She can't even spell "Pearl Harbor" right!

Also, I wonder: do members of the military feel honored when (or perhaps I should say if; depends on the quality of the camo I suppose) they see civilians wearing camouflage?

2: no. I feel annoyed that they haven't got a proper crease on the sleeves and have left their shirt pockets unbuttoned. I have to restrain myself from going over to them and tearing them off a strip.

Nia's prior foster family passed along lots of frilly, bedazzled camouflage clothing. I've been subtly not putting it out as a clothing option for school and she's too sleepy in the mornings to notice, but it was perfect for playing outside at the farm and did indeed hide both grape stains and grass stains.

lots of frilly, bedazzled camouflage clothing.

The worst of both worlds!

In any case, "wearing camouflage" would imply that the student is going round with twigs stuck in his hat and green paint all over his face. If he's talking about clothing, then he's wearing DPM (or Multicam, or MTP, or MarPat, or whatever).

Please be respectful. This is our generations D-Day.

OMG, your student is al Qaeda?

This is perhaps appropriate.

Re: 7 -- Yes, I was wondering if anyone would quietly let her know how she ought to recalibrate her historical references (unlikely) and how that would received, if so.

6: Maybe by "wearing camouflage" she meant concealing her gender.

I have a 9/11 thing I should maybe post in the flickr feed for sheer WTF/11.

I'm a bit surprised that walking around a university in camo gear, especially on 9/11, wouldn't attract the attention of the campus police. But this is Texas, I suppose.

I'm a bit surprised that walking around a university in camo gear, especially on 9/11, wouldn't attract the attention of the campus police

They can't even see her.

lots of frilly, bedazzled camouflage clothing.

When I see this sort of thing, I enjoy visualizing the background it's supposed to blend into.

I'm a bit surprised that walking around a university in camo gear, especially on 9/11, wouldn't attract the attention of the campus police. But this is Texas, I suppose.

I don't think camo is viewed as threatening anywhere in the US.

Srsly, wine store?

I don't think camo is viewed as threatening anywhere in the US.

Suckers.

It is possible to put together an outfit incorporating camo that makes me, at least, want to move to another car of the subway train. Camo garments, no problem. A full camo outfit with a lot of military-looking accoutrements, but not an actual uniform? I start wondering if you're planning to shoot up a heavily populated location. But that particular look is something I've seen once every couple of years, not as a regular thing.

I would certainly be surprised to see someone who was clearly a civilian walking around my place of work in camouflage, and I might think that person was mentally deficient, but I wouldn't be threatened.

I wear camo to work. Outside of the office, it appears as business-casual, but at the office, you can't tell I'm there.

19: Even just a cap or a t-shirt or something like that?

That is, I took "Wearing camouflage today" to be her indicating that she was wearing a piece of clothing with a camouflage print on it, not that she was in full jungle warfare gear.

21, no, that would be normal thing to have in a closet.

Way to make our new commenter Fox feel welcome, Cryptic Ned.

16: and "Maslow 6" is such a great name for a wine store. They're top of my hierarchy of needs!

When I see this sort of thing, I enjoy visualizing the background it's supposed to blend into.

Military clothing used to be all about the frilly bedazzlement. Look at some of the stuff that the Light Brigade charged in. Or the Swiss Guard.

26: Then they invented improved methods of killing people at a significant distance.

9 made me realize that I had read "D-Day" as "Pearl Harbor" in the OP. I don't even know how I did that. Apparently my unconscious is occasionally charitable.

26, 27: The shouting-and-killing-people industries haven't forgotten the need to look good while concealed.

14, 26: actually bedazzled camouflage has been used even as recently as WWII. Not sure if that was frilly, though.

Please be respectful. This is our generations D-Day.

OMG, your student is al Qaeda?

Or German?

I don't even know how I did that.

Perhaps you read comment 1?

30. Yes but I doubt if Heebie's student is actually a battleship, intriguing though it would be were this so.

Guards at GTMO wear desert camo. And escorts. Well, some wear a lightish green camo -- it doesn't seem to be related to service, or function.

34: It contrasts nicely with bright orange.

Well, axiomatically, everyone here is actually a Culture GSV Mind (of a more or less Eccentric type)*, so why shouldn't heebie's students be something similar but slightly dopier, say ROUs?

*except neb, who is a large black sphere of unknown origin approximately 2,000 km in diameter.

Didn't Petraeus visit the Oval Office in full desert camo? Isn't there some protocol regarding dress in the presence of the C-in-C?

