Giddy Anticipation

4 DAYS! That’s right ladies and gentlegerms, 4 days till I get begin my journey back to the most Unitedest of States, and I’m excited!! We had our chaplain’s briefing, in which we were told not to treat this as though we were right back home again, not to try and take over everything for our spouses, and not to get the idea that we are not going back. Something tells me I won’t have that problem, considering this is going to be more like a vacation for me than for most people.

I’m going to a place I have never been, to live in a home I have never lived in, my home, with my wife, with whom I have been fortunate enough to have in my life, she, the cats, and my stuff are the only familiarity I will likely have. So in essence, this will be like taking a 2 week vacation to San Diego, so I won’t really get the idea of ‘home’ other than a reference of things to come. We will probably go to Las Vegas for a weekend, and the last weekend I am there, there is likely to be some big blow out beach party with a bunch of the Marines, hence I have to look good *pumps iron* I don’t want to be that ‘scrawny Army guy’ in the presence of those burly Marines. Like I care, they are a bunch of pansies mwahahahah!!

So anyways, I’m trying to get all my stuff ready, I have a list of things written down, working hard to have everything perfect for my trip home long before I ever head for the terminal, because I HATE always doing shit at the last minute, it seems like a curse on me or something to never be up to date and ready to go for something, I always have to CRAM just like I always did at college for tests hehe. I have my mp3 player loaded up with music for another 24 hour flight. The odd thing about this particular flight is that I’m probably actually going to gain nearly a full day as I head west towards CONUS, so that’s going to be interesting haha, nothing like a one day encore of Groundhog’s Day, this time Bill Murray is flying from Europe to the US of A!

Current Lyrical Ramblings

If I close my eyes
And make a wish
When they open will you be
right here with me

Where Are You Now? – Janet Jackson

Book Review: Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz

Published: 2004 Finished Reading: 30Jan2006

I purchased this book back in October of 2005 while visiting belly at Cherry Point. I read it in January and am now getting to doing a review of the book. This was really a delightful tale. I have always enjoyed Koontz’s books, and this was no exception. I can remember the first book of his that I read nearly 15 years ago, and how incredibly frightening that one was, to the point that I was reading it at night alone in my house while at college one summer and I had to stop reading it because it was freaking me out.

Koontz’s books aren’t always frightening, yet even in the tales where the outcome is determined by scientific, human means, he still seems to weave the supernatural into the threads of the story. “Life Expectancy” focuses on the birth and life of one Jimmy Tock, who’s grandfather by some unfortunate circumstances dies on the very night that Jimmy is born. As his grandfather lays dying, he predicts five terrible dates in Jimmy’s life.

The challenges that Jimmy faces turn to rewards, in the most twisted sense imaginable, and in the usual Koontz way, the surprise twists are fairly chilling, although in this book they are for the most part more delightful and humorous than in many of his other tales. Of all the books I have read thus far, I would say that belly would probably like this one the best. There are still some elements that are rather unimaginable in the sense of how warped they really are. “Prepare to be Enchanted”

Rating: ****

Book Review: State of Fear by Michael Crichton

There are times when a book can be a complete revelation in terms of how it rocks your belief’s structure, in how you view a significant part of your world. This book will do that to just about any environmentalist who even has half a brain. For me it was more of a reinforcement of my own beliefs than a revelation, however. I have long been skeptical of environmentalist groups and the policies they employ, lawyers who are hell bent on ‘saving the world from humans’ regardless of the conflicting facts from the data that their own scientists’ studies are showing them.

Crichton is a master of preparation and research when it comes to writing. The book itself is fiction, but the facts presented within are formulated from actual data and studies that are done in real life, so in some ways it has a very non fiction feel to it. There are literally dozens of sources listed in his bibliography, some of which I have checked out myself by searching the internet for them, and they are true. These aren’t conspiracy theory web sites either, these are university professors, doctors of geology, meteorology, actual environmentalist scientists, and many other well educated members of the scientific community who in many cases went into these studies looking to prove the existence of global warming only to find out that the facts presented themselves in such a way as to deny that the phenomenon even exists.

That’s only part of the theory the book presents, there are so many amazing surprises within the book, from debunking the cancer from power lines myth, to showing how Yellowstone National Park was nearly destroyed due to environmental policies that were enacted to ‘save the park’, to how so much data exists that demonstrates the very idea of ‘global warming’ may be one of the greatest farces ever entertained by the scientific community.

This is one of the more important books I have read in my life, in terms of opening up people’s eyes and making them really see the facts for what they are. If more environmentally minded people read this book, it would really rock their world and change their viewpoint about a lot of things. As Crichton is quick to point out, he is not anti environmentalist, except in the fact that most environmental groups are more interested in maintaining an elitist status quo than in actually doing anything about the environment, hence having far too many lawyers on their payrolls and far too few scientists.

I cannot begin to describe the amount of work the author put into this book. As I was reading it, I suddenly put two and two together and realized he was the same author who wrote “Rising Sun”, a book about the Japanese culture and how it interacts economically with the culture in the United States, again, an amazing book with a ton of research supporting Crichton’s viewpoints.

