Ain’t That America? – Page 35

No Such Thing

24. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, World

…As too many books.

There is however, such a thing as not enough bookshelves.

When Blondie and I PCSed out of Spain over fifteen years ago, the packing crew had a pool going on how many boxes of books they would eventually pack. The grand total topped out at 64 boxes at that point. Since we returned to the land of the Big PX, replete with establishments such as Half-Price Books, the sales tables at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and various library and book-club events, the increase on the 1991 book census has been geometric. At a certain point, accommodating all the books in free-standing bookcases would have reduced the house to a kind of solidly-packed, book-lined burrow, dark and fusty, with barely enough space for a reading light, and a stove.

Beginning bout five years ago, I took the situation in hand, and began buying lengths of shelving and brackets of the ornamental sort— for the ends that showed— and utility brackets for the interior of the shelves which wouldn’t show when properly packed full of books. The first efforts at securing order among the books involved a narrow stretch of wall where the kitchen merged into the dining area, to one side of a large window looking out into the back yard. Three small white-painted shelves advanced up the wall towards the ceiling, for the cookbooks that I used most frequently, and the jar of pencils and notepads best kept close to the telephone. The rag-tag collection of shelves that had served us until then were banished to the garage. Most of them were heavy, ugly dark-wood things that took up a lot of space, bought at the PX because I had an urgent need for storage at the moment, and they were cheap. A couple of weekends later, another set of shelves went up on the other side of the window, for the not-so often used cookbooks, and the gardening and home-improvement porn. I put up a long shelf over the window for the blue-flowering Danish china, and there was that whole end of the house rendered light, and bright, and all the books in order. So, I looked around and said, hmmmm.

The wall opposite the big window was next. This had a double-doorway from the living room into a little room that we used as a TV den, more or less in the center. Four-foot-long shelves went up on either side, all the way to the top of the door… and then five more shelves above those which ran the width of the wall, but shortened to follow the angle of the ceiling. I need a very tall ladder to get to the top three shelves… in fact; the stuff that I never use is all parked up there. Everything was ordered by subject or genre, and a couple of nice vases and knick-knacks interspersed between the books. Last of all, I fitted six shelves on either side of the fireplace, and all but one of the old bookcases were banished to the garage. Now the living room was lined with books on three walls, and all the space between freed up. The three wooden shelves I kept in the house still, were squeezed into the TV den, as they were oak and matched the stereo/media center.

The only place where chaos, clutter and disorganization still reigned was among the oldest collection of books… the paperbacks, banished to a set of tall walnut-veneer bookcases in the hallway, and shelved two ranks deep. I had made a stab at alphabetizing them by author, but locating a particular book was a particularly frustrating crap-shoot. But this last weekend, Blondie had prevailed upon me… since she had a shelf of her own books, overflowing in a most untidy way… to bring order, discipline and installed shelves to that last holdout.

We took ourselves away to Home Depot for brackets and five lengths of 5-inch wide shelving, and ran a series of shelves from the end of the hall to the washer and dryer closet. We’ll need to put in another three shelves, actually, but at least everything is now only single-deep. Heck, I can now find stuff that I didn’t lay eyes on since the last time I unpacked it.

Hey, I knew I had a copy of “That Darn Cat”… Granny Jessie took us to see that movie, and my copy was a tie-in, bought at Vromans for 35 cents! And I do have all of Dorothy Dunnets’ Francis Lymond books… read the first of them when I was sick with the flu in a youth hostel in Lincoln. And there was the episode guide to “Blakes’ 7”, and every damn one of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Darkover” books. Wow, that’s kind of an embarrassment. So is the R.F. Delafield “The Dreaming Suburb”. Not too many Agatha Christie mysteries, though. They always seemed a little formulaic to me; I preferred Josephine Tey. And one of the most uproarious novels about the Restoration ever written, John Dickson Carr’s “Most Secret”… So what if they are all stacked sideways on the shelf? At least they are not all hiding behind each other! In not a few cases, I despaired of finding a book that I thought I had, and bought another copy. (Half-Price Books buy-back desk, here we come!)
At least now, we can find what we are looking for. And the hallway seems a great deal wider, too.

Anyone Want to Bet

24. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, General Nonsense, Rant

…That in about twenty-five years, Cheryl Crow will star in an advert for toilet paper?
About a third of the audience will laugh, once they are reminded by someone else who Cheryl Crow is. Another third will ask themselves: You mean the old broad isn’t an actress? She was …what? Really? And the remaining third will not care. At all.

So, anyone else besides me getting tired of being lectured by well-heeled celebrities with lavish personal life-styles about how many pieces of TP we ought to use, and chided about leaving the lights on?

This is what we had grandparents for, people. Shut up and go get another $400.00 hair cut, or a dozen Priuses for your entourage. That or build another 20,000 square foot mansion. Just spare us the damned lecture about our carbon footprint.

Tales of a Citizen Militia: Northfield

20. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Old West

It would seem from the history books that most veterans of the Civil War settled down to something resembling a normal 19th century civilian life without too much trouble. One can only suppose that those who survived the experience without suffering incapacitating physical or emotional trauma were enormously grateful to have done so. Union veterans additionally must have been also glad to have won the war, close-run thing that it appeared to have been at times. Confederate veterans had to be content with merely surviving. Not only did they have to cope with the burden of defeat, but also physical wreckage of much of the South – as well as the wounds afflicted upon experiencing the wreckage of that whole Southern chivalry-gracious plantation life-fire eating whip ten Yankees with one arm tied behind my back- anti-abolitionist mindset. But most Confederate soldiers laid down their arms and picked up the plow, so to speak fairly readily – if with understandable resentment. In any case, the still-unsettled frontier west of the Mississippi-Missouri basin offered enough of an outlet for the restless, the excitement-seekers and those who wanted to start fresh.

The war had been conducted with more than the usual brutality in the mid-west, though, in Bleeding Kansas and even Bloodier Missouri, where the dividing line between murderous vigilante bandit-gangs and well-disciplined mobile partisan units was considerably more blurred than elsewhere and some of those who had participated in warfare on that basis, were even more reluctant to shake hands like gentlemen and go back to a peaceable life when it was all over.

Such were men like the James brothers, Jesse and his older brother Frank, and their friends, Cole and Jim Younger. Jesse and Cole Younger had both ridden with the Confederate partisans led by the notorious William Clarke Quantrill. The Coles and the Youngers were so disinclined to give peace a chance that they hardly waited a year before holding up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri. Over the next decade, they hit banks from Kentucky to Iowa, Kansas and West Virginia, varying the program occasionally with robbing trains. By July of 1876 they appear to have made Missouri too hot to hold them, even though they had sympathy and quiet support among kinfolk and local residents who gave them the benefit of the doubt for having fought for the Confederacy. Casting around for a new and profitable target for robbery which would get them away from Missouri, the James-Younger gang may have taken up the suggestion of one of the gang members: Minnesota. Not only was gang-member Bill Chadwell a native, and presumably familiar with the lay-out – but no one would be expecting such an organized gang, so far off their usual turf. And robbing a bank in Minnesota would have the added piquancy of taking money from the hated Yankees.

