Silflay Hraka

Robert “The Dragon” Jordan Dies.

I remember when I first came across Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” novels. I was at summer camp in the early 90s and I was looking for something that would keep me occupied for a while but not something that would leave me hanging. I spotted what I thought was a complete trilogy in the first three books of the WoT series. “How fortunate”, I thought. I can buy all three, read them all and be done with it. I won’t have to wait for the end.

That was 17 or 18 years ago and I just finished the 11th book in December of last year. I know Jordan was working diligently on the 12th and final book in the series even though he was quite literally on his death bed. He was trying very hard to wrap things up before he passed. No word on whether he was successful or not. The world may never know the way the story ends.

Maybe that’s just as well. The over-riding theme of the novels is that time passes and the wheel of time turns, never ending, bringing what was old around again to become new. Leaving the story unfinished would be kind of poetic.

R.I.P, Robert. Peace and light be with you.

Again.

Mr. Lomborg–”liberal, vegetarian, a former member of Greenpeace,” as he describes himself–is hard to fit into any pigeonhole. He believes that global warming is happening, that man has caused it, and that national governments need to act. Yet he also believes that Al Gore is bordering on hysteria, that some global-warming science has been distorted and hyped, and that the Kyoto Protocol and other carbon-reduction schemes are a terrible waste of money. The world needs to think more rationally, he says, about how to tackle this challenge.

I have decided to refer to this as the theme song of the Allen boys.

Via AMCGLTD

Item One.

Welcome to the 250th edition of the Carnival of the Vanities. I bet most of you never thought this edition would ever see the light of day. You were very nearly right. 40 editions of the Carnival were just about enough for me. I ran out of time, ran of out of steam and decided to let the Carny pass into the fog of history.

But you can’t keep a good thing down and people love tradition. People apparently didn’t notice the carnival was no longer making its weekly appearance. Entries kept coming into my mailbox, week after week. The 249th edition of Carnival of the Vanities appeared in this space in June, I think. The latest entry I have is from August 27th. Hopeful creatures, those CoTV supporters. They persist in even the most trying circumstances. Like Herpes.

I have something like 80 entries waiting for the Carnival to return, vying for one more moment in the carny spotlight. I doubt I’ll get around to including all of them here and I certainly won’t get to read them all but I might just surprise you.

Okay, probably not.

No matter what, however, this is likely the last Carnival of the Vanities from the staff here at Silflay Hraka. Bigwig pushed his baby out of the nest years ago and Uncle Kehaar welcomed it back out of a sense of nostalgia, duty and tradition. Uncle Kehaar never did like to let go. But he’s learning.

On to the entries.

***

The latest entry received is from J Random American. J Random American presents a few New Rules for Golf. Basically he thinks the Nancy in any foursome should be forced to play with a pink ball. I do not like that rule as I would most likely be playing with a pink ball for a majority of any round. Bastiges.

The next most recent entry is also from J Random American. It’s the same entry. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, I guess.

Another hopeful is long-time CoTV favorite Madelaine Begun Kane. Mad sent her latest entry on August 24th. She should know better. She’s actually visited this blog. Anyway, she derides the idea of dressing room butt cameras in No Butt Cams For Me – No Ifs, Ands, Or Buts.

She also submits the following for your delight and enjoyment:

The latest from LTC Bob.

Fishing has begun again here at the Boathouse in Camp Victory. As many of you may remember, we did fish a bit last go around, and caught a few. There are several kinds of fish here – some are pretty disgusting – some kind of little catfish that looks more like a snake than a fish, and some others with huge teeth that resembles a bowfin which seem pretty gross to me, but not to everyone evidently – although I do respect a species that’s managed to hang on for 150 M years!!

Anyway, here at Bldg 36 it’s mainly a carp show. Carp are considered a food fish here and in most of Europe, and I have tasted some smoked carp that a local guy had last time and it was quite good.

CDR Jeff Hicks, USN, is here with us as our Facilities Chief. Last go around, he worked at another HQ: Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq, MNSTC-I, commanded by then LTG Petraeus.

In that job, he got to go run around and see cool stuff, including the cookout shown on the above pics. Our Senior Chief Petty Officer who works in Facilities caught a carp yesterday and Jeff dug up the photos. Jeff said they cooked on the sticks for awhile, then they put the fish, skin down, on the coals to finish off.

The other pics are of a kid baking bread. This is very similar to the way I saw them do it in Afghanistan as well. They stick the flat bread on the inside wall of the oven, let it cook, then grab it out with tongs. It is really good, but of course you have to eat it right away. No preservatives!

Because really, there’s probably no comment I could make that wouldn’t get me into trouble.

I’m going to try to update the blog to the latest version of MT. It could be a huge mistake. If this disappears, it was. The blog is backed up, however, and will be restored if it comes to it.

Update: It didn’t work.

Comments may not work for a while. I’m working on installing a comment-filtering plug-in to reduce the amount of comment spam we get. I’m getting an error so something isn’t working. Hold please.

Updated: Comments are apparently fixed. We’ll see if the anti-spam efforts I’ve made will prove worthwhile.