Mostly Game

Got this link from a friend and it is a chock full of life-saving information. It is from the blog of Mario Vittone, a marine safety expert for the Coast Guard. I recommend everyone read it, including parents.

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

Apparently, I don’t look at my blog while on vacation, heh. A belated Happy New Year to everyone. We had a good time, with our friend Marty visiting for his birthday, chili fest part two, and gaming. We actually played a $5 game of hold-em with five people, which was really fun since we haven’t played in two years (or longer?).

Out with the old, in with the new!

Merry Christmas, or if you prefer, Happy Holidays. Looks like we’re going to have a white Christmas here with a NWS blizzard warning in effect for the next 12 hours — which is fine with me since I’m not working and we’re not driving anywhere for the next few days. Woot!

The official fundraiser closed on Wednesday. The Marine Team won for the first time, cruising past the $35K goal with a day to spare. Thanks to everyone who blogged or contributed to this great effort.

I think I may join the Navy or Air Force team next year, as they were significantly behind the Marines and Army. I need to research some potential donors ahead of time, I think — in it to win it

Oh, I also forgot to link up to the 2009 birthday message from the Commandant and Sergeant Major. Here it is.

Tomorrow, Nov 10th, is the 234th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. Bob Parsons has already posted his annual “birthday card” to the USMC on GoDaddy.com:

USMC 234th Birthday Tribute

He also wrote in his email announcement:

I’d also like to extend this tribute to all of the men and women serving in all branches of the U.S. Military – Army, Navy, Air Force or Coast Guard. Thank you all for your tireless dedication to keeping our country safe.

Bob Parsons

Reposted from Villainous Company:

Tomorrow is the Marine Corps Birthday. One of the traditions we keep to in the Corps is the Commandant’s Birthday message – it is played at every Marine Corps Ball and at any place where Marines gather all over the world. This is last year’s message from the Commandant and Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. It makes the point that Marines have been at the forefront of the war on terror for over a quarter of a century:

The Marine team is within sight of our 35K goal, but we need your help to get there! I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the birth of our Corps than to boost the Marine team to its first victory ever.

Valour IT provides adaptive technology to help severely wounded vets recover faster, establish a support system, and regain their independence. Since the program began, every single dollar raised by Valour IT has been used to provide:

• 4,100+ voice activated laptops
• over 30 Wii systems
• and nearly 100 handheld GPS devices to wounded vets at:

• • Balboa Naval Hospital
  • Naval Hospital, Camp Pendleton
  • Brooke Army Medical Center
  • Robert E. Bush Naval Hospital
  • Madigan RMC
  • Walter Reed AMC
  • National Naval MC (Bethesda)
  • and VA centers nationwide.

The men and women of the United States military have given their all to defend the values we Americans hold dear. For the price of a few sixpacks of beer or some dip and chips, you can tell them that you honor their sacrifices and their service. Please give generously. They did:

GO MARINES!!!

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The following is an excerpt from an article about female marines from a 2005 issue of Glamour magazine, that I got from one of the Marine Team blogs. Unfortunately, the link to the full article is dead and I have been unable to locate it on Glamour’s site using the search function. It illustrates that (a) female marines are still marines, and (b) “Every Marine is a rifleman.”

From the second truck in the convoy, Marine Sergeant Kent Padmore heard a screeching of tires and an explosion, then his own vehicle braked to a stop so quickly that all dozen or so men in it went tumbling to the floor. When Padmore sat up, he saw the women’s truck in flames about 250 yards away. A flight medic back in Miami, Padmore, then 38, had been good friends with Saalman, Clark and Humphrey.

Immediately he jumped from his truck and ran toward the burning seven-ton, barely aware of the bullets zinging past him; the insurgents had staged an ambush to coincide with the car bomb.

There’s no way, he thought as he ran. They’re all dead. He stopped – it was useless to continue. But then he pushed forward. Keep going, he told himself. He thought of how Clark couldn’t wait to go backpacking with her son when she got back to the U.S., about tough-as-nails Humphrey, and about Saalman, the music-loving beauty. It can’t be, he said to himself, and kept running as fast as he could.

