New, Improved: Paktya Newsletters Right Here

The Apple lent his considerable expertise in the realm of desktop publishing to recommend an app, Issuu, that allows Turtle Drove to post Double Tap, the best-selling newsletter of PRT Paktya, directly on this site. No more tortured links.

Check out the two previous editions of Double Tap: No. 1 and No. 2; along with one edition of Avalanche, the newsletter of a sister unit to PRT-P, Task Force Avalanche, 3-172 Infantry (Mountain).

For easy viewing, once you open the link look for the "full screen" icon in the top left corner of the screen. Next to it is a page icon, click it. Scroll down to "paper view." Try it. It also works in full-screen mode.

A third edition of Double Tap, incidentally, is promised in a short time. Stay tuned. Many thanks to the Apple.

The Blistering Commentary You've Come to Expect

Nothing is so bad that a hyperventilating news media won't make it worse. Oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of hundreds of thousands of barrels a day? Not terrible enough. Coat it with some  partisan political hackery and second-guessing punditry. War in Afghanistan not keeping up with the timetable? Engage in some paper-thin debate and attach nonsensical symbolism to David Petraeus fainting at his seat before a congressional committee. It's bad enough without imagining how much worse it can be, or taking cheap shots when thoughtful analysis might find a way forward.


It's been worse, a lot worse. The steeple pictured to the left is St. Mary's Church in Ashwell, Hertforshire, maybe a half hour's drive from here. Ashwell is a picturesque ville tucked into rolling hills and surrounded by industrial-sized rapeseed fields from one horizon to another. Not far from Ashwell, out in the fields, is the site of Caldecote, a village that no longer exists. Take a walk out there and all you'll find is a patch of plowed dirt the wife of a local farmer pointed out as the place archaeologists probed some years back with shovel and trowel. Caldecote disappeared in the 1300s during the Black Plague epidemic that killed about a third of the English population.

Things were pretty bad in 1350, about two years into the event, when someone, presumably someone with enough education to read and write Latin, reached up and scrawled a message on the plaster inside the church steeple at St. Mary's.

"Pestile Cia.

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"There was a plague," it translates, in part. "A wretched populace survives to witness."

So, we have a benchmark, of sorts, to work from.

Alas, bug, we hardly knew ye

"Bug Hunt! The Maniacal Obsession with Housecats, Disguised as Weblog Comic Relief" signs off for the season with this post, the Drover having doggedly cataloged nearly all the felines in a one-block radius. Behold Gray Cat, who lives in Bug Alley and who was really the inspiration for "Bug Hunt." That's my wallet on the pavement, provided for scale.