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Barron von Hammer

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  • Interests
    Erratta:
    Correcting erroneous statements...I teach Intl conflct and political philosophy. Chess (and kicking your ass in it), voracious reader. My radio show. Looking at my naked wife.
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  • Nation Name
    Vladivostok
  • Alliance Name
    NATO
  • Resource 1
    Marble
  • Resource 2
    Wine

Barron von Hammer's Achievements

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  1. Not necessarily. The attacks are no longer conservative in nature. The overall goal is slightly different than in many previous conflicts which makes the study a bit more interesting. However I do not think it is a question of "if" but "when."
  2. It does indeed cost a lot to make this list (for God's sake look how many soldiers/material Decker and I lost in our number two position on this list). While my battle with him was close my comrades also on the list are getting savaged by their Umbrella opponents. We knew this, especially my NATO comrades. The point is to chip away at them, as time goes by they slowly descend, their NS/tech and military strength start to slowly drain away. And below us is a boiling cauldron of hundreds of NPO/Iron/etc nations with lower NS just waiting at the surface. It comes at a terrible cost to us upper-tier nations in the various alliances (AI and Nato suffering terribly) but the strategy will work. Soon dozens (if not all) of Umbrella nations will be pounded with pneumatic regularity (indeed it has already begun) in cycle after cycle. Then Umbrella will be removed from the upper echelon of power brokers.
  3. I know I am on the list. I float in-between number 3 and number five.
  4. Yea, I don't blog here much. Ten posts in almost three years.
  5. I teach International Conflict and Soviet history is a specialty of mine, so while I was enduring this episode I kept thinking of Khrushchev's tour of an Iowa farm in '59. Oddly enough my wife's grandmother served under Nikita and was trapped in Stalingrad during the German offensive.
  6. Well, my daughter’s class had a field trip to a farm the other day. Riveting. The parents were invited and the whole lot of us boarded tractor-pulled wagons that meandered down a dirty uneven road to a sparse field. I could not help but feel some solidarity with grainy film showing the artificial smiles on Ukrainian peasants forced to till the field until a lone potato was extracted, the byproduct of forced collectivization in the former worker’s paradise known as the Soviet Union. We then assembled in front of the centerpiece of the trip, a large barn that stood like an imposing monolith; like a bad game show host, the kids were exhorted by the appointed guide to guess what was behind the barn door. The kids offered various explanations as to what was indeed inside the barn (cows, horses, chickens, the farmer’s wife, etc). My daughter, showing the imagination inherited from her father, decided to rip the space-time continuum asunder with all of its constricting physical laws by suggesting that there was “another barn” inside (the result of her ongoing fascination with Matryoshka dolls in which each doll has another inside of it, resulting in smaller and smaller dolls being discovered upon investigation). Being somewhat excited she merely assumed that the barn itself must be self-replicating. Alas, my daughter’s expectations were dashed when it was revealed (to a bewildering amount of fanfare) that the barn contained potatoes. Thousands of them. There was a hushed silence as the tour guide silently nodded her head in satisfaction as if to imply that these were no mere potatoes, they were the nectar of the gods, each potato a facsimile of the most coveted emerald. She then began to ask the group questions about the growing, nurturing and caring of potatoes. My wife, constantly nudging me to get more involved with her teachers (my retroactive attempt earlier was not terribly pleasing to her when, after the tour was delayed for an hour, I remarked to anyone within ear shot that her teachers had all the preparation of the Hindenburg ground crew; this was compounded by my insistence that she witness “how far I can hurl” one of these starchy emeralds, the resulting thump against an empty grain solo culminating in a sound not unlike incoming howitzer fire). So I decided to get involved by answering the query “how are potatoes collected?” Judging from the horrified look exhibited by those in attendance, “migrant workers” is apparently incorrect. The correct answer is “a harvester.” Khrushchev would have not had a problem with that answer.
  7. I for one would like to thank my Umbrella opponent (Decker) for engaging me in the 3rd most destructive conflict of this war involving thousands. Now while I believe that at this point Umbrella is simply rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic with the inevitable conclusion at hand, I must confess a certain admiration for not letting the flag touch the ground.