Just as Padmore reached the scene, he saw Saalman staggering toward him, her charred, flayed hands held up before her, her eyes vacant in a blackened face. She’d lost her rifle during the explosion. “Sally, pull yourself together,” he said. “You are not going to die. I promise: You are not going to die. But we need some leadership.”

He watched her expression change instantly from shock to rage. “Somebody give me a fucking weapon!” she screamed. “I need a fucking weapon!” The adrenaline pumping through her body obviously masked her pain. Padmore handed her his own M16 and headed off to find other wounded marines, with the sound of Saalman firing her gun toward the insurgents ringing in his ears.
( … )

On the evening of June 23, as word of the disaster spread, a freckle-faced young female marine stationed in Ramadi, a city near Fallujah, had approached Colonel Robert Chase, who was helping run crisis control at the command center, to say she urgently needed to talk to him. He told her the timing wasn’t good, but she insisted.

Reluctantly, Chase stepped outside his office to meet with her — and in the hallway, he encountered about 10 more female marines. “Sir, we know we’ve had women killed,” said the marine who’d first approached him. “We have to replace them — we want to go.”

Chase was stunned. “I’ll be candid, it was one of the most emotional and profound moments for me,” he says. “I don’t often work with women as an infantry officer, but at that moment, there were no women there — there were just marines.”

Please consider donating to Valour-IT on the right, or better yet, if you have a blog/website, join the team!

I’m trying to drum up new recruits for Project Valour-IT today. The daily report from Villainous Company is not surprising — we are ahead of the curve on our fundraising goal, but the rate of donations is dropping off as the initial wave of people recruited have done their good deed. We need more websites and blogs so we can get more donations to our worthy cause.

So, I’ve done something today that is pretty out of the ordinary for me. I’ve solicited other bloggers to join the cause, and I’m not just talking people I actually know. I’ve also contacted some (relatively) well-known gaming bloggers that don’t know me from Adam. Hopefully, I’ll get a few recruits and even more donations out of this effort.

If you are reading this and want to join the cause, here is the link for the Marine team sign-up: http://soldiersangels.org/index.php?page=join-marines-team

Edit: heh, I submitted a form to Olivia Munn. She’s an Air Force brat and has mentioned supporting the troops in the past. If she or Bob Parsons comes through, we’ll be rocking. Unless she joins the Air Force team. Well, bad for the Marine team, awesome for our injured soldiers

He might not be that famous by name, actually, but as the founder of GoDaddy.com Bob Parsons has probably had a bigger impact on the Internet than any other Marine. In just a few years GoDaddy has become the biggest domain registrar in the world, three times as big as its nearest competitor.

As a former Marine, Vietnam vet, Purple Heart recipient, and IT entrepreneur, I thought he’d make a perfect person to highlight during Project Valour-IT. On top of that, his company assembles an electronic Marine Corps birthday card every year. They haven’t put the 2009 card up yet (I reckon that will be out on Nov 10th), so instead I’m putting up a link to last year’s card.

GoDaddy.com / Bob Parson Tribute to the 233rd Birthday of the USMC

I think I’ll see if I can contact him personally for a donation to Project Valour-IT. Wish me luck! 

Edit: couldn’t find a contact for him, but did find the GoDaddy Cares charitable request form, which I’ve submitted. Cross yer fingers, and please consider donating yourself if you haven’t already. Thanks!

Great quote on Villainous Company today. I’ll let it speak for itself.

“There is nothing particularly glorious about sweaty fellows, laden with killing tools, going along to fight. And yet—such a column represents a great deal more than 28,000 individuals mustered into a division. All that is behind those men is in that column, too: the old battles, long forgotten, that secured our nation … traditions of things endured and things accomplished, such as regiments hand down forever … and that abstract thing called patriotism, which I never heard combat soldiers mention—all this passes into the forward zone, to the point of contact, where war is girt with horrors. And common men endure these horrors and overcome them, along with the insistent yearnings of the belly and the reasonable promptings of fear; and in this, I think, is glory.”

—Capt John W. Thomason Jr.: “Fix Bayonets,” 1926, on Marines during WW I