In August of 1876, eight members of the gang, Frank and Jesse James, Jim, Cole and Bob Younger, Clell Miller, Bill Chadwell and Charlie Pitts all arrived in Minnesota – by what exact means is not certain. They pretended to be legitimate businessmen, and scouted various locations in southern Minnesota, in groups of two and three. They spent some time shopping for horses and equipment in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and did some gambling, drinking and recreating. Although they gave false names, they wore long linen dusters, to conceal their weaponry, and this had attracted notice. After some weeks of careful consideration, they settled upon robbing the First Commercial Bank in Mankato. On the day of the planned robbery, they noted a large crowd in the vicinity of the bank, and wisely decided on turning their attentions upon their second choice, the First National Bank of Northfield. They split up into two groups, to travel to Northfield, and arrived there on the morning of September 7th, where an alert citizen noticed that two of them had passed through Northfield and cashed a large check at the bank, some ten days earlier.
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Pouring Scorn and Derision on Terrorists

19. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Fun With Islam, General, General Nonsense, sarcasm

I thought we ought to have started stuff like this, ages ago. Here’s one small step on the road to making Binny and Friends a laughingstock.

I thought the line about taking out the Verizon guy was giggle-worthy. Courtesy of Rantburg, one of the finest veins of sarcasm around.

Our Peculiar Local Institution

18. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Rant, World

OK, now I am in the mood to thump the head of a spectacularly ignorant commentor….

“Being able to walk into a supermarket any time day or night, and buy a gun and bullets is obviously too much for the weak-minded American. It’s basic stupidity. Surely, surely the US can no longer deny the fact that their “freedom of protection” is a load of crap. Or must thousands more innocents die?”

Emily, Cape Town, South Africa, comment on Sky News thread, via commentor Dylan Kissane at Tim Blair’s place

Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit, if that doesn’t qualify in my book as purely the stupidest, most ignorant and bigoted statement I have run across in regards to the recent sad events. Of course, I have charted a careful course to avoid some of the deeper and most notorious fever-swamps in the blogosphere. There may be more densely concentrated blocks of ignorance out there, but fortunately I am not moved to hunt them down… stumbling over that little example was enough to get the bile ducts going like Old Faithful.

That and the fact that South Africa, as dear little Emily must be aware, has a hell of a problem with home-invasion robberies, rapes and violent carjackings just puts a nice shiny gloss on the phrase “freedom of protection”. Wasn’t South Africa the place where an inventor had worked up a flamethrower that shot out from either side of the car, scorching the hell out of anyone standing there and menacing the driver or passenger? Why, yes it was. Doesn’t look like it was popular for too long, though. Must have been hell on the poor squee-gee guys, too.

As a matter of fact, you cannot buy guns and bullets from a supermarket, any time day or night… either that, or I have persistently missed seeing that aisle at HEB Grocery, or Smiths or Kroeger. Nope, sweetie… not even in Texas.

You can buy ammunition during the wee hours at Walmart, though… and guns from those Walmart outlets which have a well-stocked sporting goods department, and they are open twenty-four hours a day, but it’s stretching things a bit to call Walmart a supermarket.

Here’s what the Constitution says about our “right of protection”, Emily dear…
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Savor the taste of the words “security of a free state” and “Right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. So, the part about “well-regulated militia” is a little loose and lumpy… somewhat like Michael Moore, come to think on it. My point is that a lot of common, ordinary Americans think of guns as tools… sort of like a band-saw, or a power drill, the sort of thing that a do-it-yourself enthusiast has around the house.

Because we are still, for a variety of reasons, a do-it-yourself kind of people… kind of prone to take care of stuff ourselves, especially in those places which do not boast 24-7 private security. We’ve been that way for a while… and sometime it gets ugly when it happens, but the odd thing that I keep noticing, is that it happens in the w-a-a-a-a-y biggest ugly way in those places…oh like Darfur, and Somalia, Kosovo and Zimbabwe, where the means of providing Miss Emily’s , “freedom of protection” is a little on the sketchy side. For the foreseeable future though, we are all stuck with the existence of unbalanced losers who want to go out in a blaze of glory and 24-7 news coverage, as well as the distain of people as exquisitely well-informed as Emily from Cape Town. It’s tragic and horrible… but it happens in other places than the US. And when some raving loony, or some hopped-up robber is disuaded by a do-it-yourself good citizen, it’s a couple of lines on the local police blotter… maybe on the local TV newscast for an evening.

I don’t own a gun, myself, and even though I have lived in Texas for a dozen years now, this last weekend was the first time I had seen a lot of people walking around with a surplusage of side arms. Even in the Air Force, our SPS were held down to one major weapon per person, two at max. Most of the antique firearms enthusiasts I saw this last weekend were dressed up in old West costume, and they were having fun plinking away at metal targets. It’s just not my cup of tea…but it amuses me as much as it would probably horrify Emily from Cape Town, to think that my own neighborhood may be as well equipped, weapons-wise as many small European militaries. (Say, San Marino, or Monaco? Do they even have militaries?) It guarantees that violent home invasions and car-hijackings in Texas are refreshingly not as frequent as they might be in those places where everyone has decided that “freedom of protection is a load of crap”.

Memo: L’Affaire Imus, and Other Matters of Passing Interest

13. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Rant, sarcasm

To: Various
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Smell of Hypocrisy in the Morning

1. My mind boggles actually, that someone who was around long enough to have a comedy disc in the AFRTS library (from the late 60s, if memory serves) with a piece called “2,000 Hamburgers to go” was actually trying to sound hip, trendy and with-it four decades later. Mmmm, ‘kay. Well everyone has hobbies. Mine is gardening… mercifully, I have come to that stage in life where I do not have to even pretend to be trendy. Nothing looks more ridiculous than extreme trendiness a couple of decades past its “best if used by” date.

2. It is kind of amusing, watching some of the very people who lined up to be on Imus’ show, line up to throw him under the bus. Please check out the definition of “shock jock”. One of the things they do is… er, shock. Also offend, belittle and berate. Or so I have been told. I’m more a classical music fan, myself. NPR’s “Performance Today” is about as cutting edge as I feel like getting these days.

3. So the ladies of the Rutgers women’s basketball team were shocked, hurt, insulted, etc. by his crude remark about them. They have a perfect right to be shocked, hurt, insulted; ladies should be offended when men say vile, demeaning and misogynist things about them. I hope that they have been kept in blissful ignorance about the lyrics of most rap and hip-hop hits, thought. That sort of language might very well prompt them to curl up in the fetal position with the heating blanket turned all the way up. Oh, but that’s different….

4. Right on schedule, here come the race-hustlers; Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton grown as fat as ticks by playing the race card, carefully inflaming old grievances and playing their version of a protection racket. “Give us what we want, or you’re a racist!”. MLK must be so proud. He’s probably revolving in his grave like a Makita drill.

5. Oh, and as regards ‘Affaire Duque La Cross’ ? If there are any communities in these United States who would instantly recognize such a thing as a lynch mob, virtual or otherwise, I’d expect it would be the academic community… and the African American one. That certain members of it were so quick to join in is only sad proof of the axiom that those to whom injustice has been done are just as quick off the mark in dealing it out to others. And the sainted “judged not by the color of skin but the content of character” MLK had such hopes that it would be otherwise.

6. And our lords of the Mainstream and Legacy Media were right there, with the pitchforks and torches. Thanks, guys… you covered yourself with glory, as usual. Now take a gallon of bleach and the garden hose, go around in back and try and scour some of it off.

