Probably one of the best known figures in history is Winston Churchill, who is extremely familiar as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the early 1940's. Famed for his fiery, passionate, colorful use of the language and often credited with being the greatest source of English moral sustenance during the dark days of early World War II, few figures in history are so widely recognized or so often quoted.

Less well known, but only slightly, is that Churchill played a significant role in World War I, when, as a man in his early forties (about half a generation younger than his fellows in the Cabinet), he served as the First Lord of the Admiralty. This position, essentially the government liaison with the Admiralty, was a crucial post in peace and even moreso in war, and he acquitted himself fairly well. His greatest failure in this capacity was his support of the Dardanelles Campaign, which would degenerate in the meatgrinder of Gallipoli. Following its profound failure, Churchill spent nearly two decades as a political pariah.

One of the documents I use to do my job ("stare drooling at monitors akimbo for eight hours a day") is called the Verification Form, which I affectionately call the "Employment Verification Form". As the name, and specifically my little nickname for it, suggests, the Verification Form is where the collation of the employment verification data for the applicant or applicants of a given loan. Usually this involves calling the applicant's employer as listed on the loan application and, well, verifying the applicant's claims. So, on the Verification Form there is a little box entitled "Spoke With", in which the verifier identifies the point of contact in the verification. I've posted a couple of pictures of these.

Lately, on a small number of occasions, I've encountered Verification Forms in which the verifying source was: the credit application. Basically, the verifier is saying, "Enh, I'll just take his word for it." This is a terrible idea, and the reason it is a terrible idea is because there are lots of people like me out there who are dangerously clever. The only occupation I can see which isn't necessary to verify is basically a stay-at-home spouse. If they're lying about that... um, well, then they're actually out there *making* money, which should actually improve their chances of getting a loan. (As an aside, sometimes people list their occupation as "domestic engineer" instead of "stay at home mom" or "house husband". They think this is cute. It isn't. If you ever list your occupation as "domestic engineer" and you are actually a stay-at-home spouse, and I find out, I will hurt you. Now that's a guarantee my competitors aren't willing to give!)

I can just see some wily applicant taking advantage of this, though it would probably rely on some luck as well. And solid acting skills. For example:

APPLICANT: "Yeah, so, I have an income of a million dollars a month. See, I'm the king of the moon. I own Earth Satellite Corporation. Also I own seventeen yachts, three of which are space yachts. And that building! (Applicant points to a building visible through a nearby window.)

DEALERSHIP REPRESENTATIVE (looking through the window): "Which one?"

APPLICANT: "The tall one. With the spire."

DEALERSHIP REPRESENTATIVE: "Um, sir, that's the Empire State Building."

But one could put some insane stuff down on one's credit application, and if the verifier decided to just use the credit application itself for verification... well, let's just say that Mr. King Of The Moon would soon be cruising down the highway in his brand new, oh, I don't know, Ford Taurus.

Also that gives me an idea for a sitcom for a guy from the moon whose surname is King. It would be entitled "King Of The Moon". Hooray!

POSSIBLY FICTIONAL PERSON 1: "You spend an awful lot of time online these days."

POSSIBLY FICTIONAL PERSON 2: "I'm talking to my girlfriend."

I discovered recently two similar but unrelated facts regarding this country's national and local leadership.

This is Jeb Bush, the infamous brother of the President Bush and governor of Florida. I recently saw him deliver a speech to the citizens of Florida regarding one of those hurricanes which was on course to devastate the region (which happened thereafter), and I noticed that he, too, bears a striking resemblance to someone I know, and, in fact, am personally related to. This, thankfully, is not President Bush. It also is not their shadowy third brother of whom I have heard very little but who was, to my understanding, arrested in some sort of scandal right here in Colorado. He may not actually exist; my memories on this topic are vague and suitable for a nutball conspiracy theorist. No, the person Jeb Bush resembles, the person who is also a part of my family, is my uncle on my mother's side, Eric. It's not overwhelming, but the resemblance is quite strong.

Recently I had cause to fire up good old Bloodlines, which, if you recall, is a game about which some day I will write a review. And while technically said review is already written, it isn't blog-quality material and so it will have to be revised in light of that.

