Excuse me, which freedoms did you think you were defending?

This relates to some stuff that came up recently in lyonesse’s journal:

Anti-Iraq war veterans pulled from parade

TALLAHASSEE — A group of 30 military veterans critical of the war in Iraq hoped to use Tuesday's Veterans Day parade to call attention to the increasingly deadly conflict but instead found themselves fighting for something much more fundamental.

Members of Veterans For Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War were yanked off a downtown Tallahassee street, directly in front of the Old Capitol, while marching in the holiday parade they had legitimately registered in.

[...]

"We don't care where they are, as long as they're somewhere else," said Charles LeCroy, an Air Force personnel superintendent in Vietnam and second vice commander of American Legion Post 13 in Tallahassee. "It's disrespectful, that's what it is, and I just can't stomach or tolerate or conceive of it."

And here (emphasis added by me) is the US Department of Veterans Affairs, on the origin of Veterans Day (originally Armistice Day):

An Act (52 Stat. 351; 5 U. S. Code, Sec. 87a) approved May 13, 1938, and the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday — a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be hereafter celebrated and known as “Armistice Day.”

Patrick points out another recent related irony.

BFL: upper-body

Hot damn! I need to remind myself to do this more often! I just upped the poundage on a bunch of my upper-body routines, and got pretty good results. I pulled off the full six reps of Seated Dumbbell Curls with 25-lb weights, which I couldn’t budge for even one rep the last time I tried them, over the summer. Yeah!

(  Upper-body workout numbers  )

More about KMKZ than it actually deserves

Went back into Manhattan today to pay my ISP bill in person, since I’ve only got two checks left, and to order more checks.

On the way in, I read the lone comic I’d picked up yesterday, which I’d stuck in my bad and forgotten about: KMKZ (aka Kamikaze), a comic about surfing and extreme sports, from Cliffhanger. It’s not actually very good. Towards the end of the first issue, the apparent protagonist suddenly wonders where his close friend, who hadn’t previously been mentioned or shown, is. We cut to the friend, who briefly mentions a girl he knows. Then, we cut to another scene, where we see a girl die, and she turns out to be the one the friend was talking about. Am I supposed to care?

I picked it up because of the art, which on closer examination i much less interesting than it had seemed. The big curling wave on the opening splash page kicks ass, but the figure rendering seems repetitive after a while. Ah well. Still, I can always use new ways of thinking about simplifying figures. A little inspiration rubbed off, and shows in the sketch on the left:

( A couple of sketches )