Dingbat Of The Year. This guy must have seen the movie Patton rather than reading Rommel.

The modern tank is useless. What are you going to do with it? Flatten houses? Block streets? Have big tank battles in the desert? Lose one every time you piss off an infantryman enough who’s got a grenade? Russian tank men recite stories of running from certain infantrymen who had obviously lost their minds or never had a sense of fear in the first place (oh, take your choice). The Germans had a BADGE for single-handedly destroying a tank. That’s right, the crack-job who actually gets under the land ship’s machine-gun range and close enough to flip a grenade into a sight slit. Nobody says it was never awarded posthumously.

The Queen of the Battlefield was the infantry. The new queen is anything with wings or propellers or a jet engine that can eject explosives in any form. But any of them can be taken out of the air by some pissed-off villager with a rifle; all fuel tanks can be penetrated. I’m not saying it’s EASY to take out an F-14, but sooner or later the pilot’s going to come down close enough, and anybody who’s fought in helicopters can describe the results of one well-placed bullet. God help you if you’re up against a woman — with our natural hand-eye coordination — with a rifle protecting the village perimeter.

There’s a reason they call it a Jesus Nut.

As for the guy’s claim that we Could Have Won the first gulf war — well, then it wouldn’t have been punitive expedition to put our Tame Dictator back in his place, would it? It was supposed to be a spanking, so our dog went back into his kennel. After all, it’s not always easy to get a really good dictator under your thumb, and how can you trust a new one?

“Never Open The Door”

I always thought I was psychically blind. Now I know.

Nearest (as in “Nearest and Dearest;” unspecified husband/wife/spouse/significant other) and I were living in the Navy town of Bremerton, Washington.

Bremerton Walks. Not like Edinburgh, but things stroll around the dark neighborhoods at night that shouldn’t be outside the wooded graveyards. They’re quiet, but they’re there. There are bodies in unexpected places; a street away from our house was the world’s smallest aboriginal reservation, a 1/2-block of big trees, with a few graves lined up in the tiny flower gardens between the house trailers.

Standing in the middle of the intersection by our house, in broad daylight, I heard a horse whinny behind me. A horse? What was a horse doing in a town street ten miles from the nearest pasture?

Not much else sounds like a neigh. I’ve heard enough horse voices; my first back injury came when I hurled myself off my sister’s ancient mare, who fell asleep and collapsed on her head while cantering. The voice on the street wasn’t a kid screaming because she’d fallen off her bike. It was a horse, calling to its ilk.

That night, Nearest and I heard hoofbeats on the asphalt. And a carriage. Four horses, at least, and a carriage. What else sounds like that? I jumped up to open the door, and Nearest — who is Scots, Irish and Wyandotte (not Winnabago, like I tease him sometimes), all Walking People — warned me back from the threshold.

“Don’t open it! “

“Why not?” I said. Then — “OH.”

I remembered why; you don’t want to open a door into yourself when THAT coach goes by. The horses don’t have any heads, and they’re the last horses you’re ever going to see.

Walt Disney’s “Darby O’Gill and the Little People” portrayed the coachman as the headless one, but in the Irish legend it’s the horses that gallop without their skulls, and personally, I just don’t want to see that. Perhaps they’re the left-overs of the old horse-sacrifices of ancient Hibernia, and they’ll snatch any opportunity to take humans with them into The West.

After we’d settled back down on the couch, we started doubting what we’d heard. Could it just have been the wind, whipping dried leaves and sand along the sidewalk gutters? The limbs of the trees knocking together in unusual ways? A kid on one of those metal scooters? A really big dog?

Then the sirens started up at the hospital, and the medics came to the house at the end of the street, where one of our neighbors died that night.

No, never open the door when that carriage goes by.

I don’t know if this English kid is giving in to the arguments for humanity — or has begun to realize how dangerous being a sniper can be.

He’s certainly quick, getting rid of a valuable souvenir.

The old joke about getting two leaders together for breakfast, sex — or in the same room as their mothers — goes back a long ways in history. Every generation of soldiers I’ve ever known has told some version of it.

This is beginning to look like America’s Culture War. There’s a bunch of us who believe in democracy and the equality of all humanity — like it says in our sloppy rough draft of a constitution and bill of rights — and there’s a gang who don’t like democracy or don’t trust it and don’t believe anybody is human unless they’re exactly like them.

Democracy is hard, messy and requires adults. Not a kid thing.

Ghost Tour 04 I couldn’t load the other files; two big. But I got these two in (see yesterday’s entry).

