While in a conversation out at the jobsite today, the subject worked around to one of my nephews who’s recently announced his intent to marry his current girlfriend. I dispensed a bit of wisdom given me long ago: “Love is like a gentle spring rain. It will just as likely fall upon a daisy as a dog turd.”
Monthly Archives: June 2005
Fifty-five
Today is my birthday. I am fifty-five years old. I am in reasonably good health except for being a bit overweight, so I plan on being around longer.
It sometimes amazes me how much the world has changed over those years. I’ve seen gasoline go from $0.28 a gallon to over two bucks. I bought a Harley and a Volkwagen Beetle both brand new on the showroom floor for less than $2000 each. I’ve seen the daily paper go from three cents to fifty, and I remember being able to take TWO pennies to the butcher shop next door and put it in a Coke machine, turn the handle and get a bottled, ice-cold Coke. That same butcher shop would give you a big ol’ meaty soup bone for free.
Sales tax was 2%. My first job paid $0.75 an hour. when I was eighteen, a pair of Converse hi-top sneakers could be bought for less than two bucks and it didn’t matter if ANYONE in the NBA wore them. Having an AM/FM radio in a car was a big deal, and somebody who installed an eight-track tape player was on the forefront of audio technology.
I was in junior high for the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I remember the drills for “duck and cover”, and the discussions about nuclear war. I looked over the fence at the Commie hordes while I was in the Army, and I’ve seen the USSR come apart at the seams.
I’ve seen welfare go from a stigma to a lifestyle. I’ve seen morals change from where a teen pregnancy resulted in the girl leaving high-school and going off somewhere to have her baby in shame to today where teen moms routinely sit around brightly discussing their babies and their school friends throw baby showers.
When I was a young teen, a haircut cost a dollar. Today it’s ten, and I don’t have nearly as much hair to cut. the only bottled water you could buy at the store was distilled water for those old steam irons. Beer came in steel cans that needed a can opener, and the store where you bought the beer usually gave you a can opener for free. Soft drinks came in bottles for which you had to pay a deposit. Kids would collect bottles from the side of the road and bring them to the store. Two cents a bottle was good money for a ten year old kid, because the BIG candy bars cost a nickel, and there was plenty of candy that cost a penny. A dollar was a lot of money.
Sp it’s been fifty five years. I went out to lunch with the folks from my office, and one of them bought me lunch. I got a card from my older sister, an e-mail from my brother, and a phone call from my daughter. I had a good day at work, and I guess I’m as content as I can be for the time being. Heh!
Real “stars” II
( Borrowed this one from a post on CSP Gun Talk’s Political Page, where it was posted by “Louis of PA”. Thanks, Louis!)
For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column called “Monday Night At Morton’s.” (Morton’s is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.
Ben Stein’s Last Column…
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How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?
As I begin to write this, I “slug” it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is “eonlineFINAL,” and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started. I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.
It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton’s, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a “star” we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament…the policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive; the orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery; the teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children; the kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.
Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse. Now you have my idea of a real hero.
I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human. I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin…or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.
But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life. I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister’s help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.
This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.
Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.
By Ben Stein
We’d have faced a firing squad…
The Army has picked up and responded to “abuse” of trainees, according to this article.
But Army regulations in effect since 1985 say superiors cannot lay a hand on their recruits to discipline them. The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command regulations also disallow any physical or verbal hazing, which includes “cruel or abusive tricks.” Vulgar or sexually explicit language is also prohibited.
When I was a drill sergeant, we were forbidden to physically or verbally abuse a trainee. In the face of some of the activities I observed, it was difficult at times to maintain my self-restraint and military bearing, but I managed, as did the vast majority of my fellow drill sergeants. The payout was simple. Whacking a trainee was a darned good way to lose a hard-earned stripe or two.