Sincerely
Sgt. Mom

YOU KNOW YOU’RE AN AGING DISC JOCKEY WHEN…

05. April 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, General Nonsense, Working In A Salt Mine...

(Courtesy of the FEN news group: One of those nostalgic things going around. I do, in fact, have scars on my fingers from miscalculated cuts, while editing audio tape with a razor blade. Just call me Miss Butterfingers)

– You were first hired by a GM who actually worked in radio before becoming GM.

– Radio stations were no place for kids.

– You excitedly turn the radio up at the sound of “dead air” on the competitor’s station.

– Sales guys wore Old Spice to cover the smell of liquor.

– Engineers could actually fix things without sending them back to the manufacturer.

– You worked for only ONE station, and you could name the guy who owned it.

– Radio stations used to have enough on-air talent to field a softball team every summer.

– You used to smoke in a radio station and nobody cared.

– Engineers always had the worst body odor, not because they worked too hard, but because they just didn’t shower that often.

– You know the difference between good reel-to-reel tape and cheap reel-to-reel tape.

– Religious radio stations were locally owned, run by an old Protestant minister and his wife, never had more than 20 listeners at any given time, and still made money.

– You have a white wax pencil, a razor blade, and a spool of 3M splicing tape in your desk drawer – – just in case.

– You can post a record, run down the hall, go to the bathroom, and be back in 2:50 for the segue.

– You knew exactly where to put the tone on the end of a carted song.

– You only did “make- goods” if the client complained. Otherwise, who cares?

– You can remember the name of the very first “girl” that was hired in your market as a DJ.

– Somebody would say, “You have a face for radio”, and it was still funny.

– Sixty percent of your wardrobe has a station logo on it.

– You always had a screwdriver in the studio so you could take a fouled-up cart apart at a moment’s notice.

– You always had a solution for an LP that ‘skipped’. (usually a paper clip or a dime on the tone-arm, somewhere)

– You would spend hours splicing and editing a parody tape until it was “just right”, but didn’t care how bad that commercial was you recorded.

– You still refer to CDs as “records”. (really old hands refer to them as ET, or electrical transcriptions)
– You played practical jokes on the air without fear of lawsuits.

– You answer your home phone with the station call letters.

– You used to fight with the news guy over air-time. After all, what was more important: your joke, or that tornado warning?

– You knew how to change the ribbon on the Teletype machine, but you hated to do it because “…that’s the news guy’s job.”

– You know at least 2 people in sales that take credit for you keeping your job.

– You have several old air-check cassettes in a cardboard box in your basement that you wouldn’t dream of letting anyone hear anymore, but, you’ll never throw them out or tape over them. Never!

– You can still see scars on your finger when you got cut using a razor blade and cleaned out the cut with head-cleaning alcohol and an extra long cotton swab on a wooden stick.

– You still have dreams of a song running out and not being able to find the control room door. (I have nightmares about the various players not working, or the control board has magically reconfigured itself)

– You’ve ever told a listener “Yeah.I’ll get that right on for you.”

– You have a couple of old transistor radios around the house with corroded batteries inside them.

– People who ride in your car exclaim, “Why is your radio so loud?”

– You remember when promotion men brought new LPs to the station – and you played them the same day.

– You have at least 19 pictures of you with famous people whom you haven’t seen since, and wouldn’t know you today if you bit ’em on the ass.

– You wish you could have been on “Name That Tune” because you would have won a million bucks.

– You even REMEMBER “Name That Tune”.

– You were a half an hour late for an appearance and blamed it on the directions you received from the sales person.

– You’ve run a phone contest and nobody called, so you made up a name and gave the tickets to your cousin.

– You remember when people actually thought radio was important.

AARGH

17. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, Home Front

Red Haired Girl competed in the regional Scripps Spelling Bee this week – a victory there would have taken her to Washington for the national competition. She’s a very good speller, but these things tend to be luck-of-the-draw (I never heard of a cruller, or for that matter, a muumuu). She did well until the second from the last (p-e-n-u-l-t-i-m-a-t-e) round when she got the word fuselage. When asked to repeat the word, the pronouncer – consistent with her performance the entire evening – gave it a somewhat British flavor. RHG, who reads a lot but not the things that boys read, spelled it the way it was pronounced that night – fusilage. Another girl was eliminated for spelling angst as ongst, and yet another for spelling chronology as chrinology – in both cases they spelled it as it was pronounced to them.

I have always considered my time in the USAF in the early seventies to be a defining point in my life, and have an on-going fascination with airplanes, so this particular defeat was somewhat crushing. RHG took it in stride though, looking forward to next year. On the way home we went through some words that she might encounter in the future, like empennage.

One of Those Days

05. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, My Head Hurts, Veteran's Affairs

So, this is one of those calls that you don’t want to hear on the answering machine, first thing after coming back after being dragged around the neighborhood by the dogs; a kind-of-upset voice from one’s only and dearly-beloved child saying

“Mom…I’m OK… I was run into by a truck and the car is totaled… I’m at 35 and Theo Malone, can you come and get me?”

There may be crappier ways to start a Monday. Frankly, I can’t think of any of them at the moment. Cpl/Sgt. Blondie is ok, but rather interestingly bruised. She is loaded up on painkillers, and her poor little Mitsubishi is in the SAPD impound lot; the concensus from the investigating officer, the EMT, the tow-truck driver and the FD response unit is that it is indeed, totaled.

It was only a light pick-up truck that hit her, after a very complicated series of events best left to the insurance people to sort out. She had the presence of mind to gather up most valuable items from it— including her textbooks from the trunk (which the tow-truck driver had to pry open for her).

She was waiting far me by the side of the road, with everything from the car loaded into a plastic tub, and a very nice and understanding SAPD patrolman (Yay, SAPD… where gallantry is not yet dead!) waiting with her, who gave me a lecture about having a cellphone of my own, since the accident had set up the most awful slow-down of traffic. I swear, I could have walked that last mile faster.

She is OK for now, but will probably feel like heck in the morning, especially when she starts to thread the maze of claims and adjustments, never mind the bruises. We plan to hold last rites for the Mitsubishi, and bury a portion of it in the garden sometime this week.

In about 500 years, someone doing an archeological dig in my garden is going to go nuts.

News Flash: Military Health Care Sucks

05. March 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: AARRRMY TRAINING SIR!!!, Ain't That America?, Air Force, Air Navy, Media Matters Not, Stupidity, Veteran's Affairs

You would think that the absolute cluelessness of the American Media, and many bloggers I might add, would fail to shock me. You’d be wrong.

Anyone who thinks this is going to do more than cause some hospitals to paint a wall or two, raise your hands.

For almost 23 years I’ve mostly been given Vitamin M (Motrin) and/or Flexoril for just about every ache and pain that I’ve ever had. I’ve been to a physical therapist twice even though I’m supposed to see one every other week…he’s usually so overbooked here he actually says, “When it hurts bad enough, come in, I’ll crack it again.” After 20 years of rather constant “shin splints” they finally figured out I had compressed compartments. The only reason they decided to operate was that they’d become chronic and were “getting ready to blow.”

And most of my crap is just muscles and nerves not doing what they should. I can’t imagine being in need of any real treatment.

