Spiking the Meme

I took my revenge after a hundred years, and I only regret that I acted in haste.
-Pashtun Proverb 

A few weeks ago CTLab’s esteemed Managing Editor tagged me with the equivalent of a chain-letter. Now normally, this is the kind of thing I flush down the toilet with extreme prejudice, and walk briskly away, whistling a merry tune as I go. In this case, I thought it better to lie in wait, lull my tormentor into a complacent stupor, and then pounce. And so it goes. 

The rules are simple:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

Because we’re a creative and irreverent lot, recipients sometimes add new rules, like here, or duck full compliance, like here. So I do both, adding rules 6 and 7, thereby completing the meme and killing it dead in one fell swoop.

6. Introduce a martial proverb.
7. Create a feedback loop and spike the meme.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Rule 1 – Check
Rule 2:

1. I served four years in 1st Bn Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. With a name like that, you HAVE to be hard. I spent another few years in the Canadian Army doing something else.

2. I’ve followed a non-traditional educational and professional trajectory, yet despite all that somehow ended up doing exactly what I always figured I’d be doing, through a series of unlikely but fortunate circumstances that could have been neither predicted nor planned for. Go figure. Call me a queue-jumper.

3. I rescued my three year old dog Rufus, who looks like a golden retriever but is really a street mongrel, from the blown out shell of  a house in a frontline suburb of Sarejevo. He was eight weeks old at the time.

4. I have a thing for brainy Irish-American redheads.

5. I once stood smack in the middle of a very large, partially excavated, secondary mass grave site. The stink of decay was heavy and cloying. All women and children. And that’s what makes me a true believer.

6.  I like it when it rains. I especially like running in the rain. I also like running in -25, with at least several inches of snow on the ground. I’m Canadian, what did you expect?

7. I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration… 

Rule 3 – Check (refer back to Rule 1, elaborated below)
Rule 4 – Check
Rule 5 – Check (see top of post – that’s Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. Yes, Kipling, this is a COIN blog after all)
Rule 6 – Check (see the beginning of this post)
Rule 7 – Check (refer back to Rule 1 through Rule 3, elaborated below, and supported conceptually by the Rule 6 meme)

TAGGED:

1. Tim Stevens
2. Tim Stevens
3. Tim Stevens
4. Tim Stevens
5. Tim Stevens
6. Tim Stevens 
7. Tim Stevens 

Done. You can all thank me later for sparing the web more chain-meming. And Tim can thank me for creating excessive superfluous links to Ubiwar. But the MEME DIES HERE…

Now get back to work!