To: Colonel Douglas C. Glendower, CO, special group attch. 32nd Lyran Guard.
From: General of the Armies Adam Steiner

We have solid intel that the Blakists, in order to try to reinforce their garrison on Hesparus II have presented us with an opportunity. They have removed almost all aerospace assets and left a single regimental-sized formation on the planet Pacifica. You are ordered, then, to select a single battalion to make way with all deliberate haste to Pacifica. En route, they will meet up with various other units to be assigned to this taskforce, in order as to not overly degrade our defences. Included in this taskforce will be a company of Canopian security forces, a trinary from Clan Wolf, and elements of the mercenary Ace Wrecking Crew and Gunmen of the Apocalypse. Other mercenary units will be named at a later date, as negotiations are still continuing. Your detatchment will have overall command of the operation.

Good luck.
[Signed, Adam Steiner]

From: Col. Douglas Glendower
To: Major Sergei N. Chereneko

Major, I have assigned you, along with specific, selected elements pulled from all four combat teams of the Cavalier Cavalry, to lead this mission. I have little doubt in your ability to do this task, and it is no slight to you or the four Colonels of the teams that they were not selected. With the increase of trouble in Circinus and the Rim Worlds, I simply cannot afford to break up my regular staff and hope to keep the regiment functioning at peak performance. You are the brightest of my junior officers, and will carry the brevet rank of Lt. Colonel for this operation. The units selected are a cross section of the command as a whole, and, as you well know, are fine men and women who will serve you well.

In addition, your father, our intelligence officer, has already gone on to Pacifica III and his elite lance of scouts are hoping to provide you the ground work on the planet, an additional edge against the forces of the Word of Blake.

[Signed, Col. Douglas C. Glendower]

Operation: RED ARRAY has arrived. Colonel Chereneko and a coalition force have been tasked with the mission of retaking of Pacifica from the forces of The Word of Blake.

In “The Initial Array”, the dropships of this task force are about to start their orbital drop runs.
http://comics.cavaliercavalry.com/redarray.htm

Sorry, I’ve been sick, busy, sick, busy, and then some more busy. Summer school is the suck. But I’ve found a few moments to drop by Xanga and actually write in the blog! Hoorays!

Well, we’re done with Marcus Aurelius, so I now have zero interest in Rome from this point forward. It’s a snooze. Legions don’t get paid, disease sweeps in, Christians gain momentum, and the Germans head west. C’mon, that tired old chestnut, please. My economics class is worse. We’re like looking at Asia’s economy 25 years ago. China is this small place and Japan is going to take over everything! It’s about as relevant as a test on my cup of tea… (Lipton-bag-in-box, unsweetened, 32oz, four Sweet-n-lows) It’s amazing I actually don’t get enough sleep now. *sigh*

Next up, I’m branching out. Miniature Rules isn’t ending, but I’m probably going to try and do a more intensive Thursday comic. I’d like to say it’s weekly, but that might be pretensious, #1 took almost four hours to generate. MR averages about 2.5 minutes, if I’m eating a bagel at the time.

Looking forward to Comic-Con San Diego. I launched MR last year to have an “excuse” to go, it’s turned into a real deal. I, for the first time, don’t feel like a fraud going there. I hope to see Ash and Gio there, along with Raven, Cara, and EvilKosh from my old B5 haunts. EK really needs to get back to his dinosaur comics, they were made of 100% awesomium.

That’s it for now, I’ll post more tomorrow upon the launch of NEW PROJECT.

God, I hate being ill. The pounding in my head, the runny nose, the awkwards sleeps, it’s all crap.

Thanks go out to my History holmes, Mike. He knows I’m tech-savvy and he found a battered Sony Cybershot DSC-T9 and gave it to me to see if I could get it running. All that was wrong with it was the battery was drained, and OfficeMax had a generic T type charger for $25. 6 megapixel camera for $25? Yeah, score. The LCD’s a little scratched as well as the casing, but for the price it’s a damned good camera.

Next up for me? Quick two-page essay on the merits or detractions of Julius Caesar. A guy comes up with a salad, and people are all up in arms over him. I came, I saw, I wanted bacon bits… call Gio!

