Giving the world a hand since February 3rd, 2002. "If you're gonna dine with them cannibals, sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten."




Comments by YACCS

 
A TWINKLE IN MY EYE?

Do men have a "biological clock"?

No, I'm being serious. I wanna know.

Maybe it's because I'm over 30. Maybe it's because I'm a single male surrounded by married couples having children. Maybe it's the constant media bombardment telling me that if I don't have a family by age 30 then there must be something wrong with me. Maybe it's Nature telling me to get my shit together. Maybe it's all of the above.

I've been having these...um...."paternal feelings" ever since my friend Eric's wedding almost two years ago. Seeing all of my friends from high school, with their spouses & children, it made me feel a little...inadequate? Left out? I'm not exactly sure how I felt, I only knew that I was missing something. Since then, the "need to nest" feelings have gradually increased. Unfortunately, Life and the sagging economy have interefered to the point where I am actually further from my goals now than when I was 18. It doesn't help that I'm not dating anyone right now.

Maybe I just need to get a cat.

I mean, a cat would never give me the "let's-just-be-friends" speech, or tell me in September that they were going to break up with me at the end of our apartment lease in May. A cat would never tell me that they had found someone new, or start avoiding me for no apparent reason.

Would it?

Well, maybe that last one. Cats are so fickle.

Even my mother has noticed how I feel about this. My mother, who has always been totally clueless as to how I feel on almost every issue, asked me a few months back "It really bothers you that you don't have a family, doesn't it?" Of course, this came right after she said that she really thought I was going to marry that Janelle woman--the one that I think will always be to me The One That Got Away.

Gee, thanks, Mom.

I really enjoy being a godfather. I love it when she calls me "Unca Neo". I love playing with her & making her giggle. I even love trying to talk some common sense to her (yeah, trying to talk common sense to a four-year-old is like trying to get a cat to wear a sweater, but I can always tell when I get through to her--she gets mad. Heh.). I've been told that it's even better when they're your own kids. I can hardly wait.

Yeah. Well.

Merry fucking Christmas to all, and to all a good Life.
so wrote Leper around about 10:47 PM

 
DOES ANYBODY KNOW...

...what the hell happened to my archived posts? They seem to be...uh...gone.
so wrote Leper around about 12:00 AM

 
AND THE POINT IS...?

It sems that the European Union is drawing up plans for an "Euro-Pentagon".

Why?

Well, they have great need of a command center for their 60,000 man EU Army which, um, will be in existence, uh, eventually, providing that any members actually increase their defense spending in order to equip the required troops.

Or something like that.

Did they mention that they'll have a Pentagon of their own?

This sounds to me like a huge waste of time. Much like every EU-sponsored project, it seems to be an attempt to create the trappings of power and importance, without actually having to go to all of the trouble of actually being powerful and important. Even more than the U.S., the EU seems to love creating an unfettered bureaucracy that has no concrete purpose. Aside from France and the UK, I doubt any European nation could provide even a brigade of combat-capable troops for the EU Army.

In any case, the proposals were drawn up in a paper to be published today by the defence working group of the Convention on the Future of Europe. They will form the basis of the military section in the EU's draft constitution next June. The paper is chock full of choice buzz words:

The document says the world has changed so dramatically since September 11, 2001, that national defence is "no longer sufficient".

The defence secretary would report to EU defence ministers but would have powers to take "necessary decisions" in an emergency.

The force would have a broad mandate to "dispel hostility".

The plans call for the headquarters to be located in Brussels and commanded by a defence chief able to launch military operations anywhere in the world.

(emphasis added)

Talk about your recipes for disaster. It sounds to me as if the Europeans (with the exception of the UK) are tired of being militarily-weak, ineffectual weenies, their voices falling on deaf ears (of the Americans) as they become more and more shrill in their insistence that they are still important, too. They wanna play the same games as do the "big kids". I wonder if they realize that people sometimes get hurt in "big-kid games"?
so wrote Leper around about 11:35 PM