Besides, we had many acceptable means of dealing with recalcitrant young trainees: extra physical training, extra duties like cleaning the supply room or orderly room, as well as resorting to the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I personally liked the extra duty thing: Saturday afternoons were valued free time for a trainee. Spending Saturday afternoon with a bucket of water and a scrub brush detailing the concrete retaining walls underneath the barracks was a great deterrent, especially after it’d been applied once or twice. I was a great fan of extra runs after the training day was “finished”, too. Carefull use of those one or two mile runs for the whole platoon, well, they were a great tool for aligning “peer pressure” to help with a few recalcitrant individuals.
Drill sergeants in the army of 1970 weren’t gods, all-powerful and all-knowing. Well, not the “all-powerful” part, anyway. We had a difficult and interesting job to do, and it meant dealing with a wide variety of the human frailties. The human dimension was both interesting and frustrating. Our job was to take civilians and turn them into soldiers, and that’s what we did.
In the two years I spent at Fort Polk, I was platoon sergeant or assitant platoon sergeant to ten training cycles, having maybe 400 trainees under my direct control, and I never had to physically handle any of them in any manner outside the regulations. bu that doesn’t mean there were times I didn’t want to. The first sergeant and the company commander both saw me red-faced and about to blow a gasket over one sort of crap or another, but the times they saw me like that was because I was passing the problem on to them to handle, as prescribed by regulation.
Just like today, the good trainees became good soldiers. Sometimes we had to encourage people to develope the proper attitudes, but that was just the job…
FLASH! Revealing evidence!
One of the amazing things about the blogosphere is that even a little ol’ lower tier blog like this can come up with amazing information that if made public, could send huge shock waves through the nation.
I have many friends in many places, and one of those friends, Norm Ricci, got his hands on video from a security camera in the Senate. The information revealed is truly shocking. Continue reading FLASH! Revealing evidence!
The Name Game — Hiatus
I am devastated. I may go into a dark corner, curl up in a fetal position, and whimper quietly.
The local paper didn’t have birth announcements last week NOR this week. I am relegated to depending on highway department work crew traffic control for signs of innovative thinking.
Well, on the subject, we Cajuns have a rich variety of names in our history. I am sure that these names didn’t seem strange to the ears of their contemporary neighbors, but to more modern ears, those names have a decidedly alien tenor.
Allow me to choose some of my own relatives by way of example. Mom’s Uncle Doc’s given name was Ozema, pronounced “Oze-may”. Mom had a cousin who married into the Patin family. That’s pronounced “POT-anh”. There are colloquial sayings concerning “Patin’s duck”, as in “I feel just like Patin’s duck. I don’t give a quack.”
On Dad’s side of the equation, things are really rich. Most of the women contemporary to my great grandmother had those rich names of antiquity, like Ophelia and Amelia. But then there was great uncle Deyhart, pronounced “Day-heart”, and Basile, pronounced “baz-eel”.
Nicknames often took a Cajun flair, too. While most of the south has a proliferation of “Bubba’s” the diminuitive form of “brother”, Acadiana had its “Tee’s”, “Tee” being the diminuitive of Cajun French “petite” or little. So any Cajun bunch worth its roux had a “Tee-boy” in it, meaning somebody was some Cajun granny’s “little boy” and it stuck.
To Defeat in Detail…
(The following is written by Maj. Dick Culver, USMC (Ret.). He and his wife are the keepers of Culver’s Shooting Pages, which is, in my opinion, the finest site on the Internet for conversation on guns and freedom. Major Culver is a man who should write a few books. He has some “war stories” that will make you squirt fluids out of your nose. He also has some serious, thoughtful and provocative essays. This is one of them.)
Ladies and Gentlemen…
I initially wrote this one during “Slick Willy’s” reign, and within the memory of the shenanagans evident in the Government’s seige at Waco. Some of my comments may seem a bit dated, but in my opinion the basic premise still holds true.
The FBI (while their tactics have been toned down a bit since Ruby Ridge and Waco) still has the potential for abuse against the citizenry.