  8. Yea, good luck with that. You will find out that your opinion of what constitutes a "dumb" decision will be irrelevant.
  9. There comes a time in every man’s life when you are required to bravely stand and man the hell up. A time when you need to stand resolutely and stare into the yawning abyss of fear itself and silently proclaim “is that all you got?” And after asking this question, when darkness descends and the urge to surrender to spasmodic, urine-inducing fear is greatest, you must declare to the universe “Damn the heliocentric model of the solar system, the galaxies do in fact revolve around my gargantuan titanium balls.” For me, that moment arrived today when I discovered that there was a large spider in my hat while in line at the “12 items or less” cashier lane at New Seasons market.
  10. I have found it necessary to purge myself of the internal turmoil caused by not confessing some of the dark deeds in my life. Confession number #1: Many years ago I had a neighbor who was an ok guy at times but had turned into quite the dick the last couple of months we lived next to each other. I had my house up for sale when he came over with a puppy he had just bought the week previously and asked if I would take care of it for the six weeks he would be gone on some promotional tour he was doing for a product he was involved in. I reluctantly agreed. He named the dog Leon after his grandfather who he had been close to. As soon as he left I worked hard to get the dog to answer to a particular name I had chosen. For six weeks I incorporated Pavlovian conditioning in my interaction with the dog (feeding, playing with him, etc) and had him responding completely to his new christened name “Yahtzee.” I sold the house and moved out two days after he came back. During that time he expressed dismay that his dog didn’t answer to his name. On the morning of my departure I quietly left a note on his door that I had re-named the dog and that he would only respond to “Yahtzee.” I understood he was quite livid. A week after I moved I received a phone call from my previous other neighbor complaining that said individual was running down the street screaming “Yahtzee” like a crazed lunatic late one night. Apparently the dog had escaped. Several months later he was spotted at the park yelling “Yahtzee” every hundred feet or so, causing dozens of people to assume he was mentally unstable.
  11. Prodigal moon: Soon there will be a peer-reviewed DNA study that will end the mystery. Hopefully it will be released fairly quickly (for a myriad of reasons).
  12. Cryptozoology is a guilty pleasure of mine. Grainy images, videos of anomalous objects, "In Search Of" episodes and an early adolescent inability to distinguish one of my great aunts from an enlarged bi-pedal hominid (leading to multiple sightings), has finally culminated in a great revelation. One of the great mysteries in my life is about to end. This summer the existence of the infamous creature known as Bigfoot will be proven. Of this I am sure. My close friends and I discuss this subject with great earnest as the day draws near. Even those friends of mine who disagree with me try to be objective in weighing the evidence. There is one though who holds my views in disdain. My beloved wife mocks me. She dismisses my views with the wave of her hand as if she were Julius Caesar dispatching legions across the Rubicon. Any attempt on my part to broker a discussion on the latest news, sightings, findings, etc, evaporates like a butterfly in a blast furnace. At first I thought it was the subject matter, maybe she didn’t understand the complex nature of aligning eye-witness reports with our current understanding of zoology, trying to build a paradigm of what said creature could be and the implications it would entail for understanding the physical world as we know it, etc. I consoled myself with this new explanation concerning her intolerant behavior. She could not comprehend what she did not understand, in the same manner one would experience in trying to explain fabric softener to a starving African child. It was doomed to failure. It was blind ignorance that caused her to be so callous and unfeeling concerning a subject that was intertwined with childhood memories such as apple pie, baseball and rampant infidelity. Unfortunately I was under illusion, she did understand. And thought it completely ludicrous. Lately though I have approached the subject in a completely different way, appealing to her marital instincts and asking that she listen to my defense as a loving testament to what a spouse does to maintain marital bliss. This was only a temporal and hastily expedient solution as her facial expression while listening to my argument could easily be confused with "Liberace looking at a vagina". So a bet was made. A large one, detailing sordid sexual activity, humiliation, and the exchange of enough DNA to populate a thriving lunar colony. And that is just me. As for her stipulations let’s just say I don’t relish the prospect of wiping my ass with burlap for two straight weeks or viewing back-to-back episodes of Mama’s Family until the entire 130 episode run has been seared into my brain, one of only a few stipulations in a dantesque wager of hellish torment. I have until the end of summer (or should I say she has till the end of summer). To channel that great seer from 1976, “the stakes are high and so am I, it’s in the air tonight, it’s a free-for-all.”
