frozen chicken pieces will be purchased.
All in all, we turned out all right.

I figured I should stop posting stuff in other people's comments section and just write a blog of my own.

To tone things down a bit from my acidic posting in Sam's blog, 9-11 is a sad, sad day. As it was describe before two years ago in the press, this day will forever be the 'Pearl Harbor' of almost every self-aware person alive. It's shocking to think that nothing will ever erase what this day comes to mean for the American psyche.

I heard a story on NPR this evening about a government employee who was the only person in his office of 7 to survive the Pentagon attack. He explained that before 9-11 he and another co-worker, someone he described as a very good friend, would go out for dinner every TH night. When that plane slammed into the Pentagon his friend died. It’s these little thing that made this day so sad. No amount of wars, arrests, foiled attacks, or revisions to the Patriot Act will allow this man to have another dinner with his friend. And I find that upsetting, because it is something you can't control. This to me is the most frightening thing about post 9-11 life. I can't control if a terrorist is going force another plane into a building, poison the water supply, or fill the air with a deadly chemical.

I guess that is what the Patriot Act is supposed to pre-empt. However, everything I read is about how the government is harassing some naturalized citizen because he refused to spy on his immigrated Middle-East community here in Anytown USA. To me that doesn't seem like progress, just a bunch of shots in the dark with a media spin.

So, for right now, at two years after thousands of people died, I say the terrorist won because look what our American government is reduced to: crushing the some innocent minority's dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness so the majority to can sleep easy at night. That is until the next time the government issues a non-specific terror warning. Maybe in five or ten years, I can feel like the American government is setting the right example of how to treat ALL the people that live. Only then will I say that America won.

Muslims Complain of Pressure to Inform
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1427735

Three People Reflect on Changes Since Sept. 11
http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=1428335

Fall Sports

The Fall edition of kickball started on Monday night. We have a new league and mostly a new team and great new field to play on. No more tripping over gopher holes on the way to second base for me. We lost - which is not new - but only by one run. We need to get ourselves some kicking power if we are going to compete this year. However this year, we've got ourselves a killer 1st basewoman who, in one inning, made a double play, then made the third out all by her lonesome. Rock solid.
In other sports related news, football season has arrived. Finally. I love me some football and week one was no slouch. The Redskins beat the Jets; The Eagles lost; Detroit won(!!!), Virginia Tech incinerated their opponent. The only team that had a disappointing outcome was the Patriots, which made me sad for Adam cuz I know he loves himself some Patriots.

Stereo: Labradford's 'mi media naranja'.