The book I was reading on the bus on Monday, The Pentagon’s New Map: Blueprint for Action, has an odd word choice in it. The author constantly refers to combat forces who are actively shooting enemies or blowing up buildings as “Leviathan”, and refers to military forces who are building infrastructure, acting as police, and winning the hearts and minds of an occupied territory as “Sysadmin Corps”.

Of course, in my line of work, sysadmins are the people who make sure the computers keep running. A real life Sysadmin Corps would have to include a bunch of people like the woman pictured to the right. I’m not really far enough into the book to judge it, though, since it had a long preface and intro.  The author’s main thesis seems to be that the USA spends a lot of money on shooting bad guys, and comparatively little money on making sure the toilets work and the roads are clear once the bad guys have been shot.

The author has a point.  However, I’m not sure that his proposed solution for all this would ever work.  He thinks there should be yet another Cabinet level department, the “Department of Global Security”, which would be in charge of creating a framework for nation building and world peace in the future sitting on their fat butts and getting paid for writing presentations. The first is what should happen, the second is what will happen. Well, the author has spent most of his life in close proximity to government, so he probably is not as aware of how horribly it can fail as the average taxpayer is.

No time to put a picture here.  Anyway, the big excitement on Sunday was going to the Braves vs. Diamondbacks baseball game.  I remembered that I didn’t have my employee badge right after I’d gotten on the freeway, so I had to pay for parking and park farther away than I’d planned.  The ballpark was pretty nice; very few obstructions and lots of video screens everywhere so you never missed anything.  The concession stands all had TVs tuned to the broadcast behind the counters, so if you were waiting in line for a hot dog, you could still watch the game.

The D-Backs pitching was pretty terrible, and their offense was also fairly lackluster.  It was 9-1 Braves when I left at the top of the 7th.  Then I found out that they totally change the traffic pattern downtown when there’s a baseball game, so I had to take the long way back to the freeway.  Ah well.

Then went to Nathan’s place, where we had Rock Band (Classic Rock Track Pack).  That was interesting. Almost everyone was there, including Trevor, who hasn’t been going to trivia for the last couple of months.  Caught up on everyone’s lives.  I don’t know how many times “That’s what she said!” was repeated, but it was a lot. Spencer’s going to be teaching theatre to 7..12 year-old kids at a summer camp soon.  He will learn how much patience he has, that’s for sure.