This Is It!»

You guys are probably cooler than me and have seen this already, but even if so, you maybe haven’t seen it in awhile and it’ll be almost like brand-new. What is it, you ask? Amanda “Mattos Locos” Mattos made an errant comment at a dinner party about something reminding her of “yacht rock.” Huh? Oh yeah, she said, yacht rock, you know, like Chicago — stuff you’d play on a yacht in the early 80s. There’s even a YouTube show about that.

And sure enough it’s brilliant. All you need to know: Hall & Oates have just challenged Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald to a songwriting competition. Language makes it NSFW.

Dogs Of War Bark And Bite»

One of my favorite black-humored military lunatics, Bob Mackey, has finally fallen victim to misjudgment and started a blog. Welcome into this world Rows of Burnished Steel, which Bob inaugurates — as men of a certain age in the Army seemingly must — by posing the question: What does the Ballad of H.R. McMaster augur for me?

The answer is that there was no hope. The Organization Men had won. Officers who sold the company product, who towed the company barge, who mindlessly repeated the company line, would be rewarded. Those who could do 100 pushups in 2 minutes…those were officers who should be generals! Graduate degrees? Boy, you tryin’ to git smart on us? We’uns don’t cotton to no brain-ifying in this here Army.

I walked. I walked in at 18, a day before I graduated high school in rural Arkansas. I wanted to “shoot guns and jump out of airplanes.” And I walked out at 43. Private to Lieutenant Colonel. The Army was good to me, I had no complaints.

But there was a limit. McMaster found it. Others discovered it as well. As did I.

When Bob sobers up, he’s going to be greeted with two throbbing, immediate truths: first, the COIN Jedi Knight McMaster is probably going to get his first star, since David Petraeus presided over this last round of round of promotions; and second, Google Cache is forever. Now, and forevermore, Bob Mackey is Too Hot For DOD.