Post-Spring Break Report

Last week was excellent...75+ degree weather in Jacksonville, no rain. Wonderful.

A couple of days on the beach, a couple days shopping...just what I needed. I picked up the four books in the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series by Tad Williams. I'm about halfway through the first book, The Dragonbone Chair, and so far, it is doing a marvelous job of keeping my attention. Some of the writing has been a tad (pun not necessarily intended) repetative; no reason to leave this intriguing story by the wayside though.

I also picked up Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, a turn-based strategy game for the Gameboy Advanced for $9.99 at Best Buy...excellent game. I've logged in some 5-hours into it so far (thank goodness for 14 hour car rides), and I've had a devil of a time ignoring it for the tests I've had this week.

One last plug. Battlefield 2 for the PC is possibly the best value game I've ever purchased. The game costs around $10.00 on Amazon.com. The game is an excellent battlefield simulater...it pits the USMC (not quite Army...but I'll survive) against the Chinese against the Middle-Eastern Coalition in the possible-not-so-distant-future. Every match you complete online earns you points based on your kills and flag-captures in addition to other things. These points allow you to unlock various weapons and specials as you increase in rank.

There are also medals, honors, and ribbons awarded for accomplishing in-game tasks. For instance, I recently earned an ariborne ribbon for jumping out of a helicoptor and successfully landing after 10+ seconds.

Everyone in my house has purchased Battlefield 2 within the past couple of weeks and we just can't get enough. I've even comtemplated purchasing the expansion packs...

So anyway, now we're back into the swing of things with school and the Army.

PT has been successful so far this week. My room mate and I have decided to start putting serious supplement time into our PT, so I've started lifting and running on off days. A little more hurt, but the results are going to be good.

The battalion is going on FTX this weekend (field training exercise). It's patrolling stuffs and whatnot. I unfortunately will not be attending because I am technically not a part of the program nor will I be training to be an officer which is of course the purpose of the ROTC program. I would have liked to have had the experience, but no big deal. I'm doing to try to catch the second one this semester or both next fall before basic.

Now for a rant. Apparently, a polar bear cub recently born in a German zoo is causing quite a fuss. Apparently, Knut's (the bear cub) mother and brother ignored him after he was born. So the zoo officials have decided to raise the cub themselves. According to animal rights activist Frank Albrecht via the Bild Daily "Feeding by hand is not species-appropriate but a gross violation of animal protection laws...The zoo must kill the bear."

Now, I could be wrong, but aren't animal protection laws in place to...I dunno save animals from death-by-humans? Apparently not.

Polar bears are near extinction according to all the environmentalist reports that I've heard as of late...something about carbon dioxide building in the atmosphere causing their habitats to melt away or some bogus science like that...

In all seriousness, this story did make me laugh. Albrecht's logic is that if the mother ignores the baby, the zoo ought to obey nature's laws and put the cub down, completely ignoring the fact that this is a great opportunity for breeding the cub can provide down the road.

"They cannot domesticate a wild animal," Ruediger Schmiedel, head of the Foundation for Bears, told Der Spiegel Weekly in its Monday edition.
Um, how about the fact that it was going to be raised in a zoo anyway? How do you think most zoos feed their bears (or any of the animals for that rate)? They toss them the food at feeding time! I've watched it happen...fact.

Ok, enough said. I hold you all have a great weekend.
Peace out.

EDIT: Read my good friend's posting on the economy over at the Common Virtue. The link to the site is over in "Friends."