Wednesday, 30 Jan 2008

Overheard on the  BBC news during a report of conditions that Canadian forces insist on if they are going to continue playing a combat role in Afghanistan. “…they insist of having helicopter gunships accompany night manuevers to help with recognizance”. Since ‘recognizance’ is an agreement entered into between a court and a person to avoid having to pay Bail,  I am thinking the journalist mean to say “reconnaissance” -

Friday, 25 Jan 2008

I am not a huge fan of conspiracy theories, neither am I convinced that Aliens regularly (or ever) visit Earth (or even that they exist). That said, I am at a loss to understand why there is such a familiar pattern of government response whenever there are UFO sightings.

1) people report seeing mysterious non-plane objects in sky (sometimes in conjunction with military planes which they say chased the object)
2) government says NO military planes were in the area and conjecture people were confused by civilian plane lights.
3) even more people come forward who saw the UFO and they insist lights were not civilian plane lights. someone reputable confirms the sighting and the details (often a pilot)
4) government insists NO military planes were anywhere NEAR the location on that night, and offers some other theory like swamp gas or aurolia borealus, or that people were drinking, or there was fog that night
5) people insist they _saw_ object and heard it and it moved unlike commercial planes or any military planes they have ever seen.
6) A week or two later the government ‘corrects’ themselves and says they DID have some fighter jets in the area who were ‘training’.

If these incidents are all easy explainable, why doesn’t the government just explain them right the first time? Why act in a way that makes people think the government is hiding something or lying to them?

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Mystery May Be Solved for Texas Town Abuzz Over UFO Sightings

Thursday, January 24, 2008

AP Jan. 14, 2008: Standing near the area where he saw a large silent object in the sky, Ricky Sorrells talks about the sighting in Dublin, Texas.

FORT WORTH, Texas — Fighter jets were training nearby the night dozens of Stephenville-area residents reported seeing a UFO this month, Air Force Reserve officials said Wednesday, backtracking on earlier statements.

The announcement did little to satisfy residents of Texas dairy country who swear that what they saw in the sky Jan. 8 was no airplane.

Some said it even bolstered their claims, because several people reported seeing at least two fighter jets chasing an object.

“This supports our story that there was UFO activity in that area,” said Kenneth Cherry, the Texas director of the Mutual UFO Network, which took more than 50 reports from locals at a meeting last weekend. “I find it curious that it took them two weeks to ‘fess up. I think they’re feeling the heat from the publicity.”

Officials at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth initially said none of their planes had been in the area, but on Wednesday they said 10 F-16s were there that day.

The officials said they were mistaken and wanted to set the record straight “in the interest of public awareness.”

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the base, declined to comment on the nature of the military training or say whether it took place on other days.

Lewis had said earlier this month that residents might have seen an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes and reflections from the setting sun. On Wednesday, he said he should not have speculated about the reported sightings.

From well-respected business owners to a county constable, several dozen people say they saw a flying object that was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said its lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane.

“I guarantee that what we saw was not a civilian aircraft,” Steve Allen, a pilot and freight company owner, said Wednesday.

The planes’ training area in the Brownwood Military Operating Area includes Stephenville’s Erath County, but Allen said it does not include the airspace where he saw the object. Also, Jan. 8 was not the only day sightings were reported.

Anne Frazor, who owns a fabric store in Stephenville, about 70 miles southwest of Fort Worth, said many in town have seen military aircraft zoom overhead from time to time as part of training operations. But she said that wasn’t what she saw Jan. 8.

“I couldn’t begin to say what it was, but to me it wasn’t planes,” Frazor said.

Since the reported sightings two weeks ago, the 17,000-resident city is having fun with the international publicity.

Some high-schoolers made T-shirts depicting a flying saucer beaming up a cow with the messages: “Stephenville: the new Roswell” and “They’re here for the milk!”

Several stores put new messages on their marquees, including “Aliens welcome.”

This week Tarleton State University is even hosting a lecture by a UFO researcher on the U.S. government’s secret response to UFOs, based on previously classified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The U.S. Air Force says it has not investigated UFO sightings since 1969 when it ended Project Blue Book, which examined more than 12,600 reported UFO sightings — including 700 that were never explained.

That program started a few months after the 1947 crash near Roswell, N.M., of an aircraft the government said was a top-secret weather balloon but others have claimed was an alien spacecraft.

“What we want is the government to admit there are UFOs and what they know about them,” Cherry said.

