Here's something I never anticipated. The COIN crowd assembled for a Tom Ricks talk this afternoon. A friend asked me to explain emo to John Nagl. Thrown for a bit of a loop, I got kind of into the weeds: "So there was this punk band, Minor Threat? And they were awesome? And then their singer links up with the guys from his brother's band? They become this other band Embrace, which is, like, less hard but also awesome...?" Blank stare from Nagl. Ricks pipes up: "Think about the music playing in every VW commercial you've heard over the past two years." Eureka moment. It's actually not really true, but I thought: Really? Tom Ricks does this better than me, too?

I think I kind of redeemed myself at the coffee line, when I explained to Nagl the jokes made at his expense on this comment thread. The man knows a lot about counterinsurgency, but he don't know shit about no LOLcats. I thought he'd at least get the concept about being in someone's base killing their doodz, but clearly he's short-changing the ineradicable kinetic aspects of COIN.