Lions and Dragons

Owain Glyn Dwr as a Complete Symbol of Welsh Nationalism

In 1999 the Welsh Parliament reassembled after a six-hundred-year hiatus. Even as the new lawmakers and councilors filled the seats of the modern building in Cardiff, the act of doing so connected them to 1405 in the fortress of Harlech. There, in defiance of England, Owain Glyn Dwr asked his retinue to form the same body in accordance with a plan for Welsh nationalism that he had come up with to secure support from other landholders within Wales. Parliament was the first step in the plan in 1405; it was the last step in 1999. Since the collapse of Glyn Dwr’s rebellion in 1409, he has been seen as a symbol of Welsh defiance toward rule from London. His plans for a national assembly, a national university, and a national library appealed to intellectuals; the genealogical connection to Lord Rhys of Deheubarth drew support from those seeking a native Prince of Wales; the wholesale adoption of the ancient prophecies and the legends formed after his demise remained popular with the common people of Wales. For all of these reasons, more so than any other single individual, Owain Glyn Dwr embodied the whole of the valiant, if futile, Welsh struggle against their far more powerful neighbor, England.

Owain ap Gruffudd (son of Gruffudd) was a landowner in a valley near the March Borders[1] region, the area that separated England from Wales. This glacial valley with its deep creek with dark water imparted to Owain the name he came to be known by, as visitors to his estate at Glyndyfrdwy called him “Owain of the deep valley and the dark cold creek,” or in Welsh, Glyn Dwr.[2] During his stewardship of this estate, a landhold at Sycharth, and his wife’s estate at Iscoed, he became the patron of a bard named Iolo Goch, as was common for the lower landed nobility of the time. While Goch had other patrons, he was most impressed with Owain Glyn Dwr due to the depth of Glyn Dwr’s lineage. Over the course of Glyn Dwr’s patronage, Iolo Goch took every opportunity to point out to the landholder the scope of his noble heritage. With the passing of his mother’s brother, the Deheubarth line ended and he became the person with the strongest claim to the vacant title.[3] His claims to nobility on his father’s side were even stronger, descending from a cadet line of the heirs to the Princedom of Powys and the source of his current landholdings. Iolo Goch made one more connection for the young Glyn Dwr when he noted that he was a great-grandson, albeit on a matrilineal path, to Prince Rhys Gwenllian.[4] With the ending of the Gwynedd line due to the death of Prince Llywelyn’s grandson in France, Glyn Dwr had almost the same degree of credibility to the Princedom as he had with the head of the house of Deheubarth.[5] With his connections to two of the noble houses of northern Wales and a firm, if unconventional, tie directly to the ruling house, Owain Glyn Dwr was in a uniquely strong position to gather support once the rebellion got underway. Iolo Goch reinforced these themes as he and Glyn Dwr toured the March Borders region, taking every opportunity to not only scout English positions and preparations, but to also tie into Glyn Dwr’s mind the connection between the land and Glyn Dwr.[6]

The genealogical connections were a beginning, but once battle had been joined between Wales and England, Owain Glyn Dwr needed to give the Welsh populace more reasons to join his cause. The rebellion had started as a feud between Owain Glyn Dwr and Lord Grey of Ruthin, a neighboring landowner who had supported Henry IV’s (r. 1399-1413) deposing Richard II (r. 1377-1399). Following the sacking of Lord Grey’s estate by the small force gathered by Glyn Dwr, he led a force to attack other estates loyal to Henry IV to promote the perception of a general Welsh revolt in favor of Richard II, rather than a dispute between landholders.[7] This was probably done in the perception that, with the passage of time, the chances of the pro-Welsh, or at least indifferent, King Richard II returning to the throne grew more and more unlikely. After a steady rise in his military fortunes, Glyn Dwr succeeded in seizing the castles at Aberystwyth and Harlech in 1405. Having secured two defendable bastions in which to consolidate power, Glyn Dwr then began to set about the task of presenting a government respectable enough to garner aid from outside sources.

One of his first acts was to summon a parliament to a manor in Machynlleth for several purposes: advising him on diverse matters of the proposed Welsh state, to accept the crown as Prince Owain IV, and to provide news to the Welsh citizenry that the proper steps were being taken by his court to provide self-governance.[8] After the conclusion of this first parliament, Glyn Dwr then dispatched messengers to gain the foreign aid that was so desperately needed to press the English to accept an independent Wales. One of the surviving letters was written in 1406 to Charles VI of France (r. 1380-1422) and laid out the scope of his intentions for Wales. In return for aid and recognition of the historic Bishopric of St. David, the patron saint of Wales, Glyn Dwr was willing to place the Welsh church in alignment with the Avignon Pope, this during the rift within the Catholic church.[9] Then Glyn Dwr asked for aid from Charles and the Avignon Pope to help construct a national university with two campuses, one in the north and the other in the south of the country, to help foster the new nation’s national identity.[10]

