Next weekend is September …

 
The last post I made referred to the approach of Hurricane Dean to my current duty station. Well, obviously (if you followed the news), Dean swung away from Guantanamo when it dipped south of Jamaica instead of north. We spent a day in quarters, waiting to see how things turned out, but in the end it was just another weekend.

( Political Observation )

( Military orders & situation )

Sometime last year — it may have been even longer ago than that — my daughter talked about taking on Mary Sue as a challenge: that is, seeing if it was possible to construct a story wherein the principal character fulfilled all clichés of a Mary Sue, but with the story still working. It was an interesting notion, though I wasn’t convinced it was possible. Surprise, it IS possible, because word_smuggler did so, and pulled it off by tackling the conventions head-on and smashing them flat. This fic, an untitled submission to obafu (and a gift to honorh), is a devastating tour de force. I can’t bring myself to call it brilliant, simply because the word is so massively overused, but word_smuggler’s result is effective, successful, frequently funny, and thoroughly satisfying. Read, and leave feedback.