In the old days when I was a youngster, when the locals were being pushed around by gangsters, the comment on the FBI’s arrival was “Thank Gawd, the FBI’s here!” Now their arrival often elicits the comment, “Oh my Gawd, it’s the FBI!” They have become a useful tool of the administration in power. Under J. Edgar Hoover (regardless of your opinion of his personal proclivities), was a patriot who had the interest of our country at heart. He could not be bullied, or cajoled as he had too much dirt on the entire political crowd – the Kennedys were scared “spitless” of him, and LBJ had one of their thickest dossiers… When Hoover passed away, the floodgates opened wide. They let the minority clerks in the office go through the files of the Bureau and remove any derigatory information held on such notables as MLK (an avowed member of the Communist Party, but the historical revisionists conveniently forget this!). Other members of the then existing politicians in power, also paid off the administrative staff to purge their records (don’t ask me how I know this!).
The head of the FBI has, since Hoover’s demise, been a political appointee who has been controlled like a puppet for partisan political purposes along with the IRS (the Clintons were famous for this practice)… Hence my comments on the FBI in the following discourse…
Unfortunately, the era of an omnipotent Law Enforcement Agency whose head essentially runs what amounts to a dictatorship is finished. We simply cannot afford to appoint a “spotless gentleman (or woman)” for life, as they no longer exist in our modern times. We were lucky in Hoover, but he slowly acquired power before anyone knew what he was doing – and then it was too late to remove him. We were lucky in Hoover, but the chances of finding another of his ilk are slim and none. Hoover was essentially unreachable by the power brokers, as their main tool is greed, and a deep pocket. Hoover however, was hooked on pure power, and bribes were beneath him. Johnson kept him on because he was afraid not to…
Read on…
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TO DEFEAT IN DETAIL
ENDNOTES are indicated in (parenthesis/[brackets])
Two days ago, I discovered a marvelous local publication quite by accident. Its name is “The Idaho Observer.â€? I picked up a copy at the local supermarket along with a copy of the local “Nickel’s Worth.â€? Checking out the new monthly “rag,â€? I found it to be a newspaper dedicated to a return to Constitutional Government!… Bingo! Well what do you know? A kindred spirit located right in the local area! Being a curious sort, this discovery prompted a telephone call to the paper’s editor. I found a gentleman who espoused many points of view remarkably similar to my own… I must admit, I was enthralled… We exchanged views and reveled in having found that there really are more folks out there who are also concerned that our country is headed down the path of destruction. Due to a prior commitment, he excused himself, but allowed as how he was headed for a meeting in town and suggested that I attend.
I gathered the “Memsahib” and headed for town. Due to the short fuse on the “heads up” notification of the meeting, I arrived a couple of minutes late. There were no signs or logos identifying the group, and if my “mentor” had identified them by name, I could not recall. About five minutes into the meeting, I began to wonder if I had gotten the address correct. Since I had not yet met the editor of “The Idaho Observer”, I could not identify him by sight. Hummm… A quick check with one of the attendees during a momentary lull located my quarry. I knew he was not going to attend the entire meeting, so when he arose to leave, I followed him outside. We shook hands and made plans to have coffee the following week. He departed, encouraging me to return to the meeting so that I would not miss anything. Before he departed, I asked him the name of the group inside. He informed me that they were known as “Americans for a Constitutional Government”. Strange… that wasn’t exactly the impression I had gotten by listening to the first 20 minutes of the discussion or the thrust of the first two speakers?! So far I had identified (to myself at any rate) the following small groups of individuals: Continue reading To Defeat in Detail…
Disaster of the day
well, I made it through the whole week without a major disaster, right up to 6 PM today. That’s when I got the phonecall. I had a couple of technicians working on a plant shutdown this weekend, and they hit the office at 6 PM. and found that our little water heater had burst, flooding the halls, two bathrooms, Chrissy’s office and our file room/calibration laboratory.
They turned off the water heater supply valve to stop the flooding, and I headed to the office, stopping to buy another wet/dry vacuum cleaner. when i got there, one tech had pretty well mopped up most of the hallway and bathrooms, and I took the new vacuum after the saturated carpets. We got up most of the water. Those wet/dry shop vacs are fantastic. Fans will dry up the rest by Monday.