Guards at GTMO wear escorts? Damn you, Obama. Don't Ask Don't Tell was our last hope.

I used to wear army fatigue pants, combat boots, a kung fu jacket and a black trenchcoat. I either looked scary or brutally nerdy. That was before 9/11, though. It was in honor of arbor day.

39: I either looked scary or brutally nerdy.

Hmmm.

Whenever Joey wears camo, I pretend I can't see him. For some reason, the rest of my family is tired of this joke.

Hawaii always comes to me for help getting dressed and says "Put this on" and I always say "I think it's too small" as I pretend to start putting it on. My family too is tired of this joke, or at least Jammies is.

Actually, I'm trying to remember if I've ever seen an Army person in desert camo, or if it's just the Navy. Both wear green. Prisoners wear white, a sort of buff, or orange, depending. I'm not sure they still wear orange, actually.

33:Neither are these people:

http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2010/03/31/computer-vision-dazzle-makeup/

http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/15/student-thwarts-face-detection-software-with-cv-dazzle-makeup/

It was in honor of arbor day.

Fuckers stole Nebraska's thunder by jamming Earth Day on top.

I honestly can't stand it when my colleagues, in their facebook feeds, mock our students. But it doesn't really bother me when you do it, heebie. I'm not sure what accounts for the difference in reactions.

Anyway, in case people haven't already seen it, Biden's remarks today (the transcript is 1/3 of the way down) were really quite beautiful and provide what seems to me an object lesson in the power of genuine empathy versus ersatz sympathy.

46.2: For real.

I honestly can't stand it when my colleagues, in their facebook feeds, mock our students. But it doesn't really bother me when you do it, heebie. I'm not sure what accounts for the difference in reactions.

Actually, I don't like it when I see it in my FB feed, either. It definitely feels disrespectful to do so there. (And obviously it is here too but I'm a jerk but I'm glad it doesn't bother you, Wafer.)

I'm glad it doesn't bother you, Wafer

I just wanted to reassure you that I'm not judging you. About this.

I kind of want to post the status update:
"I have a nagging feeling like I'm forgetting something today..." but I'm chickenshit in real life.

"So many moments that make you think in early September. Yesterday was Jon Hamm's Dick Day, and now this."

Well, axiomatically, everyone here is actually a Culture GSV Mind (of a more or less Eccentric type)*

How flattering!

39: did you top it off with a fedora?

I wore a fedora often around 1987-1989 and Jammies teases me about it in a way that reveals that he doesn't think fedoras were ever stylish, on par with his terrible thick nerd glasses, and it drives me nuts. TOTALLY DIFFERENT. I got kissed at summer camp because of that fedora.

You wore a fedora to camp?

Yes?

What, cool kids can't go to camp?

I just doesn't seem like camp attire, at least not in the applicable use of the word "camp."

Not outdoors camping. Sleeping in dorms summer camp.

I wore a fedora every day when I went to camp camp. I didn't stand out because some of the camp camp kids were a lot more camp at that particular camp.

59: Then I withdraw the question. I just assumed camp involved a lake, some dirt, and trying to roast hot dogs over a fire started using diesel fuel.

I keep thinking the title of this thread should be sung as a parody of R. Kelly's abhorrent musical atrocity "I'm a Flirt". Bearing in mind that the song uses "I'm a" to mean "I'm going to".

There's no shame in wearing a fedora, although I don't think wearing one ever netted me any kisses.

I thought GSVs didn't go Eccentric very often. Ulterior, maybe. Anyway, you have to be pretty out there to reach Eccentric status; maybe Emerson and apo, at most. Halford is an ROU (not dopey, just differently purposed).

I definitely wore a fedora every day through some of the years I went to camp. I don't remember if I wore it at camp, though, which is weird. I must have, right? I wore it every day. I do remember getting in fights with kids who were trying to bully me at camp, so that certainly argues for my having been wearing it.

Yeah, well I wore a fedora and a trench coat. Regular Humphrey Bogart, I was.

One kid at my high school wore a fedora. People whistled the Indiana Jones theme when he was coming or going. He also wore these long white untucked dress shirts.

What's the vibe in the US vis-a-vis the US involvement in the creation of al-Qaeda? It is something that ever comes up anywhere near the mainstream? Is there any embarrassment regarding this or is it just swept under the carpet laid out for the jingoism parade?

Also the lion animated GIF in the other thread is something else. Why hasn't anyone commented on that?

My dad wore a fedora, but not ironically or anything.

