Tuesday, September 4th, 2007

Today's Meanest Man In The World  Award goes to one Garry W. Lamar, 47, of North Kingston, Rhode Island. He was released on $200 bail and has been ordered to stay away from his 78-year-old mother.
 


"This isn't just a family cat!
She actually called this cat her 'companion'...
since she lived alone."  Sergeant Daniel Ormond

News Flash Happy Ending: Police don't believe the cat has been harmed!

Monday, September 3rd, 2007                                          Honor Labor

Sunday, September 2nd, 2007

"There is an element of pathos in the spectacle of a 62-year-old man holding a press conference to deny that he is or ever has been gay, and to give an account of his actions so implausible as to arouse more pity than contempt."
Patrick Martin

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

I had planned to spend the first night of my drive from Harlingen to New Orleans in Victoria, which is at the intersection of Highway 77 and Highway 59. However, the laptop computer which I carried had no wireless capability and the only 'plug-in hotel' I could find on the main drag in Victoria (Sam Houston Highway) gave me the willies. I would have been the only occupant (or, at least, the first to check in for that evening) and the 'staff' seemed to have plenty of time on their hands. With visions of the Bates Motel, I kept driving toward Houston until I came upon the City of El Campo, whose citizens had voted 2-to-1 for Bush over Kerry.
 
A police officer's annual starting salary in El Campo is about $32K (compared with about $70K for an officer in Oakland, California). It's not hard to find a three bedroom, two bath house for under $125K. I checked into the first hotel I could find with wired Internet access. Then I went out in search of food. Desperate, I settled for a Gatti's Pizza which, on this Friday night, featured all-you-can-eat pizza, pasta and salad for $4.99! It was packed with families with kids and the food wasn't half bad if you were hungry (I was). I left full and feeling as if I had robbed the place! Now...if you happen to get lost in rural Texas, you can get very lost. Living in urban California, one  forgets how much open, flat land there is in this world.
But so what if it took me an hour to find my way back to the hotel (which  was only a ten minute drive from Gatti's)? At last I had my guitar, coffee and broadband! Life is good!      ^_^

Friday, August 31st, 2007                     The More Things Change

"We have to stop blaming the Iraqis {for} our failures in Iraq. With all our military might we cannot control the violence and it is futile to expect the Iraqi government to do so. It is time we accept that we made miscalculations and mistakes. It makes no sense to make more mistakes to cover up earlier ones, especially when the lives of our soldiers and innocent people are at stake. Ego and stubbornness can take us only so far. We know we will have to leave Iraq someday. The time is now."
Prakash Navare  August 24th, 2007

Saddam Hussein was the leader of Iraq because it was never a job for Fred Rogers. The disparate factions that make up Iraq did not come together from shared interests. What 'unity' there had ever been was imposed from without and without a 'unifier' (i.e., someone willing to do what had to be done to keep order), there has never been an Iraq. 

"I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is becoming really impossible. Our forces are reduced now to very slender proportions. I do not see what political strength there is to face a disaster of any kind. There is scarcely a single newspaper which is not consistently hostile to our remaining in this country. I do not see what we are getting out of it. At present we are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having."
Excerpted from a letter to Prime Minister Lloyd George from Secretary of State (for War and Air) Winston Churchill, September 1st, 1922

Thursday, August 30th, 2007 

It has been noted that even Adolph Hitler loved dogs. In fact, at the end of his service as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, he vowed that he would never eat another one. And anyway, he much preferred the taste of cat.
Leona Helmsley received lotsa bad press in her day...most of it probably undeserved. Her will was made public this week and, in addition to the much-publicized twelve million dollar bequest to her beloved Trouble (pictured with her at left), she made a point of disinheriting two of her four grandchildren...the offspring of her only (and late) child (a son) with the endearing words, "for reasons that are known to them."

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene I

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Is it a sign of a coming recession...or a sign of people coming to their senses? Yesterday, Sotheby's put two baseballs on the auction block:

#755 has a starting bid of $60,000 and #756 starts at $100,000. Go to the Web site and see for yourself how high these memorabilia have been bid up already! [If you have to ask what '#755' & '#756' mean, then you don't care.]

For comparison: the ball that Mark McGuire hit for his 70th season home run in 1998 was (supposedly) bought (by some sucker) for $3,000,000! Yeah...I don't believe it either! 

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Okay...so I'm Old and In the Way, but yesterday afternoon at Safeway I spied this chick wearing a most "inappropriate" tee shirt! I had to angle so as not to (be seen to) ogle until I read, "Even Flowers Smell Like Doo-Doo" in two-inch red letters! Of course I was scandalized and so when I got home I mentioned it to Maggie and that's when I learned that the phrase is from an Outkast rap song called 'Roses'. Well, I searched online but I couldn't find those exact lyrics anywhere but especially not on a tee shirt...though I did find a site with some notables:

Monday, August 27th, 2007             Some people just can't help themselves!

“At 1216 hours, Craig tapped his right foot. I recognized this as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct. Craig tapped his toes several times and moved his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly. While this was occurring, the male in the stall to my right was still present.

I could hear several unknown persons in the restroom that appeared to use the restroom for its intended use. The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.” Sgt. Dave Karsnia of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport Police Department

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

It's a little less than 700 miles, by road, from Harlingen, Texas to New Orleans, Louisiana. I needed to get to Tampa, Florida but the idea of just flying there from Harlingen made too much sense. So, because of the additional time and expense (of hotels and food and gasoline and car rental) and the danger (of getting wiped out in a highway crash on an unfamiliar road), I decided to drive to New Orleans and fly on from there. I figured if I made only 250 miles per day, then it could be relaxing and educational: something to bore people with if I ever got home.
It was surprising to me that virtually all of what little radio (AM and FM) there is in south Texas is broadcast in Spanish. Ninety-five percent of the programs are about Jesus and the other half consist of brainless mariachi music (an oxymoronic redundancy ). I was hoping to overcome the monotony of Highway 77 (from Raymondville to Kingsville is a moonscape...the only break is in Sarita, where the Border Patrol stops every car to ask about citizenship) by finding a National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate (they're always at the bottom of the dial) but it wasn't until I got near Corpus Christi (some one hundred miles north of Harlingen) that I found one (KEDT-FM, 90.3). I was hoping for a taste of home: ya know, an hour or two of Bush-bashing...but it was not to be. This is Alfred's home state. 

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