Anyway, to digress from my point, most games have an internal variable editor called, appropriately, a console. While normally said console is a spooky, tricky maze of non-sequitur commands and dark beige coloration, those who know the console commands can often have a lot of fun with the game. Thankfully, Valve, creators of Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, on which Bloodlines is built, realized the spooky-but-fun factor of the console and built theirs to be, say, user-friendly. It isn't exactly actually user-friendly, but it is a far cry from all previous consoles in that, when one types in a letter, a drop-down listing will open with every command which starts with that letter. As further letters are added, the listing is pared down to include only commands which begin with that string.

While I was playing with Half-Life 2's console, which allows the editing of various physical parameters of the world such as gravity, I discovered, among other commands, that which allows one to edit gravity! Naturally I increased the gravitational constant to be approximately that of a planet thirty times the size of the sun, and watched the fun commence. Sadly (also, awesomely), Gordon Freeman, the main character, failed to be immediately crushed to death. The only practical consequence that I found, while playing around in one early, enclosed area of the game with the gravity set this way was that I couldn't jump at all. Boo.

Then I stepped off of a piece of wood onto the ground approximately one inch below it (as in, the piece of wood was lying flat on the ground), and the falling damage I suffered, due to this one-inch drop and the massive gravity, killed me immediately. It was hilarious.

So I was playing around, a few days ago, with Bloodlines's console, which has the same drop-down listing of commands (seeing as it's the same engine as Half-Life 2). One command was titled, cleverly enough, "money". I, thinking, quite logically in my opinion, that this would impact either the amount of money my character had or the prices of the goods in the game, decided to test my hypothesis. The first value I set the "money" variable to was 1000. My money failed to change; the graphics were horribly altered. There was some kind of unholy graphical abomination as seen here:

However, that icon there in the middle of the bottom of the screen meant that I was near someone that I could talk to (in this case it was Heather, my character's sexy ghoul). Once I started the conversation, I realized just what the graphical anomaly was: Heather's breasts. And, technically, her hair. Thanks to the fact that not only does hair, in this game, often sway realistically with movement, but breasts often do too (and this is, not to submit hyperbole, the finest idea any human has ever devised regarding video games - a jiggle engine), there had to be a set of physical variables to describe, basically, breasts. "Money" just happened to be the variable which controlled the size of said breasts, and, in setting it to 1000 instead of 1, I increased proportionately the size of these jiggling breasts. This is definitely a man's variable.

Playing with it some more, I discovered that if set to 0, women simply fail to have breasts; if set to a negative number, they have concavities in their chests which, at great enough negative magnitudes, cause inverse breasts to come jutting out of their backs. It's kind of creepy. The last thing I did was to go out to Chinatown and set money, once again, to 1000. A hooker just happened to be in sight:

While it's an absolute tragedy (also a tragedy is the fact that the explosion created tremendous levels of spookium particles, the greatest single component of the terror molecule) that so many people died and were injured in the London bombings - and let's get this straight; while civilian casualties are a reality of modern war, this is nothing shy of malicious cowardice - I have to wonder about the target. For one thing, London is not the prime target - Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston... major US cities would be far better targets. After all, at this point the UK is virtually a province of the United States (which is historical irony for you) rather than an ally; and in any case the driving force for the so-called War On Terror (which, much like the Soda Wars and the War On Drugs, has little to do with conventional warfare besides cool, refreshing corporate sponsors) is the United States. If somehow we could be ousted from these efforts, the whole thing would simply collapse.

Then there's the fact that the G8 Summit was taking place only a few hundred miles away. While I'm sure that security must have been tight, it would have made a much better target than any city. Kill all of these world leaders at once, and I suspect we'd be seeing a stronger response among people than we currently are - namely, abject apathy. But we can probably rule that out as a realistic target for sheerly practical reasons. Blowing up a bus and some trains would be way easier than penetrating that security. Were I a terrorist, I could probably manage to blow up a bus or a train. I probably could not even begin to figure out whatever security was around the G8 Summit.

