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Esse quam videri
The Bat & the Blog
 I attended the
University of
North Texas and Europa
Kollege Deutsche Sprachschüle für Ausländer in
Germany
for my International Studies, foreign language and music degrees, which
are naturally three areas of interest to me. During my time in school I
also worked part time in the unique position as a mounted security
trooper, which allowed me to spend countless hours with my horses while
enjoying the required inflow of cash any college student needs in order
to subsist. While I was overseas studying, I was able to stay up on
riding while exercising Dutch Warmbloods and a spirited Russian Mare
named "Gaga". Of course, travel was also pretty high on my agenda. I did
a lot of that between semesters during my studies in Germany. Some of
them were at least as educational as the semesters. One such notable
semester break included a trip to
Paris with two friends, one
from
Hungary and the
other from
Russia.
For the trip we had scheduled a charter bus from Frankfurt to
Paris by way of
Mannheim that
was to pick us up the last Friday of the semester break and carry us
comfortably to Paris. But when the time had arrived for the bus to make
a showing, it simply came to our stop...and kept on going. Distraught,
the two Eastern girls could only imagine how they would get to
Paris since
they had already lost so much of their money at the travel agency for
the bus. Time was also not in unlimited quantity: classes resumed the
following Monday and it was already getting late. I suggested we should
contact the authorities, but the Hungarian and Russian both scoffed. In
their countries, such things were far too rarely resolved, they said,
and no one really cared if a person's money were lost for such things as
say, a snotty bus driver. I decided I would gently help them see that in
the West things would not be that way. We not only had the right, but
the opportunity to contact the authorities and get the ball rolling. So
we found the Bahnpolizei (Highway Patrol) station, not too far from
where we had been stood up and to the girls' cheerful surprise, the
Polizei were more than happy to help us out. So we did just that. Once
the authorities had found the bus in
Mannheim and
pulled it over and made the
driver wait until we got there, we were able to hail a Taxi to that
spot. The driver was irritated, but he had not gotten away with leaving
us stranded. We were able to board- and finally get some shuteye. The
second half of this lesson came after we returned to Germany. It was
time for us to visit our travel agency to get our refund of the
difference between Frankfurt and
Mannheim.
Again, the girls were skeptical, but once we walked out of the travel
office with cash-in-hand, they could see things in a brand new light-
and were naturally quite happy about it. After the trip, Éva and Maria
(yeah, I know, "Ave Maria"...sounds like a song) also bickered less.
Bickering between the two of them was something problematic in the
beginning of the trip and primarily due to the tiny matter of a brooding
historical resentment of each other combined with the Hungarian's
working-class upbringing contrasting the Russian's of somewhat more
patrician origin. A good sociology experiment, to be sure. Both still
enduring friends. Shortly following my return to school in the states, I
was appointed as the liaison to the international student body by the
school's director of international student services (and ROTC director),
so my experiences while in Europe certainly became valuable to me in
that it, among other things helped me to fully understand the needs of
the foreign students attending State side. For some reason, it wasn't
that strange of a post for me.
After
college, I moved to
Houstonwhere
I entered the information technology field. My work in IT eventually
led me to Nashville, Tennessee, where I worked for about two years. I
enjoyed my time in the new place, but home was still home. Naturally, I
was happy when the opportunity came for me to move back to the Dallas
area, wher I now work and plan on attending my old school in pursuit of
a Masters at some point in the near future.
I began my blog officially while I was living in Nashville, however in
all honesty I was doing what today essentially is called "blogging" long
before the term was coined. The original site, dubbed "the Wombat Zone"
(who knows) was part of the logic behind "Blogbat". Blog+Wombat=
Blogbat. I thought it was original at the time...
This blog typically deals with news-related items, but it also sometimes
strays into other territory. Here are some of the blog's highlights:
Recently I was most likely the very first to tell you about the
Libyan nuke arms transfer to
third party States (which I recently contributed to Wikipedia.com) days
before it even became public. In the blog I mentioned that
Leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's
regime wasn't acting as much as the end-point of arms and technology
from Pakistan, North Korea and China as it was a conduit. This later
broke the headlines after IAEA
director-general Mohamed El Baradei said about the findings,
"This is of course an important and urgent concern for us." In the
report, Egypt was
also mentioned as one of the recipients of technology in what seems to
be a somewhat vast international arms network, which the
US
seems to have stumbled upon just in time.
Some other recent
notables: buried Iraqi MiGs,
which were published around the same times as they were by Newsmax, but
with a few more of the photos. Analysis of what I called the
"Dysfunctional" CIA and general
intelligence gathering in the US government. Some of the language
of my analysis was virtually quoted
verbatim by 9/11 Commission Member John Lehman, as well as
reflected closely by both the House and
Senate versions of intelligence gathering prior to 9/11. Other
items I've talked about include North
Korean Developments have been a big topic, and just a few weeks
after I gave my impressions of where they were heading, who was involved
and what was going to happen next,
Reuters and WorldNet Daily came out with two seperate reports
confirming my analysis. In the time since my blogging began, I also
tackled a disturbing story about
Amazon.com and its seemingly calloused Pedophile-friendly
offerings, while investigating a similar story which SkyNews covered
with another respected online bookseller,
Barnes & Noble. I found in my
research that not only was Amazon.com doing much the same, but the
material was even worse. I was able to find "Pedophile-ideology" books
along with what basically were "how-to" manuals for catching their prey
and several books with heaps of sexually infused photographs of young
children, taken in many instances by photographers who either had been
arrested or were wanted in several
states. To this date, Amazon is still selling the garbage.
Other things I dealt
with have included the truth of Johnny
Depp's Stern interview, which was ineptly translated and badly
spun by the English-speaking press. I
read the original interview in German and translated it for you
as we discovered some very shocking statements by Depp,
which only came out later on talk radio
and a few news outlets. Then there was the huge
Houston Bible
Monument controversy that popped up
shortly after the Alabama
case. I was one of the first to quote from the interview on a local
Houston radio station in which the proponent of
removing the Bible monument painted herself into a huge corner...and
then abruptly hung up! Other writings
include contemplations on modern society, the state of State education,
the relevance of American history, the balance between corporate and
private sectors in the US,
the status of things in
Russian society and so on. Also to be
found are a few of my humble poems, humor by way of photoshopped images
and other media, as well as the occasional posting of my daily goings-on
in "The Daily Poo". There is also the "Pic of the Day", "Notes from the
Garden Journal" segment, "There's More-isms", which are little sayings I
randomly make up and throw in; "Philosophical Notes", often running very
deep but to the point, the "New Word of the Day", in which I coin a word
and assign its definition, and finally a "Lost in Translation" segment,
where I take a sentence or passage and happily translate it into another
random language and back again about 5 times using a common software
translation tool. The results are always interesting-- and often bear a
secret message that turns out to be the moral of the day.
As always, proud as
heck to be able to add my two cents to the mountain of pennies.
I hope you find my
blog site informative, enjoyable and, as always, a colorful daily web
café.
©2004
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