This suggests that despite how the rebellion had started, Owain Glyn Dwr was all too prepared to take his role as Prince of Wales seriously. As a colony of England and under its dominion, the national infrastructure of Wales was left to an absolute minimum as a matter of state policy.[11] Glyn Dwr made every effort to give the appearance that his new Wales would be a truly separate nation, with all the trappings (university, recognized Metropolitan See) that was enjoyed by any other country in the fifteenth century. By setting these ideas down before his councilors and the men he hoped would recognize him as a fellow monarch, he hoped to give both prestige and legitimacy to his fledgling government.

Having secured the backing of the nobility with his heritage and set down the basis for both foreign policy and self-rule, the last keystone in Owain Glyn Dwr’s plans was to gain the support of the common people. The pull of his ancient connection was strong but required explanations to a populace undereducated at the time; his promises of national institutions were couched in a timeframe longer than the average Welshman could hope to realistically see the benefit from. To connect to the people, Owain Glyn Dwr turned to the ancient myths and legends that prevailed throughout the Welsh countryside. Well grounded in them due to the tutelage of Iolo Goch during the March Borders tour, Glyn Dwr adopted many of them personally in what can be described as nothing less than a propaganda campaign to raise national spirits and personal loyalty. One of the legends set to song for the bards of Wales is “The Ohs of Merlin,” the text of which is cited from The Black Book of Carmarthen in Alex Gibbon’s The Legend of Jack of Kent and the Fate Of Owain Glyn Dwr:

A bear from Deheubarth will arise

And his men will spread out

Over the lands of Monmouth.

Over the Moon

Will the waiting of Gwenddydd be when a lord of Dyfed

Will be the occupier…

Yet I fortell the battle of Llwyfain woods

And streches all red

Befor the rush of Owain…

By Owain’s band.[12]

In this passage, we see the connections that Glyn Dwr needed to be made clear to the people, made accessible through both the familiarity with the Merlynic legend attached to this medieval ballad and the pervasiveness of the bardic traditions within Wales. Certainly, Glyn Dwr and his counselors could not have asked for a better song to have been written: it laid out his connection to the lines of Deheubarth and Powys, and the early success the rebellion had against the loyalists of Henry IV. The old song certainly began to further imply the ancient prophecy of a Welsh rise; the song’s connection with the ancient Arthurian legends gave it a credibility that a ballad written specifically for Glyn Dwr’s campaign could not possibly hope to match. Glyn Dwr was fond of using these perceptions on campaign and in his correspondence with others. At Caernarfon he unfurled a new standard meant to both inspire the Welsh and shock the English; he raised the golden dragon upon a white field that had been, supposedly, the standard of Uther Pendragon, father of Arthur.[13] When he sought an alliance with Robert III of Scotland (r. 1390-1406), Glyn Dwr could not resist using mythology in his attempts to secure the fellow Celtic king’s assistance with references to the shared legends: “…the [Merlynic] prophecy says that I will be delivered from the [English] oppressions and bondages by your aid.”[14]

It was his fondness for the supernatural and mythological that made the reign of Owain Glyn Dwr the first attraction to Welsh nationalists. After Glyn Dwr’s defeat in 1410 he went into hiding in the March Borders region he knew so well, yet national identity did not seem to suffer from it. Despite the destruction of the rebellion, which could fairly be laid on Prince Owain’s hands, the Welsh maintained that after Glyn Dwr finished his wanderings he found the way to Merlyn’s cave where they both wait until Wales is ready to receive him again, a popular legend even today.[15] Recently ideas have been put forth, most notably by Alex Gibbons, that in his final years Owain disguised himself as a friar and a wandering bard. It is in this time, around 1415, and in this area, in the vicinity of Kentchurch, that the beginnings of the “Jack of Kent” legends began. These legends described a man blessed with supernatural foresight and abilities who had an affinity for outwitting the devil at numerous places throughout the whole of Wales.[16] These tales describe a wit and tenacity against the apparently overwhelming power of the Devil. In one tale, Jack has the Devil build him a bridge across a river in return for the soul of the first creature across it; upon its completion Jack produces a loaf of bread and throws it to the other side where a hungry dog emerges and chases it across the span.[17] Another has Jack appearing much later, during the Cromwellian revolt (1660), and supporting the Scottish troops resisting Oliver Cromwell’s troops by blowing a horn and turning a corn field into an array of reinforcements.[18] Gibbons illustrates that Scottish commanders successfully copied one of Glyn Dwr’s earliest victories, earned by hiding a substantial reserve in a brushy area, during the wars with Cromwell.[19] Most telling, legends still persist that a grey-cloaked sorcerer was buried at Kentchurch in the early 1400s.[20] It is here, the stories say, that Owain was about his morning walk and noted that the abbot was up early: “’No, sire” the abbot said, “it is you who are about too soon.’”[21] If the stories themselves failed to inspire, the tales of Glyn Dwr’s power within England were a source of pride; two hundred years later, the English playwright William Shakespeare still had used Owain as a bogeyman for the English: “I can command spirits from the vasty deep… Why I can teach you, cousin, to command the Devil,” says Glendower in council with Hotspur during Act 3 of Henry IV, Part I.[22]