68.2: The lion hugging the guy? I was cooing quietly to myself over it.

To be completely accurate, I've never asked him if he was wearing hats ironically or not. And I'm not 100% certain that any of his hats were all fedoras. Whatever hats people used to wear before the kids started with that crazy rock and roll music, he just kept wearing.

The twins that I thought would arrive a few weeks ago were born today! 6.8 lbs and 6.11 lbs, and the parents are doing fine.

Rory wears a fedora, so it must be stylish.

I love the idea of being a Culture mind. Time to pick out a cool name. How about: Balding 47-year-old man in a basement?

We describe the look as fedorable, because we are clever like that. (Stole the coinage from her ex-boyfriend, to give proper attribution.)

37. Ooooh. That one bugged the crap out of me. he was dressed as if he came right from the battlefield in Manassas. He had a long flight from Afghan and probably had time for a shower. He could have taken the time to change out of cammies before he meets his Commander in Chief at the White House.

+istan

Virginia isn't that much like central Asia.

46.2 Oh wow. That's truly touching.

I hadn't known until just now that Adnan Latif was cleared by the 2009 task force. (These things are not made public.) What kind of asshole appeals a ruling ordering the release of someone you have already decided you don't need to keep in your jail?

Of course Bush, Rumsfeld and Brown are to blame. But they are not the only ones.

I'm not going to go the full mcmanus, but I'll be responding to fundraising appeals for the next while suggesting they call whoever it was they were pandering to by keeping this man in jail.

One kid at my high school wore a fedora. People whistled the Indiana Jones theme when he was coming or going

Awesome. Rocking a fedora, and having theme music. Talk about living the dream.

I presume I've mentioned before that I have an abiding hatred of Pete Docerty (formerly bafflingly high profile rock star junkie in the UK) for making it impossible to wear a fedora or trilby and not come across as a twat? I love fedoras and trilbies and he's ruined them for everybody, the bastard.

Doherty. Bastard even messes with my spelling.

80, CC, could you link to relevant reading material re. Adnan Latif?

jms, I'll look a bit later -- can you send me an email? The DC Circuit opinion is frankly shocking, and plenty was written about the case when that came out, and when the Supreme Court denied cert. I can't send people to Lawfare, but you could look at Scotusblog. And, I think Andy Worthington will probably have something up already.

(Cert was denied maybe 3 months ago.)

Thanks, CC. I found materials on the sites you mention in 84.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Farhan_Abd_Al_Latif

A little more. Some of his poetry was published in the gtmo anthology.

(and if you send me an email, I'll send you the statement his lawyers put out today)

88. Sent, thanks!

I'm not going to go the full mcmanus

Something like the full monty, the naked uncivil disservice

90 made me laugh. Now mcmanus is Robert Carlyle in my head.

80: wait, somehow I missed that. Which article is it in?

I don't think camo is viewed as threatening anywhere in the US.

That depends. Are you a non-union strikebreaker? Or a deer?

83: there's also Marcy Wheeler, www.emptywheel.net

||
Further evidence that the Joe Biden persona invented by The Onion is rooted in true fact. From the pool report of Biden's visit to a Pennsylvania fire station:

Somehow he then got into a discussion of racing. "I'm a frustrated --" and then he stopped himself and said he shouldn't say so in front of the pool but went ahead anyway, "dragster." As your pool was then ushered away, Vpotus was saying something about the feel of the road.

The fedora thing is further evidence for the thesis that Heebie is actually Blossom.

I don't think Fedoras were ever actually cool in the 80s-very early 90s but they were a sort of acceptable signifier of quirky if you were a teen.

74: LOU Challenges in Personal Hygiene

The fedora thing is further evidence for the thesis that Heebie is actually Blossom.

I think you mean Joey from the Zit Remedy.

I had a beautiful giant black felt hat with a portrait brim in the late 80s, a present from a friend, that I never wore because I didn't think I was quirky enough to carry it off. I was peculiar, but not the kind of quirky that entitled one to hats. (Or so I thought at the time.)

Speaking of 9/11, and the legacy thereof:

http://www.bagnewsnotes.com/2012/09/james-nachtweys-911-eleven-years-later-like-night-and-day/

I wore a battered old blue cord worker's cap for a while in the late eighties and early nineties, then I lost it somewhere. It had been a gift from a coal miner uncle of mine. Loved that thing.

that was me

There's something slightly sinister about the shift in the photos in 100.

100 is interesting. The newer versions of the photos look more apocalyptic. They carry the mythic weight of the event better than the old versions. The new ones are closer to the way current CGI mantasy films depict epic events.