Wednesday, 23 Jan 2008

First off, I am not a big fan of product placement - the practice of companies paying money to have their products featured in television shows or movies. When it’s something fairly innocuous like seeing an apple logo on a laptop someone is using I can live with it because the plot has the character using a laptop and logos are normally visible when you are looking at the computer from most angles. I DON’T like the zooming in on logos like “Alias” used to do with the cars in their chase scenes. Very blatant, uneccessary and completely unrealistic.

So, I’ve seen a lot of bad product placements over the years (don’t get me started on the Bill Cosby bomb of a movie that was from all accounts much more successful as a continuous coca cola ad that it was as a film), but last week I saw the most egregious, worst of the worst, offensive and mind-boggling example of product placement I have _EVER_ seen.

It was on an episode of “Law and Order” - perhaps the “Law and Order SVU” variant, I am not sure. Here’s what happened.

Teenagers raised by drug-addicted mom were cycled through foster care “abandoned”/mistreated by “system” end up in prison where they graduate high school with high marks and go onto college where they get framed for killing a girl. Detectives convinced the boys didn’t kill the girl go to the boy’s mother looking for a girl who hangs around the projects who they believe might know who really killed the girl. Mother is obviously still on drugs (or appears to be) though she says she is 7 days clean and sober. Mother tells sob story of kids being taken away and tells them how when she is clean for 90 days she is going to suprise them by taking them to Red Lobster. (WTH? ok, maybe RL is the writer’s favorite restaurant or they are trying to play against stereotypes or something? Don’t know but maybe it was just a weird thing that SOUNDED like a product placement.) then she tells them the girl’s name. Detectives somehow use the information to exonerate the boys and at their release THE VERY NEXT DAY they plan to suprise the boys with their clean and sober mom. One detective goes to pick up the mom to meet the boys and other detective waits at the courthouse as the boys/men are released. Detective at courthouse tells boys their records are clean, AND he got them reinstated at the college and boys are very happy. he then tells them he has “one more suprise for them” then walks out of earshot to call other detective to find out why he isn’t there yet with mom. Cut to other detective opening door of mother’s apartment to find her sprawled out on chair apparently dead from heroin overdose (needle/hose in plain sight). Detective with boys says “Ok, no, I’ll tell them” and hangs up the phone looking pensive. Boys ask detective “WHAT is the other suprise?” The detective puts on a fake smile gushes fake enthusiasm as he puts his arms around boys and says “I am treating you to Red Lobster!” then looks seriously towards camera.

WTH WAS THAT? “I am treating you to Red Lobster?” Like that’s anything remotely close to reality - a detective takes two exonerated college-aged men out to Red Lobster after they are freed even though he doesn’t know them and they’ve never expressed any interest in mass market seafood restaurants.  I know they were hoping to avoid the revulsion by making it seem like that was the druggie mom’s ‘last wish’ - to take the kids to Red Lobster, but it was STUPID, OBVIOUSLY a lame product placement and using it in the final heartstring tugging moments of the episode made me want to punch Red Lobster and Law and Order in the Head. Repeatedly. That was just WRONG. I can’t even begin to describe how it was wrong, but trust me. People who do things like that are going to come back in the next life as dung beetles. Or worse. Using even a fictional character’s death as a way of advertising your product is just wrong. “I am treating you to Red Lobster”? Seriously just WTH?

Tuesday, 22 Jan 2008

When I was younger I used to read a lot of sci-fi - creative fiction just seemed so much more interesting than reality. My suburban USA reality was a very predictable and safe sandbox in which to play. But I thought that was what the world was like. I was so sheltered. Even though I am aware of how different that world I was raised in is from the real world there are times when reality just jumps up and pukes on my lap and sickens me anew. Reality is just so much worse than I ever imagined. I can’t find anything else to say about this story.

Liberian Ex-Rebel Confesses to Killings

By JONATHAN PAYE-LAYLEH
The Associated Press
Monday, January 21, 2008; 3:56 PM

MONROVIA, Liberia — One of Liberia’s most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked for charging into battle wearing only boots, has returned to confess his role in terrorizing the nation, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths.

Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned last week to face his homeland’s truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie. His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon’s practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy.

Other former warlords, though, have refused to ask forgiveness, dismissing a commission many in Liberia see as toothless. Blahyi is urging other former killers to come forward as the country founded by freed American slaves in 1847 struggles to recover from past horrors.

“I could be electrocuted. I could be hanged. I could be given any other punishment,” the 37-year-old Blahyi said in a weekend interview following his truth commission appearance last week. “But I think forgiveness and reconciliation is the right way to go.

