Long time no see!

I'm fine. My guys are fine. We're halfway through our rotation, and we've been too busy to notice ten weeks have flown by.

How busy? Busier than Rush Limbaugh with a pint of Hagen Dazs. Busier than Tom DeLay's corkscrew. Busier than Sean Hannity with a new Seek-a-Word puzzle book. Busier than Bill O'Reilly with a vibrator in one hand, and a phone in the other.

I seem to spend every waking hour working; there's very little time for anything else. Which is good, because there's very little access to anything else -- can't be with my wife. Can't play with my son. Can't catch up with a friend over the phone. Can't watch baseball on the recliner.

But jam out to a good tune? That I can manage.

I don't think I ever appreciated how fine a song Smoke on the Water is until this summer. SOTW was slightly before my time - I was six or seven when Deep Purple published it - but the more I listen to it, the more I appreciate how it must have broken ground. Not lyrically, but structurally. That classic riff (imagine Beavis & Butt-head, in unison, growling, "Duh-duh-duuuuuuh . . . Duh-duh-Du-duuuuuuh . . ." is what you come away with. Not the chorus. Not the verse. A non-instrumental song with an intrumental hook. DP cast tradition aside, resisting the temptation to smother Blackmore's unforgettable riff with lyrics, and broke major ground with Smoke on the Water.

Incidentally, if you're not familiar with the story behind the song, you should look it up (sorry, can't exactly find a good reference for you under these conditions). Frank Zappa most certainly saved dozens, if not hundreds or even thousands, of lives that night. Much unlike the tragedy in Rhode Island three or four years ago -- where a hundred of so people perished because Great White were too cheap to work in a club for which the town would grant a pyrotechnic permit -- the fire that night, and the subsequent evacuation, seems to illustrate how much more mature rock icons of those days were. Maybe the reality of Vietnam and its non-volunteer draft victims woke up the youth of the day. Of course, FZ had more brain cells in his Corpus Callosum than the whole of Great White's collective gray matter, and I'm in no way saying he'd have been any less brilliant in a different era. I'm just sayin'.

Non-Sequitur Sequitur

I love how any character in The Sopranos, when talking to someone he's expected to respect, can get away with blatant insubordination so long as he tacks onto his observation the following three words: "I'm just sayin'." That's become a bit of an inside joke around here. "Sir, that was a really dumb maneuver... I'm just sayin'."

HELL

Taking a short breather at Club Med - not far from work, but much more relaxing. Civilized, even. The food is good. The toilets work. We even have AC.

Yes, it's scorching hot here. Here, 30 clicks north, 200 clicks northwest. Doesn't matter. It's all the same 50+ degrees Celsius (you figure it out), and 50 knot dust storms. We call it 50/50.

But the real hell is the internet. Actually, the lack of access to the internet is hell. I can't even access my own website (many thanks to Marc Perkel, my fearless e-leader, for hooking a brother up) at this point, but not because it's such a popular, tree-hugging e-rag. No, I cannot access my own site because within it I smartly embedded a blog, thinking I could at least blog from over here.

Wrong answer. Blogs are restricted, except as listed below. The hypocrisy within the rules governing these DoD computers is uglier than Ann Coulter's adam's apple.

Random thought: if the GOP had been running things in 1941, would WWII have been a War on Air Strikes?

More computer Woes

No, I'm not done ready to change subjects.

So far my laptop has borne this 120º+ hell with honor (all hail my brave little jerkmonkey, with her magnificent battery stamina and plenitude of porn!), but as there are tons of restrictions on what a GI can access over here, I haven't exactly been inspired to do much with it.

I recently spent some time on a DoD computer, and here is a short list of sites a GI CAN and CANNOT access:

Amazing, flagrant hypocrisy.

I can't wait

Till 2008!

Oh, and one more thing I should get off my bleeding chest before I wrap up and dispatch this to my fearless leader:

FOX News in Southwest Asia

For nearly two decades I've watched and listened to DoD-run television and radio programming while stationed or deployed overseas; I've watched it evolve, and evolved it has.

Just a decade ago you were lucky to get one American TV and radio station in Germany, or South Korea for instance. But now you can watch a handful of themed TV stations (sports, kids, movies, news, etc.), and listen to three or four radio stations in some locales. In fact, a recent study by Lund Media Research showed that most GIs are neither fond of Rush Limbaugh, nor fans of country music. (That's right!) In fact, I seriously doubt as many of us are as fond of Faux News as Faux News would like the civilian population to think.

Nevertheless, FNC constitutes a big chunk of what the DoD has programmed into its news-themed AFRTS TV station. No surprise the DoD gives us what they want us to get, and not what we want. But the odd thing about the blatant FOX News/DoD alliance is what happens during FNC's commercial segments.

Normally, we don't get commercials. DoD Regulation 5120.20R prohibits AFRTS from airing commercials. So we're subjected to a series of 60-second long propaganda bits. Corny, DoD-generated "golly gee" crap. How to make a PCS (moving your family to a new assignment) run smoothly, why it's dangerous to discuss sensitive information on unsecure phone lines, a scrap of trivia about General MacArthur, etc. This regularly-scheduled brainwashing occurs for all programming. Even on the news-themed AFRTS TV station.

Except when they show FOX News. During the 23 hours a day AFRTS' news network airs FNC programming (that might be somewhat exaggerated), we don't get the standard DoD brainwashing crap; we get... more FOX News.

FOX News has built its own repertoire of putatively non-commercial spots to fill the spaces normally occupied by the AFRTS Brain Detergent. The problem is, as I see it, these FNC-generated "golly gee" breaks are all subtly commercial in nature. At least the couple I've seen here in Club Med.

One spot presents basic guidelines for those who wear contact lenses. Don't sleep in them, wash them with this, don't wash them with that. And so forth. But during its presentation we're shown a lab where contact lens cleaner and contact lenses themselves are made. Obviously it's okay to endorse commercial products on a DoD broadcast if you shroud your endorsement in a we really care public service announcement. Oh, and don't spend too much time on that Bausch & Lomb logo...

I need one of the big dog bloggers to expose this crap. I'm not going to be at this particular spot much longer, and as you know my internet access is shakier than Karl Rove's sexuality, so I'm afraid I won't be much help (although, again, I have to hand it Perkel - I can't check my Yahoo email account, or my GMail, but I can sure as hell check my Perkel email! Email me if you learn anything more on this BS!)

Must for to go now, amigos. Hope to return before another month expires. In the meantime, keep advocatin'.