Since most of Sock Wars took place in the dark (or very low light), photography opportunities were limited. About midnight, however, we stopped the games and started to clean up. Something strange seemed to be happening, however …
The Mall Diva’s Golden Birthday Tour kicked off one day early with a stop Thursday at Keegan’s for Trivia Night and so her “peeps” could pay tribute.
Our team, appropriately named “Golden Birthday” and consisting of the Diva, myself and Kevin Ecker, finished in a four-way tie for first with 19 points. We would have won outright if MD, our licensed beautyologist and fashionescenti had known the name of the new J-Lo cosmetic line. Oh well, here’s our traditional victory token:
Once the important business was out of the way – it was time for presents! A couple of “Old Stogies”, David Strom and Margaret Martin, presented the Diva with her very own cigar, a Black Pearl! (Andy is upset in the background because he forgot to bring a present).
No matter. Andy figures that while the Diva is still too young to drink beer, there’s no law against her wearing it. (Kevin not only forgot to bring a present, he also forgot to pick up a beer to pour.)
For Friday night, on to Sock Wars!
I’m still on blogging vacation, but a recent event got me to pondering comparitive cultural approaches to crime and punishment. I will meditate on this during my time off. In the meantime:
Four young men broke into an apartment in South Minneapolis last week, only to be wounded and chased away by an intended victim wielding a samurai sword. Three of the attempted robbers have been arrested: Hossem Chalbi, Iman Ahmed Abdelhakim and Mohammed Khalil. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m guessing that these youths aren’t Amish.
Chalbi was slashed on the arm and Khalil was slashed on the abdomen and also lost a finger. Assuming Khalil isn’t a wayward Amish who has forsaken his religion of peace, but is perhaps a follower of the Islamic law of Sharia, then he got off relatively easy: the Sharia penalty for theft calls for amputation of the whole hand.
(Interesting but unrelated sidenote: the attempted robbery took place in the 3100 block of Lyndale Avenue S. I used to live just two blocks away, in the 3100 block of Harriet Avenue S. I didn’t have a samurai sword, but I did keep an old bayonet around the house.)
“Vacation” is sweet. So far I’ve been able to resist the temptation to let fly on the busted terrorists, the missing Egyptian “students”, the use of samurai swords for home defense, capital punishment for auto-insurance scofflaws and the mystery of how Chrysler went from Lee Iacocca to Dr. Z.
I’ll be getting back to the routine soon enough, but as this video proves, even if you’re on a treadmill it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun.
My dad said, “post something to keep the homefires a-burnin’!”
Like he can just take the rest of the summer off and make me do this instead.
As I stated before: I am lazy. For today, at least. Thus I instigate (dun dun DUN) an open thread! Cool beans! If you’ve never posted a comment on the Nightwriter blog before, I dare you to. To all you regulars- Welcome back! I’ll think of something to start with.
Ok, so it’s day one of my blogging vacation and here I’ve already broken my self-imposed exile. Just because I intended to stop writing, however, doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading and this post from The Wide Awake Cafe brought me out of my hammock. It contains a link to a series of photos and video images from EU Referendum that show the revealing timeline and backstory behind the famous images from the Qana attack (caution, the photos of the childrens’ bodies are intense).
It is clear that, as we have known, the Israeli attacks killed many civilians. What is illuminated, however, is what we have long suspected: these events, if not deliberately instigated, are enthusiastically manipulated by the likes of the dynamic duo of Green Helmet and White Tee-Shirt Guy with assistance from their gang, The Willing Media in their never-ending quest to score political points.
Sadly, outrageously, the score is being kept by dead bodies. These little girls are dead, perhaps coldly killed by Israeli bombs, but assuredly and cold-bloodedly exploited by the psycho cockroaches of Hizbollah and its patrons who first used these children as human shields and then searched the rubble for the most shocking remains to be paraded bathetically in front of the cameras and then abandoned as indifferently as when they were thrust into the line of fire in the first place.