Photos of people being killed by a tank in Syria

100 is interesting, because my own memory of 9/11 is that it was a beautiful day in New York. Blue sky, warm early-autumn sun. And the original photos reflect that, but the revised versions don't.

re: 106

Oh, yes. They've been deliberately manipulated to create a false impression. One that may indeed 'carry the mythic weight of the event better than the old versions' but is dubious in the extreme.

It's something you see more and more with recent news photographs, which often seem like someone is running them through an 'HDR/Michael-Bay' preset and where there's something unnatural, bordering on untruthful about the look of them. But retrospectively doing it to 11 year old photographs is an interesting, and depressing move.

"When think about that day, I'll always remember the orange-faced firefighters digging through the teal wreckage, their orange trucks lonely against the clear, teal sky."

My thoughts exactly.

Retouching to make sure that images told the right message was a habit of early communists. They also wanted ubiquitous surveillance and to eradicate the family kitchen. Late capitalism is making communist fantasies a reality, but not quite the way they hoped.

At least they didn't use Instagram's 1977 filter.

107, 108: More Onion prophecy, I guess.

Clearly we've now decided that "About suffering they were always wrong/ The Old Masters..."

this is what i think of when i think of people wearing camo to work.

Eddie (reading): It's a hot night. The mind races. You think about your knife; the only friend who hasn't betrayed you, the only friend who won't be dead by sun up. Sleep tight, mates, in your quilted Chambray nightshirts.

On the same topic, but less sinister:

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/menk-by-john-doran-orange-yeah-thats-right

Doran has a great turn of phrase.

Here's me outside Abra-kebab-ra in Dalston with a Hipstamatic setting that recreates the atmosphere of a twilit Autumn in 1972 as it filters through the leaves of an oak tree in the New Forest as taken on Jacques Cousteau's fucking Lomo.

Here's me buying an Orthodox Russian birthing kimono from I Dream Of Wires near Brick Lane taken with an Instagram app which makes all subjects look like post-coital Donald Sutherland in 1981 ...

like post-coital Donald Sutherland!

A singer-songwriter whose house concerts I've attended wrote a song about the Sept. 11 attacks that juxtaposes the blueness of the sky in NY that day with the horror of the events. As far as that songs on the topic go, it's pretty good.

115 is great.

So they talked about 9/11 at Iris' school on Tuesday*, and I gather that she asked AB to see pictures or video or whatever. I missed the start of the conversation, just hearing AB say that she never wanted to see images of it again.

Oddly, what her teacher did was to have them recreate his 9/11 experience, which was an evacuation of his college (!) lecture hall. No idea where he was located, but I suspect the message was supposed to be that even people not at Ground Zero still felt threatened and responded (AB, working downtown for the City, was sent home).

* AFAIK, the first time anyone's really told her anything about it - maybe last year she overheard the news and asked, but we would have been vague. She's now 8, in 3rd grade

BTW, in the pics in 100, the first pair are the only ones that aren't duplicate - the new one is actually a different shot (although obviously less than a second apart). It's a better shot for various reasons, and the detail is much clearer, but the foreground cross is a bit much.

My daughter was in 10th grade. Her teacher told the kids that their parents were under attack, had either been killed or not, and that they'd have to wait until they got home at the end of the day to find out.

120: I blame teachers unions.

115 is really outstanding.

I was going to say that 118 is insane, then I read 120. What kind of maniac does that sort of thing?

To be fair, "either been killed or not" is obviously true regardless of the circumstances.

123 someone not afraid of a bunch of crying teenagers.

I was going to say that 118 is insane

Yeah, I really need to follow up on that. By all accounts said teacher is excellent, so it's not like I think he likely did something insane, or even unsound, but from what I've heard, I wonder.

8-y.o.s, unfortunately, are not the best reporters (nor are the people employed by the Washington Post to report on things, but that's irrelevant).

re: 117 and 122

He writes about music for The Quietus [excellent UK multiple-authored music blog, sort of like a less twatty Pitchfork]:

http://thequietus.com/users/3

It's in a different mode from his Vice columns, though.

sort of like a less twatty Pitchfork

More proof that that the analogy ban's unless-it-uses-the-descriptor-"twatty" exception was a goo call.

"good call", dammit.

Although Twatty Goo could make a good drag name.

Twatty goo, little pig. Twatty goo.

131: Another DDG variation?

Heh. At 128 and 131. Actual out-loud chuckle.