Who Are You? What Do You Want? Where Are You Going? Whom Do You Serve – And Whom Do You Trust?!
In watching Bravo’s Blow Out today, which featured Jonathan Antin going on QVC to sell his product line, I can’t help but wonder whether his people were lying to him, or to us. No, it’s not about the product, it’s about him – total hype. And, if you check out the prices for Jonathan Product, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Oh, and does it matter that QVC is part of the E! network, a co-venture between Disney/ABC and General Electric/NBC (which owns Bravo)?
…And they’re closing all the factories down…
WAIT!!!! Not any more it seems. Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley is emerging as one of America’s fastest growing regions. It is being revitalized by (believe it or not) Latino immigration. Stories like this give lie to many of the fears of the xenophobes.
I am currently watching Bravo’s Blow Out, which is into about the third of fourth episode of its second season. And I can’t help but think what a marvelous Hollywood star machine, and co-marketing vehicle this is. How do I tie into a comet such as this?
This From OpinionJournal’s Best of The Web:
House Party
Liberal blogger Steve Smith observes, intriguingly but inconclusively, that
there is a strong correlation “between a robust housing market and Democratic
voting patterns”:In fact, the correllation [sic] gets stronger the further back you go in
time. While there are a handful of Blue States in the third quartile of the
housing market for 2004, and only one (Michigan) near the bottom, only one
Blue State (Michigan, again) was in the lower half from 2000-2004. Going back
even further in time, every state (and the District of Columbia) that voted
for John Kerry last year, without exception, was among the top 24 states in
the country in terms of the increase in residential property values since
1980. The 27 states with the lowest rate of increase, again without exception,
voted for George Bush. Only four Red States (Virginia, Florida, Nevada and
Colorado), placed in the Booming 24, and Kerry was competitive in each of
those states.I don’t know what it all means, but I thought I’d share that with you.
Mickey Kaus notes this and asks:
Do Democrats produce rising home values or do rising home values make people
Democrats? (The latter seems implausible.) Are both phenomena related to high
education levels and/or a large concentration of universities? And how does
this correlation jibe with the much advertised GOP dominance in the fastest-growing
states, which you’d think would be states with rapidly appreciating real estate?
Explain it away if you can, Michael Barone!Well, we’re not Michael Barone, but here are three factors that may explain
it in part:First, Democrats help produce rising home values by supporting development
and labor regulations that suppress new construction, thus limiting the supply
of housing.Second, geography produces both Democrats and rising home values. That is,
Dems tend to prefer living in old cities that are already built up and that
often have physical barriers to sprawl (i.e., oceans, lakes and rivers). The
housing supply in these places is less elastic than in Republican-leaning cities
like Phoenix and Dallas.Third, low housing prices attract Republicans. As the Los Angeles Times reported
in November (and we noted):In this month’s election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation’s 100 fastest-growing
counties, most of them “exurban” communities that are rapidly transforming
farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan
areas. . . .These growing areas, filled largely with younger families fleeing urban centers
in search of affordable homes, are providing the GOP a foothold in blue Democratic-leaning
states and solidifying the party’s control over red Republican-leaning states.In other words, housing prices are low in Republican areas because there’s
enough land and enough freedom for the supply to keep up with the demand, whereas
in Democratic areas housing is expensive because it is scarce, for both natural
and artificial reasons.
I think the idea merits further investigation.
Well, well, now that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has announced her retirement, it seems the race is on. The news(?) media are salivating all over themselves and rolling around in orgasmic happiness. Democrats in the Senate are gearing up, I hear, for the fight of the century, no matter who President Bush selects to fill her seat on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, on the other hand, are getting set to push to the wall to get the President’s pick confirmed.
As for me, all I ask is that Sgt Mom pass the popcorn, I’m just gonna sit back and watch these dreary old men (and women) make total asses out of themselves, if they can be bigger idiots than they are now. As I said in the beginning, let the games begin!
I just saw a commercial, sponsored by Anheuser-Busch, which touted beer-drinkers as “the nation’s best moderators.” Oh, give me a break.
