By request, no drama!

One of my longtime readers has gone on the record wishing the blogs she follows would cut the drama.  A noble request, and unless you get me ranting, one I easily fulfill.  For example, I give news updates such as this:

The Japanese murderer of five, the "haiku killer", if you will, was apprehended.  Upon capture, he explained he wasn't getting along with his neighbors.  (Note to Bob G. - this is NOT acceptable social behavior.)  He also mentioned he didn't think they liked his dog.  (Note to Scrappy:  STILL not socially acceptable behavior.)  This seems to be the same excuse that the deceased Boston bomber (as opposed to the one Rolling Stone thinks should be a rock star) was going to use, modified for his non-residence status.  He also told the cops that he "should have died", but he failed to accomplish that.  (Note to other maladjusted individuals looking into murder/suicide:  Try killing YOURSELF FIRST.)

I have been loving Japan news (specifically the Japan Times), because I always seem to find an interesting socio-historical story.  This time, I found the story of a 1968 North Korean commando raid into the south, with a goal of assassinating then-S-Korean president Park Chung-hee.  Apparently the group of 31 elite commandos made good progress until they ran into a group of four villagers out chopping wood.

Here, a dispute breaks out over the parameters of the mission- some of them believed they should kill everyone they ran into; others thought that would thwart the purpose of the assassination- to cause a popular uprising that would drive the South into the North's open arms.  So what happened, in the words of one of only two survivors:

According to Kim (Shin Jo, the interviewee), a fierce debate ensued over whether or not to kill them. For reasons never entirely explained, they opted to offer the four some on-the-spot ideological training, and then let them go with a stern warning not to raise the alarm.
The villagers promptly went to the police and alerted them.

So lesson #1, ideology training, even 18 years after you release the Chinese army on a people, doesn't work well.  (Unless you are a prospective voter who thinks MSNBC is news.)  The commandos made it to "within a few hundred meters" of the Presidential "Blue House" (don't ask me) before ROK troops wiped them out, save for Kim and another fellow who somehow got back across the border.  And the moral of the story?  Kim was

interrogated for about a year and then, much to his surprise, was released, partly on the grounds that he had never discharged his firearm. He publicly renounced the North, married a South Korean woman, converted to Christianity and finally became a pastor.

And to top it all off, Park did end up being assassinated- by his own security chief- eleven years later- but no popular uprising occurred.  Thus their attempt at ideological conversion, assassination, and even causing a revolution, were all shot in the butt.


Besides news, I also do insightful commentary on spam.  Today, I was perusing my "referring sites" list, and found a couple I hadn't paid much mind to before.  One was a site called Thetaoofbadass.pw ("The Tao of badass", for those not of a mind to dissect).  It is apparently a video that will show you some secret for getting any woman you want.  Doubting its efficacy, I left over its protests and pleas, and decided to find out WTH ".pw" was.  At one point, it was the web address for the south Pacific nation of Palau, a coral flyspeck due north of Papua and due east of the Philippines.  I guess you don't need a whole directory for a nation a little bigger than Allen County in area with a population roughly equivalent to Huntington, Indiana, so it was re-assigned to an outfit that calls itself "Professional Web" and sells sites to low lifes like the Tao of Badass.  I sent them an e-mail questioning their "professional" status.  I am NOT holding my breath.

The other little troublemaker was something called "ceae2122.dyo.gs" in which the ".gs" belonged once upon a time to the South Georgia Islands, a flyspeck off the Falklands (size: approximately Ft. Wayne; population, a semi-permanent 30).  Nowadays, it's run by an outfit that "shortens URLs to make them readable", and sells them to your friendly porn dealers.  The site it connects to in this case is one of those lovely places that gives you the fake "Your flash player needs updated" message that then downloads Webcakes, a spam toolbar that I have now done battle with twice.  (PSA- NEVER download flash player anywhere but from the actual Adobe site.  If you get a message to update- close it, go to Adobe, check to see if you are up-to-date.  Odds are, you will be.)

Speaking of PSAs, here's another one, which the Rolling Stone thing reminded me of.  1190 (and now on 92.3 FM) WOWO announced that anybody who had a subscription to RS and was offended by the Tsarnaev cover, WOWO would buy them back, bundle them up, and send them back to RS with a polite "thanks but no thanks" note.  Local moron talking head Gary Snyder (formerly carried at WOWO briefly during the Gregg Henson reign) thought that was terrible, posting a blog bit about WOWO sinking to an obvious catering to a listenership "one Glen Beck command away from drinking the koolaid".   PSA to Mr. Gary Snyder- the Henson war is over.  Your side lost.  Time to grow up and play with other toys now.  And as far as Rolling Stone?  I would never give money to anyone who would keep KISS out of the rock'n'roll hall of fame.  Moving on...


Of course, the MOST fun we have here is with pictures!

This morning, off the north trail.

Hey, I caught that indigo bunting!

Another hole inspected.

Tonight, the highlight happened too quick for me.  As we turned the north corner onto the back trail, Scrappy paused to pee- directly onto a good-sized garter snake!  It seems that Scrappy was firing from an empty tank, though, and the snake never moved until the lifted leg came down on top of him, and Scrappy (who, as I've said recently, turns like a drunken trucker) only jumped as the last six inches of the snake made it into the brush.  Me?  I was too dumbfounded to do anything but say, "Scrappy, you're peeing on a snake!" as it disappeared.

Back to the fungi...

...and butterflies!

Another frog?  Well, I wasn't gonna, but he was practically posing...

 And we ended the trip with a mini comedy of errors on my part.  As we made our canal cross-over, I saw a deer WAAAY down towards the end of my line of sight.  As I pulled out the camera, desperately trying to remove from pouch, turn on, and aim in one fluid motion, at some point during the "point the damn thing the right direction" maneuver I hit the "look at the pictures you've taken" button.  Unaware, I hit the power button (to no effect) and tried to sight the deer (who had just paused to pose) only to find myself looking at a picture I took of a weed I mistook for a bunny earlier.

At this point, I had two options to get a chance to snap the picture.  I could have re-pushed the "look at the pictures I've taken" button, or pushed the "focus/shoot" button, either of which would have gotten me back into picture mode.  But it was the power button I hit instead, and as the deer dropped into the woods I watched my screen go black, as Scrappy waited at the bottom of the canal, grumbling something about "always taking bird pictures..."


And finally, I admit mistakes.  After excoriating the Cardinals for having steroid poster-boy Mark McGwire as their hitting coach, I found out he was actually now with the Dodgers.  Please feel free to go back and paste in "former" next to the reference.

"Step one, look around for Canseco.  Step two, drop your pants..."