Hey! It's me! I'm back! This is, the central, scrutinizer.
And there, folks, is a Frank Zappa reference to start off the new year. If you have ever read any of these posts and said "Holy Frijoles where does this guy get this stuff" listening to a little bit of Zappa may provide a starting point that in unraveling the glorious knot of bullshit spewing synapses that have stitched themselves together in my skull.
To my 12 regular readers (whom I love), I am sorry for not writing for so long. I was gone for much of the December holiday season on business. My 12 readers also know that I am reluctant to talk about what I do for a living (rest assured, its not blogging), but I will say I was on a US Navy ship over the holidays. Having a military Christmas is an interesting thing...I'm not so naive to think that if everybody had to spend one Christmas away from their family in the middle of the ocean than everyone's eyes would be opened and all wars would cease. But it does give one some empathy for the sacrifices that so few of us have endured for so many for so long. I won't soon forget it.
I will also say that my company decided to send me and the rest of the team home flying first class, and I have never felt so awkward.
You see, one of the small, self-righteous joys I allow myself to is to silently curse at all the rich people sitting comfortably in first class while I struggle my way back into the smelly, cramped confines of coach with the rest of the normal people. But my company, in a moment of clarity, decided that it would be rather dickish to force upon people who had just spent Christmas away from their families the additional misery of being cramped in steerage for the 17 hour flight from Tokyo to Atlanta.
No one should be allowed to travel like we did. Instead of having to wait at the gate, I got to sit in a nice lounge with free booze. My seat on the flight from Guam to Tokyo fully reclined, it had a foot rest, and I had my own TV with many, many options for things to watch and listen to; my seat from Tokyo to Atlanta was not so much as a seat as a small pod in which I could lay down and not have to have contact with another human soul. In both cases we were given complimentary champagne before we had even taken off, and I could only imagine what the people trudging on the plane and making their way back to coach thought of us as we sat there in our large, comfortable seats, swilling champagne. I felt like demanding a top hat and a monocle to make the experience more complete (and I'll bet you 10 to 1 they have some somewhere in the back).
I returned to America on New Year's Eve. I have the good fortune to now travel outside the country three times and its always a bit of a jolt to return to America; every time I go through customs I feel like a herded cow going through the stocks, being led along by brusque cowboys in blue uniforms. I never get that sense when I go through customs elsewhere, but maybe it is just an illusion that the cancer of progressivism has placed in my poisoned mind.
I had an additional shock when I saw that the Iowa Caucus was but a few short days away, and I remembered that 2012 is an election year. So much for a happy new year.
I was hoping that Mitt would deliver a knock-out blow in South Carolina, but this was no to be, as he got sucker punched by the Iowa re-count and a re-re-resurgent Newt Gingrich (he's like that Russian dude in Snatch. No matter how many times you shoot him, he just won't die.). This is a shame, because not only does it mean that the republican candidate most likely to snatch my vote away from Obama now may not win the nomination (which would make the rest of this year much less interesting for me politically), but now the race is going to drag on, meaning a shorter respite from the primaries and the national campaign "season".
The race is on!