Survey after survey has shown that, even among hard-core boozers, those with the greatest tendency towards moderation are those who drink it “straight”, or nearly so – “say, scotch-on-the-rocks, or a very-dry-martini.”
The fact is, the harshness of high-proof beverages produces a self-moderating effect. Save for a few real zoners, the hard-core drinkers consume at 30 proof or less.
Yes, my favorite human piniata, of whom I wrote earlier
“I think they should keep him; for the sheer amusement value. Professor Churchill has inestimable value as the bulls-eye for metaphoric target practice; chained to the academic stocks as it were, focus for scorn, derision, for deconstruction of his fraudulent scholarship, vilely insulting writings and speeches, his questionable status as a “native American”, extremely thin academic qualifications, bullying demeanor, and general fuckwittedness. There is just so much good materiel to work with; we could go on laughing at him for years, picking him up in the intervals between bigger and more transient matters for a little more thrashing, much like my cats derive hours of amusement and exercise from batting around palmetto bugs. I’d rather go back and thrash him every once in a while for practice, than have him all over the media being a martyr.”
According to this, it seems that he would like to encourage the conscripted troops to “frag” their officers. No one seems to have pointed out to the dear professor that the forces have been all-volunteer for simply decades. I know that it is an axiom that the military is always fighting the last war, but it looks like the anti-warriors are fighting the one before that….
(PS— Courtesy of Rantburg the source for all things bizarre)
I’ve been paying $10 for a haircut for the last 10 years. But my stylist has just retired. I shudder to think what I might have to pay now.
On May 18, 1999, Bill Clinton had his hair cut in Air Force 1 on the LAX tarmac, by one of Hollywood’s top stylists, Christophe, reportedly holding up air traffic (delays in air traffic later debunked). The word at the time was that Christophe got $300 for a typical haircut. Jose Eber was just on Cavuto, talking about “the $800 haircut” (he gets $400-500). On a recent episode of Bravo’s Blow Out, Jonathan Antin said he gets $500 for a haircut in his shop, and $5000 for a “housecall.”
It’s a quiet day, today in the neighborhood; the paper was late, it seems most of the town was caught up in some sort of basketball final last night. I assume it was important because of all the little “Spurs” flags flying from car windows over the last few days, and venders of banners and tee-shirts setting up kiosks on various vacant corners. Myself, I was more taken up with transporting buckets of mulched tree-limbs to spread over the plantings in front and back. My neighbor the roofing contractor had two of his trees severely cut back, two weeks ago, and the guys doing the work were feeding the cut limbs into a chipper: I went at asked for half the truck-load, if they had no other calls on it, so they obligingly dumped a goodly pile in the middle of the driveway. There is enough to mulch everything the requisite four inches deep, against evaporation in the summer heat. It is not the no-float cypress stuff, of course— but you can’t beat the price. The gardens are recovering from the colossal hail storm in April, which left shredded leaves like green confetti all over my yard, and stripped the leaves off the firespike and the potted plants along the south side of my house. I have hardly any damage left to show now, and the new roof is right and tight and just about paid for.
The re-roofing continues, at a slower pace in the neighborhood now; at any one time two or three houses have a crew on the roof, peeling off the old, and nailing on the new, with a peculiar slap/thump sound that the mechanical nailers make reverberating over several blocks. I notice that many residents, now that they have a new roof, are painting, and sprucing up otherwise. A bit of fresh new color to the siding between the brickwork, touching up the trim with sparkling fresh paint, planting new flower beds in front. A couple of fancy new fences and decks have gone in also; I think of the storm as the Spring Creek Roofing and General Contractor’s Full Employment Act of 2005. It was always an attractive little neighborhood where most residents owned their homes, and now it just looks that much better.
