Reference : http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/americas/10/12/canada.troops.marijuana.reut/index.html

OTTAWA, Canada (Reuters) -- Canadian troops fighting Taliban militants in Afghanistan have stumbled across an unexpected and potent enemy -- almost impenetrable forests of marijuana plants 10 feet tall.

General Rick Hillier, chief of the Canadian defense staff, said Thursday that Taliban fighters were using the forests as cover. In response, the crew of at least one armored car had camouflaged their vehicle with marijuana.

"The challenge is that marijuana plants absorb energy, heat very readily. It's very difficult to penetrate with thermal devices. ... And as a result you really have to be careful that the Taliban don't dodge in and out of those marijuana forests," he said in a speech in Ottawa, Canada.

"We tried burning them with white phosphorous -- it didn't work. We tried burning them with diesel -- it didn't work. The plants are so full of water right now ... that we simply couldn't burn them," he said.

Even successful incineration had its drawbacks.

"A couple of brown plants on the edges of some of those [forests] did catch on fire. But a section of soldiers that was downwind from that had some ill effects and decided that was probably not the right course of action," Hiller said dryly.

One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana'."

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There are so many things going through my mind right now I don't know where to start.

If the "ill effects" of the downwind are what I think it is, and they actually manage to burn the forest sometime soon, it would make for a REALLY interesting fight between the Canadian and the Taliban troops. Then again, I'm not even sure a fight would take place, given how mellow the troops would be.

The only thing more surprising than a forest of drugs appearing in middle of nowhere is finding Canadian troops in the middle of nowhere. Though, if I were a Canadian troop, though, I'd sob happily and cut some of it to help pay the bills at home.

If you sent in teenagers and hippies I reckon they'd clear the forest pretty quickly.

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(Back to regularly scheduled programming!)

I received my enlistment letter a couple days ago. While not completely awe-inspiring, I can take comfort in the fact that my post A-level holidays are going to be longer than most people within my gender, and then some outside it.

On a side note, did anyone(or everyone) receive a yellow letter regarding people who serve their NS doing medical service? If the answer is no, I can look forward to a life as a medic under the shade. Which when you think about it isn't the worst job ever. Better the save a dying man than be the dying man.

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We sometimes forget how lucky we are sometimes.

No, no, don't get up and leave! Not just yet, anyway. I'm not going to play the harmonica and wax lyrical about the past like an organic hodgepodge relic who does nothing but watch The Black Adder all day, both on TV and in his youth, and then whip out a cane at the speed of light at the slightest suggestion of indifference from generations below. No, I'm not that sinister a person. If I were I'd have plastered pictures of S.H.E and Madonna moving to the tune of Pussycat Dolls music. Speaking of which, is there any artist in the music industry more over franchised, overrated and more irrelevantly marketed than the Pussycat Dolls?

What I'm trying to say here is, we've come a long way, both technically and practically. Remember what studying was like 10 years ago? The only concern you had when you walked into school was what you were going to do during recess. Back when doing math was actually fun. When school legally ended at 12 everyday, and playing truant was never taken seriously. Fast forward to this year. School becomes your life instead of jus a part of it, doing math is about as fun as ramming your head against a grey wall and subsequently realising it's an elephant's buttocks, the list goes on.

In another sense, however, we have it much better than both generations before and after us. While people from JCs of past had to struggle with 10-variable differential equations involving complex numbers, we have a relatively comfortable sylabus. While people of past had NS experiences involving push-ups by the thousands and chicken patties that are burnt black and still frozen inside via mystic chef chef magic, we have NS once again relatively easy, while the system threatens to obliterate NS off the face of the earth once and for all in the near future. And I'd rather have lax NS than no NS. While we had the best kids' shows in Old School Power Rangers and Ultraman, the new generation has to cope with the local crap that Kids Central produces and multiple bad Power Ranger spinoffs. They don't even know who Yogi Bear or Fred Flintstone is anymore, and to them the Green Lantern will always be a black construction worker who has a fetish for birds, which I imagine will lead to scenarios of varying degrees of awkwardness when they encounter Bangla workers(TM). In addition to that, people seem to be getting shorter and shorter by the year, and increasingly stupid as well - J2s should know this.

In a sense, we have it the best compared across time - They say you can't predict the future, but hey, I tried. But as history would prove, people with the best equipment at their disposal will find a way to screw it up somehow. It hasn't happened yet, but the conspiracy theorist, apocalyptic visionary and pariah-cum-prophet in me all see it somehow.

So... make the best use of your time, because to quote Wong Mei Lin,"Time and tide wait for no man and no woman". The fact I'm using this quote had added a much-needed item to her short list of uses that initially only consisted of spotting A level questions.