Saturday Mad Science: The End of TomKat!

Not a lot going on today.  Let’s get to it, shall we?

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The U.S. Army is getting ready to change its camouflage pattern because the current one apparently doesn’t work very well even though it cost a fully five billion dollars to field.  Slate and a few other sources tell the story like this: the Army got jealous when the Marine Corps fielded its newest camouflage patterns because they’re awesome digital designs based on Canadian models.  So then the Army brass wanted cool digital patterns too, but they decided to go with a one-pattern-fits-all-terrains model in order to avoid logistics problems, and as it happens, that wasn’t a very good idea.

Army leaders got jealous of these awesome-looking USMC uniforms.  And how could they not?
The Marines have always been the better service at managing their image.

If you’re curious, the problem with the old patterns was that while the uniforms themselves came in a variety of colors, the very vast majority of the Army’s equipment is/was green.  So we had soldiers running around in tan-colored uniforms but with green equipment belts and green canteens.  This not only looked ridiculous, it also made the soldiers easier rather than harder to see.  So a change was needed.  However, that change was probably not a five billion dollar change to the entire service’s uniforms.  In retrospect, spending a half billion to simply buy more equipment in more different colors probably would’ve worked a little better.  Maybe that’s not the sexy solution, but y’know, the Army is anything but sexy.

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Katie Holmes left Tom Cruise this week.  That’s notable mostly because of the way that Ms. Holmes has orchestrated her escape and has since carefully kept herself in the public eye.  She’s been spotted multiple times in public recently, always with her daughter in tow and in seeming uber-mommy mode.  The whole thing strikes me as a public relations ploy as much as it does the end of a marriage.  But whatever; that’s fine.  Tom Cruise seems like a creepy, controlling guy, and I can well-imagine that Holmes is happy to be out from under his rule.  And when your business is being famous and getting work because of that fame, I suppose the way you get divorced in public is as important as the way you get divorced in private.

On sale now!

That said, I feel sorry for Cruise.  It looks like this whole thing dropped on him without notice, and that’s the kind of thing I’ve seen happen to several friends of mine who’ve had wives in their early- to mid-thirties in the past few years.  Especially when the couple married young.  Usually it happens because the wife has checked out of the marriage emotionally, and the guy is too busy working to really notice how unhappy his spouse has become.  Frankly, that to me is terrifying.  It’s by far my biggest fear.  Here’s a guy who’s been busy working to provide for and support his family, and suddenly his family is ripped out from under him because, y’know, the wife thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.  There’s no cheating, nothing really wrong per se, but the wife is unhappy, and she doesn’t want to be.  Now granted, you’d like to be the kind of husband who’d stay more in contact with his wife and her feelings, so that you wouldn’t actually be blindsided by this level of unhappiness, but still… communication is a two-way street.  Lots of wives will go-along-to-get-along when they probably ought to stay up and fight about the issues that’re really bothering them.  If the husband’s not paying attention in that kind of case, bad things can happen. 

To me, the hardest thing about marriage is just the fact that everything else in my life keeps me so damned busy.  So while I want to focus on my wife and my family—but really, for the purposes of this discussion, the focus needs to be specifically on my wife—the fact is that there are always ten thousand things that distract from that natural focus.  I mean, Sally is my best friend, and I really, really like spending time with her.  But at the same time because she’s my best friend, I sort of expect that she’ll understand when I can’t spend time with her.  However, over time that is a destructive expectation.  In a marriage, if you’re not sort of pulling together, then you can quickly find yourselves pulling apart, and that’s when bad things happen.  Even if “bad things” aren’t infidelity or alcoholism or something like that, still that doesn’t mean that your partner is necessarily happy.  And over time, chronic unhappiness can lead to divorce.

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Former WWE CEO Linda McMahon is again running for Senate, this time for the seat that will soon be vacated by Joe Lieberman.  Man, talk about trading down.  Last time out, Ms. McMahon spent fifty million of her own money in a losing bid against Democrat Richard Blumenthal.  This time she’s running against former Congressional Representative Christopher Shays, and though she’s supposedly ahead in the polls, let me assure you that there is no force on earth that could get me to vote for her this time. 

I sure hope she doesn’t win.  Fortunately, the state’s Republican establishment seems to agree with me.

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Lotto’s André Greipel beat Team Sky’s Mark Cavendish in Thursday's sprint finish to win his second stage in two days.  Now I don’t dislike Greipel or anything, but I happen to really like Mark Cavendish, and I was hoping that he’d win yesterday’s stage after having crashed out of the bunch sprint the day before.  Following that crash, Cavendish fell way behind current green jersey holder Peter Sagan in the points classification competition, and really, it didn’t look like there was much of a chance that Cav was gonna be able to catch up.  But then Sagan crashed on Thursday's stage, and suddenly the door to the green jersey opened back up.  On top of that, Cav even had a lead-out train from Team Sky—something he hasn’t had all Tour.

So the stage is set, the course is pretty much perfect for the bunch sprint, and Cav… loses!  Yes, the best sprinter in the world got fifth yesterday.

Eh.  The points competition is still a little hotter today than it was yesterday, though not quite so hot as we might have hoped.  In addition, we seem to be building to a nice little rivalry between Greipel and Cavendish.  That doesn’t suck.

Today marks the first Mountain Stage of this year’s Tour.  I’m looking forward to that one.

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And that’s all I’ve got.  Have a good weekend!