Rerun: Save the Whales of Afghanistan*

I wrote this while I was stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan after a lengthy discussion with some of the other staff officers about all of the many ways that charitable organizations were stupidly squandering money and manpower on frivolous projects throughout the country.  I still consider it one of my greatest hits.  Enjoy...

Over three decades of war have wrought death and destruction across the nation, but nowhere are its effects more apparent than among the Afghan whale population. Their numbers have diminished so much that nowadays most people will tell you that they don't even exist. At the rate they’re being killed today, this common misconception could become a cold prophetic truth as the last species of Afghan whales become extinct by 2025.

In prehistoric Afghanistan, the nomadic Dirkadurka tribes would follow the whale herds across the desert, hunting them for sustenance and living in harmony with nature. But as the world's great empires began to vie for power in the region, foreign invaders with more devastating weapons began to harvest the whales and even kill them for sport.

A trio of British Army officers posed atop a trophy-sized Kandahar Humpback Whale bull, circa 1881.

Now, as the centuries have passed, the detrimental effects of prolonged warfare, poaching, widespread deforestation, soil erosion, agriculture, and over-grazing have decimated these burrowing monuments to graceful Nature.

Here we see a rare photo of "Kandy," the world's most famous Kandahar Humpback, in mid-broach:

Once great herds of beautiful creatures like her would migrate across the deserts of Kandahar, Helmand, and Nimruz, stretching as far as the eye could see. In recent decades these battle-scarred regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border see fewer and fewer new calves every year. Now she is one of only seventeen alive in the wild today, and there are too few remaining for there to be any hope of repopulating the species. Click here to listen to her soulful, haunting song.

In 1992, Afghan whalers killed the last Oruzgan Long-Finned Whale the world ever saw:

She was murdered while carrying an unborn calf. Killed only for her ambergris, which would be sold on the black market for use in perfume. Despite being one of the earliest to be placed on the endangered species list, under the lawless Taliban regime poachers were free to kill as many as they liked. Now they are only a memory, the stuff of local legend and the occasional rare photograph.

Despite their impending extinction, the local government has no plans to ban the hunting of whales in Afghanistan. Plus, even as their prey continues to diminish in numbers, Afghan whalers are constantly developing more effective tools to massacre them. Without your help, there will be no end to the carnage.

A group of Pashtun whale poachers (left) sets out for their early-morning hunt. Vehicle-mounted harpoon guns like that shown at right have killed countless whales in the unregulated wilds of Afghanistan.

The Hindu Kush Narwhal, the smallest species of Afghan whale, was completely wiped out as recently as 1997. They were killed for their luxurious hides and their tusks which were believed to have powerful aphrodisiac effects. What finally spelled their ultimate doom however, was the popularity of Dorsal soup in eastern Asian countries. It took five of these peaceful, defenseless animals to make just one quart. Now all that remains are a few scattered bones in the heights of the Hindu Kush Mountain Range.

An anonymous Taliban fighter seated alongside some Hindu Kush Narwhal vertebrae near the Khyber Pass. While they were still alive, these animals were so reclusive that they were never photographed. Now they will never be seen again.

It's not too late to save what's left of the Afghan whales. Every dollar brings us closer to our goal of building the Chakhansur Whale Reservation, a vast expanse of open terrain in the Nimruz Province where Afghan whales will once again be able to roam, free from the predations of Man. There we can continue research to benefit the Afghan whales and educate the world.

To make a donation and help preserve a piece of this gentle giant's natural habitat*, click here:

With your donation, we can ensure that these amazing animals don't become a thing of the past.

An Afghan National Police officer overlooking the sun-bleached skeleton of a Kandahar Humpback whale from his hilltop checkpoint.

*In case you haven't figured it out, this entire post is satirical. While it is potentially in poor taste, it's intended to be funny. There are no whales in Afghanistan. If you're foolish enough to actually donate to this cause, I'll gladly relieve you of your money. Just know that whatever you donate will go directly into my pocket and I will be personally spending it as wastefully and frivolously as possible. Your donations are NOT tax-deductible.

