The Rusted Musket

Last week, a Professor of mine found himself in a situation that provoked an interesting rant, I think the irony of said rant is fantastic, so here’s the story. It was the beginning of class, and the Professor in question wanted to erase the dry erase board, a simple enough thing. But lo and behold, the classroom contained not a single ounce of spritz solution, a four dollar liquidy substance needed in order to easily clean the dry erase board. So, while he was in the middle of trying to eradicate last hours teaching points, he turns to the class, and in a serious/crotchety tone says, “This is what budget cuts do.” Here’s the irony; it just so happens, that immediately to the right of the Professor, and the budget cut induced hard to erase dry erase board, is a brand new, installed that semester, SMARTboard which cost between 3,000-5,000 buckeroos. Oh the irony…

Thumbnail Credit: worthingtondirect.com

So a US senator had a very interesting comment about government universal health care in this AP article:

Sanders, an independent and socialist, said his approach is the only one “which eliminates the hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, administrative costs, bureaucracy and profiteering that is engendered by the private insurance companies.”

You see his comment is rather interesting because as I was reading it I could have swore he was talking about the federal government, specifically medicare and social security… Very interesting that he seems to think a government run option will be so efficient and waste-less, I mean just look at their excellent record deficit and astronomical debt, or the broken and nearly un-fixable social security debacle… Yep, lets let the government run our health care.

The title of this post is the title of a newspaper article that I read, and I must say that parts of the article made me very sad. Why you may ask? Well the gist of the article is that people sometimes give bad gifts at Christmas. I’m thinking, okay, yeah it happens, some gifts are pretty bad and should have been thought out a bit more. But the article went on to talk about some specific circumstances where women broke up with guys in part because of some bad gift decisions. Maybe, they weren’t bad, but more un-tasteful. Has our culture become so selfish that if a gift isn’t good enough that we’ll breakup or divorce the person that gave us that “bad” gift? If that is the case it is very very sad.

I understand that some people’s love language is receiving and giving gifts, but as it often seems is the case people (read guys) can have a hard time picking something out for their lady (not that women are always better at it). It is a spot that guys can work on, but it is really the thought that counts and if the gift is that bad talk to him/her about it and try to view it from their perspective, or just be happy that you are special enough to someone for them to get/make you a gift…

There is an inevitable fork in the road of life that forces a choice between one of two major directions. The choice is this, do I choose bread or roses, the path of practicality or passion? On a base level this is the decision between the minivan or the convertible, but on a more serious level, your direction in life. For instance, do I go to college for the degree I’m passionate about but offers little real world opportunity to provide for a family, or do I go for the college degree that will be dependable, if not at all excitable to my spirit?

I was discussing this theme the other night over some fantastic Italian, when something worth retelling happened. My good friend opinioned that if the choice was between bread and roses, he felt the best option would be rose bread! This delightfully lighthearted response has grown on me, and in turn, helped steer my thoughts in another direction; that of scripture. I once read somewhere in Ecclesiastes something to the effect of being busy during the day, and at night not letting your hands be idle, for you don’t know what will succeed, this or that, or whether both will do equally as well. I think my thoughts went in that direction because it affirmed the rose bread diet my good friend spoke of.

I admit, this doesn’t quite answer that college question, or the minivan vs. convertible debate. Still, it makes me think that even though life’s decisions seem like either/or affairs, maybe they don’t always have to be…

Ecclesiastes 11:6

So if you’ve been following the news you’ve probably heard about the story about a leading global warming research unit’s data breach. Basically someone released a few thousand internal emails from the organization (its not clear whether it was a hacker or a internal person) and they have verified that these are legitimate emails. Funny thing is, all these emails discredit all their findings because it is hinted that they manipulated data to serve their uses…

Hopefully they will be brought under scrutiny from this and that people will take a hard look at the whole global warming debacle.

Here are two articles that explain more in depth:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/11/24/the_fix_is_in_99280.html

http://www.forbes.com/2009/12/01/climategate-scandal-science-obama-opinions-columnists-shikha-dalmia.html

Let’s get the frustrating out of the way. The single player pillar of MW2 is garbage, absolute Micheal Bay over the top garbage. Time and time again you’ll find yourself in unbelievable situations that can be solved only with an equally unbelievable amount of bullets. Also be prepared to die, again, and again, and again, and upon death be subjected to death quotes which are to long to read before the respawn timer is up and are frustratingly bad in the first place. For instance, there’s like 5 JFK quotes and then a whole batch that make you feel like Patriotism is for blockheads; they round out the quotes by throwing in a Dick Cheney for good measure.

Then there’s the franticness, which is frustrating, even on hardened difficulty, most SP levels crawl slowly by. I’m not a fan, it’s not fun, it’s a pain, only if I’m really hard up for gamer score will I ever attempt these levels on Veteran. It’s just that there’s so many angles to keep track of and no “hugging the walls” cover system to help make quick peeps around corners. The SP has a few select moments that rock like the snow blind mission and the oil rig hostages but overall the journey is full of fail which brings me to something full of win, MW2’s; Spec Ops.

This is Co-op gold, I’ve now got help taking care of all those angles! Spec Op’s is the second pillar of MW2 and is separate from the single player. So, you can’t redo those SP missions that I was telling you about which is fine, because the offering of mission snippets you get with Spec Ops is robust, featuring all kinds of different objectives, time limits, and scenarios. Each Op has three stars of difficulty for a total of sixty nine possible stars whereby unlocking an achievement. One level I tried at the second star rating, had you and a buddy defending this platform against 4 waves of infantry with a few truck and jeeps mixed in, it was awesome and the kind of “frantic” I enjoy. I’ve only played  a few of these Op’s and they rock. I’m holding off on doing the majority of them till I can enjoy them with a friend.

The final pillar is MW2’s multiplayer which is undoubtedly the most frustrating and fantastic thing in the game. Everything is better than the original, the killstreak rewards are awesome, the perks are refined, the guns are cooler, the attachments steller, and everything is, dare I say it, balanced! I carry around a Stinger missile launcher as my secondary weapon and am always on the ready to knock the enemies Cobra’s, AC130’s, and Pavelow’s out of the sky. Post match I love hearing the guys complain how their ten kill streak reward crashed to the ground ten seconds after they called it in. I love it! The maps are great with Scrapeyard probably being one of the better MP maps around. The ranking up takes time and has legs, there’s so many ways to get bonus points that it makes it really addictive. Every gun and piece of equipment has challenges and rewards for those challenges. I can’t sing the praises of the multiplayer enough. The only negative for me is the franticness of the multiplayer slightly echos the SP campaign. You will feel like a loser if you haven’t killed anyone within three seconds of spawning. Indeed you ‘ll be losing if you don’t because more than likely you’ll be dead in three seconds. Don’t feel bad if the person I just described is you because it is me as well. In order to prolong my life from two seconds to three I’ve built my perk set around detection and evasion. Hopefully some day I’ll be good enough to have a K:D ratio of 500!

My conclusion is this, man this game’s difficulty curve is high and frustrating but good grief it’s addicting, you’ll have no regrets if you pick this one up…