During a brief respite from the drudgery of my everyday life of reading and planning lectures I let my mind (and vision) wander to the television. The glowing light...I could not turn away. Anyway, there was a story on the local nightly news that caught my interest simply because I had seen it before. That is, I had seen something similar. It was an "insider" story on military training war games, essentially. It came complete with Top Gun-ish air combat, missiles flying, explosions, etc. Everything you would want from a Summer blockbuster. This was now the third such story I had seen on the local news...I do not know if they were all on different channels or the same - I have made no attempt to actually "live" here and "know" things about here. The justified tagline for such stories were to show the viewer how our troops train for our war on terrorism. So, has this happened elsewhere? Wasn't there some kind of national show that was similar? Also, what is one to make of this packaging? They are not really informative about proper training tactics, etc...that would probably be too dry. It is really just about blowing stuff up with a bunch of toys. I just find it to be a bit surreal. Not really bad, not really good. Just some kind of "other." The simulacra? These can be juxtaposed against the continual discovery of more planets, including the discovery of ones that have the potential to be very much like Earth, ones that seem to be forming as we watch, etc.
