Pomo sentiments

This caption from a NYT photo has an ironic quality: Areas Taken Must Be Secured. It's like the title of a Guided By Voices song.

Also entertaining was this up-close-n-personal piece about a Marine leiutenant who is the company joker:

He seems more cheerful as the surroundings become more miserable. The smell of the camp's trash burning wafted over his cot, and he laughed, imagining telling the boys at home: "No, literally, we lived in a dump."

One of his best friends is in the unit, First Lt. Matt Neely. The two met a year ago, and get together regularly at home in Jacksonville, N.C., golfing on Saturdays, having afternoon beers. Lieutenant Neely is short compared to the stocky Deuce, and other officers have been known to call them "Gilligan and the Skipper." Before the war, they found distraction in the long wait in Kuwait by constantly arguing: What, say, would be the best song to listen to while crossing the Iraqi border? They threatened each other, drew their K-Bar knives on each other so often that no one around them paid attention. ...

They crossed the border. Both selected morbid songs by indecipherable heavy-metal bands mostly unknown outside Germany, with choruses like "Let the bodies hit the floor."

In another piece that shows how difficult it is to write satire these days, a piece today in The Onion headlined Bush Thought War Would Be Over By Now reads like straight news. Well of course he thought it would be over by now.