  13. Anya and I, with our two children, live outside a large city in the Southeastern U.S. Like many, we moved from the midtown area when crime was rising and moved to a small town outside the city, about 30 minutes away. This small town is at the crossroads between a large city and a rural countryside that extends for hundreds of miles. Unfortunately we have to move again for occupational reasons (getting transferred); our eventual resting place will be 1500 miles away. Therefore we had to necessitate getting the house ready for sale. Anya, who loves interior work to begin with, took over the task of hiring the appropriate personnel to renovate those areas that the home inspector deemed necessary to work on, the reason being is that her company is taking over the house and wants to make sure it is in the best shape possible. Now my wife has a knack of hiring those that are good at their profession but also those that are simply the most bizarre in their profession, a strange dichotomy that to this day defies any attempt on my part to understand this bizarre duality. The fact that we are just far enough to justify hiring the local help probably does not help the situation. The below occurred over a 48 hour period in the hottest week of August. The first was a painter who came over and gave us an estimate for the house (it was, like the others who followed, someone that Anya had called thereby insuring that it would be an individual unerringly from the pages of H.P. Lovecraft). I was by myself and upon greeting me he asked me what he was there for, an odd remark considering that he was coming over in response to our request for an appraisal. “We want to get the house painted” I replied. Ah yes. He walked slowly from room to room, seemingly making mental notes about square footage, paint integrity, price, flat vs gloss…or so I surmised. Instead I got this: “You ever had a vasectomy?” Baffled I replied that I had not. “Well you don’t know what you are missing.” He then began to explain about the freedom he enjoyed from ridding himself of the wanton risk of impregnating his wife. He misconstrued my perplexed countenance completely by trying to alleviate me that “it didn’t hurt as much as you might think.” I stared at him as if he were behind glass, a representative of some species with a Latin designation that signified an irrational instability usually associated within the confines of a meth lab. As we went from room to room his entire conversation was an amalgamation of medical terms, the application of a matte finish, and what constitutes a feasible vasectomy and the price required to achieve either. To this day I don’t know if he was an urologist who painted or a painter who had a morbid fascination with my testicles. In addition to the cosmetic corrections that must be made there is the insistence by the realtor that it would help by getting a new stove to compliment a soon to be renovated kitchen. Finally we get a crew in and the house is full of painters and two Sears delivery men arrive bringing in the new stove. First though they must eradicate the old stove from its moorings and this ends up being a difficult task so I give them a hand. The two of them have trouble negotiating the turn out of the house with the old stove in tow so once again I come over to help them, at the same time two painters are coming up with a bucket of paint thinner. It is raining pretty hard and as the three of us are going down the steep driveway dumbass #1 loses control of the trolley causing the stove to speed up its descent to the street. Dumbass #2 tries to grab the stove but ends up colliding with me and the two approaching painters (inexplicably grabbing my hat in the process for some reason, as if to say "This stove is out of control; I'm grabbing that guy's hat."). I hit the ground hard but not before I bring down two Mexicans and a Jamaican named "Demonde." I am bleeding from the knee down and now have paint thinner sipping into it. Dumbass #3 (me) grabs a tube of petroleum jelly out of the medicine cabinet thinking it is the Neosporin (they look just alike). So now I have ground in the thinner residue with a prodigious helping of petroleum jelly. I am now on fire. While nursing my wound the winpor guy arrives to replace a large window in the living room that had a hairline crack. He proceeds to give me a history of how glass is made. In Louisiana. Shreveport to be exact. He expounds on transition temperatures, structural integrity, and other such technical details that end up begetting conversational material that is only slightly less exciting than a quilt festival. It was a fascinatingly dull conversation in which I lapsed into a fixed stare at the center of his forehead, an unrepentant gaze that would have impressed even the most hardened of epileptics. It was at this point that I left my body. His voice slowly faded away, only his