There was no SOFA post 2011, that is publicly why we withdrew. I was in Iraq for all of 2011 and was one of the last high-ranging officers to depart in December of that year. I sat on a steering committee as part of the Strategic Framework Agreement team at the US Embassy in Baghdad and I can tell you that the…

Well, as a general practice, if you don’t intend to use the artifact in a scientific study, and you don’t have explicit permission to remove it from a site, most items are required to be left as you find them.

That’s not only the letter of the law, but also the spirit. There are plenty of arrowheads locked up in…

The other night I’m playing with my 2 year old son. It’s just us home since Mom is out to dinner with some friends. Then when it’s time for him to go to bed. I pick him up, carry him up the stairs, and as we’re walking into his bedroom he points behind us, back towards the other completely empty and dark bedroom, and…

Back in high school, I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, which was difficult because he was a frequent sleepwalker. The hardwood floors would creak when he would get up and walk out of the room. I would have to follow him and bring him back to bed at least 2-3 times a week.

About a dozen years ago when I was a grad student in anthropology, I was on a field expedition in the high mountains in the western US (for obvious reasons I can’t specify where).

This field work took us deep into the backcountry at elevations above 8,000 feet, and we had to make do with very basic survey and…

When I was about 13 I slept over a friend’s house. His parents went out for the evening, leaving us alone with his older sister (think she was 15). Well she whips out this book about devil worship, witchcraft, etc. We read this chapter that said if you light 5 candles, drip the wax from the candles into a pentagram…

When I was 23 I was staying overnight for the first time at a girl’s place who I had just started dating. We fell asleep and at some point during the night I rolled over to throw my arm around her and she wasn’t there.

One night I was at one of my all-time favorite bars, The Buccaneer in San Francisco. I met a girl who was expressly my type in the sense that she had red hair. We talked for awhile, and she mentioned she had just started working there recently and her shift was over. So we got some free shots at the bar, went out for…

Pfft. You can buy a Triple F.A.T. Goose for like half of that. Which is also still too damned expensive.

I always imagined Leia should be bitter about that. “Oh, you blew up my entire planet, but God forbid lil Luke suffers. Fuck.”

But it’s not so much ‘a glimpse’ as giving his character away completely (as well as basically spelling out how the film is going to end). It would have been far more dramatically effective to have Vader’s change of heart come at the actual climax of the film rather than be revealed two-thirds of the way through.

I...I...fuck. I can’t disagree with anything here. I...just fuck it, man. Game over. *curls up into ball, begins rocking back and forth while making a high-pitched keening noise*

I like it. Sort of like the Godfather going back to Italy before Michael takes over.

Amazing that the NFL has such detailed rules for the shit its players can wear on the field, to the point that players can’t have simple, minor tributes to dead relatives without getting fined, but something that actually affects gameplay is just “Eh, we’ll let the billion dollar franchise figure it out on their own…

Russia’s biggest problem is it masquerading as a “world power” when it has an economy the size of Italy’s, and has corruption on a scale that rivals the geopolitical basket-cases of Nigeria and Lebanon (Link below). It’s publicly acknowledged military spending, as a percentage of GDP, is higher than the US by an…

So I skimmed the list briefly and googled a name at random. What are the chances its another sports related person?

As a resident of Danville with a brown lawn, I shall bring out the boo birds and the incredibly sassy hissing the next time I see Beane at the Blackhawk Starbucks. SHAME! Now let me get back to passive aggressively despising those tree hugging, AstroTurf landscaping losers in Lafayette.

Could you imagine if he would have tilted his hat?

This is a terrible comment from top to bottom, but I’ll answer the question at the end: Lots of people.

It’s a shame whenever so much can be pinned on one guy, but that’s a big part of what makes playoff baseball so special. For better or worse, it’s tough to have heroes in the absence of goats.