Therapy Culture

26. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Pajama Game

Among one of the small stories that I remember hearing, or reading after the monster tsunami that struck South-East Asia on the day after Christmas several years ago was the one about the clouds of mental-health professionals, breathlessly hurrying in to offer grief and trauma counseling to the understandably traumatized survivors… only to discover that… well, most of them were getting along fine. And if not fine, at least reasonably OK; yes, they were grieving, they were traumatized by all sorts of losses, their lives and livelihoods, their communities and their families had been brutally ripped apart, but a large number of the survivors seemed inclined to be rather stoic about it all. They seemed to be more interested in pulling up their socks, metaphorically speaking, and getting on with it. It appeared that, according to the story, their culture and religion predisposed them to a mind-set that said: the incomprehensible does indeed happen, wheel of life, turn of fate and all that, and when it happens, pull up your socks and get on with it.

The peripatetic grief counselors seemed a little at a loss, that their services were in so little demand in the face of (to them) such obvious need. I was also left wondering if wall-to-wall counseling was somewhat akin to taking a ton of over-the-counter remedies for a case of the flu or a cold. In most cases, you’re gonna get over it, anyway.

When my parents lost their house, lock stock and contents in the Paradise Mountain/Valley Center fire in 2003, Blondie and I were monitoring the whole situation from a distance. This was the house that my parents had built together, after owning the land for nearly twenty-five years previously. It had everything in it that I remember growing up with, from the spiky Danish Moderne teak dining room set, to a complete run of American Heritage magazines, from the days when it was in hard-cover and without advertisements, and every shred of mementoes and furniture inherited from our grandparents and Great-Aunt Nan… everything that had not been diverted to my sister Pip, my brothers and I. My parents were left with two vehicles, the clothes they stood up in, their pets, and a small number of things my mother put into her pockets when she did a final sweep through the house as the fire roared up the hill, or that the firemen grabbed off the walls when the heat of it began exploding the windows inwards.

They were rocked… for about a day. And then they borrowed a camper, and moved right back onto their hill, and began planning to rebuild the house. As my mother philosophically explained many times to us, their friends, and those members of the disaster-relief community offering counseling and therapy, she and my father had gotten off rather lucky in comparison to others. They were retired, and did not have to rebuild a business, they had escaped the fire with their pets and themselves physically unscathed, and they were completely insured. All they had lost were things. And one more thing: they had lived in fire country for many years, and always in the back of their mind was this very possibility. They knew the risks and accepted them willingly. The odds caught up with them, at last but they pulled up their socks and got on with it. I own to being quite proud of my parents for being so stoical about the whole thing… really, it harks back to my current obsession, the 19th Century. I’ve been reading a lot of memoirs, and accounts of fairly shattering events, and yet the people writing them afterwards seem remarkably un-traumatized and quite grounded, following upon events that by twentieth-century mental health practice would have justified a life-time valium prescription and a couple of decades of survivor-support meetings. As I told Mom and Dad about one of the characters I am writing about , “Today, he’d be in therapy for post-traumatic stress… but he’s a Victorian, so he’s only a little haunted.”

I have to admit to a sneaking affection for the Victorians; at once terribly sentimental and operatic in their emotions, but at the same time fully aware that bad things could, and indeed happen fairly often. Husbands buried wives with depressing frequency, also wives burying husbands ditto, and parents buried small children ditto and vice versa; accidents of industry, transportation and war occurred with similarly discouraging frequency. Victorian death rituals are infamous for what we have thought, during the enlightened century just past, to be terribly over-wrought, indulgent and … well, just too morbid. But I do wonder, if maybe they might have been better able to cope, and emerge being able to function after catastrophic tragedies, knowing that the possibility of such experiences was always out there. Sure, there were people back then who were entirely shattered by various traumatic experiences, and self-medication with a variety of interesting substances was not something of recent invention— opiate addiction positively soared among injured Civil War veterans— but still and all, one does wonder.

Discuss among yourselves, if interested!

Doing That Thing You Do

18. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, GWOT, Mordor, Pajama Game

So, yeah, my heart hasn’t really been in this blogging thing for a while… no, no nonono, I am not working up to pulling the plug, it’s just that I have been diverted by another mission. As I said in a post a couple of months ago, I’m just laying down to bleed a while, then up and fight again… but I know how Timmer feels. There’s a lot of stuff going on, which in days of yore I would have been perfectly at home, piling on with the rest of us. Some of it is just the usual blogger shit-fit: Marcotte who? At where? Ummm. OK… this is the blogger-face you want with your campaign? It’s always a bad sign when you piss off more than you make friends with. Didn’t anyone actually read hers and that other blog before taking them on board officially? Apparently not. Smooth move, Ex-Lax, as we used to say in junior high.

Anna Nicole Smith, news coverage of, 24-7. Umm, OK. Clear demonstration that the major legacy media are not serving us well, although the Princess Di-like coverage fairly well illustrates the adage about first time tragedy, second time farce. We’re kinda over served in the farce department here, although the astronaut Lisa whats-er-fern is probably grateful for it.

Britney Spears, bald. Sorry, I’m not stooping to the obvious here. (Although the remembrance of a cartoon entitled “Her First Masked Ball” keeps popping up in my mind. I think it was in National Lampoon in about 1979. You google for it, you pervert.) Girl, the trailer park is calling. It is your destiny!

Talk about flashbacks to the 1970s, though… watching our major political parties and politicians maneuver over the last couple of days. Tragedy and farce, tragedy and farce, people. Only this time it’s going to be a tragedy and a tragedy again. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. It’s been like watching a blindfolded person walk over a cliff; for the purposes of scoring domestic political points, just go ahead and kiss off and abandon our allies (yes, we do have some, here and there, although you wouldn’t know it from your abject flunkies in the legacy media) and pull our forces out of Iraq in 90 days or whatever other timeline you have pulled out of your ass which will look good in the polls. Yeah. Sure. Whatever.

Sell out our national credibility and commitment to a long and difficult mission for a mess of pottage and polls. Do whatever it takes to keep you in that nice little office you have scored for yourself. Just keep thinking of your short-term interest. Just keep hoping that all that jihadist narsty stuff in the woodshed will all go away, when George Bush exits the White House. Yep, just keep hoping. Get your friends and mouthpieces in the legacy media to help you out with that. Everybody will love us once again, once the Bushhitlertyrant is gone, and our betters are in control. Take a nice long drink of the Koolaid, comrade, you will feel so much better.

Me, I am trying to take the long view. With luck the blogosphere will circumvent the “flee-all-is-lost-in Iraq” meme, as best we can. No more kindly and authoritative Uncle Walty declaring without opposition after the Tet Offensive , that “all is lost in Vietnam! Flee, flee for your lives!” And also there is a means of fighting the “our troops are bloodthirsty baby-killers and war-criminals” meme. Here’s hoping we can scotch that one, right at the starting post, although given that the so-called military expert for the Washington Post is singing that little ditty like his hope of heaven depends on it doesn’t necessary ensure that that particular meme will go down without a fight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride in the next two years: fasten your metaphorical seatbelt, and prepare to weather the shitstorm

Me… I have the feeling that bad stuff is going to happen. And that I can do my best part now by going back to our stories, or recollections of who we are, and what we had to overcome. We have had hard times, bad times, times when we might have given it all up. We have to remember these stories. Our past, those stories that some of us know, and that some of us have yet to be reminded of, we will need them, very soon. Things will start happening, in the next months or years. Events will overtake the best intentions of us all, and so we need to be reminded of our history, our stories and our heroes and heroines.

They are a talisman, our hope, our light in the dark when every other light has gone out.