Yet it is not antagonizing the English that is on the forefront of the Welsh nationalist minds. The legends of the sleeping Prince were fine for the story-fire and pub-hall, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century a growing movement began to quietly question Wales’ role within the United Kingdom. At first it started with looking at the power that the Church of England had over the everyday role of people in Wales. Small parishes outside of the Anglican hierarchy questioned the idea of how an English clergy ministering to a Welsh populace was in the interests of the country, to the point where the quarrelsome nature of Welsh religion became a defining characteristic of the people.[23] The debate between people in the church began to expand beyond the ecclesiastical and into the realm of nationalism. The realization that Wales possessed a unique language, culture, and history that was separate from England spawned several small movements throughout the 1800s. Since there had been few national institutions within Wales in the past, these new nationalists turned to the only point in time where a Welsh leader had proposed such organizations. Well started on a church identity, they moved to point two of Glyn Dwr’s plan; in 1872, a college was opened in the city of one of Glyn Dwr’s captured fortresses, Aberystwyth.[24] After it had been granted a royal charter in 1896, raising its status to the University of Wales, nationalists pressed on and managed to get the British Parliament to also construct the National Library within the University in 1902, as well as securing the funding of the National Museum in Cardiff in 1922.[25]

The above institutions provided a way to focus national sentiment, but one last piece of the Glyn Dwr’s hope for Wales remained: government by the Welsh themselves. The nineteenth century’s Welsh movements had concentrated on a cultural reinforcement of Welsh culture, centering on the distinctiveness of the language; the movements in the twentieth century focused instead on the steady expansion of the British governmental bureaucracy, especially after its explosive growth during the Welfare State years following the Second World War.[26] One of the primary driving forces in this effort was the Plaid Cymru political party, founded in 1923, which took the more active roles in the grass-roots campaign in the early referendums for a Welsh National Assembly in the 1960s.[27] These referendums failed because of the poor economic conditions pervading in Wales at the time; while interest in self government had a fair degree of support, Welsh at the time saw the Assembly as little more than an expensive debating society in an economic crunch, especially as it would have no legislative power.[28] During these campaigns, the symbols of Wales came out, the flags of St. David flew, the names of old princes revived, and the legends began to be told again.[29]

Even as the alliance between the English Labour party and Plaid Cymru were using the legends, including that of Owain Glyn Dwr, to promote a legislative path toward Glyn Dwr’s plan of a national assembly, another group used Glyn Dwr’s name to stage violent protests in the name of Welsh Nationalism. Calling themselves Meibion Glyn Dwr, the Sons of Glyn Dwr, this group was responsible for a series of arson attacks on homes and estates that were owned by English as vacation homes.[30] The influx of English into areas had the impact of driving up property values, preventing locals who were predominantly Welsh from owning land, and diluting the Welsh speaking population in those areas, an was then seen as a cultural attack.[31] The name was specifically chosen for its connection to the armed insurrection against the English, turning toward an established Welsh hero who remains a potent figure within the English fears in their collective subconscious.[32] Prince Rhys had seen his power erode between the infighting of his sons, and Llewellyn, while respected, had capitulated to Edward I; Glyn Dwr, on the other hand, had fought until the end, with some of the legends saying he died in a last, desperate battle in the March Borders, a far better image for an extremist group to adopt. Both Plaid Cymru and Meibion Glyn Dwr had similar aims, but the inherent Welsh distrust for violence that had built up in the rural areas for the last 200 years built on the patience that the return of Arthur and Glyn Dwr legends had instilled in them, caused the campaign of the Meibion Glyn Dwr arsonists to founder, and never even come close to approaching the level of other anti-English groups such as the Irish Republican Army. The efforts of Plaid Cymru were ultimately successful; through their efforts the Welsh Home Office was created in 1962, and the National Assembly for Wales opened in 1999, which had the federal powers of the Welsh Home Office passed to it in 2006.