But I think that's kind of the point. Theoretically our terrorist foes are all around us, basically standing over us while we sleep with a packet of anthrax and maybe a copy of the Koran prominently displayed in order to make clear that our enemies Are Not Christians. Why aren't there more of these things in the US? All things considered, it probably would not be that difficult to sneak a bomb or a gun onto a plane, train, or automobile, especially if one happened to own the automobile in question. I know that we have these intensive thirty-minute training courses for our police to help them stop any terror molecules from invading our localities, but still. Our protection is not one hundred percent. I doubt it's even ninety percent. Which suggests that, since there has not been, to my knowledge, even ONE terrorist attack in the United States in four years,  the efforts simply aren't being made to COMMIT these acts.

Now, I don't like Bush. I don't like his style or his administration, and I'll be happy in 2008 when somebody else comes in to office; unless that somebody is Rick Santorum in which case I will destroy the planet. And anybody who can't fathom why clearly has no idea who either I am, or who Rick Santorum is. And since R-Santy has "a frothing discharge of feces and lube which is formed by anal sex" named after him, I can't imagine anybody does not know who he is. But I'm not part of that sect of people who believe that there's a Massive Conspiracy afoot. I think the government has lots of secrets, and I think that there are plenty of conspiracies; but these are essentially harmless other than the fact that they completely hamstring correct functioning of democracy (an outdated value we've hardly noticed for two hundred years anyway). That said, I don't believe, at this point, that one of those copious numbers of conspiracies is some sort of arch-villainy designed to keep us angry at terror.

In any case, the government is pretty transparent about its attempts to maintain the interest of a largely-apathetic public.

Like kindred spirits, Grey and I are. Too bad he lived a century ago.

"I believe, however busy, however active, however flustered a man may be with the battle of life, he is always looking for some place where he may lay his inner heart, his soft and tender nature, in safety; else there is a danger that he may lose it altogether or find it injured in the rough struggle. Such a place he finds in a woman, and when he really loves, he confides it all to her freely without reserve."

Amen, brother.

A few days ago, on the third, I was at my parents' house for a little party thingy, and at one juncture several of us were gathered in the living room. We were chatting (as opposed to our standard activity of fighting to the death), and the topic turned to... something. I don't remember what, but it's irrelevant. What is relevant is that my dad happened to make the comment (and this made sense at the time, I swear) that he "washes [his] hands religiously." Being the sort of person that I am, this immediately triggered in me a realization of other possible meanings.

One was a religion of washing one's hands, but that's really just OCD. A trifle off-kilter, but still not so much hilarious as very sad.

The other major factor was that, in order to wash one's hands religiously, one must pray to the water spirits. This culminated, through contributions of others, in lifting one's hands to the ceiling, throwing one's head back, and exclaiming, "Poseidon, cleanse these hands!!" And then proceeding to wash one's hands. So I'm pretty sure that I need to do this at work one day, but instead I won't. It's funny as a concept, but would probably drive people insane simply to witness it.

If I were a more religious person, I might explain it by saying that the Devil is throwing at me difficulty to stop me from my life's current upward climb (inch-by-inch though it is, blood- and sweat- and tear-stained though it is). But I'm not a more religious person, so I don't favor that explanation. However, I do find quite amusing the fact that, when life decides to hit me in the back with a baseball bat (without nails in it), it at least does so in an ironic fashion.

So today I went out to my car in order to enter said vehicle and, through proper operation, to convey myself to my place of employment. I got out there and placed the key in the door, and, upon turning it, found that there was no resistance of the sort I would expect were the door locked.
Opening the door, my eyes first fell upon the lock tab of my door, which was, of course, in the "unlocked" position. That's odd, I thought. I could have sworn I locked my car last night.

Then my gaze turned to the messy pile of things in my passenger-side seat. That's odd, I thought. I could have sworn I had left those in an orderly fashion.

Then, at last, my gaze turned to the gaping hole in my vehicle's center dash console. That's odd, I thought. I could have sworn I didn't tear out my stereo leaving wires hanging out of there.