Our homes, our own little suburban castles… for someone who owns their own little patch of paradise the Supreme Court decision as regards the Kelo case is as a patch of cloud against the sun. Eminent domain? Well, my parents lost the first home they owned, Redwood House, to a freeway, after a long and protracted fight, at the end of which we were about the only family left in a neighborhood that slowly reverted to chaparral covered hillside, but at least we could assume that the freeway was to the greater good of the public. (Yuppified the hell out of what used to be a blue-collar, out of the way little neighborhood way up in the hills once people discovered that it was only half an hour from downtown, instead of two hours, but that’s a side issue.)
Perhaps the municipality of New London will be revived, and new jobs and a solid tax base may take away the bitter taste of having steamrollered over people who had the misfortune to own property which stood in the way of the greater good. It seems that in this one case, a good enough argument was made for the “greater good”, but the precedent is horrifying: Either we own our houses, our businesses and our lands, free and clear… or we own them only temporarily, at the pleasure of a municipal establishment who can suddenly decide one day that someone else can make better use of them.
And it is not so much the big projects like the New London scheme which afford the greater danger to property rights; I think rather it will be the thousand smaller, little civic actions, picking off a small business here, a block of modest homes here, to benefit a slightly larger business, or a local plan by a city council to “fix up” a slightly less than top-drawer neighborhood— nothing so spectacular as outright confiscation as practiced by such experts as Stalin and Mugabe… just the death of a thousand little cuts, insidious, local… and practically unnoticed
“Race you home.” was what the young lady in the gym parking lot said to her young man as they kissed, let each other’s hands squeeze for a moment, before they walked away from each other to climb into their huge, gas-guzzling trucks from hell. Huge monstrosities that the farmers in my family would give body parts to be able to afford.
It was just so…decadent. They actually drove to the gym in separate behemoths. I’m talking the Transformer-inspired Chevy thing and the Dodge with the flaired fenders that almost clear my head. There were no trailer hitches…I was flabbergasted enough to actually look.
I must be getting old. I cringe when I fill the Hyundai and almost weep when we fill the van. I don’t get it. And I won’t ask if I see them again. I don’t have to. I mentioned it to a group of younger folks at work and one of them said, “Me and my husband do that all the time…we like different radio stations.” blink-blink A younger guy kind of nodded like, “Yeah, we do that.”
Is it just me or does that just seem like one of the signs that a culture is imploding?
I am moved by this commentary, from Joseph W. Gauld at the Portland [Maine] Press-Herald:
But our present education system is clearly failing in this responsibility. Former Bowdoin College President Rob Edwards called today’s students “ethically unformed . . . many with anxieties that have been sanctified.”
At our four Hyde Schools, all education is built on the development of character:
Curiosity: I am responsible for my learning; courage: I learn the most about myself by facing challenges; concern: I need a challenging and supportive community to develop my character; leadership: I am a leader by asking the best of myself and others; integrity: I am gifted with a unique potential and conscience is my guide in discovering it.
Once students truly internalize the power of these qualities, we find they are never willing to give them up in life, no matter what the circumstances. And their academic proficiency still sends 97 percent of both Hyde private and public school graduates to four-year colleges.
Since character is primarily developed by example, all Hyde parents and teachers undergo the same process, and they uniformly report the experience transforms their own lives. Their strong growth at Hyde reflects what our educational system had failed to do for them.
But character development is not a part of No Child Left Behind, only numerical results. The resultant corruption is staggering:
Most American schools are fairly safe, it’s true, and the overall risk of being killed in one is less than one in 1.7 million. The data show a general decline in violence in American public schools: The National Center for Education Statistics’ 2004 Indicators of School Crime and Safety shows that the crime victimization rate has been cut in half, declining from 48 violent victimizations per 1,000 students in 1992 to 24 in 2002, the last year for which there are complete statistics.
But that doesn’t mean there has been a decline at every school. Most of the violence is concentrated in a few institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, during the 1999–2000 school year 2 percent of U.S. schools (1,600) accounted for about 50 percent of serious violent incidents—and 7 percent of public schools (5,400) accounted for 75 percent of serious violent incidents. The “persistently dangerous” label exists to identify such institutions.
So why are only 26 schools in the country tagged with it?
