Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Happy Oxi Day

The Greek Old One, Cthulhu wishes all of you Hronia Pola!

Oxi Day is a Greek holiday celebrating when the Greeks told Mussolini to stick it in his ear. It was quickly followed by the Italian army invading Greece, which was quickly followed by the Italian army failing to capture Greece, which was quickly followed by Hitler and his boys coming to their rescue.

It is a very Cthulhuloid sort of holiday, an ancient alphabet, impending doom, denial, bloody resistance, mountains of death, Nazis, screaming death from the skies, muha ha ha ha!

BTW I can't use Greek characters, but it is pronounced like Oh-khee, not ox-ee (the second letter is a khee, not ksee).

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Getting My Game Face On

After an overwhelming majority (5 to nothing) I am tossing my computer in the ring and have signed up for NaNoWriMo 2009. Wish me luck.

I'm going to be writing a mystery this time round. I talked about the main characters before. The story is tentatively called The Boys of St. Leonard's.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Cthulhu Sunday

I got the Call of Cthulhu silent movie from the library and it put me out of action for days.

I highly recommend it.

PS. I'm going to go to go to work on Friday as a Superfan for Halloween.

Five reasons the Bears lost to the Bengals today:
5. At least we don't have to live in Cincinnati (it's not a reason for the loss, but at least it cheers me up)
4. The Bears just gave an excellent clinic on how you cannot win NFL games with no O-line, no D-line and no special teams. Did everybody pay attention, we don't want to have to do that again.
3. The team was out all night last night celebrating Da Coach's 70th birthday
2. Whatever happened to Lonnie Anderson and WKRP. Lovey and Ron were so busy trying to find the radio station that the game just got out of hand.
1. What're you talking about? The Bears didn't play the Bengals, that's just crazy talk, they're an AFC team. Forget you.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Strange Weather

Fifth coldest October on record so far, but we puny humans have been keeping records for a measily hundred years.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Nightmares of Katrina 4 - The Arrival

I need to write while I can, but I’m arguing with myself. I need to write, but, I don’t really want to write about, that incident. I have to write though and I have begun to tell the story so I really need to finish, whether I like it or not.

When we arrived in the New Orleans area things were very strange. People had a glassy look in their eyes and their faces were blank. The damage didn’t look too bad to me, but I had been jaded. I hadn’t been too long out of Afghanistan and you just can’t compare any place in the United States to the primitive and deprived conditions there.

We skirted south of the city, far from Lake Pontchartrain where the land was higher and the carnage inflicted by the Lake’s release had little or no direct effect. Still, there were small signs here and there of damage and destruction caused by the Hurricane herself.

The chief indicator was the people. They looked spent and were all headed out of town. Most of them had come back into the area to check the damage and to retrieve what they could. A few who had official duties had come back to help in the rescue efforts. While their own houses were underwater they were helping others.

In Belle Chasse NAS itself, things were even more chaotic than outside. Every state and territory with a National Guard had sent supplies, food and soldiers to support the relief efforts, but none had been coordinated. Units arrived by air and land with no instructions or orders; and with no one expecting or prepared for them.

I have been in the National Guard for over twenty years and I have seen the confusion that happens every month as civilians slowly, staggeringly and sometimes painfully change themselves into military personnel. This was beyond anything I had ever seen. There were regular Army, Navy and Air Force people there who were just as confused. It was almost as if there were some outside force affecting us, causing everyone to be even more confused and uncoordinated than they possibly could have gotten by themselves.

General Honore famously said we were, “Stuck on stupid,” but I don’t think it was stupid we were stuck on, and I don’t think it was all our fault.

An example of the confusion was how supplies were flown into Belle Chasse. The C130s would land, the supplies would be shoved out the cargo door and the planes would leave. The airfield would become quickly and irrevocably disorganized. Any unit with forklifts was employed to move the supplies off the airstrip, and more would land. The situation deteriorated to the point that yellow Post-it notes were used in lieu of ANY military forms.

No one seemed to see a problem with this while the inexhaustible stream of equipment and food continued to flow. The entire month we were there, it never did dry up.

We too, seemingly came out of no-where with no usable assets or skills, but we couldn’t be sent back. As far as the people in Belle Chasse were concerned, we were of no use without trucks or forklifts. The ideas of just-in-time supply, efficient logistics, planning and coordination were just foreign gibberish. We were raving lunatics of no conceivable use.

We spent three days trying to convince someone that we could bring some order to the logistic nightmare if only we could be allocated several rooms, computer and phone connections. As the Group Signal Officer it was my responsibility to make the connections. In the entire month of September that we were there, I never, never found anyone who would admit that they were the Senior Signal Officer in the AO (Area of Operations). Everyone was in charge of something, but that one over-all, coordinated, unity of command, as far as signal was concerned never materialized.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Cthomputer Cthulhu Cthaput!

My work computer died the other day. Unfortunately that was where I had all my Cthulhu stuff (and some writing stuff).

The IT folks at work said that the hard drive was completely wiped, absolutely empty, like it didn't even exist. This smacks of some malicious intent (and not on my part or maybe even not on the part of anyone of my species).