No valuable test equipment was damaged, maily because we keep that stuff in a secure storage enclosure in the shop, but the cheap office furniture in Chrissy’s office is NOT reacting well to standing in water. The particle board is already starting to swell. I can see new office furniture in the near future…
Cajun First Aid
Boudreaux and Thibodeaux and dey friends went deer hunting and paired off in twos for the day. That night, Boudreaux returned alone, staggering under the weight of an eight-point buck.
“‘Ey, Boudreaux, where’s Thibodeaux” the others asked.
“Mais, I t’ink he got a heart attack or sumthin’. He’s a couple of miles back up the trail,” Boudreaux replied.
“Oh, no, Boudreaux! You left Thibodeaux laying out there helpless and carried the deer back?” they asked.
“Mais, yeah, I had to t’ink about dat. It was a tough call,” nodded Boudreaux. “But I figured no one is going to steal old Thibodeaux!”
>>
Math help
Boudreaux was the owner of a bait shop in Creole, Louisiana. Having not a lot of formal education, he was confused about how much he needed to pay on an invoice, so he decided to ask Clotile,his secretary for some mathematical help.
He called her into office and said, “Clotile, you graduated from high school and me, I need some help wid dis figurin’.
If I were to give you $20,000, minus 14%, how much would you take off?
Her face lit up. “Cher, everything but my earrings.”
Dummy
A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer, “This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.”
The barber puts a dollar bill in one hand and two quarters in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?”
The boy takes the quarters and leaves.
“What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!”
Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store.
“Hey, son! May I ask you a question? Why did you take the quarters instead of the dollar bill?”
The boy licked his cone and replied, “Because the day I take the dollar, the game’s over.”
(From a post CSP gun Talk’s political page by “Clyde from deep in the heart of Texas”)
Blog Survey
For some reason, MIT is conducting a blog survey. I participated.
Epiphany at “Minivan Mom” pointed this one out…
Carnival of Recipes is Up!
Pass over to Note-It Posts and check out this week’s offerings, including my own sandwich recipe.
“Sandwich recipe? You posted a freakin’ SANDWICH recipe?”
Darned right I did. I’m trying to expand horizons here. If you folks don’t get off your butts and try this stuff, next week when the Supreme Court says we all have to start eating Soylent Green and “Purina Yankee Chow”, you won’t know that you’re supposed to be fighting for REAL FOOD with REAL TASTE. You’ll think you’re going to war over Coke Classic or somethin’.
Eminent domain…
There is a lot of talk over the recent Supreme Court decision concerning the power of local government to confiscate private property under the doctrine of “eminent domain.” If you’ve been on a desert island for the last few days, here’s an article that sums up the thing.
I have to admit that I didn’t expect this one. I guess my own antennae have been up for other issues like gun control and the war on terror. I never figured that the Supreme Court would allow its sophistry to abrogate a key provision of the Bill of Rights. The Fifth Amendment says, among other things,
- “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
We’ve all seen the normal cases of eminent domain’s legitimate intent: Homes and property taken to make room for highways and such, but this recent decision redefines the “for public use” clause.
In a nutshell, the Supremes ruled that a city can force the sale of provate property in order to make it possible for ANOTHER PRIVATE ENTITY to build where it wishes. The logic behind this is that the city will gain JOBS and TAX REVENUE.
Therein lies the rub. The lust of governments for tax revenue is insatiable. Homeowners do not generate nearly the tax revenues as do businesses. Displacing a few homes to make room for a new strip mall, or a big box store, or an apartment complex is easy math when viewed in terms of how much tax revenue the city can get per acre. It is no small wonder to me that after years of treating people like sheep, to be herded and sheared regularly, government is beginning to see people as having no right to the fruits of their own labors.
With right to private property cheapened by this court decision, we enter a whole new era of persons of privilege and power against the ordinary citizen. Real estate developers now have the ultimate tool. They can choose a piece of property and by leveraging political connections, can have that property condemned under eminent domain, simply by making a case to local governing bodies that are notoriously susceptible to corruption in many locales.
This case is interesting in that I cannot really place my view on it into either the Left or the Right’s purview. I think it transcends the traditional divide in American politics. And it just might be the case that garners enough support to rein in the courts…