Post Super Bowl Valentine's Day

A very special Monday post in which we begin with...What Will's Watching, Super Bowl LVI. Were we not entertained? A solid game with tonnes of tension at the end. For reasons unexplainable we wanted the LA Rams to win. We felt bad for Rams wide receiver Odell Beckam when he got hurt. We felt great for Ram's QB Matt Stafford who spend a decade suffering in Detroit.  We have no major coaching criticisms. The halftime show was a boring disaster in which they tried to cram as many acts into fifteen minutes as they could. It wasn't about the show but about nostalgia. For an example of a good halftime show, see The Weekend last year or dare we say, Prince in Super Bowl XLI performing Purple Rain in the rain. The commercials were remarkably un-woke. 3/4

A special LA Rams Monday not Metal:

For most American NFL fans this is truly the beginning of winter. There's nothing but six weeks of dreary weather and nothing to look forward to on the weekend. We don't care about basketball and have only a passing interest in the NHL. Sorry, moose eaters. 

We were working with The Great Nuclear War of 1975 MS and had major technical problems. Man, one can take all the pills one wants and still get worked into a rage so bad one wants to rip the refrigerator out of the wall and toss it into the back yard. The formatting seems to have been resolved. 

This blog anticipated that Roll Canada would be the last bit of Soviet collusion we wrote for some time, maybe ever. But there's been no invasion yet...comrades. We'll plan on writing something this week. What to do? We write about what we think is interesting. Here's our post-Super Bowl article from last year.

Over the weekend we boxed up more of the library. That's 30 banker's boxes in all. We'll need 30 more. After carrying the books to the utility room post Ida (cunt), and having to put them on the remains of our book cases when a bad storm was coming and we weren't sure if the sump would work, and finally stacking them in the corner, the books are all jumbled without rhyme or reason. We're tempted to sell them to one of those outfits that resells books by the yard for decorative purposes. We did find the Saddam and Kremlin books and set them aside. We think we'll toss the print on demand books we used for Pershing in Command. These were hundred year old out of print books whose copyright had expired and frankly, an eyesore. 

Below, the Stroock's Books Valentine's Day Spectacular, Freak me baby, awww yeah!:

Powell on a Russian Wednesday

In which we collude with the Soviets using Colin Powell as cover: 'Colin Powell died October 18, killed by Covid-19. In truth he was already a very sick man and being treated for multiple myeloma, a kind of cancer that attacks the immune system. Despite being fully vaccinated, Powell was extremely vulnerable to Covid. America in 2021 being a nation lacking in empathy, partisans are using Powell’s death to argue over vaccine efficacy. he partisans will argue over Colin Powell's legacy as well. At his death, Powell is probably best remembered as President George W Bush’s secretary of state. In 2003 Powell made the Bush Administration’s case for war with Iraq before the United Nations General Assembly. He argued that Saddam Hussein possessed vast stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction and this could not be allowed in the post-9/11 world. We know now this was untrue.' Click on through....

Back in the 90's, plenty of GOPs wanted Powell to run for president. It's possible he could have won in 1996. He would have done better than Bob Dole. But Powell never had a presidential run in him. We doubt he was politically tough enough to weather a campaign. Powell spent most of his career being revered. How would he have responded to the Clinton/Gore attack machine? Politically speaking now, this blog doesn't think Powell was tough enough to win a presidential race. On the campaign trail he would have been Jeb Bush in uniform.

We are working on the Australian F-111 scenes in The Final Storm. Target: Svobodnyy (SS-11 missiles with a range of 11,000 kilometers.) We are writing and watching tons of F-111 interviews and docs on Youtube. As one of the characters remarks, the Assies and Yanks are taking orders from Japanese AWACs controllers. We have no idea how this raid goes. The 'vark' can carry some really big bombs, like 4,000 pounds. They could at least damage silo caps, no? 

