The Midnight Hour

My week has recently been brightened by a shipment of gaming magazines from THXnet and blog contributor Mintz. It’s fun to read many months worth of magazines in chronological order within a week. I’ve seen EGM reverse course on their opinion of Too Human for Xbox 360 and seen pre-E3 hype, the E3 report, and the fallout after E3. Very interesting.

Unfortunately, long ago I had to move to a strategy of bogarding my magazines until I’m done with them or else they walk away. When I’m done I set them on the coffee mess table and everyone knows they’re fair game. Nothing is worse than coming to work looking forward to finishing that awesome article you started before getting off shift and finding out the magazine is now nowhere to be found.

I do a lot of reading in my spare time. I cycle between books, magazines, semi-newspapers (Marine Times, Stars and Stripes), and Wikipedia. Sometimes when I’m really bored I’ll use the “random article” button on Wikipedia. Over the deployment my interests have spanned fiction, science and physics, military history, ancient history, canonized fiction, gaming, and Norse mythology…in chronological order.

A little Ugandan goes a long way. Over the course of the deployment I have picked up a few Swahili (I assume) phrases from the Ugandan gate guards. Jambo is “Hey!” I started out using that as a greeting and then learned “Abadi” which means “How’s it going?” They will usually then reply “Mizuri, Abadi.” Which means “Good. How’s it going with you?” It took me a while to realize they were returning a question to me, so now I follow up with another “Mizuri.” Just when I thought I had it licked, now one of them is following up the entire greeting exchange with something that sounds like “…..alama.” It isn’t the Arabic phrase “masalama” or “salam ayalickum,” so I’m stumped. I know those transliterations are probably horrible, but after learning how to write/read Arabic I pay very little attention to the proper spelling of non-western words in western characters, because the two don’t mix. You can’t technically spell Arabic words in western characters, so I just give it my best shot and call it a day. One day in a debate over the proper spelling of Zaidon (vs Zaydan) I wrote it on a piece of paper in Arabic and said “That, is how you spell Zaidon. Whether you want to transliterate it as Zaidon or Zaydan doesn’t really make a difference. Use whatever makes you pronounce it correctly.”

Someone crapped in a shower on Camp Grizzly. The barracks manager thinks it’s probably a local national, perhaps an interpreter or one of the contracted local nationals. I don’t know how he came to this conclusion. I can only assume turd forensics.

It’s hot again this week. It had cooled down a little to the 107-109 range, but now it’s routinely getting into the 115-117 range. Yes, you can actually tell a difference. I would have thought that once it gets hot enough you stop being able to discern a difference in comfort, but I haven’t found that to be true, yet. Up to 110 is bearable without a lot of discomfort. After 115 walks outside are fairly uncomfortable. The couple times it’s reached 119 it was almost painful when the hot wind would blow against my skin. I can’t comment on any temps greater than that. Sunday it’s supposed to be 119 again. Joy.

My shipment of non-essential goods recently arrived at my house. I have one more shipment to make before we get out of here. It is surprisingly cheap to mail things home on a space-available basis. A full foot-locker was less than $20. A seabag was less than $15. The seabag arrived first, within about two weeks, and the footlocker followed in one additional week.

Tensions are high and whining is rampant as we wind down our time here, making leadership even more of a challenge. Determining the right time to explain the why behind the what and the right time to just say “Shut up, you’re doing it.” is sometimes more art than science. Perhaps the trickiest part is finding the correct use and position of the f-word, and which of its various prefixes, suffixes, and descriptors are most appropriate for the situation.

Why aren’t seasons of Ren and Stimpy available on DVD? You can purchase every season of every pathetic sitcom to shame a cathode ray tube, but not the greatest children’s cartoon ever made for adults. Why?

A recent generator swap caused a power surge that killed five of our computers (or at least their power supplies). The power surge popped circuit breakers around the room in a clockwise motion, making loud and horrifying sounds similar to when a book is thrown against a wooden floor. One quotable moment:

Someone: “Uh-oh, this one (pointing to a computer) is smoking.”

Me: “Are you serious?”

Someone: “Don’t you see the smoke?”