Tears of a Clown

02. February 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, World

I think one of the sadder things about the recent death of columnist Molly Ivins was that the cancer that killed her this week seems to have also killed every scrap of humor in her writing long ago – it’s as if chemo killed the funny bone, too and replaced it with an advanced case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Nothing I read after 9/11 had the same panache, the same sort of hilarity and affection for even those she disagreed with politically. It was painful to read, and so I stopped reading her columns, possibly because I dropped a lot of the publications they were printed in. In the shadow of falling towers, magazines like Harpers, or Mother Jones and the local Current (the oh-so preciously politically correct weekly funded by ad revenue from titty bars and kinky personals) just seemed … well, frivolous. They hyperventilated over the same old obsessions and concerns as if nothing had happened at all, and if they so much as acknowledged 9/11 happening at all, well it was just one of those unfortunate things that was really our own fault for one reason or another. An air of antiquation hung over them, as if they were knights in tatty and hand-me-down armor, going through the rote motions of chivalry, holding jousts in the age of cannon. Besides, I got hooked on the internet and began blogging, exchanging one addiction for another.
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Memo: Going Around, Coming Around

30. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Military, Politics, Rant, sarcasm

To: Various
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Response to Various Recent Events:

1. To: Major Legacy Media – Cease pussyfooting around and anoint the Chosen One… that is, the favored Democratic presidential nominee. Try to give the blogosphere a more substantial chew-toy than last time.

2. To Major Legacy Media – additional note. Keep in mind that anyone who has been in politics for longer than the last five minutes has “form”; that is, an established record of votes, speeches, interview, op-eds and appearances on the Sunday morning wank-fests. Contradictions, misstatements and mis-handled jokes will be noted by the blogosphere with every evidence of keen enjoyment. Take notes, try and keep up.

3. To Reuters and the AP news services: I already turn the page, as soon as I see that credit line at the top of the story. I am beginning to think a lot of other people are doing the same.

4. To President Ahmedinajad of Iran; So, punk, how lucky do you really feel?

5. To: Jewish residents of Western Europe, and those few Christian residents left in the Middle East; one word. Emigration

6. To: Those who feel moved by anti-war passions to expend bodily fluids in the general direction of uniformed military personnel; word to the wise. Our toleration of that s**t ran out approximately thirty years ago. The same goes also for businesses whose employees get snippy with military customers for the same reason.

7. To: The Council on Islamic American Relations; We have not noted Hollywood churning out vast quantities of anti-Islamic propaganda, in order to whip up the feelings of us ignorant proles. In fact, quite the reverse. But we have noted that whenever there is an uptick in car-bombs, beheadings, riots, mob violence, hostage-taking and assorted other anti-social activities in the news, the odds are very good that that a guy named Mohammed has been involved one way or another. Good luck with trying to erase this association in our minds.

8. To Ms. Jane Fonda – Please, if you are so damned keen to reprise the glory days of the 1960ies, confine yourself to doing a remake of Barbarella. Please.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

Thought-crime

07. January 2007 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Cry Wolf, General, Good God, Pajama Game, Politics

I was never, even in my convinced feminist phase, much of a fan of hate crime legislation. Tacking on extra special super-duper penalties for a particular motivation in committing a crime against a person or property seemed… well, superfluous. Defacing someone’s property, lynching someone, harassing phone calls; most of the stuff of which hate crimes are made is already illegal anyway, with pretty hefty penalties already attached upon conviction.

But on the other hand, I could understand how the persons and communities against whom such crimes were routinely directed were pretty generally directed could feel particularly threatened, and could honestly feel that such legislation could provide a modicum of protection. Many of the crimes typically reported as being “hate crimes” were pretty vile, as well as being very widely reported. I could understand those fears; as a feminist woman, and member of one of those classes against hate crimes could theoretically be committed. Personally, though, the existence of misogynist comedians and the whole so-called patriarchal establishment dedicated to keeping women down so lavishly documented in MS Magazine just didn’t cause me a moment of worry. I just figured that being a bigot of whatever persuasion was punishment in itself. Ignorance and bad manners wasn’t something that could, or ought to be legislated against.

I could also understand and sympathize with legislators who passed hate-crime legislation. They run for office, and it must be extraordinarily difficult to look into the eyes of constituents who are frightened and beleaguered and tell them “no”. At the very least, our solons need to be seen as doing “something”. The same for community organizations, and local media outlets; the case against hate crime legislation was made, if it was made at all, almost apologetically. No one wanted much to be seen as being in favor of bigots and racists, misogyny and homophobia, which is pretty much where you must be if you were against such a worthy cause.
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More Freaking Snow

28. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?

My favorite take on this comes from the locals: “We used to have snow like this all the time, this is so weird.”

And that’s from the military folks, not the hippies.

I’ll keep you posted.

Don’t Forget, NORAD Tracks Santa

24. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Air Force

NORAD Tracks Santa 2006

One of our best Christmas Eve’s ever was the eve we spent manning the phones for NORAD. Boyo was only 6 and was interviewed by the local news while he and a bunch of other kids were in the corner of the Command Center watching Rudolph etc. while Beautiful Wife and I manned the phones. We must have had 40 phones in there and we just couldn’t keep up with the calls. A small kitchen was filled with all sorts of food from sliced cold cuts to every imaginable Christmas Goody. The “uniform” was Christmas Casual and it’s pretty darn weird to see a Four-Star walking around with antlers on his head and a glowing nose on his face. Almost made you think he was human.

My absolute favorite calls went something like this:

“HQ NORAD Tracks Santa. This is Sgt Timmer, may I help you?”

“Hi Sergeant, this is a Mom in Milwaukee and I’ve got you on the speaker phone with my five children who are too excited to go to bed.”

Sounds of giggling kids, one little voice “Where’s Santa Claus?” then another, “Yeah, where is he?!”

An excited Sgt Timmer: “Milwaukee?! Ma’am, we’ve got Santa and his sleigh inbound to your position within the next half an hour! NORAD recommends that all good children in Milwaukee go to bed immediately in preparation for Santa’s arrival.”

Sounds of children shreaking, laughing, and bolting down a hall…doors slamming.

A giggling Mom, “Oh, God bless you Sergeant, Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas Ma’am, NORAD out.”

Pretty soon our house is going to fill with the smells of tomorrow’s feast. We’re not going anywhere this year and I didn’t invite anyone over this time. This year it’s just the three of us and I’m okay with that. Next year it will be a houseful of folks back home. Maybe not our house, but a house and you can be sure it WILL be full. Beautiful Wife’s got a HUGE family. Their weird, but we love them.

Merry Christmas and God bless us…everyone.

Bad, Bad Toys

20. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Pajama Game

Ran across this little account of the Very Worst Toys Ever, and began to chortle…. Not so much at the toys themselves, although JP, and Pippy and I were actually given at least one of the deadly worst and a couple of the others mentioned in the comments.

We, of course, emerged un-maimed, although Dad probably regrets to this day that he didn’t give either one of us the atomic energy lab. Probably couldn’t afford it, as he was only a poor graduate student on the GI bill, round and about then. We did have loving and generous grandparents, though; how we didn’t ever get BB rifles like all the other neighborhood kids is a mystery. Mom probably put her foot down about that, believing that yes, you could put out an eye with them. Well, so could you with a “wrist rocket”. We had a pair of them, a sort of bent-metal sling-shot with a bottom end that braced against your wrist so that you could sling a bit of gravel at practically ballistic speed. But they weren’t toys- we had them to chase the blue jays away from the house where they tormented the cats and dogs unmercifully. As far as I know, Dad was the only one of us who ever actually hit a blue-jay with a wrist-rocket impelled missile. Square in the butt, actually. It let out an enormous squawk and vacated the premises henceforth and forthwith and at a good speed.