The basic viewpoint in “State of Fear” is that we have created a society that needs to continually develop grand new scary theories of doom, the idea of a ‘state of fear’ that we live in, in which the media screams about the danger and scientists back up the doom with all this suspect evidence. This is true from the Salem witch trials all the way to the current day Global Warming theories. As Crichton explains, if anyone is really interested in an open and frank discussion of the facts about global warming, they will find that the majority of data involved in the studies on global climates do not support the theory of global warming at all, and that those who are trying to further promote the theory thru strong editorial positions in scientific magazines, have no business doing so do to a big time conflict of interest, in that there is a name to be made by attaching one’s self to the new ‘state of fear’, regardless of whether or not there is any truth to the theory.

As far as the plot of the book and the storyline, there are times where Crichton gets a little lost in the details of the characters, likely because of the complexity and brilliance in the presentation of the scientific details backing the conclusions within the storyline itself. For instance, one character is trying to decide between two women he likes and you never do get any idea as the book comes to a close whether he ever makes a choice or not. This happens throughout the book, and is the only real reason I didn’t give it a full 5 out of 5 stars. 4 and a half stars is a stretch in terms of the fictional quality of the book, but the staggering amount of scientific influence on the story pushes the rating up, in my mind.

Crichton’s own views at the end of the book are very insightful, and it’s best to close with one: "We haven’t the foggiest notion how to preserve what we term “wilderness,” and we had better study it in the field and learn how to do so. I see no evidence that we are conducting such research in a humble, rational, and systematic way. I therefore hold little hope for wilderness management in the twenty-first century. I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners. There is no difference in outcomes between greed and incompetence.”

Rating: ****1/2

Book Review: Pacific Vortex by Clive Cussler

This book is part of a series of books, starring main character Dirk Pitt. It is the second book of the series that I have read (I can’t remember the name of the first one), and there has been a movie made of one of the books in the series, that being the movie ‘Sahara’. This is actually the first book of the series. There is a brand new state of the art US nuclear submarine, and it goes missing in a mysterious part of the Pacific Ocean known as the “Pacific Vortex”, where more than 30 ships have disappeared in the last 40 years.

It’s a decent tale, but I believe that Cussler wants to infuse himself into the tale, I get this feeling that he models Pitt off of a younger version of himself, with Pitt of course being much more daring, charming, the ultimate man’s man, that no woman can resist, who does nothing wrong. Within the perfection lies the flaw of the book and series in general. Human nature is to err and due to Pitt’s constant triumphs over unbelievable odds, and his conquests of every single woman who comes along (to the point that James Bond is a mere hobo it seems), without so much as a mistake, you begin to find yourself almost bored with his exploits. Sure, there is the ‘how is he going to get out of this one?’ type of thing going on, but for the most part, you say to yourself “oh geesh, WHATEVER!!”

Still though, it’s a decent read if you can see past that fault, and I’m sure I’ll likely read others in the series if I come upon them.

Rating: ***

Book Review: Ice Run by Steve Hamilton

Oddly enough I just picked this book up in the MWR building one night when we first got to Iraq, before we had internet set up in our hooches, and I got into it while reading it for about a half hour waiting to use a computer, sitting in the makeshift library they have here at Tallil.

The main character of the book is an ‘on again off again’ detective, Alex McKnight, who runs a snowmobile/camping cabin resort type of place, like a hideaway, way up north along the border with Canada in Paradise, Michigan. There is a river that basically makes up the border line.

McKnight is the main character in a series of books from this author. McKnight gets drawn into suspenseful mysteries more by sheer dumb luck than any determination to actually do detective work. As the story goes along, he falls in love, gets his ass beat a number of times, and of course by the end of the book he solves the puzzle. Hamilton’s description of the cold winter scenery is excellent, you can almost feel the chill in the air from the blustery Michigan wind as you read the book.

Even in the cold eerie dark setting, you want to be there, going to the old hotel, riding in the small plane to the old mysterious island in the center of some lake, I guess that’s part of the intrigue of mysteries such as this, and the suspense that goes with them.

Rating: ***

Book Review: Phoenix Sub Zero by Michael Dimercurio

As this story begins, the Europeans and Americans find themselves in a war against the Arabic nations of the middle east, who have united in an alliance to defeat the ‘infidel west’. In terms of the overall technical descriptions of the submarines and naval warfare in the story, such as the lives of the sailors on the subs, and the intricate workings of the subs from engineering to the conn, Dimercurio has done an excellent job.

The story itself is fairly decent, and eerie considering it was written in 1994, well before most of the terrorist attacks of the 1990’s (USS Cole, embassy bombings) and certainly before 9/11. Dimercurio writes the book much in the same style that Tom Clancy uses to spin his tales, but doesn’t quite hit that same mark. You can get a pretty good picture of what will happen well before the end of the story arrives. Still though, it’s an excellent warfare adventure book, and worth the time to read.

Rating: ***