A Man From Halfghanistan

One of the guys I was in Durkadurkastan with just sent me this pic, so I thought I'd share:

Jury Duty

Just before I paid off of the last ship a summons came in the mail notifying me that I was to appear for jury duty. I realize that this may sound strange, but this actually struck me as a good thing. Somehow I've felt like I've fallen behind on civic duty in the past few years* and it's nice to be a useful, contributing member of the community again. Aside from this, the only thing I do for folks I don't know is donate blood.** I'm probably the only person I know who would actually be looking forward to something like this.

According to the little stub that showed up in the mail, I was to call the courthouse phone number or check the website the night before my report date to see if my Juror Number was required to appear in the morning to be a part of Justice in action. I checked in for five evenings in a row, eager for the opportunity to visit society's vengeance upon some wayward citizen. I was anxious knowing that, for the briefest of time, I would be part of one of the three branches of our constitutional government. I was almost giddy with anticipation as I waited for my turn to flex my raw judicial power.

My juror number was 1325 and they only took a couple hundred per day. On the fifth evening, there was a message posted on the website as follows:

Juror Numbers 931 - 1700: since you were on call and not asked to appear, your services are complete for a period of at least one year.

Blast! Now I have to wait at least another whole year before I get another chance to send someone to the chair. So it goes.

*Yes, I know, seven months in Afghanistan should've made me feel like I've done my bit lately. It did, but I'm talking locally. The average Afghan dude doesn't impact Sonoma County all that much.

**I am not allowed to donate blood for two years from the date I left Afghanistan. So there's even less that I'm doing for society.

The First (and Possibly Last) Drill Since My Return

I mentioned in a previous post that I was frustrated on account of my latest drill weekend. Here's a brief synopsis of what happened:

After weeks of travelling around the country and trying to relax, it was time to shave, get a regulation haircut, and dig up my uniform. I finished all of these things for the first time in quite some time on the Friday afternoon before my scheduled drill weekend. That Saturday I woke up in Petaluma at ridiculous-o'clock in the morning so I could drive down to Alameda in time for morning muster. Since I'd been gone for quite a while, I gave myself a little extra time in case I got lost on the way.

Bear in mind that the unit I'd been drilling with since 2005 has been decommissioned. The last thing they were able to do before I shipped out to Afghanistan was to reassign me to a new unit. In the hustle and bustle of being processed for mobilization and deployment, I had just enough time to meet a few of the folks at the new unit, shake hands and trade email addresses, and scoot out the door.

At the time they were meeting at a separate location a few minutes down the road from the Navy Operational Support Center (NOSC) where I had been drilling for the previous two years. Being a creature of limited imagination, I went to the same location in the hopes of finding the unit where I'd left it some ten months prior.

They were not there.

Not only were they not there, the building was locked and dark and when I asked a passer-by if he knew anything about it he said he'd never seen a Navy person in that building in two years of working there. Suddenly I was in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.

Well prepared for such an occasion, I headed over to the NOSC to ask WTF. Upon arrival I got the standard runaround during which I learned that A: my unit has been relocated to another city altogether, and B: their drills have been rescheduled and I was in the wrong place on the wrong weekend. So it turns out I'd gotten the world's worst haircut for nothing. Awesome.

Since I was already there and all dressed up, I wandered to the NOSC Admin office and asked if there was anything they needed me to do now that I was back from deployment. This started me on a bonus runaround during which I was reminded of all the reasons I've hated being in the military. I got to stand in a couple of hours worth of lines so that I could have half a dozen different petty officers tell me that they couldn't help me, I was in the wrong place, and the previous person had told me wrong, only to be sent to another line where the couldn't help me because I was in the wrong place and the previous person had told me wrong.

The final straw was when I stopped by medical to drop off my records and the corpsman behind the counter mentioned that they were really busy and could I please come back on Monday. This is a drilling center for reservists. Usually these people have day jobs on Monday through Friday. I told her she could call me if she had any questions, but no, I would not be there Monday.

Added to these little bits of aggravation was a whole shopping list of administrivia that I'm apparently delinquent on. It turns out that being deployed to a war zone doesn't give you a buy on all of the minor stupid shit that they would've had me doing during my routine drill weekends (mainly filling out forms and sitting through powerpoint presentations). So I've got twenty days worth of websites to page through and certificates to print out proving I've been schooled in topics ranging from Alcohol Abuse Awareness to Small Arms Safety to the Flavor of the Week in Naval Terminology.*

While I was there I put myself in for a six month leave of absence. I'm not sure if I'll go back. If I do, I'll have to find a new unit to drill with, a new NOSC to drill at, and start the whole pain in the ass all over again.