We did have a variant of the creepy-crawler toy, with the heater that heated up a pair of metal moulds that (IIRC) made little GI Joe figures and their various little accoutrements. Just open the little bottles of black and brown and OD green rubber compound goop, pour into the molds, and bake until done. It did heat up quite hot, and the baking rubber smelt pretty vile. Still, no dangerous adventures to report, no animals ever ingested the little marble-super-balls… but the “clackers” rather lost their charm after some painful bruises. Picture a pair of billiard-sized balls, on either end of a length of cord, with a finger-hold in the middle. The object was to get them going, “clacking” them against each other while hanging from your hand, and then get them going so fast that they would rebound and “clack” against each other above your hand. Eh… it was the novelty toy in about 1966… for as long as it took for kids to figure out that the damned things hurt.

Other bad, bad toys? Definitely the water-rocket. I clearly remember watching Dad and JP launch them from the back yard of the White Cottage, which would put it squarely in the early 60ies, the Golden Age of Really, Really Dangerous Toys. It was bulbous blue plastic rocket; there may have been a pair of them. They flew on an interesting combination of (I think!) baking soda, vinegar, water from a garden hose screwed into the launcher mechanism, and some kind of pressure pump-thingus. It was a wet and messy business, preparing for flight, but they zoomed up to a thrilling height from the ground when released from the launcher with considerable force.

Who needed lawn darts to maim each other with, when you had rocket power? Although to be fair, I don’t think we had nearly as much thrilling fun with them, as we did when Dad was overseeing the launching. And Dad brought us enough in the way of dangerous toys; it was his notion to snake-proof us at an early age, by having us handle the not-so-dangerous sorts. And Dad was the one who gave us an enormous magnifying glass and showed us how to focus the suns’ rays with it, so that we could set stuff on fire. And he brought home dry ice from the lab; heaps of fun, throwing a great lump of it into the baby’s wading pool, and enjoying the bubbling, and the billows of white vapor. That was nearly as much good clean fun as the insulated flask of liquid hydrogen, and dipping leaves and rose petals into it for a moment… then dropping them on the tile kitchen counter where they would shatter like glass.

Grannie Jessie was notoriously blasé about toy hazards, but even Grannie Dodie, who wasn’t, still let us play with Dad’s classic old Erector set, which included enough small nuts and screws to provide a choking hazard to an entire elementary school… and the crown jewel, a small electric motor. Said motor was a good three or four decades old when we played with it, and even to my eyes looked a little… I don’t know… frayed? Insulation cracked… connections not quite up to par? We never managed to spindle, shock, or mutilate with it, so perhaps it wasn’t quite so child-unsafe as I remember it. Oh, yeah dangerous toys – bicycles without helmets, large horses, and go-carts on steep hillside trails, rope swings in tall trees.
Oddly enough, we survived. Even without the toy nuclear lab. Add your own accounts of Bad, Bad Toys. Especially if they were received as Christmas presents.

(Don’t drool, people… Dad’s old Erector set survived our childhood, still in the original case, but it was in their garage when the house burned to the ground, four years ago.)

Anatomy of a Rotten Day

15. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Pajama Game

And I mean a day that sucked so badly it pulled small objects nearby into itself, a day that started off setting a new record for suckage, a day that spread blight, disaster and discouragement in every possible direction, even to the gingerbread cookies that Blondie attempted this afternoon, following a recipe from the pages of “Joy of Cooking” which defiantly should have stayed there and never seen the light of day. It’s the Gingerbread Man recipe on p 712 of the 1970s edition, BTW. Can’t miss them… tastes like ginger and molasses playdough, and look most unfortunately like dog turds. And we know dog turds, these days, for we are the one set of responsible pet owners on our street who do, in fact, whip out the approved plastic bags… no matter what that rude woman on the corner with her herd of nasty-tempered rat-dogs called after us, yesterday.

Oh, yeah, ginger-flavored dog turd balls, that’s for sure what we’re going to give to our neighbors for Christmas. The ones that don’t speak to us will probably never not speak to us again, and the ones that we do speak to will be looking after us strangely and discretely spitting out the bite they were polite enough to take into a paper napkin.

Does anyone actually ever eat the Christmas cookies from neighbors, anyway? I think they just pass them on to someone else. Like fruitcakes.

My computer has been glitching, over the last couple of says, abruptly terminating the internet connection, and sending me repeated pop-ups for things that I am not interested in, and so yesterday I burned several hours of writing time running the usual sort of diagnostics, with the result that this morning, absolutely the third thing I tried to do on line froze it up entirely: there was the desktop, and my documents and everything…less my accustomed cookies and log-ins…and it remained frozen. So, first thing of the day, a day dedicated to writing and a chapter of the new book which I had been thinking about all night, and planning to pick up where I had left off yesterday…and I can’t. All my notes, and the very complicated excel spread-sheet I spent hours on this week, plotting out the various events and characters…all locked up, because of course I haven’t copied them over to disc because they are not finished yet.

My computer genius friend says he can’t get to it until tonight, but if we meet his daughter at a place in our neighborhood that she is going to show to a potential buyer, she’ll take the computer to his place, and he’ll work on it after work tonight. We spend some time, locating the place, and waiting for the daughter. She tells us that there has been a sudden rash of malicious worms and Trojans, in the last couple of days… his own website crashed and a lot of his clients are infested up the wazoo with them. He may just have to rescue my documents, wipe the hard drive and start all over.

I have always thought that the jerks who write and set loose malicious stuff like that should be stripped naked, smeared with honey and staked out over a fire-ant nest. Alive. The prospect of perhaps having to re-write what I have so far (not all of it, because a friend who is away for the holiday had the first chapter sent to him as an attachment and he may have it still, but I won’t know until he is back after the holidays!) or even interrupting me when I am in the throes of creating something really, really terrific…and putting a crimp into earning my living writing makes me really, really furious. Yeah, I’ll go for the fire ants nest, but I’d like do to this malicious little bastard (who is probably chortling to himself in a nasty cold-water walkup in Russia or the Philippines or wherever these shits congregate) what the Comanche used to do to their prisoners. (Wasn’t pleasant, BTW. Involved eye-gouging, amputation of marital tackle, hot coals, and stakes.)

I finally finished hemming a length of fabric for a scarf for Blondie, and adorning each corner with an elaborate tassel of beads, all very headachy work, done under bright light with very tiny glass beads. I’ve been putting off finishing it for days, finally did so today, and when she took it back to her room this afternoon, one of the tassels caught on the baby-gate we use to keep the dogs our of her end of the house… and ripped it all loose. Beads all over. When I finally finished it, it stayed finished for a whole… I dunno, fifteen minutes?!!!

I can’t pay a bill that I have been promising I’ll pay today because I haven’t been paid… and I worked three hours and a half, clipping certain real estate ads out of the newspaper, trying to clip them so they could be readable, even if the particular section was on two sides of the same sheet of newsprint. I have a headache from this, and my fingers are all over newsprint and dust. Again, I won’t be paid for this until next week sometime.

I am waiting for the book I have already finished to connect with the publishing world; which is moribund until after Christmas, or even New Years, even. I had the mad notion to do a proposal for the new book, and include it as a two-fer, and I also wanted to try and do my Christmas card letter today… but can’t because my computer is frelled, all because some malicious little twerp decided to stick it to the man.

