JUST PASSING THROUGH

Well, I've just come off teaching as much as I could of the two millennia of Christian art and architecture to a dozen new deacons (I got up to around the 1500 year mark, selectively, in about three and a half hours), and all that compacting of data and analysis has wrung out my brain.

Am preparing to head south to visit various family, having duly packed off masses of chicken fajita jerky to Al Asad air base, via Treats for Troops. (Great group -- send a soldier some goodies.)

Can't stop to chat now, but will insert this incendiary device just for fun. Greyhawk over at Mudville Gazette thinks it's an unfair comparison, but I disagree.



Also worth noting, from the Milblog universe: you know that much-touted "drawdown" of 17K troops by diverting them from Iraq to Afghanistan? Commingler-in-Chief Obambi neglected to mention that another stryker brigade is being sent to Iraq in place of the "diverted" one. So it's a wash -- no drawdown, just one more chapter in the Obama multi-front shell-game. Thanks for popping up that illumination shell, Mudville and Blackfive.

Blackfive also has some good stuff on the new documentary "Brothers at War", where the film-maker follows around his two brothers both serving in Iraq. This sounds like something I may be able to watch. I have a pile of videos I've ordered over the past five years or so, all fine work about the real face of the Iraq campaign, bought because I wanted to support the filmmakers who are usually working on a shoestring to get the truth out against great odds. But so far I really haven't been able to make myself watch any of them. The most recent (which isn't for sale yet) is "Taking Chance", a remarkable true story of the return of a Marine's casket for burial at home. It sounds wonderful, and got rave reviews from military folks everywhere. I think I'll probably be ready to watch it in, oh, maybe 2012 or 2015? Not now -- too close to the bone.

"Brothers at War" is something a little different (though its trailers do warn that military families may be disturbed by the part about an IED explosion -- and the foul language!!! Are they kidding?), so maybe I'll give it a look before the next decade. Opening this weekend in selected theatres, with filmmaker Jake Rademacher and producer Gary Sinise attending the premier in Fayetteville, N.C.


IT'S THE ECONOMY, COCOA PUFF

You probably didn't put all your eggs in one basket, but the trouble is, governments have a way finding all your baskets and playing reverse-Easter-bunny. Here's a young woman who knows how to get the point across to the post-literate generation. I think it's smashing.



[Hat-tip/ Real Revo]