Last night, after POTUS and SECSTATE had gone wheels up a group of us EOD types decided to go out, explore the city (I should say explore it a bit more since we all tried to get out during the week as much as the mission allowed) and maybe share a drink.  During our revels we met a pair of locals named Zdravka (it took ma about 10 minutes to learn to pronounce that correctly…silly American!) and Sandra who stayed with us for the rest of the evening and talked with us about a variety of subjects including Croatian food (Zagreb Steak = thin beef steak wrapped around stuffing, bacon and cheese…soooooo goooood) and the similarities and differences in certain Croatian modern folk songs (your wife dies/leaves you and you lose your house)  and American country music (your wife leaves you, the dog dies, and you lose your truck).  It was a great evening and the end to a fantastic trip, one that I’m certain I will remember with happiness the rest of my life.  So if you every get the chance to travel to Croatia make sure you get to Zagreb, talk to some of the local folks and have a Zagreb Steak for me, you won’t regret it!

P.S. – Check out some of the pics of local landmarks in the photo album.

I’m hoping that unlike last time I can keep up on the posting a bit better.

Anyway, great big apologies to any of you who have actually gone to the trouble to check in the last couple of months, hopefully I can make it worth your while to check in a bit more frequently.

Here’s a preview of some things I should be posting on soon: Croatia, Alien Attacks, Snowboarding, and the EEOB.

One of the young women was asked: “What is the capital of Iraq?”

Her first response was: “Could you please spell Iraq?”

Wha?

When pressed for an answer she finally replied: “Afghanistan.”

Afgh…whu…did she jus…guh?!

The word ‘vacuous’ comes to mind.

sigh

“The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review’s Rich Lowry this week, in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact. As Lowry remarked, “This is the lonely war” — its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front.

It’s an interesting point and given the reporting many of the traditional (print and broadcast) major news organizations produce it does feel that way sometimes.  Of course, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law (OK, yes I know, this isn’t physics, but bear with me) and with the help of the internet all sorts of alternate sources of reporting have sprung up. In this instance I’m refering specifically to Milbloggers like Blackfive and Michael Yon who go out with troops and report back the situation as it is, not as some news outlets might want it to appear. So next time you hear on the news about a car bomb in Baghdad, or the daily death toll, or how everybody in Iraq hates everybody else, spin up your ‘puter, hop on the interwebs and check these guys out for the view from our side, it’s actual fairly sunny over here.

Sorry about the pun, I couldn’t help myself…

And at least it’s cooling down, it was only in the upper 80s today!

On a whim (and because I’m an incurable sci-fi nerd) I did a search for Powered Armor and came across something called the HAL 5 Type-B (made by a company called CYBERDYNE no less) as well as this article about the R&D going on in the states.

So I guess the only question now is: how long until I can volunteer to become a Space Marine?

Courtesy my friend the Gleeful One I have discovered my Rockstar Name:

 I wonder if they’ll let me change my callsign to “ACE”?

Call me crazy, but if you live in a city that has a serious VBIED threat I would think you’d probably be pretty careful where you park.

Well not this guy.  He decided there wouldn’t be anything wrong with parking his car on a busy market street that had been barricaded off (he had to drive over the sidewalk to get past the barricades), locking it up and wandering off to do some shopping.

Understandably, somebody got worried and called the authorities who called us with the rather predictable results (this isn’t the first suspected VBIED in Kirkuk and it won’t be the last) seen in the photo linked above.

Hopefully the guy learned his leason, I certainly enjoyed administering it.

I asked our terp Mike about it, he said it wasn’t an actual person, but a personification of freedom for women in Iraq.  Pretty cool.