And we can’t afford to go to my parents for Christmas, when everyone else will be there, and it’s a week before Christmas, and we are juggling time and commitments and money. Candidly, I kind of wish Christmas was over already.

Oh, yeah, and some kids were running around the neighborhood vandalizing cars. And I have to write this on Blondie’s laptop, which has a keyboard and the weird little tracing pad and two buttons instead of a mouse, and everything is in the wrong place…

Bah, humbug… Merry ******Christmas! The person who tries to tell me how it could all be so much worse is getting an internet nuclear wedgie, as soon as I can figure out how to administer it.

Lifestyles of the Struggling Writer

10. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Working In A Salt Mine...

Last week I nerved myself up to actually call the literary agent who was reviewing the entire manuscript of “To Truckee’s Trail”. He had e-mailed me at the beginning of November that he was savoring every word and would let me know “soon”… but I had already begun to sense what the word would be, when I didn’t hear anything by mid-month.
And the word was, no, he didn’t think he’d be able to “sell” it to one of the big name publishers; although he was very complimentary— it’s a terrifically gripping read, very nice characters, and researched down to the third decimal place— but…

And this is what I have come to think of as the “Big But”; it would be a hard sell, harder than he wanted to dive into. It’s not quite a genre western, definitely not a romance, since the passionate relationship is between two people who have been married for a decade at least, and it’s not the sort of historical novel that seems to sell these days, which as he explained it, is about an unknown aspect of an event or person that people have heard about (Sigmund Freud, the Civil War). He floated the Stephens Party in a couple of casual conversations, and drew an absolute blank every time… which I thought would have been a selling point, but never mind.

No way does this put me back to square one: I’ve been applying to other lit agencies all along; so far, three form rejections which are about what I’d expect, but…

Another “Big But”… a friend of a friend who is a writer himself and coached me through writing up a proper proposal, and sample chapter, etc, is going to put it straight to his publisher. He is not one of the really big names, but he has made a regular living at it for a long while, and moreover is a big fan of my stuff. I’ve tweaked the manuscript again, in response to feedback from knowledgeable readers, and he will review it one more time, and send it in after Christmas. Apparently, nothing happens in the publishing world over Christmas.

Over the last month or so, I sent out a number of proposed articles to various magazines; rewritings of some of my best blog entries, actually. One of them is being considered by a history magazine, and two of them have been rejected…. But with a hand-written note of encouragement from the reviewing editor, expressing profound enjoyment of them, and apologizing because the publication had no budget for free-lancers this quarter.

This represents a step up for my rejection slip collection, actually; yeah, they’re rejection slips, but they are nice rejections, and give evidence that the submission was actually read and considered. It’s all about progress.

I’ve started the next book, too: the one about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Now, that will have positively operatic levels of everything: the wild frontier, lust, cliff-hanging danger and sudden death. I might even put some sex into it, too.

Pouring Ridicule and Scorn…

09. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, General Nonsense, sarcasm, The Funny

…upon certain so-called celebrities who either cannot afford underpants or who have never been schooled on how to exit an automobile gracefully while wearing a short skirt.

Not quite safe for work, though… or the family hour, unless your family is Paris Hilton’s. Link found through of 2 Blowhards who found it someplace else… but scroll down, the other stuff is hysterical.

Pet Rules

09. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, General

This was sent via e-mail from a pet-loving friend, and posted for your amusement

To be posted VERY LOW on the refrigerator door – snout height.

Dear Dogs and Cats:
The dishes with the paw prints are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Please note, placing a paw print in the middle of my plate of food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.

The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn’t help because I fall faster than you can run.

I cannot buy anything bigger than a king sized bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue sleeping on the couch to ensure your comfort. Dogs and cats can actually curl up in a ball when they sleep.

It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize space is nothing but sarcasm.

For the last time, there is not a secret exit from the bath room. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, meow, try to turn the knob or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. I must exit through the same door I entered. Also, I have been using the bathroom for years –canine or feline attendance is not mandatory.

The proper order is kiss me, then go smell the other dog or cat’s butt. I cannot stress this enough!

To pacify you, my dear pets, I have posted the following message on our front door:

To All Non-Pet Owners Who Visit & Like to Complain About Our Pets
1. They live here. You don’t.
2. If you don’t want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture. (That’s why they call it “fur”niture.)
3. I like my pets a lot better than I like most people.
4. To you, it’s an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn’t speak clearly.

Remember: Dogs and cats are better than kids because they:
1. Eat less
2. Don’t ask for money
3 Are easier to train
4. Usually come when called
5. Never drive your car
6. Don’t hang out with drug-using friends
7. Don’t smoke or drink
8. Don’t worry about having to buy the latest fashion
9. Don’t wear your clothes
10. Don’t need a gazillion dollars for college, and
11. If they get pregnant, you can sell their children.

Goliad

03. December 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Military, Old West, Pajama Game

The Texas Revolution in 1835 initially rather resembled the American Revolution, some sixty years before— a resemblance not lost on the American settlers in Texas. At the very beginning, both the Colonies and the Anglo-Texans were far-distant communities with a self-sufficient tradition, who had been accustomed to manage their own affairs with a bare minimum of interference from the central governing authority. Colonists and Anglo-Texans started off by standing on their rights as citizens, but a heavy-handed response by the central government provoked a response that spiraled into open revolt. “Since they’re trying to squash us like bugs for being rebellious, we might as give them a real rebellion and put up a fight,” summed up the attitude. The Mexican government, beset with factionalism and seeing revolt against it’s authority everywhere, sent an army to remind the Anglo-Texan settlers of who was really in charge. The rumor that among the baggage carried along in General Martin Cos’ train was 800 pairs of iron hobbles, with which to march selected Texas rebels back to Mexico did not win any friends, nor did the generals’ widely reported remarks that it was time to break up the foreign settlements in Texas. Cos’ army, which was supposed to re-establish and ensure Mexican authority was ignominiously beaten and sent packing.

Over the winter of 1835-36 a scratch Texan army of volunteers held two presidios guarding the southern approaches from another attack, while representatives of the various communities met to sort out what to do next. First, they formed a shaky provisional government, and appointed Sam Houston to command the Army. Then, in scattershot fashion, they appointed three more officers to high command; it would have been farcical, if the consequences hadn’t been so dire. With no clear command, with military companies and commanders pursuing their own various plans and strategies, the Texas settlers and companies of volunteers were not much fitted to face the terrible wrath of the Napoleon of the West and President of Mexico, strongman, caudillo and professional soldier, General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. He did not wait for spring, or the grass to grow tall enough, or the deep mud to dry out: he intended to punish this rebellious province with the utmost severity. Under his personal command, his army reached the Rio Grande at Laredo in mid-February, and laid siege to a tumbledown former mission garrisoned by a scratch force of volunteers… San Antonio de Valero, called simply the Alamo. But this story is about the other presidio, and another garrison of Texans and volunteers; Bahia del Espiritu Santo, or Goliad.
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Wal-Marts and Macs

25. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Pajama Game, sarcasm, That's Entertainment!

Having survived Thanksgiving (we only had eleven guests this year), the only specific plans I had for the long weekend were to go to the annual Wal-Mart Friday blitz and to get Windows installed on Red Haired Girl’s Mac Mini. The first went well; the second is, shall we say, a work in progress with the results (or status) to be reported in another post.

