NAME GAME. Hey, editor Martin sent something in, and since he is unable to manipulate Blogger (being at this point nothing more than a mouldering corpse in a Victorian breakfront), I will post some of it myself, with quotation marks so you know it's Martin speaking, not me (this device, and the word "blogosphere," were invented by Steven Den Beste, or Penelope Ashe, I forget which).

Commenting on a recent New York Times story about Major General Paul Eaton's plan to gin up a new Iraqi army, with "1,000 soldiers training by August, and 12,000 by the end of the year... [and] 40,000 by an unspecified date in 2004," Martin writes:

"Are we going to give them our stuff, or are we going to the rummage sale for some 1960s Soviet crap, so that when the new army stages a coup to set up a militant Islamic state, we can play war with them again?

"I often think about guns. AK-47s and M-16s? Isn't that a bit like typewriters and mimeographs? Where are the plasma-pulse pistols and destructor-ray rifles? Who's working on these things? They're fired. (No pun intended.) Also, have you noticed that nobody refers to the afformentioned AK-47 as such since some time last year? Now it's 'Kalashnikovs.' Why haven't we started calling M-16s by the name of their inventor, Eugene Stoner? Oh, I see, right..."

And so forth. Good show, Marty! How I wish you were not a mouldering corpse.

I think the name thing can be easily explained, though. Being older, I remember when the word "AK-47" stirred the American adrenaline -- it was like the names we gave our guns, (e.g., Colt .45, Winchester 77), but slightly more modern (and therefore slightly more cool) in that we dispensed with the words and just used letters, man. It was like gravitational measurement units (Mars, I recall, rated a G4), or the HAL9000 in 2001. It was like the X-15. It was our vision of the future. Food out of tubes, and all that.

Nowadays, we are at least as tech-mad, but we are way, way more brand conscious. In my day, brands were either simple descriptors (e.g. Keds) or evil clouds of anaesthetic gas meant to distract us from the accelerating Nazification of our country. Since Reagan, of course, brands have become objects of worship. And since we must call our beloved(s) by name, not by number, it is better to call them Skechers and Microsoft than G6 and X7. Kalashnikov might as well an edgy fashion line. Or a band.

Now fetch Old Uncle Roy the jug and he'll tell you more about life in the Rust Belt.