Montgomery McFate’s Nom de Plume: The secret is out. When she is not doing for embedded anthropology what Anita Bryant did for orange juice, Montgomery McFate is busy writing lusty blog entries of military men on her site I Luv a Man in Uniform. In a statement to Wired’s Blog, McFate wrote that she can not affirm nor deny that she is Pentagon Diva, the author of the blog who describes herself in the About Me section:
Hey girls, remember TeenBeat? Remember when you thought Andy Gibb and the Bay City Rollers were just the hottest boys in the world? Go on, don’t be ashamed – you can admit it! Now that we’re all grown up, our tastes have changed – no more foppish, self-indulgent rock stars for us! Since there are so many studly guys in uniform slinging rifles these days, what better way to show our appreciation than a little fan site dedicated to men in uniform? As the Gang of Four once sang, “The girls — they love to see you shoot!”
Eww. Although Marc Tyrrell at In Harmonium emphasizes that Pentagon Diva and I Luv a Man … is essentially a big joke, Maximillian Forte at Open Anthropology suggests that the joke isn’t all that funny.
And so it begins… Wired and Culture Matters reported that the Pentagon has officially released a call for proposal submissions for Project Minerva.
Culture on the Move: Sandra Rubia Silva, a Brazilian PhD student, posted this piece at Material World on her proposal to research cell phone usage in the South of Brazil.
Really, Really Cold War: So cold it happened in the Ice Age. (Ouch, bad joke.) ABC News reports on recent findings out of University of Missouri-Columbia that there was a prehistoric arms escalation of arrowhead technology. The projecting of current events into the archaeological record and then using them as an example to illuminate our world might best be illustrated by, well, ABC’s illustration of arrowhead evolution.
New Journal: Kerim passed along a recent announcement for (con)textos, a new PhD student journal in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Barcelona. Enjoy!
Thanks. Regarding the Minerva Research Initiative, I attempted an initial analysis of some of its implications here at http://tinyurl.com/6l68hz, with some additional notes provided earlier at http://tinyurl.com/5wfzqc. The MRI has international academic implications, which projects like the Human Terrain System did not. I am glad to say that I have prompted some early discussion about these implications within the executive of Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), and that you should expect to hear more from CASCA in the coming weeks and months.