First let me say that I have a typical guy attitude about shopping – I hate it. I prefer gouging out my eyeballs with a dull spoon to walking up and down the aisles on the watch for some widget that would be just perfect for (fill in the name here), particularly during Christmas season when the legions are out with the same mission. However, about three years ago Real Wife talked me into going to Wal-Mart for the Black Friday sale. I was hooked. It isn’t really shopping because, per the terms of my agreed participation, we walk in with a list, reconnoiter, develop a plan, execute said plan (ruthlessly if need be), and leave. We then go to a local diner for steak (very rare) and eggs. This year, unfortunately, Wal-Mart and the local diner did not coordinate, with the result that the former started the sale an hour earlier, and the latter did not adjust their schedule accordingly. Hence, no bloody steak and eggs. Nonetheless, we were 100% effective in securing the sale items we wanted. My specific task was to snag a Symphonic 20” LCD TV ($248) for the kitchen, which is where I watch 98% of the time. I located the pallet with the TVs and secured my outpost at 04:30 hrs. Enemy forces began forming almost immediately, while I studied each new arrival to establish whether they would be a threat or not in order to adjust my tactics accordingly. I had a fresh buzz cut for the occasion (it helps to look like a potentially violent criminal). This year, a cowboy walked up and, in a pleasant conversational tone, told me that he wanted two of them. I laughed and said “Fine, but this one right here is mine”, all the while giving him that penetrating look that drill sergeants use to such great effect. He got the message. More »

Friends Helping Friends

05. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Eat, Drink and be Merry, Home Front, Pajama Game

I learned a couple of months ago that a close colleague had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that apparently is somewhat advanced. He has been undergoing chemo and radiation therapy in the hopes of reducing the tumor to an operable size. He is a fairly young man in his thirties, and recently married to a wonderful woman with two children. She was previously married and involved, respectively, with two men not particularly stable spousal material.

In order to help with the expenses and reduced disability income, several people at work organized a benefit that RHG, Real wife and I attended last night. The festivities began with a Midwestern hog roast. Loyal Readers may recall that I am a great fan of New England clambakes, but a hog roast comes close (a real Texas barbecue is on my list of things to do). How can you beat a locally slaughtered whole hog cooked over an open fire served with homemade potato salad and baked beans? We then had about an hours worth of live music by a local band composed of forty and fifty something year old rockers. Other musicians of local notoriety shared the stage throughout the night – all very good. Yours truly demurred (all I can really play well is the opening riff of Over the Hills and Far Away). The band then took a break for a couple of hours and hundreds of donated items were auctioned. Loyal Readers may also recall that I am a sucker for auctions, having furnished much of my home at local antique sales. A silent auction was held throughout the evening for numerous other items. Then the band played on until about one a.m.

The person for whom the benefit was held, in cahoots with another colleague, started Hawaiian Shirt Friday a couple of years ago. I think that the original reason was to give our then-clueless management something to be paranoid about, although I cannot confirm that to have been the motivation. In any case, a dedicated group of us wear the most outrageously hideous Hawaiian shirts every Friday, winter included. I have a nice supply of Havana Jack silk shirts purchased at a Kohl’s clearance sale, although many of the guys have found that ebay offers the ugliest. In any case, Hawaiian shirts and leis were the attire of choice for the evening.

Attendance was, in a word, unbelievable. Fire department occupancy regulations were broken. Former colleagues came from as far as San Diego and North Carolina. Real Wife and I were fortunate in finding a table early with another couple, and there were plenty of other early and pre-teens for RHG to hang out with (thereby precluding the agony of hanging out with Mom and Dad). Real Wife was a little stressed about not being able to have a cigarette given the presence of her students, until I pointed out that the parking lot was a side door away. Given the upcoming auction, we limited our intake to two bottles each of Old Milwaukee Light (the beer of the gods); RHG had sufficient ID to drink Shirley Temples. As is usually the case, the auction brought some outrageous bidding, with a strawberry pie and can of Cool-Whip going for $500. The buyer, a former irreverent (I mean Monty Python irreverent) engineer now working in San Diego, then auctioned it again – offering his face as a target for said pie. Two hundred dollars later the offer was accepted and consummated. For my part, I bought a beautiful set of red-oak mission style end tables crafted by one of our more woodworking-gifted engineers. My friend who has cancer comes from a family of Midwestern dirt track racers (You may be familiar with the Outlaw genre – open cockpit with huge V-8s and lots of wing), so the organizers requested auction items from various NASCAR teams. Almost without exception they responded with t-shirts and hats which, in these parts, are considered uniform of the day. The number 8 is huge in these parts, and it brought the biggest money.

My friend was having a good day as far as the effects of the various therapies, and was therefore able to attend. You will never find a more self-effacing, kind, and true-hearted individual. His wife, when recently asked how she was holding up, replied that he saved her life, and now it was her duty to save his. Before I left, I caught a glimpse of him standing alone, worn and tired, but yet watching lovingly at the hundreds of people who had gathered to help him and his family. It was a moment of indescribable sadness for me, knowing that the odds do not favor him. Nonetheless, I admired him for the fact that he has led his life in such a manner that so many people would come from all over the country to support him. How many of us can lay claim to that?

What have I learned from my friend? Drink milk, be an optimist, listen to what others have to say, be anxious to learn what others would teach you, and finally, be an optimist.

This is not original…

03. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, My Head Hurts, Politics

… but I just had to share it.

2008 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION SCHEDULE

7:00 P.M. Opening flag burning.

7:15 P.M. Pledge of allegiance to U.N.

7:30 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast

7:30 till 8:00 P.M. Non religious prayer and worship. Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton.

8:00 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.

8:05 P.M. Ceremonial tree hugging.

8:15 – 8:30 P.M. Gay Wedding– Barney Frank presiding.

8:30 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.

8:35 P.M. Free Saddam Rally. Cindy Sheehan– Susan Sarandon.

9:00 P.M. Keynote speech. “The Proper Etiquette for Surrender”– French President Jacques Chirac

9:15 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.

9:20 P.M. Collection to benefit Osama Bin Laden kidney transplant fund

9:30 P.M. Unveiling of plan to free freedom fighters from Guantanamo Bay . Sean Penn

9:40 P.M. Why I hate the Military, A short talk by William Jefferson Clinton

9:45 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast

9:50 P.M. Dan Rather presented Truth in Broadcasting award, presented by Michael Moore

9:55 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast

10:00 P.M. How George bush and Donald Rumsfeld brought down the World Trade Center Towers– Howard
Dean

10:30 P.M. Nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Mahmud Ahmadinejad

11:00 P.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast

11: 05 P.M. Al Gore reinvents Internet

11:15 P.M. “Our Troops are Stupid War Criminals” — John Kerry

11:30 P.M. Coronation Of Mrs. Hillary Rodham Clinton

12:00 A.M. Ted Kennedy proposes a toast

12:05 A.M. Bill asks Ted to drive Hillary home

And the Troops Respond…

01. November 2006 · Comments Off · Categories: A Href, Ain't That America?, General, Politics

A West Point graduate emails The National Review, regarding Kerry’s botched joke.

Ms. Lopez,

Thanks for link to U-toob. Me not understand big words bout kerry. Like pictures better.

BOY, it Hard to rite e-male with crayon.

Very respectfully,

major

Camp slayer, Bahgdad, iraq

And my personal favorite is this photo.

halp us

h/t AllahPundit at hotair.com

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