Random image!

Work on Monday was pretty unexciting. While I was waiting for the bus, everyone else was complaining about the bus stop that got eliminated. One of the other people asked the bus driver what had happened to the bus stop. This driver, who wasn’t the same driver who told us about the stop on Thursday, had no idea what we were talking about. So either the transit company, the drivers, or the transit authority has no idea what’s going on. Figures.

I suppose lots of people saw the picture of the guy with an AR-15 slung over his back near the place where the President was speaking on Monday. While he had the legal right to do that, it was also a pretty dumb thing to do. The media didn’t help; they called this semiauto .223 an “assault rifle”, which is a really imprecise way of describing a large and diverse class of firearms. (The AR-15 looks like an M-16, and operates very similarly, but one trigger pull = one shot fired with an AR-15. M-16s can do full-auto or 3-shot burst, unlike the civilian versions.)

Haven’t gotten that far into the book about West Point in the 1800s. The part about the Seminole War was interesting, though. That’s a mostly-forgotten small war in the early 1800s, almost entirely fought within the swamps of central Florida. Relatively few people died during this war, but the soldiers fighting it said that it was the worst experience of their lives. Lousy leadership, inadequate supplies, terrible weather, and not knowing where the enemy was made morale suffer tremendously.