April 2006 Archives
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Wanted: Single, Dedicated Grassroots Movement
By John
Andi over at Andi's World wants you to help Save Fran O'Brien's. She links a letter from Greyhawk over at Mudville, who writes:
Folks,Marty and Hal need our help. For over six months they have been asking the Hilton Management for the terms for renewal of their lease. For over 5 months they were told not to worry they would have the renewal lease in a few weeks. About a month ago the Hilton folks stopped responding to their emails and voice messages for a status report and last week Hal and Marty received a one page eviction notice. No explanation was given. We suspect that at least part of the reason is the Friday night dinner Hal and Marty have been hosting for the last two and a half years. It may be that the Hilton folks are concerned about the increased liability of having so many severely injured and disabled soldiers in their basement each Friday (several have taken falls on the steep stairs at the entrance to Fran's (but no law suits or problems have ensued). It may be that there is very limited and problematic wheelchair access to the restaurant (although no ADA complaints have been filed). The truth is that we don't know for sure but what we do know is that this is unfair. Unless we can change the minds of the folks at the Hilton Hotel Fran's will be out of business on May 1st and we will not have any place to hold our Friday night dinner for the injured soldiers and marines of Walter Reed and Bethesda Naval Hospitals. If you are so inclined I would like to ask you to call and/or email the following two officials at the Hilton and voice your support for Hal and Marty and express your concern for the reasoning behind this seemingly arbitrary decision. Please call them tomorrow or Friday and feel free to share this with anyone else who might be willing to call.
Here are the people to call:
*Dan Boyle (212) 838-1558
daniel_a_boyle@hilton.com
Brian Kellaher (202) 393-1000*
Guys, let's fix this problem with the usual milblogger precision okay?
Launch Update
By John
To answer an email I just got, yes...all the old Officers' Club stuff will also be available on OpFor. Blogger is being stubborn this evening so the export probably won't be completely wrapped up until tomorrow.
Our First Podcast
By Charlie
Hey everyone, our first podcast is up!
John and I explain what Op-For is all about, and give a little background about where we're going from here.
Bumper music is American Hi Fi -Flavor of the Week and Brand New- the Quiet things that no one ever knows.
Check it out and let us know what you think!
Relaunched!
By John
I know, you guys are probably wondering what happened to The Officers' Club. In short, junked. Here's why:
The OC really took off. And I when I say it really took off, I mean it really flippin' took off. After about a month and a half of blogging (we started in late Oct 05), Charlie and I had three standing offers on the table to pull us off of blogspot and onto a more capable platform. In the end, it wasn't a difficult choice. Military.com, who also sponsors Defense Tech and Milblogging.com, picked us up, redesigned us, and found us a nice cozy home on their server. They wanted us to help them connect military folks with the benefits and services found on their website, and we wanted them to help us plug their 6 million members into the blogosphere. Not a bad trade eh?
So why the name change? A few reasons, one being the fact that we felt bad calling ourselves "The Officers' Club" when some of our most loyal readers are enlisted troops. That and Officers' Club was clunky; it was two words too many and no one could get the punctuation straight.
OpFor works on a couple of different levels. In the military tongue, OpFor stands for "opposing force," an army-ism that we felt accurately summed up this grand experiment we call milblogging. Plus it's short and makes civilians feel important when they say it.
As for the site itself, we've made "some special modifications." You'll notice a few extra pages up top: resources, support the troops, and podcasting. The resources page was a little project of mine, I was sick of using Red Google to solicit research materials for posts and decided to consolidate a link dump of military and defense sites that would benefit all of our readers, not just Charlie and I.
Support the Troops is self-explanatory, we owe the armed forces a lot. If just one willing donor uses OpFor to connect with a charity that suits him, we've done our job.
As for podcasting, we've already done podcast #1 and we're looking foward to more. That's Charlie's bag, he'll talk about it in future posts I'm sure.
Although we are blogging under a new identiy and a new (and sexier!) site, we're the same John and Charlie, and we'll be blogging on the same topics that we hit on the OC. Many, many thanks to Sekimori Design and Military.com for making OpFor possible, and a huge thanks to Steve Green at Vodkapundit, who has offered phenomenal support, advice, and drinking tips from week one.
We're really excited about OpFor, and hope you guys are too. Thanks for your patronage, you readers are the ones who made this new site a reality.