lips moving as I entered the ethereal plane and enjoyed a chess game with a scantily clad Croatian woman of a sordid reputation. Unfortunately I had to leave the game early and arrive back into our living room in time to answer his repeated query, "Well do you want me to order it or not?" Now the roofing guy insists I go up the ladder to see the shingles he is replacing. Both of them. Two 4x6 shingles. As if I was in danger of not taking his word for it (could he possibly only be replacing one shingle and charging me an extra seven dollars?) So I went up there. And stared; me and one heavily set repairman standing on my roof staring at a shingle for ten minutes. Why ten minutes? Because this individual, knowing the magnetic pull of my reputed curiosity for all things mundane decided to tell me about the worst roofing repair job he had ever done, a topic only slightly less interesting than a recital of the periodic table (which I enumerated privately to keep my dwindling sanity). That's when she beckoned me, the Croatian woman, somewhere between sulfur and phosphorus. I left my body once again and we frolicked through fields of green but alas I had to come back as my astute rhetorician was descending the ladder. Unfortunately he stopped halfway down to talk to me some more, so now for the next five minutes there were the two of us, sturdy men bonding together while one of them suffers the temporal burns that a aluminum ladder sitting in the hot sun can produce. I can't wait for the plumber. The plumber (and his apprentice who was barely coherent) arrived promptly at eight am. While entering the house he assured me that he was “the best plumber in Fayette county” and proceeded to tighten his tool belt six inches below his waistline as if he was ready to protect his reputation by whipping out a battery powered drill and applying it prodigiously to anything (or anyone) who dared question his claim. While looking over the litany of complaints that our obsessively attentive assessor had compiled, he dropped on to the kitchen counter his hat, cell phone and curiously enough a copy of the latest Farmer’s Almanac, as if he was prepared for any eventuality. It was comforting to know that in addition to satisfying our plumbing needs he could also answer any questions as to how long one could get an ear of corn through the innovative use of fertilizer or how to alleviate the lingering effects of a bee sting by applying some long forgotten Appalachian wisdom. With his mute assistant at his side he explained what he was going to do and several minutes into this one-sided “conversation” he began to pepper his speech with colloquial witticisms. I use that term loosely as I had not the foggiest notion what he was attempting to imply. In explaining the usage of the drip valve he exclaimed that “two frogs don’t swim in a leaky barrel.” What? Two frogs won’t swim in a leaky barrel? Why? Do they have the capacity to differentiate between a leaky barrel and one that is not leaking? How do they accomplish this? How do they get into a standing barrel in the first place? And why two frogs? Would one swim in a leaky barrel but not if accompanied by another of its own kind? While trying to understand the ramifications of amphibian intelligence his mute assistant suddenly discovered his voice and began laughing as if to imply that the joke is on me…two frogs will indeed swim in a leaky barrel. What this had to do with the acquisition and installation of a pvc valve was beyond me. At this point I was beginning to form my own colloquial witticism such as “two plumbers can’t breathe in a sealed container.” They then moved onto the bathrooms and began working. Half an hour later I saw them walking up and down the hall when they walked into the living room and asked me “where is the upstairs?” Apparently after a fruitless search they could not find the stairs. I had never been asked this before and was afraid of pointing upward for fear their gaze would be transfixed at that particular point in the ceiling right above me. I told them to open the door right before our bedroom; he immediately responded with some droning anecdote about a set of stairs that had previously confused them on an earlier job. He continued his invocation to the gods of topographical confusion when I suddenly noticed a strong wind and a blinding light emanate from the dining room. It was her, my scantily clad Croatian woman. With an enticing gaze she beckoned me from the netherworld to leave this place and join her on the other side. I floated toward her when she suddenly disappeared; the electrician had knocked on the door. The plumbers departed to find their elusive quarry while I answered the door, greeting a large man who looked as though he had just finished river bathing. If there is ever a scientific qualification of what it means to be a “good ole boy” then surely this is their