Norman Rockwell Scares Me

Found this at work while doing overnight inventory. Some thoughts:

1. That is a military flag. It has fringe on it, thus, based on the large crowd consisting of multiple families, this is unlikely to be a military tribunal and more likely a parade. Or, that's a veteran, a couple of female spies, and four child soldiers with their handlers.

2. The kid half covered by the flag is having none of this. Based on his scowl and foreign-looking haircut, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest his parents were beatniks with ties to a then-Soviet Bloc country who were investigated and had their reputation ruined by Senator McCarthy.

3. The fat little kid on the left is absolutely terrified of war, but sees it as an inevitability, where he will at least have a chance to prove his manhood, as his grandfather has so often expounded upon the virtues thereof.

4. His slightly older sister is utterly terrified. She sees the violence and civic engineering being implemented by the patriarchal military-industrial complex and fears her deeply heartfelt feminist leanings will be crushed under the weight of this and future administrations as men like her grandfather continue to cleanse the world of difference in thought and appearance, while maintaining and further consolidating their own power.

5. Her grandfather accuses her and constantly reminds her that her parts are filthy, just like the French prostitute his squad mates took turns having their way with so many years ago back in the Ardennes. Filthy, filthy parts.


Norman Rockwell, you subversive little minx, you.

Why I Keep Military Grade Medical Supplies in My Car

"I'm never watching Planet Earth ever again!"

My mother attended a barbecue with some friends, recently. She described them as late-twenties/early-thirties for the most part, Ren Faire geeks who play CCGs and smoke corncob pipes, and I get the feeling based on facial hair that they listen to both a lot of metal and classical music.

Basically, all the radio station dorks I hung out with in college. Awesome.

In any event, and I don't even wonder how the subject comes up anymore, I guess my mom started talking about me and my friends, and all the horrible things we end up doing by accident in the course of successfully doing much, much worse things. I believe the line she uses is, "You know, if they were out drinking and chasing girls, that would be a lot less dangerous."

Well, rest assured, we do quite a bit of that now, too. In fact, we very rarely play midnight Frisbee in the dark anymore. Most of us have work in the morning, so it's just sex-drugs-rock-and-roll on the weekends. Nothing fancy.

Still, we're prone to bruises. Proof of concept: a few weeks ago, completely hammered, someone tried to ride his bike across the street for an omelet (something I was not okay with, as you can still get a DUI, though he insists he has done it countless times). Long-story-short: facefull of asphalt, black eye.

We are not bright men, when we choose to set aside our law schools and magna cums.

I suppose this is why my mother's new friend floated a couple packages of QuickClot emergency EMS gauze our way. It's pretty cool. Rolls of it are standard issue for all field combat military personnel, now. It significantly speeds clotting and can save your life. Basically, it's what we're going to use until cryogenics takes over.

I checked online, these things go for anywhere between $75 and $125 per five-pack, and the cheaper sites require you to be a medical company to place orders. (ZuckerCo once got me my special anti-bacterial ear soap for a botched piercing, but I'd prefer to keep away from an outright committal of fraud.)

So … yeah, I'm keeping those in the trunk of my car next to the regular first aid kit, the road flares, the pocket knife, pulleys, grappling hook, emergency towel, colored pencils, flashlight, air horn, rape whistle, bullwhip, and thermal survival wrap.

Because knowing us, it's entirely possible we might end up needing it.

Protecting Children from Harm: It Will Kill Us All

A couple weeks ago I saw a kid wandering around with a toy gun, all brightly colored in blue with a big orange tip. He was shooting it at random things, possibly even "bad guys" in his mind.

I tried playfully ducking behind objects, as if dodging his shots, giving him a real live, moving target to play with. I looked back to enjoy the delight on his face.

Nothing.

He was confounded.

Too well had this child been trained to "Never point guns at people." He didn't even know why he would do such a thing. It doesn't matter that he had a toy gun, or that it could never be mistaken for the real thing. I doubt he had any conception that "bad guys" could also be real people. He simply knew never to engage in this certain behavior, which made my ducking and dipping rather confusing, I suppose.

Well, there goes the future of our armed forces.

When I was little, They had just mandated the little orange tips on toy guns, mostly after plenty of kids got shot dead by on-duty officers who thought they were holding real weapons, pointed their direction.

Hell, I nearly got in trouble in college for holding a B.B. gun in between scenes of a student film. This kind of stuff really happens. But that's all over now.

Along with Scooby-Doo's Velma and Shaggy dating and more than 151 different kinds of Pokémon, guns are now ruined for children.

If not for the counterbalance of adult-sized automatic Nerf guns of disturbingly realistic battle features, I would expect us to be overrun with French legions by 2065.