The Assembly was the descendant of those early parliaments held by the upstart government of Owain Glyn Dwr, but the path to its formation was part of the whole of Glyn Dwr’s connection to the Welsh people. The studies of Welsh nationalism tend to focus on either his military or statesmanship skills; the legends he had adopted and generated around him are largely relegated to stories and plays. Only in recent times have scholars such as R. R. Davies, who was Chichele Professor of Medieval History at All Souls College in Oxford, begun to actively fuse all the various aspects of Glyn Dwr’s curious mix of heritage, political adeptness, leadership, and quirkiness to present a more complete picture of why his legacy connects so well to the Welsh people. Even at the end of his last defiant push for the independence of Wales, Owain Glyn Dwr laid the basis for a far quieter, but ultimately more successful, national movement by disappearing instead of being defeated. He left behind a plan for Welsh institutions, a legacy of a dream for home rule, and the legends that tied together a people through six hundred years of rule from London. But in the end, while waiting for Arthur or Glyn Dwr to rise, the people of Wales used the legends to raise themselves and bring about the changes Glyn Dwr had once dreamed of. The legends say that Arthur and Glyn Dwr will wait forever until Wales needs them again; the legends ensure that there will be a “Wales Forever” (Cymru am Bith).

Bibliography

Davies, Charlotte Aull. Welsh Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: The Ethnic Option and the Modern State. New York: Praeger, 1989.

Davies, John. A History of Wales. London: Penguin, 1993.

Davies, R. R. “Colonial Wales.” Past and Present 65 (Nov. 1974): 3-23.

Davies, R. R. The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr. New York: Oxford Press, 1995.

Gibbons, Alex. The Mystery of Jack of Kent and the Fate of Owain Glyn Dwr. Sparkford: Stutton, 2004.

Jones, R. Merfyn. “Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh.” The Journal of British Studies 31, no. 4 (Oct., 1992), pp. 330-357.

Morris, Jan. The Matter of Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country. New York: Oxford Press, 1984.

Pitchford, Susan. “Image Making Movements: Welsh Nationalism and Stereotype Transformation.” Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Spring 2001): 45-65.

Shakespeare, William. “Henry IV, Part One.” The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.3.1.html.

Williams, Glanmor. Clarendon Biographies: Owen Glendower. New York: Oxford Press, 1966.

I thought the pictures might be enough, but apparently no one wants to see pictures of birds and flowers. I love colors, it’s what held me in good stead in art class. I’m just so *hair toss* expressive. Besides, for years my nick name was “Sparrow”. Or more accuratlely “^Sparrow^”. The carets are wings, doof. You see, I had a buddy on EFNet’s #Babylon5 who went by the nick of “^Raven^”, and one day I wanted to tease him a bit. At Jim Burke Ford, the ravens would chase the sparrows first thing in the morning, and the sparrows would escape by flying full speed at chain link fences and tucking their wings and ballistically guiding themselves through the holes. The ravens would have to pull up due to a: they were too big for holes, and b: the top of the fence had constantine wire on it. So that day the channel conversation went something like this.

*D_Quixote is now ^Sparrow^
*^Raven^ looks at ^Sparrow^
*^Sparrow^ looks back, and hits the button setting up 37 linear miles of chain link fences in a haphazard pattern.
*^Raven^ squints.
*^Sparrow^ waggles his eyebrows.

and at this point it’s a lot like a coyote-roadrunner cartoon. For years I tried to get him to say “What about Raven?! WHAT ABOUT ME?!” like Scott Levy, but he never would, so on the Interwebz, it’s Sparrow, not Raven, as he was a lot more popular than I was on the channel. Oh, I had my moments like Top Ten lists and IRCWARS, but there was little doubt that Raven was one of the lifes of the party, and I was glad to ride the coattails inbetween creative droughts. I’d like to think I’m building similar rappor with other members of the CBT community, but I get the feeling, now that I’m older, that I’m more independant and comfortable. A lot of that came with just watching Raven and how he interacted, kinda like the big brother I never had. See you at Comic-Con, Raven, and you still can’t catch me!