The underreporting of dangerous schools is only a subset of a larger problem. The amount of information about schools presented to the general public is at an all-time high, but the information isn’t always useful or accurate.
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, now three years old, parents are seeing more and more data about school performance. Each school now has to give itself an annual report card, with assessment results broken down by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability, and English-language proficiency. Schools also are supposed to accurately and completely report dropout rates and teacher qualifications. The quest for more and better information about school performance has been used as a justification to increase education spending at the local, state, and national levels, with the federal Department of Education alone jacking up spending to nearly $60 billion for fiscal year 2005, up more than $7 billion since 2003.
But while federal and state legislators congratulate themselves for their newfound focus on school accountability, scant attention is being paid to the quality of the data they’re using. Whether the topic is violence, test scores, or dropout rates, school officials have found myriad methods to paint a prettier picture of their performance. These distortions hide the extent of schools’ failures, deceive taxpayers about what our ever-increasing education budgets are buying, and keep kids locked in failing institutions. Meanwhile, Washington—which has set national standards requiring 100 percent of school children to reach proficiency in math and reading by 2014—has been complicit in letting states avoid sanctions by fiddling with their definitions of proficiency.
The federal government is spending billions to improve student achievement while simultaneously granting states license to game the system. As a result, schools have learned to lie with statistics.
But where is the outrage? The Left rails at the excesses of the executives of Enron, Tyco, Global Crossing, et. al.. But public school officials across the nation are getting away with nothing more than a promise to “do better next time” – if that. And the children of our nation are being cheated on a scale that makes the employees, stockholders, and pensioners of these companies look little more than slighted.
I want to see some district superintendents, state secretaries of education, and the like, doing the “perp walk.”
Being on the fire department in the small village of York, Maine, was really an experience, and for those who lived there, somewhat of a status symbol. If your origins were from somewhere other than York, it was nearly impossible, thus a statement of acceptance if you succeeded. I was really happy to have been accepted as a “probie,” the one-year probationary period.
It wasn’t all societal, it was serious business. I actually got involved because of a fire that included a fatality. Nurse Jenny, in those days, wasn’t a nurse, but a dispatcher on the York Public Safety Communications Center, and I was the Motorola Tech Rep for the area, involved with supplying the communications equipment and assuring that it all worked. The VFD probationary period was a time of a lot of learning. Fire technology, hydraulics, water pressure, fire ground operations, so many classes, and all that just to volunteer to fight fires.
Parenthetically, I would volunteer to fight fires on a number of departments after York, the last one being while back on Air Force AD, in Monument, Colorado. What I learned in York would make me a good firefighter, and some of it would save my life in some touchy situations.
The “white coat incident” mentioned in part one was really embarrassing, and it was a touchstone of ribbing for a long time afterwards. Well, you gotta have something!
One important aspect of fighting fires is speed. Getting there fast, getting set up fast, getting water on the fire as fast as you safely can. One day, about three months into my probie period, there was a small fire near my house, a situation in which I responded in my car, and got my coat and helmet off the truck. Engine. What am I thinking! Truck is ladder, engine is pumper, for the uninitiated! OK, got my gear on, and grabbing the nozzle, in I went. The fire was out quickly, and I quickly found out my big mistake. Someone told me to get that white coat off, unless I was really a chief in disguise. OOPS! Without thinking, I had grabbed a white coat, which is an officer’s garb. Now, they’re really serious about that. It was the deputy chief’s coat, and my putting it on was the source of so much ribbing and teasing for a long time. You can be assured, from that time on, I paid attention to the color of coats in the locker!
Fighting fires is fun, or at least it is something that gets in your blood. This -Vidalia, GA – is the only place that we’ve lived since York in the 70’s, that I haven’t served on a fire department. Just can’t do it, since getting injured on my job as a paramedic in 1995. I hate to have to stand still when I hear a siren, but we get old, and sometimes we have to ease up on the throttle!
But, as Elroy commented on the last post, those were great days, and the fire department folks in York were some of the finest people I’ve ever served with! York Volunteer Fire Department, I salute you every one!
