squidpants

so they captured saddam, which is pretty cool. I first saw it last night because i was at work all day, and when i saw the front page of Yahoo with the picture of saddam with a beard i thought it was some kind of banner ad for the Onion or some joke, and then there'd be an animation of the headline tearing and something crazy would happen, like an SUV would drive out. But anyway, something struck me as odd with this: the operation to get him was called Operation Red Dawn. I immediately thought, "wow, Red Dawn is that stupid World War 3 movie with Patrick Swayze." The movie is pretty hilarious, the Russians and the Cubans (oh no, not the Cubans!) invade the US and conquer lots of stuff, up into Wyoming or something, and Patrick Swayze and some kids make a guerilla group and fight the Russians and the uh, Cubans. Or maybe they are from Nicaragua. It's kind of entertaining and it has lots of funny patriotic stuff about the Russians and Cubans being bad. They are like "Ha-ha Yankee prisoner, smoke this cigar until you get sick!!!" No, they do stuff like parachute into a high school and kill all the kids, since they are so bad. That's probably one of the most bizarre beginnings of a movie ever, actually. There was a really hilarious article in Maxim awhile back that showed how Swayze quotes from the movie reflected Zen philosophy or something, but I can't find it now. Plus it was apparently the first movie to be rated PG-13, interesting. Here's a link about the movie: from IMDB.

So anyway, I thought that was a weird coincidence, "Red Dawn" is kind of a random title for anything, and then I read on Yahoo that the two houses the troops searched to find Saddam were code-named "Wolverine 1" and "Wolverine 2". "The Wolverines" was the name of the guerilla group from the movie. So some Pentagon planner obviously likes cheesy ass war movies. Kind of amazing it wasn't called like "Operation Complete Justice" or "Final Victory" or something corny like that. But no, now Patrick Swayze killing damn dirty commies with his teenage army will be forever remembered.