Mr Sagdiev is survived by his wife Lunelle, several girlfriends, a dozen prostitutes, a multitude of children (legitimate and illegitimate), as well as his mother and numerous brothers and sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters, brothercousins, sistercousins, ladyboys, he-shes and other indefinitely gendered relatives from the nuclear reactor zone near Kucik.
Funeral details and an obituary have yet to be published
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
¿¡Viva la Revolución!? ... ¡Viva Louis Vuitton!
The Spanish speaking world has been providing us with some good stuff lately! First King Juan Carlos telling off Chavez, and now this:
Basically, this Venezuelan politician is in the middle of a tirade:
"The only path to justice is socialism. It is not capitalism, it is not cannibalism..."
He is interrupted by the reporter:
"You want to talk about capitalism, and here you are in your Louis Vuitton tie and your shoes from..."
"Uh, that is, uh, I mean, uh...
(rough translation, but basically politician begins to stammer and do the speed-wobble)
...I would love it if all of this was produced in Venzuela, In which case, I would purchase everything that is produced here and we would not have to import 95% of the goods we consume."
Funny. The reporter has since been "disappeared" for double-plus-ungood thoughtcrime.
OK, maybe not...I made that last bit up.
Monday, December 17, 2007
The Chocolate Side of the Force
"**I move my frontal breathing vent away from the mic to respirate."
That's just awesome.
If you haven't yet, check out the original. Over 12 million views. Unbelievable.
*****
Jon Kay looks at military funding in this country over the last 40 years or so. The data may surprise you at first, but there is a reason something looks cockeyed. (hint: check the comments for the answer) The real kicker for me is that not only did I join the CF just as defence spending went into a nosedive, but I left just as it started to get better!
I can well imagine that nowadays the average no-hook buck private reservist with 18 months of service has already had access to more state-of-the-art military equipment and advanced training than I ever did as an NCM and Officer from 1993 to 1999. And that is as it should be.
Becoming a soldier today, even a reservist, is no longer the vague open-ended commitment it was when I got in fifteen years ago. The prospect of combat looms large, and the preparation for this eventuality must, I think, give the task of training and moulding the soldier a focus and urgency that the process may have lacked in the nineties.
For instance, I have no doubt that nowadays, the average recruit gets familiarized with every weapon in the infantry's arsenal, including mortars and anti-armour weapons, sometime in their first couple of years of service.
Yet even though something like the .50 machine gun is considered one of the basic arms of the mounted infanteer, and I perhaps flatter myself to believe that I was trained as an infantryman – I never got to fire a single round from one.
The fifty cals were always in “war stores” (reserved for use on UN missions overseas and workup training for UN missions) whenever it came time to break them out and learn how to operate them on any given course during any given summer of my unremarkable militia career. As time and time again my training on the weapon was deferred, the "Fifty" began to take on an almost mythical status.
After a while, I came to suspect that the 50 cal did not in fact yet exist -- that it was a theoretical weapon that military theoreticians had developed to help formulate future doctrine in the war colleges of NATO. It wasn't theoretical. It was in fact an antique - it had existed for close to a century; basically a precursor of the weapon was used during the Great War. Imagine my surprise the first time I saw one being fired on exercise, 4 years after joining the military!
