Whoever in the comments corrected me on the name of the camp destination: You were right. It’s Bloody Gorge, not Gulch. Evidently I’m the last to know. When Kate and Alan pulled up to the house after he picked her up at day camp, she caroled out to a neighbor, “We went to Bloody Gorge!” Another neighbor, my age or older, called back, “I went to Bloody Gorge at day camp, too!”
I told you this camp has a history.
The trip to Bloody Gorge — which seemed to involve wading, in socks, shoes and clothing, into water to the knees — was a huge success. Kate was dirty in the way that only kids who have truly played themselves to exhaustion can be dirty. I mean: She was coated with grime. I’m washing her clothes now, stained brown to their very warp.
What a great day camp. If I left her in it all summer, she’d be truly feral by Labor Day. But happy.
Oh, well. I don’t want to get all Lileks on you here. I’m just casting about for material, and hey, look, there’s a kid in the house. Maybe this blog is finding a new theme. Chapter 1: Daily Life with Links; Chapter 2: Re-invention; Chapter 3: Whatever Comes Next. In these mild days before Whatever Comes Next, some linkage:
One of our most interesting KWF seminar speakers last year was Republican pollster Bob Teeter, who died this week. During his introduction, he mentioned he had a place on Coldwater Lake, where our little cottage is. Alan says he recognized him from the water and thought he sailed an E Scow. Hot boat. Too bad.
We lead their guys around on leashes, they cut our guys’ heads off — a look at beheading as a tool of terror, by the AP.
Another key-to-the-city type greeting to the returning sabbatical-takers: Welcome to the Fort! You’re just in time for the TB crisis!
Lance Mannion said on June 22, 2004 at 10:50 pm
Got to say this before any dittoheads show up to point out how savage “they” are compared to how just, well, a little frat boy frisky “we” are. Y’know. Beheading being barbaric and putting leashes on naked men a useful intelligence-gathering method and a sign that Iraq really is better now that you know who’s gone.
We don’t just put leashes on them. We drop bombs on their heads, we cut them to ribbons with machine gun fire, we burn them up in their homes. They do it back. We are fighting a war. People die horrifically. Are dying horrifically. The South Korean had his head cut off. How awful! How “gruesome”! How medieval! Yeah, well, AP, what do you suppose the bodies of the four Marines who died yesterday look like? Or the bodies the four Iraqis we blew to smithereens in Falluja tonight?
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John Ritter said on June 23, 2004 at 9:28 am
Off topic here, but is anyone else creeped out by the Jack Ryan (Illinois Senate candidate) sex story?
bonus material:
Last week in my local newspaper (The Day, New London CT), there was a sub-headline “Sewing the seeds of terror”. Evidentally, al Qaeda is starting a quilting circle.
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alex said on June 23, 2004 at 10:24 am
Creeped out? Why heavens no, I’m delighted to see my state’s GOP Senate candidate mired in a cesspool of his own shit. Sonofabitch thinks marriage needs to be protected from my kind? I say the Senate needs to be protected from the likes of him.
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Randy said on June 23, 2004 at 10:54 am
Relating to Lance’s post up above, the barbarism exhibited by the interested parties (US/Iraqis?Muslim extremists/am I missing any?) is appalling. War is hell? I don’t fully buy that rationale.
On my personal scale, the amount of dread one feels up to their (anticipated) death is the measure. People being tortured, people awaiting decapitation must be filled with fear few of us could imagine. I would argue that even when torture victims survive, they almost certainly lose a part of their soul from the ordeal.
The deaths occurring in “war operations” (and I know everything is blurry in this conflict), the bombings, shootings etc. are awful. There is no consolation in those pointless deaths. The only mercy for many of them was to have a quick and hopefully less painful death.
What I’m saying is the only fate worse than a premature death is a premature death with an agonizingly long build-up.
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Jenny said on June 23, 2004 at 11:20 am
Randy:
How about the guy stuck in a cell (naked) who’s been beating his head against the walls, the door, the cell bars? He’s done this so much, our lovely, “non-torturing” military put a helmet on his head? You don’t think maybe, that is because of the “agonizingly long build-up” of not having a fucking clue what is going to happen to you after a year of confinement, huh? Not to mention out government won’t release the “truth” about how we have tortured our prisoners. We’ve killed at least a few in custody. We’ll have the special report released soon….give it about ten years.
The problem with the latest casualty of beheading is that he was a translater. Yes, he REALLY knew what was going to happen to him because he spoke the language. But, his government could have easily saved his life. Instead, they insisted on releasing a statement saying basically, fuck him, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do. Sounds an awful lot like a guy over here, who lost the election, but got the title, doesn’t it?
Jenny
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Lance Mannion said on June 23, 2004 at 2:13 pm
Randy,
I’m with you. I’d rather have it come quick and by surprise too. But I didn’t want to get into which private nightmare is scariest. (Although it’s only the people who are killed instantly by the first bomb who don’t have time to think about what’s coming, and there are people who’d rather have time to make their peace with God and their consciences than have only a moment to say, “What’s that? Oh holy sh—” before they wink out.) I was hoping to head off any irrelevant comparisons. “See, they behead hostages! They’re savages! And that makes us the good guys!” In the wide spread slaughter that is contemporary war—forget precision bombing, by the way. In the first days of the war we specifically pinpoint targeted 50 military targets and missed them all. The bombs still went off. Guess who died.—a beheading or two or twenty doesn’t matter. The main question is whether or not all the killing is leading to something. And it doesn’t appear to be leading to anything but more death. Doesn’t matter then if we’re the good guys or the bad guys. We’re going to be the losers, if things don’t change.
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