Cost of War

No long diatribe here. Just a link showing the costs of this war in dollars. No one can put a monetary value on the over 1800 lives lost in the US and the thousands of civilians lost in Iraq.

Is this me in an alternate timeline?

I watched the trailer for the upcoming film 'Lord of War' starring Nicolas Cage. In the first 10 second of the trailer he says several sobering facts about about arms use in the world, and then says something so wrong that my mouth actually fell open. Then I giggled.

Go watch the trailer, then come back... I'll wait...


Ok. I know that rampant gun proliferation is not solving the worlds problems. I actually support gun control because too many stupid monkeys have access to guns and tend to use them in very bad, stupid ways. Getting a gun should be a very difficult process that involves careful training, psycological examinations and a test before getting a license. Of course, I also feel this way about breeding, but that's another matter.

But this film makes me smile. I worked selling swords and pole arms at the Ohio Ren for five years. And I loved it. There is a great sense of pride in providing a quality product to a customer at a decent price. I loved showing off what the swords could do. In short, I was an arms dealer. I should be shocked that Hollywood would take such a serious subject and trivialize it into a comedy. But I'm not. Because when I see Nick Cage up on that screen, its like looking at myself through a kind of funhouse mirror. The fact is, shooting guns is fun as hell. I love it. It's just the part where people point them at other people that kills my buzz.

5 star accomidations

5 star accomidations
Originally uploaded by stevepack.

Nothing but the best for us when we travel. Here we see the shower

house- er, spa, yeah that's it, at the luxurious hotel--- uh campground.

Reprieve

In short, today rocked. This is a good thing. The sales figures over the
last two weekends showed about a 40% drop from last year. That's pretty
serious. Lots of murmuring amongst the merchants. Bitter words and
rolled eyes at the ineptitude of management. People start wondering
aloud if maybe Pittsburgh would be a better use of time and resources.

And than a great day hits. It was like feeding time at the Pirhanna
tank. Several of us pulled about a pretty decent day. Enought that the
extra sort of balances out one of the earlier suck days. This
'correction' suddenly makes us forget all the bitching and moaning we've
been doing up to this point.

'Oh sure, attendance is down, but we had a correction. Sunshire and
rainbows can't be far around the bend now can they?'.

'Yesh, the patrons have contracted ebola and I myself am covered in
boils but we had a correction, so things are looking up.'

Its like we have the attention span of a flea. I'm hoping for another
great day tommorow, to further help balance out some of the previous
suck. That would be nice. And it would help with the boils...