Will Writes: We mentioned yesterday that Colin Powell is a character in the World War 1990 series. We wrote the man as we saw him and did the same with the rest of the Bush admin characters that transfixed us during Desert Storm. We didn't over think things. We didn't pour through memoirs and bios to learn how Dick Cheney liked his steak, or why Paul Wolfowitz wore socks with holes in them.* Like we said, we wrote 'em how we saw 'em. An Amazon reviewer claims to have worked with these men and says we nailed their personalities. Who can say? It didn't take a genius to figure out John Sununu was a conceited jerk. As for Jim Baker, he's a son-of-a-bitch, the kind of man any good admin needs. For The Great Nuclear War series, we've gone deeper into Rockefeller's personality as readers will see the man more intimately. He liked art, women**, couldn't remember names, demanded subordinates offer solutions to problems, and would do work in the car outside the officer before heading to work. Our overall message here is don't over think. Just write.

What Will's Watching: Loudermilk. Two episodes in. Ron Livingston (Office Space, Band of Brothers) plays a former rock journalist. In the 90's he was totally a thing, riding the tour bus with Nirvana, Pavement, REM and the like, and looking the part. Now he's four years sober and burnt out. Filled with Gen-X cynicism and nihilism. This is Gen-X in middle age, a Gen-X Archie Bunker with wit.  Why yes, yes we will finish this season. Why do you ask?

*You're just gonna have to look that up.

** Just look up how he died. Heh.

We're Getting Paranoid [Getting?-Ed]

So this blog has been getting some traffic lately to some weirdly specific older posts about the Charlottesville incident, Richard Spencer, our Kek flag, the Capitol Hill Mostly Peaceful Protest, etc etc. This blog has been scanned before by plagiarism software* and some media 'anti-disinformation' outfit. One of our articles was even mentioned in a report about 'Russian disinformation'.**It's almost as if someone where trying to connect us to something. We've always been a little paranoid about our writing for Inforos. We've wondered, 'What if the Feds decide it's collusion?'

We were pondering this very question when, we swear this is true, a big black SUV drove past, went around the cul-de-sac, and then stopped in front of the house.

'It's happening!' we shouted.

'Huh?' Mrs. Stroock replied.

A man got out with a fruit arrangement a day late for Valentines Day. We took it, thanked him, and then checked for listening devices. 

This William Westmoreland is an interesting fellow. Confident, competent and driven but not to the point of arrogance or false modesty. Westmorland studied under Omar Bradly at West Point and came to admire him greatly even though they had totally different command styles. He was, as it was once said, groomed for the top slot in the corporation almost from the beginning. Regular  and general officers all saw it. One even remarked, 'He's going to be Chief of Staff one day.'  Westmoreland commanded an arty regiment in North Africa and pretty much single handedly stopped Rommel at Kasserine. 

So after Mitch McConnell slammed Trump, Trump slammed Mitch McConnell right back in the most Trumpian way possible. Trump also promised to support MAGA candidates in the primaries. So no, Trump isn't going away. And why should he?  A recent Morning Consult Poll shows 52% of the GOP would vote for Trump in the 2024 primary. That can change of course, but wow. The war for control of the party between the GOP-E and the GOP base is over and the GOP-E has lost. Bigly.

This blog doesn't know if Trump should run in 2024. Maybe it's time to move on. We're open to someone like Ron DeSantis, who fights MAGA but not MAGA style. Here's our fear, though. The GOP will nominate DeSantis but Trump brings the house down at the RNC and we'll think, coulda had Trump. This blog councils patience.

Here's a good Substack theme: Ronald Reagan. We have an article titled Reagan's War on Terror, another on the Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters, a third on Khaddaffi....ahhh that takes us back. We used to have a Khaddaffi Duck T-shirt. We can't find it on the internet because we can't figure out how it was spelled. In the above mentioned articles we used 'Qadhafi'.  

Yesterday the temperature reached the high 40's. So we shoveled off the back deck and let the sun do the rest. After the gym, we cracked opened a bottle of Cavalliere d'Oro and lit up an Arturo Fuente Short Story, our first since 28 December.  We damn near had a religious experience out there.

*Accuse us. We're laughing at the superior intellect. 

**They didn't give proper attribution. Fuckers.