This story, combined with the news that broke over the weekend of the doctored photos published by Reuters (a story that even CNN couldn’t ignore) is truly depressing. Rather than return to my hammock, I think I may go to my prayer closet instead.
That’s all I’m blogging today. However, for more details on the Reuters scandal see these related stories from Powerline, Michelle Malkin and the blogger credited with exposing the fake photos, Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs (slow loading due to very heavy traffic).
Frankly, I’m not much of a Francophile, but there is one French custom that has a certain appeal to me: the month-long August vacation.
I like blogging and I’ve had more fun and gotten a lot more satisfaction from doing this than I ever expected when I started nearly 18 months ago. Therefore I’m not planning on quitting anytime soon. I am, however, going to take the rest of this month off to try and remember what I did with all my free time before I started blogging.
I’ve got some chewy books I’ve been wanting to read, a couple of new Xbox games I’ve barely touched, a fantasy football campaign to plot and a desire to spend some of the remaining summer evenings out of my basement. There’s also an element of personal development to this exercise: I want to see if I can get through a day without looking at it as blog-fodder; I want to see if I can get to bed earlier at night; and I want to see if I really can stop, anytime I want to.
That doesn’t mean “The Night Writer” is going dark the next few weeks, however. The Mall Diva and Tiger Lilly can post anytime, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be more updates leading to MD’s big golden birthday bash (not to mention the big unveil she’s been promising of her birthday dress). Furthermore, I may pop in if something timely comes up or occurs to me that I can’t let pass without comment.
I’ll be back the week after Labor Day, and I hope you will be, too.
Obi Sium is running for Congress in Minnesota’s Fourth District, a seat currently held by liberal DFLer Betty (I don’t remember the words to the Pledge of Allegiance) McCollum who replaced the late Bruce Vento in the long-time DFL stronghold.
Sium is Eritrean by birth, a U.S. citizen by choice, a civil engineer by profession, and a Republican by philosophy. Oh, and a non-entity by the standards of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, which has ignored his campaign except for a short article back in May that both announced and dismissed his candidacy.
Here then are a list of the top 10 things Obi can do to get the PiPress to cover him:
Mitch reminds us that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of the death of war correspondent Steven Vincent, killed not in the heat of battle but in cold blood by Islamic “warriors” who targeted him because of things he had written (I believe we’re still waiting for the New York Times to be outraged).
Interestingly enough, today happens to be the birthday of one of America’s first embedded reporters, Ernie Pyle. I read a lot of Pyle’s writing, and writing about him by others, when I was in junior high and high school. It was a time when war was a fascinating subject for me and I read voraciously about the Civil War and World War II, cutting my teeth on Richard Tregaskis and the Landmark Series put out by Random House and moving on to Pyle and many others.
Pyle was a native of Indiana, where I lived at the time, which may have made him more interesting to me at first. What stands out now for me, however, is that his coverage of World War II may have been the first reading I had done that pierced the romantic cloud of glory and honor and all the glittery trappings that can so easily mask the reality of war when viewed from the distance imposed by geography, or experience — or willful ignorance. While there was certainly plenty of glory and honor in Pyle’s stories, it was tight-lipped and gritty as he related the activities of men who didn’t fight for a cuase so much as they fought for each other and for the chance to see another day, and sometimes paused to consider what they may have lost in the process. A great collection of Pyle’s columns can be found online here.
From Pyle I began to get a picture of men who hated what they were doing but knew it had to be done, which I later learned also pretty much described his own feelings about his calling. Though he won a Pulitzer for his reporting and was able to leave the war for awhile, Pyle chose to re-enter the storm and was subsequently killed by a sniper while covering the action in the Pacific.
Steven Vincent was a worthy successor to Pyle and there are many others today such as Michael Yon who carry on the tradition of giving the reader a chance to see the picture up close. That is an invaluable perspective because it blows away the camouflage that others (pro and con, left and right) so easily create for those who prefer to watch from a distance.
In the process some of these correspondents die too young. At the same time, something very important lives on. I urge you to check out the above link to the Pyle collection and rediscover (or discover) the power of a compelling story, expertly told.