template. He came equipped with a screwdriver, a LED reader and a t-shirt that listed ten reasons why drinking beer is preferable to that of having a wife. He introduced himself as “Stan, I’m your man” and told me he lived behind Gus’s fried chicken shack on I-64. This comment was momentarily disturbing to me as the only thing I had observed behind Gus’s fried chicken shack was a dilapidated picnic table and two rusting 55 gallon drums. Nevertheless my fears were allayed by his experience in correcting our electrical problems as listed by the assessor. While he worked in the kitchen I sat down at the table and began reading my book. Trying to initiate small talk he asked what I was reading, I replied “The Age of Napoleon.” He commented that while he liked the movie and it made him laugh he could not see himself reading it. Seeing my confused look he commented that “the chickens have sharp talons.” It was obvious that the Napoleon of antiquity was not the one he had in mind. I replied that this was Napoleon of France in which he retorted that he usually doesn’t like foreign movies but if it was as funny as the American version he would give it a chance. I thanked him. Half an hour passed before he attempted to engage me in conversation again while working on an outlet under the microwave. He surmised that we were moving (his perceptive ability was stunning) and asked me where. I replied Portland, Oregon. “Better take your gun then.” I asked why, he replied “because there are a lot of bunny lovers out there.” Bunny lovers? In Portland? Was this some sort of sordid sect? Seeing my confusion he clarified. He explained that there were radical groups of people who would interfere with your hunting, not wanting any animals to be harmed. Apparently he had seen my itinerary for this year: a) Move to Portland. b) Hunt rabbits. He told me that when hunting, hunters needed to arm themselves against these nomadic tribes of ethical warriors that roamed the countryside. This was confusing to me as I thought hunters were already armed to begin with. Again she beckoned me, to travel with her to the Emerald city. “Well we are done.” The plumbers had finished. His assistant revealed his incredible grasp of intuition by noting that as I had “a lot of books up there” that I “must like to read a lot.” Especially biographies on Napoleon Dynamite I privately surmised. As I wrote him a check for the amount billed I asked him if everything was all right as I had smelled some gas when they were working on the furnace heater. He stated that they had briefly disconnected the gas line to check it and that the gas was residue that should dissipate. He assured me there would be no problems with their repairs but added “then again you can’t teach a barn owl to whistle.” What? Who would do such a thing? And why? In the kitchen the electrician, overhearing the conversation laughed. In the distance someone strummed a banjo. Afterward the electrician spent 20 minutes (in which he eradicated the notion of time being linear) telling me how to successfully hunt coyote. What about me screams Allan "the coyote hunter?" What could have possibly alerted him that I was interested in this subject? As I was trapped at the moment (feeding my son Jack) he told me of the bait used, the traps employed, and the ways to mask your scent and how to skin them. I was horrified. This sudden knowledge could only be useful within an apocalyptic scenario in which a mysterious plague wipes out most of mankind and leaves only me and millions of ravenous coyotes. I am now in the possession of the suddenly profound knowledge of how to eradicate certain scavengers within Fayette County. Sadly I found myself regretting not being able to use these suddenly acquired skills to rid myself of local electricians. He then told me that he also had a daughter Maya's age and was raising her to be a "hunter/gatherer;" which is useful if Western civilization collapses and our economy is reduced to bartering beaver pelts and exchanging fire. Who are these individuals? Does my wife purposefully combine the words "handyman" and "mentally unstable" in Google? She never gives me a concrete answer. Just a lot of giggling; it is because she knows all too well my self-proclaimed axiom, that if there is an oddball about I will be pestered by him.
  14. [quote name='Devilyn Caster' timestamp='1324051793' post='2879929'] I was when I posted! [ooc]computer problems[/ooc] [/quote] This conflict has so many different theatres of engagement going on I guess you could say we are on the same side. I am fighting Knights of Ni because an ally (TPE) requested it. The first time I heard of them was when I dropped half a dozen cruise missiles after saying hello. Of all the conflicts I have been in this is certainly the most comprehensive labyrinth I have seen when it comes to wars.
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