I’m watching the new series on Discovery, “Firehouse.” Set in Boston, it’s examining, tonight, at least, the house containing Engine 37 and truck (ladder) 26 and their life during one shift, which is 24 hours. Ohh, this brings back some memories, some very bittersweet memories! Anyone who hasn’t been a firefighter can’t have even a clue of what it’s like. The life of a firefighter is like no other on earth, and once bitten, it’s a bug that can’t be shed….I was a firefighter, about three lifetimes ago, it seems, but yes, there was a time,,,,
York, Maine, and the year was 1972. This was the year I began my break in active service, having come home from Thailand and going to the AF Reserve at Pease AFB, NH. Funny, I was assigned to maintain the very same tankers (KC-135’s) that I had worked on only four years before, on active duty! Seems both of us got off A/D at about the same time!. So, here I was, with an impossible dream and a more impossible schedule set up to get me there.
The first dream was to get myself through college, and for that purpose, I was enrolled in New Hampshire College, at Portsmouth (NH) High School, classes at night, and for the next six years I would hit the books hard. Maybe, if my pals Elroy Moulton or George Lariviere, check on here, they might verify that, as Elroy and I were going through much of the same courses together, and for part of the time, I worked with George. Something great clicked between myself and George and Elroy, a friendship that has endured a lot of years, and a closeness of our wives and children as well. Both families have proven to be folks that we love, and that still prevails after all these years…wonderful!
The next dream, to work in the civilian electronics field, was to come true as well, some of that thanks to George, as he was working for a company that was able to supply part of the hope, a small company called General Sound and Visual, Inc. I have to say, the company was really pleasant to work for, all the people great folks, and I have fond memories of that experience.
The fire department….Hmmm, the fire department. One of my neighbors when I moved to York was a fire fighter, and he got me interested. So, I started hanging out with firemen, got to know a few, and one day put in my application to join the York Volunteer Fire Department. You gotta understand; this was a great status symbol in York. Belonging to the fire department was a sign that you had arrived, that you had been accepted into the society of the small village of some 3,000 goode people. Now, being from the south, even though I had spent some 4 years in New England already, made it somewhat of a challenge to become one of the “chosen”. I could have cared less about the “society” aspects, one of my hangouts was a coffee shop across from the firehouse, and I just filled with adrenalin when those trucks hauled tail outta there! I just had to be a firefighter!
Next Time: The White Coat Bites Me!
I called Mayor Pearson-Schneider’s office, and this is not a hoax:
Laguna Beach, CA (PRWEB via PR Web Direct) June 14, 2005 — Mayor Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider announces an effort to aid recent victims of Laguna Beach’s landslides.
“It is the City’s goal to repair the hillside, the infrastructure and the roads in the landslide area. In addition, we want to create a ‘pad’ for each homeowner to build a new home,” said Mayor Pearson-Schneider.
The fundraising effort is called “Adopt a Landslide Family.” Private donors, large companies, associations, unions and others are being asked to raise $150,000 for each of the 20 affected families through their employees, members and other avenues. Families are expected to be homeless for over two years. The funds will be used as follows: $3,000 per month per family for living expenses for 30 months – for a total of $90,000. An additional $60,000 of the funds would be used for geology surveys and initial architectural planning. “We will accept family contributions on a cumulative basis,” added Pearson-Schneider.
The Mayor is partnering with the Laguna Beach Relief & Resource Center, a non-profit 501 (c)(3) charitable organization. Contributions will be tax-deductible.
As none of these homes were worth more than $5,000,000, Mayor Pearson-Schneider likely saw them as a blight on the city anyway.
Update: won’t you join me in offering this to the people of Laguna Beach:
In a move that literally stunned millions who have been watching, pop singer Michael Jackson was today aquitted of all ten counts with which he had been charged. The jury sent word of a verdict around 12:15 PM, PT, and the verdict was read when all the principals were in place at 2:00 PM, 5 PM ET. Thousands of fans were gathered outside the Santa Barbara County courthouse listening to their pocket radios when the verdict was read by the court clerk, and they erupted in shouts and screams of joy as the “not guilty” verdicts were read.