“I have been looking for an opportunity to tell the true story about my life _ and every time I tell people my story, I feel relieved.”

The civil war, which killed an estimated 250,000 people in this nation of 3 million, was characterized by the eating of human hearts and soccer matches played with human skulls. Drugged fighters waltzed into battle wearing women’s wigs, flowing gowns and carrying dainty purses stolen from civilians.

Before he led his fighters into battle, wearing only a pair of lace-up boots, Blahyi said he made a human sacrifice to the devil.

The sacrifice was typically “the killing of an innocent child and plucking out the heart which was divided into pieces for us to eat,” he told The Associated Press on Saturday. He appeared before the commission Jan. 15 _ and put a figure to his killing spree for the first time.

“More than 20,000 people fell victim (to me and my men). They were killed,” said Blahyi, who dated the beginning of his murders to 1982, when he was ordained as a ritual priest responsible for making human sacrifices before battle. He said when he later led his fighters against the insurgency launched by Charles Taylor, he commanded them to embrace this tradition……

…In the interview, Blahyi told the AP: “Some people see me and congratulate me. Others see me and say I should not be walking down the streets of Monrovia posing proud. But I continue to tell such people I am not proud, I am ashamed.”

In 1996, he said in a 1997 interview with the AP, God appeared to him as he charged naked into a battle and told him he was a slave to Satan, not the hero he considered himself to be.

He became a born-again Christian and for a while, traversed the war-wracked streets of Monrovia selling cassettes of his sermons.

Liberia’s violence began in 1979 when security forces killed dozens of people during massive riots. The following year, President William Tolbert was ousted in a coup by Doe, an illiterate master sergeant, who ordered Tolbert’s Cabinet members tied to poles on a beach and executed.

Rebels led by Taylor invaded in 1989, plunging the country into another civil war. The war went into a momentary lull after 1997 when Taylor was elected president and again surged, ending only when Taylor was forced into exile in Nigeria in 2003. He is now facing charges of crimes against humanity at a tribunal in the Hague for atrocities committed by a rebel movement he allegedly supported in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Thursday, 17 Jan 2008

Lately (due in large part to snow and cold and people complaining because they didn’t find their paper that I threw RIGHT WHERE THEY ASK FOR IT TO BE DELIVERED because 5″ of snow fell between when I delivered their paper and when they got and went outside to look for it. Excuse me. Please submit all complaints to someone who controls the weather and leave me out of it. ) I’ve been feeling a bit negative about delivering papers. Not so much negative about the actual delivering as towards certain individuals I deliver to.

So, to the person who now wants her paper on her top step at the front door because she didn’t see it on her walk under the snow and who also complained the last time it snowed when becauase her street hadn’t been plowed I had to WALK a couple of hundred yards up her street through 6″ of snow and freezing sleet/snow to deliver her paper to her walk? I have many nasty things I would like to say but won’t lest I sound even more petty than I already do. I wouldn’t even mind delivering her paper to her top step front door but her house is the almost the worst possible kind of house to deliver to. e.g. Not too far from the road - definitely within reasonable tossing distance except that there is a row of stupid ornamental trees and landscaping screen stuff between the front door and the road. Not even a direct walkway I could practice and throw straight through, no I have to stop the car, walk down the driveway, then walk along the curved walk until I have a straight shot at her porch. I don’t know her enough to personally dislike her, so this isn’t as pointed as it sounds, but last week one of my driveway delivery customers died and at this point I’d definitely prefer it had been her.

Seriously? If you WANT your paper on your top step at your front door, be reasonable. Don’t ask for your paper there if there’s NO WAY your paper carrier can get it there without walking right up to your door UNLESS you are willing to tip him/her for the extra effort involved. Seriously, If I had to spend as long as I did on every house on my route as I did on that person’s deliver it would take me over 3 hours to deliver papers every weekday and even longer on the weekends. It would over double the amount of time I spend delivering papers, and I DON’T get paid by the hour. Don’t ask for someone to deliver your paper to your front door if you have obstacles between the road and your front door. If your porch is surrounded by paper blocking shrubs DON’T ask for it on your porch unless you are willing to pay for the extra service involved. If you want your paper on your walk DON’T line your walk with fragile solar lights or delicate statuary or those glass globes on pedestals.

Just use some common sense.

Don’t make unreasonable request.

Don’t make me drive to your house and slap you, because you _know_ I will.

See what I mean? I get so annoyed with little things and think bad things about people over a few seconds of inconvenience.