Again, Roberta Gregory filming me in the Pike’s Place Market.

Ghost Tour 01

Sorry for the teeny link, but that’s what my AVI file shows. Pretend you’re watching on an IPhone.

Roberta Gregory filmed me trying to recreate the ghost tour at Seattle’s Pike’s Place Market. It’s not crowded because it’s after hours. I got to go on the tour for free because I helped the tour guide string complimentary bead spirit plummets at the haunted bead shop in the market.

It was during the tour that I first heard that a market personality , whom I’d known and been fond while working the slabs at the market myself, had burned to death. Not the nicest way to discover something. I dunno if my gasp of “Mae?? Burned?? Oh no!” really added to the tour.

Working for the Forks Forum, I could never shake the feeling I’d known my first editor and her husband. Then he died, and I went to his beach-side wake. Over my shoulder I carried a black bag I’d bought in the market years ago.

She pointed at it, and said, “Where did you get that!?”

When I told her, she said, “My husband made those! We sold them in the market!”

That’s when we recognized each other. If you live long enough, you’ll stop accusing Dickens of too much wild coincidence. He couldn’t make this stuff up.

Her friends had all worked in the market and we spent most of the wake telling market stories.

The guy the Russian is based on would do something like this. Nearest has stories of his helicopter crew chief and pilot digging out armloads of munitions from an “abandoned” munitions bunker and playing with them. The dumb bullet-and-a-hammer fireworks, of course.

Note: for those of you writing “war” comics, this is the kind of crap that goes on in the field. Stateside — or Reichside — at least until the enemy crosses the border, there is something called the Unauthorized Discharge of a Firearm. A comics artist I’ve seen recently — whose work looks like mine in 1963, and I like it a lot — shows a sergeant discharging a firearm in garrison, just to get the men’s attention.

I tried to convince artist that the next scene would be funnier than hell, with the sergeant on the carpet in front of his Lieutenant, but I couldn’t explain Military Fear. Guess you hadda be there.

The little radio operator is about to share a real truth about humanity.

The Peach — at least at this time — doesn’t ask. He was so sweet and accepting. By the end of the series he has no temper left at all.

In AFTERDEAD, he’s gone totally obnoxious. His former lover, Rosen, a wildly handsome asshole pilot in life, has been extremely mellowed by death. Rosen has to put up with a Peach who gets drunk and shows up at his apartment, totally torn up and angry.

It’s the opposite of what most of us might go through; life drives us crazy, but death — whether it’s Heaven or Decay — calms us down. The Peach always does everything backwards.

There’s a point where we’ve just HAD it with the racial jokes.

Or IS there? How many of us — yeah, you too — have just had to share an extremely awful joke, but we’ve prefixed it with, “This is a really really bad joke, and we shouldn’t laugh” or “I can tell this because I’m part this race or I am this race or somebody who is this race told it to me.”

Admittedly, censorship is always bad, and people are dying to share if something is just funny. Some racial jokes are awfully funny — especially the ones told by the races themselves. There’s an extremely offensive rape/Cossack/Jewish joke that I heard from a Jewish guy. I’m not telling it here.

There’s a Kamikaze/Jewish joke told me (part Jewish)  by a Japanese girl. Do I get to tell it?

Get a few beers in me.

There’s a modern culture clash going on with the Doctor, here; the inability to understand that other people are different and that there is nothing so odd out there that it is odd in its own culture.

Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri make a Porno is, like all his other films, about normal life among subcultures (this is me with my bullshit critic voice). There’s an incredibly sweet moment in the outtakes on the dvd: Stacey and Lester are done filming some Hot n’ Nasty Anal Sex. He asks if she’d like to go to breakfast. She says no, she’s not hungry, but she’ll see him tomorrow for more work. As she leaves, he says quietly to himself, “Nice girl.”

He looks like he’s just met her at the malt shop. What they’ve just done is normal in his culture. That doesn’t mean she isn’t sweet and nice, and he can appreciate that. It’s really all about the context of where we come from.

Filmology: watch for the use of ellipses and the Double Dutch Rub.

Cautions: you could laugh your thyroid out on the floor watching this movie. The only time Nearest ever laughs that hard is watching the scene between Peter Boyle and Gene Hackman in Young Frankenstein.

Which we saw in a double feature with The Fearless Vampire Killers at Seattle’s Harvard Exit theater. There were some yeshiva student from the Hebrew Union Theological Seminary in the audience, laughing their yarmulkes off over the Jewish jokes.