The Jackson family emerged from the courthouse minutes later, looking much more confident than when they entered. They all entered their characteristic black SUV’s and headed for Jackson’s Neverland Ranch.
Tom Sneddon, the District Attorney for Santa Barbara and Santa Maria, responded to questions in a short news conference after the trial. When asked if he was finished with his chase of Michael Jackson, he responded, “No comment.”
So, what happens next? No one knows, we shall see.
According to this story the identity of the person known as “Deep Throat”, a term coined by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post during the Nixon Impeachment times, has been revealed as 91-year old W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s number 2 man during the early 1970’s.
The question today is, does anyone really care today?
You would think that admitting Ligaya Lagman, whose son was killed last year in Afghanistan, into American Gold Star Mothers would be a simple matter. Public sentiment is certainly with her. But, as these two conflicting AP reports (here and here) show, it ain’t that simple:
“We can’t go changing the rules every time we turn around,” said Herd, the national president. “When we have problems within our organization with people not abiding by the rules, we just get it straightened out, we don’t change the rules.”
Mrs. Lagman may not be a citizen. But she has been a legal resident here for over twenty years. But most importantly, her son, Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman, gave everything in the service of America. This should be a no-brainer.
Then again, one has to wonder why Mrs. Lagman would even want to be part of such a stick-up-the-ass organization.
It seems the “gentlemen’s agreement” reached by the alleged “gentlemen” of the US Senate does not hold water. In fact, instead of leaking like a sieve, it apparently elicits waterfalls on its own!
On Thursday evening, just days after a group of Senate “moderate centrists” patted themselves on their backs, (breaking at least five arms in the process) congratulating themselves profusely for having saved the empire union from certain destruction by elimination of blusters filibusters, Senate Democrats totally surprised the entire world by breaking the agreement and blocking a cloture vote on” Mr. Nice”, John Bolton, the President’s pick to kick ass represent the US at the UN – or something like that! While Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist was receiving medical assistance in the cloakroom (or was it bathroom?) for having passed out in shock over the event, Majority minority leader “Dingy” Harry reid was grabbing every microphone in the corridor, while his associates and acolytes rounded up all the TV camers so he could gloat assure all of the rest of us that this was not really a filibuster.
Mr. Bolton will now have to go back to the end of the line to await his turn, and recess may be over by then, so he may not get to play at all.
Sorry for all the strikeouts, Nurse (sister) Jenny kept hitting me on the hand with a ruler.
One of the reasons I can’t hang with most liberals any more are the negative pep rallies.
It’s like,
“Yeah, I’m an American, and my country really sucks.” “RIGHT ON.”
“Our country is the worst in the freaking world!” “TRUTH TO POWER.”
“We suck worse than anything the Soviet Union ever did.” “TELL IT MY BROTHER.”(yelled by a balding white guy with a pony tail)
“Bush is a bible thumping warmonger who wouldn’t know the truth if it went ‘nuclar’ on him.” “BUSH LIED PEOPLE DIED“
You want me to pay attention? Quit already. We’ve got a rule in the Air Force…it’s unwritten…but it’s there none-the-less, if you’re going to stretch a meeting out longer by bringing up a problem, then you’d best have at least a possible solution to it for discussion…otherwise, STFU, my son’s got TaeKwonDo.
—-
Update: Or you can read Annika’s response to Pepsico’s CEO.
Mostly unrelated but don’t want to waste more space: Ever since I discovered Diet Coke with Lime…I haven’t touched a Pepsi Product. No…the Pepsi version ISN’T the same. Just sayin’…
A comment from another post has had me thinking all day. That’s tiring and it’s interrupting my full enjoyment of Firefly (How the HELL did this get taken off television?) so I’ll be asking you all to do my thinking for me for this one:
Which freedoms have you personally lost since the Bush Administration took office? Please provide details.
And while I’m thinkin’ ’bout it, never trust a redhead you’re previously accidently married…it can only lead to trouble.