So that's that.

I'm thinking of transferring to the Merchant Marine Reserve program so I can still serve in some capacity and at least earn points toward retirement. We'll see how that goes.

*Naval Terminology has an odd way of morphing from something useful to something completely useless. Example: years ago someone coined the term Command and Control to describe systems used for, you guessed it, command and control. Simple and straightforward that. You hear it and instantly understand it. Then some time later, some jackass** decided it sounded cooler to say C2. Okay I guess. But then some other jackass** decided you can't have Command and Control without Communications and it became C3. Add another jackass** and it became Command, Control, Communications, and Computers, or C4. Then, because brevity is the soul of wit, the Navy had to make it longer. With the diligent work of another jackass**, a moron**, a fucktard**, and at least one idiot**, it became Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaisance, or C4ISR. Note that C4SRI has just as many syllables, making it just as ponderous and time-consuming to say, as Command and Control.

While I was gone, the Brits actually took this term one step further, coining C4ISTAR, or Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaisance. With just a few more improvements, this will become the superacronym that includes every single thing the military does.

I figure by the time my six-month leave of absence is completed, it will have grown again into Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Confusion, Telephones, Internets, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, Reconnaisaince, HUMINT, SIGINT, Intelligence, Information, Intuition, Indecision, and Special OPerations, or C5TISTARHSI4SOPs for "short." At that point, nobody will be able to understand what it means anymore and they'll commission a study at great expense to find a useful term to describe can be defined as the exercise of authority and direction by a properly designated commanding officer over assigned and attached forces in the accomplishment of the mission. I'd help them out, but I'm sick of the process.

**Admiral

More Shiny

Forgot to mention it, but the other day I got one of these in the mail from the ISAF headquarters where I was stationed in Afghanistan:



So that's neat.

Project Background: HALO Costume

I don't think I've written this project up in this blog, so here goes.

A couple of years ago, I was brainstorming some ideas for Halloween costumes with a handful of friends. The plan was to save time and money by pooling our resources. After a bit of discussion, we decided to go as the characters from the online cartoon Red vs. Blue. The show is easily the most famous example of a burgeoning animation style called "machinima" which uses video games to render character action. In this case, they use a multiplayer version of the game HALO.

The beauty of this particular idea is that all we'd have to do is make several copies of the same costume and then just paint them different colors.

The end result should look like this:

With the internet in our lives, it turns out you can always find someone somewhere who has already done anything you can think of. In this case, I found an entire forum of like-minded geeks making HALO costumes called the UNSC 405th Infantry Division. These guys have come up with all sorts of creative ways to replicate this costume. Most notably, they use a Japanese shareware program called Pepakura to transform the 3D meshes from the video game into paper folding models.

Using this method, I started by building a low-resolution model of the helmet to make sure I had the size right:

Once I was happy with the size of the low-resolution model, it was time to crank out a more difficult, detailed version:

As you can see, there are a lot more folds and cuts involved in the high-resolution model:

The funny part is, I screwed up and printed a smaller version of the helmet and didn't realize it until it was 75% built. I figured it makes sense to go ahead and finish it anyway so I can have a rough-draft version of the helmet to experiment with before I waste time and mess up the larger one. Here's the three versions of the helmet I built:

Once the paper models were assembeled, they were coated with polyester resin (the cheaper laminating resin for fiberglass) to make them more rigid:

Once the polyester resin had set up, I coated the inside of the helmet with several layers of urethane casting resin for strength:

This left me with at stronger helmet that would hold up to the rigors of mechanical sanding and shaping:

After only a couple of days' effort, I had gone from nothing to having the smoothing and bondo work about half done:

If I had sculpted this in plain clay like I did with my last helmet project, it would've taken me at least a month worth of evenings to get to this point:

Just to get an idea of what it would look like, I had to test-fit the face shield:

And try it on:

And pose like an idiot:

With the initial shaping and smoothing done, it was time to add in all of the annoying little details, such as the recessed area under the brim:

For the sake of simplicity, I decided to forgo the bulk of the little problems on the smaller helmet:

The full-sized one got the full treatment and a quick shot of the final color it would wear:

I'm especially pleased with the details around the back of the neck:

The next trick was to come up with a workable template for the details on the faceplate:

Then the final fitting of the gold visor with it's clear styrene overlay:

So here's what in-game version looks like:

And here's my prototype:

The next step was molding and casting. When I was done, I was suddenly able to make lots of helmets to add to my stack of helmets needing work. Here you can see some of my HALO helmets in the left side of the pile:

Then I made a low-resolution model of the torso armor to test the fit:

Once I'd settled on a size that fit me properly, it was time to build the high-detail version. The high-detail version was filled with all sorts of tiny little bits and pieces and was tedious as hell to build:


Once it was assembled, I went ahead and set it up with one of my helmet castings to get an idea of the proportions:

And the side view:


The helmet looks a bit big on my size of torso armor, but it should look just right when coupled with larger sizes.

With the first one built, it was time to reinforce it by coating it with resin:

And another shot for size comparison:

Once the resin had set up, it was on to bondo and fairing:

After the first couple of rounds of filling and smoothing, it looke pretty good:

So I had to separate the front from the back and test fit the whole thing again:

Then prime, fill, sand, prime fill, sand, prime fill and sand it again:

Then it was finally smooth enough to be ready for moldmaking:

And the chest piece:

The paper model also included the abdomen plate, but I decided I didn't like the way it looked and had to fabricate my own from scratch. I made the basic shape in MDF and then added some urethane foam to build thickness:

Then I sanded and smoothed it a bit before adding some relief details to the surface:

Speaking of details, here are some of the smaller parts I added to the chest:

On to moldmaking, here's a shot of the detail coat of silicone rubber being applied to the armor. This picks up all of the fine parts on the surface of the piece:

After building up a few more layers of silicone, it was time to move on to building a mother mold. Here I've added some water-based clay to the surface of the rubber mold. Once the mother mold is built, the clay will be removed and more silicone will be poured in to fill the void it leaves behind. This guarantees a good fit between the rubber jacket mold and the fiberglass mother mold that will keep it straight. The plywood parts are the frame that the fiberglass mothermold will be built onto:

Proper Personal Protective Equipment is a must when working with fiberglass. I'm in a large, well-ventilated shop, so I can get away without a respirator. I must still wear rubber gloves however:

The mother mold after the application of several layers of fiberglass mat saturated in polyester resin:

And the first casting pulled from these molds:

For the next step, I assembled a size tester for the upper arm armor:

And just for giggles, I went ahead and painted the size tester to get an idea of what the whole thing looks like at this stage:

The forearm armor I picked up from another maker, but I have since made a few of my own. Oh, and it's not pink, it's light red.

Since then, I've fabricated two larger sizes of the chest armor, two sizes for the calf armor, two sizes for the forearms, and a whole host of other parts. Here's a bunch of pieces I cranked out while I was out to sea aboard the M/V Moku Pahu last year:




When I paid off the ship in New Orleans, Ana and I fiberglassed the insides of the paper models and then I moved them back to California where I filled them with foam in preparation for all of the sanding, filling, shaping, detailing, and molding:

Since I had a couple of weeks to kill in September of 2008, I decided I needed to make a custom pair of boots to go along with the costume. Here's a shot of the uppers that will go with them:


And here's the prototype soles:


Unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the molds in time to have a wearable pair by the time I shipped out, so I was back to building additional sizes for the armor parts while I was in Afghanistan:


This includes a light red codpiece:
I've also made one of the older style helmets (as worn by one of the characters in the latest seasons of the show):


Finally, here's the middle sized version of the torso armor I've been making in the hotel in Washington DC:

This is the abdomen plate that goes with it:


I'm doing the fiberglass work on the roof of the hotel in order to avoid killing myself with the fumes.

Hopefully the staff here won't notice and I won't have to explain it. On the other hand, I suppose it's not the most unsettling project I've got going on in the room. There's also these other minor works in progress:

That's the captain's pistol from the sci-fi series "Firefly" and the movie "Serenity."

And here's my set of Wolverine claws which still need a lot of shaping and polishing:


More to come. Stay tuned.