I have a friend who does a real good deed, buying up items like baby wipes and beef jerky and candy and stuff and sending out boxes to deployed troops once a month. Very cool.

He also sends along copies of movies on DVD (of questionable provenance), CD's with photos on them that cannot be altered by magic marker (if you catch my drift), and sometimes, some adult beverages.

That last bit there is all contraband, I know, and if I were an officer over there I would be kinda ticked that people were sending stuff like that to my troops. But from where I sit now, I think its kinda cool, so I won't reveal how it works. But the troops are really happy to get his boxes.

Today it is reported that there is a specific threat to Washington, DC. That British Airways flight that keeps getting cancelled coming into Dulles Airport. I heard it on the radio (link via Indepundit). In fact, I heard it on the radio in the car while waiting in line to get into the new Stephen Udvar-Hazy annex of the National Air and Space Museum. Yes, waiting in a line of cars to get onto the grounds of Dulles Airport. I thought the hold up might have been security inspections, but it was just everyone in the DC area decided to go there today. As I was leaving, somewhere overhead one of those BA flights was getting an F16 escort into the airport. Evidently not everyone thinks that Tom Ridge's "go about your lives" normally advice is silly.

By the way, if you like airplanes, you have to go to this museum. It is a big hangar-like space devoted to almost purely aircraft. Inside the building are the space shuttle Enterprise, an SR-71, the prototype for the 707, a Concorde, and, of course, the Enola Gay. But they take up a very small percentage of all that space. Admission is free as with all of the Smithsonian museums, but parking is $12. A bus from the main museum downtown is available, too.

From Fox News:

Soon after, five men "wearing black press jackets with 'press' clearly written in English" fired on U.S. paratroopers guarding the crash site, Kimmitt said. He said it was the first time he had heard of assailants in Iraq posing as journalists.

I hope journalists are quick to denounce this tactic. It sounds like it makes for a bad situation for all involved. Of course, I never heard anything outside the blogosphere about the Al Jazeera guy who was carting money around for Al Qaeda, I only heard how the US was discriminating against Al Jazeera.

I seem to have missed my blog birthday. First post was Dec 29, 2002. Hmmm. That's my anniversary. That might explain why Mrs. Blaster was so cranky that I was spending all that time typing on the computer....

One of these days I am going to get around to categorizing the posts and hooking up links through that. I guess the longer I put that off, the worse it gets. A lot of things are like that.

Bill Quick thinks we ought to just start nuking all the Arabs, and that will fix everything. I think that idea fails the common sense test.

If you wonder what the heck I am talking about, click here.

I think we are going to catch somebody. No, not him, he's dead. Someone trying to do something. Not today, not tomorrow. But very soon.

Like I said, just a hunch.

I think I have horked things up a bit - ran into my disk quota, and busted comments at least in the post below. Bear with me.

I am still amazed at what people don't remember. Desert Storm was not that long ago, really. Just a dozen years. And people forget. People who should know better still forget. For example, in the Washington Post, an article about "stop-loss," a policy by which the military keeps people from leaving the service (link via Drudge). An excerpt:

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist.

Charles Moskos is not a newbie to the military arena. Google him up, you'll see. He should know better than to say that the use of stop-loss "reflects the fact that the military is too small." Why do I say that? Well, stop-loss went into effect during Desert Shield and remained until after Desert Storm was over. We had an army of 785,000 people then, with 16 divisions. Did that mean we were too small, then, just noone wanted to admit it?

Of course googling Charles Moskos will also turn up that he's a Democrat, and he is for the draft. And now the Post is puffing him up on the front page.

I've been warning you....

UPDATE Comments gone because of a corrupted file. See what this does.

Wow, a catfight in the funny pages! Wiley's Non Sequitur takes a break from drawing President Bush as a monkey and takes a (hard!) swipe at Berke Breathed! Not like he doesn't deserve it, though. Maybe he needs to take Steve Patsis advice on becoming a professional cartoonist, quoting Scott Adams: "Be funny."

By a comic strip in today's paper. The Washington Post carries Pearls Before Swine, one of those "funny in a weird sort of way" comic strips (For example, he just finished a series where the characters went searching for Gary Larson. See what I mean?) Today's strip, though, was not funny, but it was simply stunning, seeing it there in the Sunday "funnies." Click on the first frame below to see the whole thing.

Bravo, Mr. Pastis. Bravo.