Well, they had the next-to-last “Everybody Loves Raymond” episode tonight, and if this was any hint of next week’s 90-minute nuthouse, I’d better bandage my ribs ahead of time! Anyone who loves family comedy will mourn with me when Ray Romano kills my favorite rib-buster next week. Oh, he won’t kill anyone, they will just pack up the insane asylum and move to the Jersey Shore…..
Not that there’s anything wrong with the Jersey Shore, but have you been there? What with all the oil refineries and waste dumps….Oh, right, that’s north Jersey. Ah, well, guess I just like Lon-gisland, nothing personal.
But I’m gonna miss the whole bunch of nuts!
I’ve served drinks to at least three of the people on Arianna Huffington’s new webpage, and been completely *-faced with another.
Hey! She didn’t blogroll us!
Doesn’t she know who we are?
She does?
That’s the problem?
Oh…carry on…
Here’s a shot we took on the Chicago River Architecture Tour which we highly recommend. E-mail me if you want it full-size.
Oh…I forgot last time. Shot with a 5 megapixel Kodak EasyShare DX4530.
The Monday following the blowout weekend party is usually the best for storys about who did what, who drank what, and who streaked around base housing at 1am in the morning.
The best stories start like this:
5. “Dude!!!!”
4. “Holy S**t…..look at the size of that hicky….what was she related to…… JAWS!!!!”
3. 10am….*ring* blurry reaching for cellphone
“ugghhhh”
Voice on other end, ” uh Cpl…where does so-and-so live?”
Me: “Insh a housh…I tink.”
Voice on other end: “Uh Cpl…I got locked out when I went outside to use my phone…I’ve been wandering around trying to find the way out of base housing!”
Me: “Soookay so-and-so lives in base housing just follow this road and ish will take you to Mainside.”
Voice on other end: “Uh…..Cpl I don’t have any pants on and the neighbors dog has been chasing me for the last three blocks.”
Me:….blink blink blink…”F**k I’m on my way”.
2. “He could’nt stand for s**t but he sure did piss a perfect ring around the outside of the toilet”.
1. “See what has happened was…….”
Blackfive’s on top of it.
BACKGROUND:
On Thursday April 21st the United States Senate passed legislation yesterday creating Traumatic Injury Insurance that will issue active duty service members a payment ranging from $25, 000 to $100,000, should they incur a life altering injury while serving their nation. This legislation, known as the Wounded Warrior Bill, was introduced as an amendment to the Emergency Supplemental Funding Bill by Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, at the urgent request of three injured soldiers from the Wounded Warrior Project. The Traumatic Injury Insurance will make an immediate payment to the service member and their family within days of sustaining their injury to support them during their hospitalization. Additionally, the legislation passed will make Craig’s measure retroactive to the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, which began in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.
Go read the rest of it and do that hoodoo that you do…
I started this out as a comment on Kevin’s post below, but it got too long, so here we go again. During the cursed 60’s, when I was a young airman in the “theater,” a lot of us were desperate to hear the voices of our loved ones back in the land of the golden BX. You know,where they had paved roads, fresh eggs, (heck, even fresh chickens!) and real, working telephones.
There were no cell phones, no satellite relay systems (unless you worked in COMM, or were a general) no commercial telephone systems that worked, and not even direct-dial long distance in the States. Yes, Virginia, there was a time when you went through a live operator just to make a long distance call. All we had was that damnable back-scatter over-the-horizon single-sideband system that was notoriously badly mistuned, leaving one, sounding like Donald Duck, with a costly session consisting mostly of “Can you hear me, Mom?”. My first OS call, from Korea, sitting inside a soundproof box, was just such a call, trying to find out if my girlfriend had received the engagement ring I had sent her, so I’d know if she was my fiance yet. After some 5 minutes of her crying, me snuffling, and the frequent “What did you say?”, I paid the princely sum of some $150 out of my monthly $178 A2C salary for a call where I still wondered if I had even talked to the right girl.