Of course, the reality quickly set in: my car had been burgled. Or, to be entirely accurate, my car had been burgled again. It's annoying as heck. A new stereo is going to set me back a few hundred dollars, and until I get it installed I won't have any music in my car. Plus, the Bad Guy, who was actually conscientious enough not to rip out the console entirely and strip down my steering shaft in what I assume was an attempt to hotwire my car as happened the last time my car was burgled, stole my few CDs and, most annoyingly, a $25 gift card I had been given at work on Friday in recognition of, basically, being a super bad-ass employee (or, technically, being the top producing employee by a wide margin for roughly six months running).

Curiously, I wasn't too bothered by it. I mean, yes, I'm annoyed. And disappointed that somebody would do this. But, in addition to being unsurprised, I have failed to thus far really be angry about it. It's inconvenient, but I refuse to let some sleazebag who was probably trying to get enough money for his next fix dictate my happiness. I sure hope a stereo which'll probably sell for under a hundred dollars, a handful of self-burned CDs, and a $25 Target gift card were worth that bit of your soul, pally.

The thing that I find funny about this, though, is the timing. Yesterday, the day when we celebrate the nation's birth, was the day I was robbed. It could have been worse - it could have been National Not Robbing Saladin's Car Day (which should frankly be every day, in my opinion) - but the timing was just dynamite. Thanks, Bad Guy!

Today is a day - the day - which we dedicate to the honoring and celebration of the birth of the United States of America, a nation which - according to popular history but not, technically, to scholastically-established fact - was born 229 years ago. And while the date is somewhat arbitrarily selected from among several reasonable times (the bulk of the signatures on the Declaration date from August, not from July 4), it serves its purpose well. Today, we honor our country. Today, we remember those who rebelled not because they were by their natures bellicose or recalcitrant but because they felt that it was the last option open to them in the redressing of their grievances. And while one can argue endlessly over whether or not their complaints were a valid basis for rebellion, in the end rebellion is the course which this nation pursued. It is for this that we honor them and commemorate our nation's birth.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we do this. For in this rebellion, those men and women who fought and died for this cause brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. And if that nation has strayed from these goals, if its people have grown perhaps beyond the scope of effective true democracy, if it seems now to have lost its way, if, above all, it never truly embraced those tenets of its fabrication - still it can be said that our roots lie in this most basic concept: that not by class nor race nor creed shall our worth be determined, but by our souls, by the very essence of ourselves. By the fact of our humanity. Those men centuries ago fell far short of the ideals to which they largely aspired. Yet in the acceptance of this failure they acknowledged not only that they, too, were human, and thus given to flaw and failure; but also that by the creation, through the great and hallowing sacrifice of blood, of a nation dedicated to the equality of all men, even the oppressed, even the downtrodden, even the tired, the poor, the huddled masses can realize their dreams of freedom.

Yet, in a larger sense, we cannot hallow - we cannot consecrate - this nation. Our very history is the story not only of those with power, but of those without. This nation has since before even its birth been a beacon of hope for the hopeless and a home for the homeless. These poor people, these hopeless and homeless folk, did not find always here a place with arms open, but still they found a place which would take them in. The oppressed did not always find a place willing to grant to them that cherished equality, but still they found a place where they could have hope of one day finding that. The brave men, the brave women, living and dead, who have struggled here, have consecrated this nation far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they have done here.

It is rather for us to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored ancestors we take increased devotion to that that cause for which they gave their full measure of devotion - that we here resolve that they shall not have struggled and fought and died in vain - that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. We must never lose sight of our dedication to that freedom, to that liberty, to that equality. We must remain vigilant and wise, guarding these things with our voices when we might be heard; with our actions when we might be seen; and with our lives when we might by our deaths grant yet better lives to those for whom we have died.

Today we honor those who have fought, over these centuries, for a noble goal. We honor those brave soldiers who have fought, whether they have died or lived, in wars to defend this goal. We honor those men and women, immigrants of convenience or desperation, admiration or hope, who have spent their lives in the pursuit of this nation's highest ideal. We honor those men and women, born in this country with the birthright of liberty, possessed of skin of all shades and circumstances of all sorts, slave or freeman, pauper or plutocrat, who labored for this goal. We honor these people who have struggled in the name of freedom, in the name of equality - in the name of government of the people, by the people, for the people, that it might not perish from the earth.