SO, I'm really scrambling to put my external "brain" back together.

The up side to all this is that I found Propnomicon. I was very excited until I realized that the "prop" in the name is referring to stage or RPG props. Oh well, we do share a sort of kinship.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Weekends with Cthulhu

Boy, hangovers are really bad when the Great Old Ones are involved.

Sorry I fell behind on my Cthulhu posts.

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Cthulhu Help Me

Note that I have changed Nightmares of Katrina 2 and moved the information that was there to a new post (Nightmares of Katrina 3).

Please excuse the way I've been relaying the tale of my experiences in New Orleans after Katrina. It is a very painful and difficult memory and rather like scrubbing an infected wound to try and dredge up.

Please understand that I am struggling with a way to convey the information in a way that will serve as a warning, rather than simply as a story to entertain, or gods forbid, for anyone to try and follow.

I could never forgive myself if anyone tried to find the places I'm describing in these posts. I am going to give enough facts so that you will believe me and heed my warnings but please do not attempt to find the specific streets or buildings I'm going to tell you about.

I would be most happy if everyone abandoned New Orleans entirely, but I understand that it is home to some good people. For them I hope the best. For the rest of us, if you do not have to go to New Orleans or Louisiana at all, please don't.

I know I won't be going back.

Nightmares of Katrina 3

On the way down from North Riverside in the Chicago area we stopped off in Alexandria, LA near Fort Polk.

Fort Polk is the home of the Joint Readiness Training Center. It's the equivalent of the National Training Center in California, except that the NTC is mainly for training armor in a desert environment, JRTC is mainly for training infantry in a third world, tropical environment. If I ever wanted to choose a place in the US to represent a third world country it'd be Fort Polk.

At Fort Polk we were billeted on a parking lot. We waited two days as our OIC (Officer in Charge) was flown to the New Orleans area to find out what exactly our mission would be. He returned only having succeeded in determining that we would be stationed at Belle Chasse, New Orleans Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base (NAS JRB). Our mission was unknown, our facilities were unknown, our billet ting was unknown, the situation was unknown.

We left Fort Polk at first light. Somewhere just past Baton Rouge along I10 the expressway was closed for everyone except military, police and fire vehicles. The LA State Police had road blocks up and turned every civilian vehicle away. The road was ours alone. It was a bright sunny day, but we only saw a few ambulances heading southeast, nothing headed the other way. A lone HMMWV (Hum-Vee) on an unknown mission.

Monday, October 05, 2009

Lord's Day Cthulhu

So, I was in church yesterday. There was a Sunday School open house for my youngest. I sat in while they did some studying and then played a game of answering questions. My brilliant daughter stole some answers from the other team, knowing, among other things, the name of the censor (the thing they burn incense in and bless the congregation).

In honor of that I put this image.

Interesting that Acts 16 talks about what happened when
Paul went to Athens. He was invited to debate in the Socratic style. Predominately he was laughed at and ignored.

The church makes this point to show how special Dionysus was to accept the Word and become the Bishop of Athens.

I don't remember hearing this story before, but if I did I never realized that even back then, when you apply logic and reason to the Bible, it falls flat. Now that I'm thinking Deistically I see that as the real point of the story. I think our responsibility as sentient creatures is to use our God-given brains to the best of our ability, not to turn them off and follow blindly.


Anyway, it has nothing to do with this month, but Cthulhu is fun.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Cthulhu Icon?

For Halloween I decorate my cubicle and I was thinking this time to make a Cthulhu icon.

My wife and kids are Greek Orthodox and they're big on icons. We, like all good Orthodox are supposed to, have a space in our house that is set aside for the icons.

They are usually called Icon Corners or Icon Tables. Here is one.

They look very mystic and I think it would look extremely creepy if it were dedicated to the Elder Gods.

I am planning on printing an image of Cthulhu and decoupaging or varnishing it to a board to be my icon. I'm also going to get some of those battery powered candles. What else do you think I could have in my Blasted Icon Corner?

Friday, October 02, 2009

Photographs of Cthulhu

Wait a minute, did that say PHOTOGRAPHIC, as in from a photo of the Great Old One? Well bust my britches and buy me a new white jacket with extra long sleeves, but this here site claims to have made posters from photographs.

I think there may be a certain Inspector LaGrasse that might want to look into that one. Either that's false advertising or something else sinister. I hesitate to say more sinister, because what could be worse than expecting true revelation from one of the elder gods and finding that it's a hoax perpetrated by just one of Cthulhu's many followers, bent and twisted as they are? Huh, I ask you.

BTW, I don't know why I switched into a kind of affected country accent just then.

Thursday, October 01, 2009

Let Cthulhu Month Begin!

It's Cthulhu Month again, hurrah! This is the third annual one. That's right, I've been posting daily Cthulhu images two years already.

This year I'm going to try to get some unique images that can be found no where else on the net. I've seen my share of uncanny and unearthly things, I know things that shouldn't be known. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately for your sanity and mine, I never seem to have a camera when I encounter strange things.

If you have strange images, or know of someone who does, please contact me I'd like to put them on the blog. Hey, insanity loves company, right?