After this incident, being a “ham” operator already, I got involved with Air Force MARS. No, not space cadets, the Military Affiliate Radio System. Officially, it was the backup for the “official channels” of radio communication, and it was used for that sometimes, but mostly it was a bunch of ham operators tinkering around with AF radio equipment, playing with our hobby at taxpayer expense. It was with MARS that I got to be the king of all AF scrounges. We operated the best means of communication with the “world,” making contact with Stateside MARS stations who would put through collect calls to our homes via a “phone patch,” a device that hooked the radio up to the phone lines.
We could get anything from anyone on base. Not just supply. Midnight, in the middle of a 24-hour period of placing calls, and hungry. Call the chow hall.
Me: “Anybody there want to call the States?” Minutes later: C/H: “Hey, you guys, the MARS station has a connection to the states. Fix them a dozen ham sandwiches and get the SP’s over here to deliver them! And whoever wants to make a call get in the office here!” (Then we’d put through a call for the guy from Security Police, too.)
I got us a 15,000 watt amplifier for our radio when the Comm SQ turned one in (MO’ POWAH!). We got good, comfortable office furniture, for those long sessions sitting in front of radios. Most of what we had, though, was cast-off, second hand stuff, because officially, we were the purple-haired stepchildren of the Air Force. We worked based on how long the atmospheric propagation would allow us to have 2-way conversations with the States, and I think my record was something like 28 hours. Some days, nothing. Some days, Katy-bar-the-door, until everybody on base who wanted to call had gotten through, some more than once.
God bless one man, not with us any more: Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) had about the best ham station on earth. And he had volunteers to staff it. On holidays, he would place our calls for free, and everybody got to call home without the expense of a collect call. Now, that was a man who cared about the GI’s. And everybody in the service at the time knew it.
Not only MARS operators, but a lot of folks in the service learn to be good scrounges. Sometimes I think the military really works on the backs of its best scrounges, because they know how to find what they need, be it DRMO, supply, or whereever. They are the ones who get things done, and it’s “full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes!” Here’s a salute to those unsung heroes of the war effort, I know that today they are just as important to getting things accomplished as they were back in the “old” days!
Ordinarily, NPR is the news venue most useful for minimizing exposure to fading celebs with mounds of baggage, flogging their new doorstop around the usual book-flogging “tour d’lame” circuit. But Jane Fonda was interviewed this morning, on Morning Edition… and I was so sunk in ennui, indifference and disinterest that I didn’t even bother turning the radio up to listen… or down so I didn’t have to. My well of “just don’t care” is practically bottomless as far as she is concerned, as a singular person. She does interest me in a mild way, as being typical of a certain sort of activist dilettante, flitting from one trendy cause du jour to the next. There never seems to be any deep and abiding commitment to one particular cause amongst this sort of person, just a vague attachment to the currently most fashionable of them, as if to cover up a lack in themselves by making an ostentatious show of “caring”.
I suppose I could go back and review her notorious propaganda trip to North Vietnam, remind myself of why practically all the older guys— Vietnam-era veterans all— in my early service life despised her, and boycotted those few movies that she did appear in, in the late 1970ies. I could recall again how very, very few of those celebrity/activists who protested the war vociferously in 1968 were still around in 1975 to help pick up the pieces and resettle the refugee population from South Vietnam that their own good intentions helped create. (Buffy St. Marie is the only one who comes to mind, incidentally.) By then, Ms Fonda had already moved on to being a diet and exercise guru and from there to being a corporate media wife, and fashionable feminist. And I— along with most the rest of the world, have moved on. A good chunk of that world, if they think of her at all, think of her as someone on their mom’s excercise tapes.
The woman has been everything by turns over the last thirty-five years, but none of it for too long, or too deeply. It’s hard to feel anything much about someone so shallow, who seems to drift according to the orbit of whatever husband she was with at the time, or the whim of fashion. Bothering even to work up a dislike feels like beating up on marshmallow fluff; a waste of energy, because it’s mostly air over a creamy and attractive surface.
Bet you the book will be on the remainders table, marked down %50 in six months.