I officially have no idea why I wrote this, this entry was going to be about something completely different. Stream-of-conciousness 4TW! TIME FOR THE POTATOES!

Despite Circuit City’s best attempts to keep the man down, I’m locked and loaded for all new photo fu!

Now, you would think that a company would want to make people feel welcome, to invite them back, to make them feel part of the family. OfficeMax does, hell, they didn’t have almost anything I wanted but I made sure to give them their cut of my get-a-new-camera-rig money in the form of three kick-ass high-speed-capacity SD cards. Loyalty was earned, loyalty was repaid. But I still needed the batteries for my rig, and I knew that Circuit City had them. Just one problem. THEY’RE AT CIRCUIT CITY! I swear a trip to the dentist scares me less than this. We walk in and drone-boy says his “hello”, despite that me and my girl are both walking in with rather odd bags. I’ve a camera case and she’s a courier bag that she uses as a purse. Well, we saunter over to where the stuff is, and naturally I’ve a question or two about the batteries, their types, and where did the cheap knock-offs go that were just on the wall three days afore.

But there’s no one there. I literally could have whipped out a box cutter and went to town on Kodak batteries and SanDisk media, and no one would have been the wiser. The cameras even point the wrong way there. Ten minutes we wait, trying to solve our little puzzle by ourselves. Finally I give up and we go marching out the door. I waltz through with my camera bag (containing a $350 camera, by the by) and not a word, but my girlfriend is stopped. Now it might be a case of a policy to check all “oversized bags”, but how would he know what was supposed to be in it… if he didn’t check it coming in? And if I walk in with a camera bag, is there no guarentee that it’s full of camera when I walk in? No, this seems clearly like a case of SWB. Shopping While Black. We get this no where else in Bakersfield, not even WalMart (home of high harrassment). But Circuit City goes out of their way to ignore us until we leave, then it’s FUCKING ON.

Circuit City, you could have made $100 in Kodak products off of me, but that money went to your competitor, Best Buy. They’re no angels over there, but they didn’t leave me alone for 10 minutes and they didn’t harrass my girl afterwards. You’ve made your last dime off of me.

…Bakersfield.com’s free public bloggers are. Whenever politics comes into the fore, you can be sure that several asshats from both side of the virtual isle step forward to put forth their own brand of vitrol, piss, vinegar, and out-and-out bullshit onto t3h intrawebz. Personally, I’m sick of it, so with this rant, I’m leaving Bakersfield.com, except for my stellar eatery reviews. See, B.Com has a rule about no personal attacks, and since this entry is going to be nothing but, hooray for me for following the rules.

The following asshats should.

Oh randomfactor, you think you’re so enobled and enlightened because you don’t believe in religion and you’re hip because you have a flying spaghetti monster avatar. Yet every post you make says with perfect clarity that you simply hate everyone you percieve as being stupider than you… actually the “you percieve…” part is an overqualification. Your avatar makes you as much of a symbol-stealing, brain-off sheeple as the most conservative idiot. Your long years of a total lack of respect for any viewpoint of your own as made the baby Osama proud.

AllRed, I understand you’re a product of a time in the past, a simpler time when things were black and white… and black didn’t count for much. I’m glad you’ve learned to use a computer and blog, but I’d invest in a Hacker Guide to help with your atrocious spelling and grammar. I’d help with your logic, but frankly not even Mr. Spock’s up to that challenge.

sfinboston, I’m glad that you’re all liberal and shit, but that doesn’t mean that all people who are “conservative” deserve to be painted with your big-ass brush. You’ve escaped from Bakersfield, yet feel the need to come back to remember why you left, apparently. Unfortunatly, we haven’t gained the same wisdom to figure out how to keep you out. It’s not your opinions, it’s the fact that you can’t play nice.

RoyTullis, you seem to enjoy baiting sf and Random. Now, whilst I enjoy a good debate (which is why my moderate ass has a radical anarchist and a old-school conservative corprocrat as friends) you seem to love wrestling in the mud with these two. I am thinking that it’s the intellectual equivilent of a homoerotic fantasy, you might want to rent RHPS to easy some of your inner closet.

These are your friendly neighborhood morons who make it impossible to have a civilized discussion on the local website. That and the fact that the site is run by asshats who insulted Charles Schulz to my face. It’s time to cut them loose, and stick to the good ol’ Xanga.