I’d like to thank the voters in the 2009 Best of the Valley Readers’ Poll for voting my defunct, deflated, detached, just plain de-a-d blog Paradise City Best Local Blog.  It’s really nice of you all.  Thank you.

However I am but one person distilling one experience of one perspective in this great big Valley of ours.  We all walk around this beautiful side of paradise every day having singular experiences and I want to use this opportunity of unprecedented advocacy-journalism media attention to do some advocacy for those capturing the goings and comings of Valley life better than I.

First there’s the man who’s been blogging for longer than the term itself existed, Tom Devine.  I make that distinction not as a snarky comment on age but as a tip of the hat to his lengthy tradition of consistently wonderful musings on his experience of the world around him from space to UMass to Beacon Hill.

Then there’s Gazette writer Mary Carey with her AboutAmherst.  I love her candid reflections and confessions.  Just today I learned that she used to be a department store Easter Bunny.

Another regular stop for me is Jennifer Myszkowski’s blog.  Again, she’s someone who’s been detailing the antics of her life on and off stage for a long, long time.  Lately, as she’s been pursuing stand-up comedy more steadily, it’s been exciting to read about her discoveries within the craft.  And it’s just nice to catch up with someone you love but never see.

Jim Neill’s Life in the NohoDome is a must-read.  That man has more in his head than most and the way he puts it all, really ALL, down on the virtual page is pure elegance.  Plus the photos of his walkabouts downtown are one-part painterly and one-part story.

Daryl Lafleur’s Northampton Redoubt on the Advocate’s site definitely deserves a shout-out.  I can’t think of a more detailed writer of what’s happening around City Hall.  Daryl goes through meeting minutes with a steel flea comb and I mean that in a good way.

There are dozens and dozens and dozens more people writing up the world as they see it and I think it’s all awesome.

KelseyFlynn.com is a babe in Blog Wooods compared to them all so the blogroll down on the right of this page is just getting started.  Please shoot me an E-mail if I don’t have yours and I’ll gladly slap it down there along with the rest of them.

When it comes down to it, all I got here on kf.com are stories.  No analysis, no punditry, just the distillate of this life of mine after it works its way through the still that’s my brain.  And by the looks of that last sentence, you’ll find no poetry here either.  That’s why Tommy Twilite’s site is good to have on hand.

1. That I was 31 once…for an entire year supposedly.

2. That there was a beginning to this war.

3. That shock and awe didn’t work the way they were hoping it would.

AWE, SHOCKS

I was just on the phone with my pal Jennifer Myszkowski. I called her at 10am on a Sunday. I guess my 31 years are showing as I don’t think that’s terribly early anymore, having gone to bed at 11:30pm the night before. It’s not that I don’t get wild – oh, I can shake it. I was at the Peking Garden in Hadley last night drinking watered down Heineken with a bunch of under-age UMass kids until 11pm! Yep, you read that right – eleven o’clock! HELL YEAH! Wait a minute, I just realized how that probably looks. No – I wasn’t portraying Prof. Humbert Humbert to any promising Lolitas. We just all happened to be in the same place at the same time.

My point is! that I woke up Jennifer this morning at 10am. We got to talking and sharing our feelings about all this war as is the only way to get through it and of course, we stumbled upon the words Shock and Awe immediately.

“You had me at Shock and Awe. You had me at Shock and Awe!” I guess we are hoping for a Renee Zellweger response from Iraq, aren’t we?

Jennifer asked who is responsible for this concept of Shock and Awe. Good question. It’s not the media. They’re responsible for doing their own Shock and Awe of the Shock and Awe concept on us, the audience, but not for initiating it. No, this concept of S&A (similar to S&M, but the spanking’s not as fun) smacks of a decidedly think tank flavor. So, I did some armchair research. And wouldn’t you know the Command and Control Research Project is behind it. It seems Harlan Ullman and James Wade are the responsible Drs. Strangelove.

They wrote the book! Literally – Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance. It’s not in print on Amazon anymore, but a reader does give a very cogent review [ed. note: who needs print when you can get this title on the Amazon Kindle!]. Luckily, our S&A cronies at the Command and Control Research Project have it available in PDF form still.

In their 1996 racy hit, Harlan and Jimmy wrote about a “very selective, utterly brutal, and ruthless and rapid application of force to intimidate.” They figured the idea is to get the opposing force to quit before they die. Question is – how can you hear them surrender with all the Shock and Awe going on?

It’s one of those good bad things – in think tank parlance.