Anti-war but not a pacifist War is a huge-ass thing, not meant to be lived with on a day-to-day basis with no endgame. That's my philosophy. It should involve a clear purpose and the support of the public, who is obliged to make sacrifices and build Victory Gardens and put on a brave face. War should not be part of life's background noise.

But if your nation gets clobbered by a giant cyclone and hundreds of thousands of people are dead, and you're holding onto all the aid, you deserve to get your ass kicked by the world's superpowers. We're all in this nasty-ass polluted and depleted Earthly boat together now, and allow me to adjust my tinfoil hat and mention that we're going to have bigger storms now, all of us. And we do not actually have the Rescue Heroes, as much as it saddens my child to have to say so.

We are the Rescue Heroes.

Mission select!

Ron Stone, no! I had to come out of hiding for this. Ron Stone died.

When I was a little kid in the 1970s, a cone of silence descended upon our house Sundays at 5:00 when The Eyes of Texas came on. Ron Stone was, like, my other dad. He was a kindly, slightly folksy, yet authoritative old-school broadcaster. It didn't even matter that much that he was actually from Oklahoma.