Category: Uncategorized

Tonight in downtown Lawrence is the latest installment of the Film Noir Outdoor Film Festival. They’re scheduled to show Notorious, projected on the side of a parking garage, with free seating in the adjacent empty lot.

Naturally, tonight we’re expected to get thunderstorms.

BOO.

This one may just sneak under the radar of the American people — I doubt the media will cover it extensively, as they’re too busy giving us 24-hour coverage of the floods, the election, and the death of Tim Russert (I’ve seen so much about him on the news recently, I started to wonder if he was, in fact, a Missing White Woman).

It seems that the original partners of the Iraq Petroleum Company — Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP — along with a number of smaller companies… are now about to be awarded no-bid contracts to operate Iraq’s oil fields, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationlization under Saddam Hussein.

Interesting, eh? The Iraqi Oil Ministry, which is still packed with American “advisers”, gave them these contracts — ignoring offers from over 40 other companies (including Russian, Chinese and Indian firms) in a no-bid process, which is extremely unusual for the industry.

So a brand new “democracy”, at a time when oil is at its highest prices, and could have fetched amazingly high bids from any company for the job……”just happened” to hand it’s extremely rich oil fields over to the very same companies that were driven out by Saddam.

Mission Accomplished. Heckuva job, Georgie.

Daily Word Count: 509

Favorite Passage:

With a piercing howl, the locomotive belched smoke and steam that trailed out behind the train, swirling and flowing like a great mane around the head of the cast iron temple-lion that formed the entire front of the engine. The trains of the Western Periphery & Frontier Rail were not the newest machines, nor in the best condition. The flags fluttering from the engine’s wheelhouse were tattered by the wind and faded from perhaps too many runs in the Western sun, and the paint on the passenger and cargo cars was worn and dusty, but the engine was kept in top working order, and the temple-lion figurehead on the prow of the locomotive was free of rust and polished to a dull sheen. The crews of the WP&F traditionally believed that the lion represented the guardian spirit of the train, and like all lions, it was a proud creature, so it was kept in good order, for luck on the journey.

Notes on the Day: Back at work on Far West (in novel form, instead of RPG). Not a lot of new words written (as the Daily Count testifies), but a fairly large chunk of older words deleted or rearranged for later use.

Given the amount of time that has passed since I last stepped into this particular world, I found it easy to get into the mix of wuxia and western — which is a good sign for continued progress. Stay tuned.