Guilt

A couple of days ago I wrote about the apparent uselessness of your average American male these days, and I meant every syllable.  This all has to do with the Secret Service prostitution scandal in South America. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I know.  They were really bad boys and deserve decapitation. Right. Here’s my take, generally, on men who do dangerous jobs.  Like policemen of all stripes and the military: We want.....nay, NEED, aggressive, daring men in these jobs.  Much as I dislike our current President, I want him adequately protected.  At the risk of being accused of being a sexist, this means we need aggressive courageous men doing the job.  Same thing applies to law enforcement agencies of all sorts and military units of all sorts. Strong, aggressive American men.  Brave.  Decisive.  Risk-takers.  I don’t want them saddled with a wheelbarrow full of sissy regulations.  When you get the sort of men you need for these job...

Living in NorthEast Ohio is both good and bad, I suppose, like most areas, but one of the benefits of living here is our proximity to Amish and Mennonite farms, from whom we buy eggs, chicken, and a host of other goodies. This morning’s breakfast consisted of two brown eggs from the Beiler farm in Ronks, PA--that would be in Eastern Lancaster County.  Amos and Lydia Beiler (and their son Arlen and his wife Dana) are the 8th and 9th generations of their family to farm that particular land.  The land was originally purchased from William Penn’s son, and the original deed was written on a deerskin. These people have permanence. So, breakfast consisted of two eggs from that farm.  Brown in color, like the chickens who laid them, with the sort of flavor I’ve come to expect from chickens that are allowed to walk around.  Cage-free, in the current parlance. Also on the menu was some freshly ground Rwandan dark coffee (no Rwandans, I’m lead to believe, were harmed i...

I see that some of the elected Congressional women are making quite a thing out of their contention that the Secret Service sex scandal would never have happened if more women were in the Secret Service. Oh, Crap.  Here we go again. Having lived through the women’s movement of the 70s and the misery that followed.........I do tend to ramble, don’t I?  I understand that the supervising agent who investigated this mess was a black woman who had previously joined a lawsuit against the Secret Service for racism and sexism.  Got that from an article at http://www.dailymail.co.uk . OK, then.  I think, at this point, that men in general, and white men in particular, have lasted too long.  Either we need to be relegated to being traveling artists, minstrels, poets, and actors....going from town to town plying our non-aggressive abilities and occasionally fathering a child (who will be raised by a nice community of non-violent/non-aggressive females), or, in the o...

All right then.....I recently got a new large TV for the living room.  Replaced an aging but dependable Toshiba 46 inch wide screen (about 8 or 9 years old) with a new Vizio HD 47 inch.  The new one has built-in Internet WiFi, which is way cool, and it is quite a bit lighter than the old Toshiba.  Some programs do look a bit creepy, and I understand this is the Soap Opera Effect (SOE) of certain older films being interpreted by current high definition technology--Doesn’t bother me much, but my Bride gets really creeped out by some of it. When I bought the old Toshiba eight or nine years ago, it ran about 16 or 17 hundred at Best Buy in Bakersfield, California.  The new Vizio cost $519.00 American from computergeeks.com, including shipping.  A bargain if ever there was one.  The Vizio Internet Applications (VIA, in Vizio-Speak) forgot to include a Major League Baseball Ap, so I added a ROKU box to watch baseball.  The old DVD/VHS combo hooked right...

Dick Clark has died--We can no longer ring in the New Year.......... Well Played, Mayans.

I know that I make fun of the SyFy channel frequently, but, really now.....they make it so easy. I can only make a couple of guesses here.  One is that the art of proof-reading has gone the way of the button shoe, or, maybe whoever writes this drivel really has no idea about the word "intact".  I dunno.  Could be other stuff, I guess.  Spell checker won't pick up this sort of error.  Anyhow, here's the snippet taken from the SyFy web site, um, intact.  Emphasis is mine and mine alone: One Giant Leap   Full Episode It's chaos in Eureka when an energy beam rips through main street but the Astraues launch must go on...with or without Eureka in tact . Guest starring Felicia Day, Ming Na and Wil Wheaton. In.  Tact.

On December 21, 2012, certain segments of society seem to think that the world will end.....or something. If anyone believes this stuff, please tell me why-- I believe that, as far as reliability is concerned, Wikipedia might as well be written by monkeys.  Despite that, there is a pretty thorough discussion of this junk at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_phenomenon . Ok, then--that’s it.....End of the World, Wikipedia, Monkeys.

Giant pitching ERA (to date) Zito:  1.13 Cain:  3.00 Bumgarner:  3.97 Lincecum:  10.54 (But it was over 12, so this is, um, good)

SyFy Channel:  Imagine Greater Time Warner Cable:  Enjoy Better Jim Young:  Fragment Abhor

Barry Zito:  Complete game shut-out. Madison Bumgarner:  7 and a third innings, one earned run, and a victory. Matt Cain:  One-hitter, complete game shut-out. Tim Lincecum:  Really long hair, a rad Facebook page, 0-2 record, and a 12+ ERA.

OK, then.  The Giants are still in last place, but it's a CLOSER last place than yesterday.  They managed to win a low scoring (by Denver standards, anyhow) squeaker, and it gives me hope. In the American League, the Indians are still in last place, but the just signed Johnny Damon to a one year deal, and that's gotta help that anemic offense--always been a Damon fan. Look--when you root for the Giants in the National League and the Indians in the American, you have to look for silver linings, OK?

In the 1960s, when I was but a High School pup, I went to a school dance that was a formal affair.  Actually I went to two of them on two consecutive years.  The event was called "The Prom".   "The Prom" When was the "The" dropped from "The Prom"?  And why? Does this have anything at all to do with Sears dropping Roebuck?

The pathetic part is that I’ve already paid over a hundred bucks American to MLB.TV so that I can watch out of market games.  Out of market games, in MLB speak, are games that don’t play on local TV wherever you happen to be.  Since I live in Northeast Ohio, if I want to see any games other than the Indians, I need an out of market subscription to MLB.TV.  So, like I said, I’ve already paid.  So that I can watch the progress of the 2012 Campaign of my beloved San Francisco Giants. Pathetic. Three games into the season we are, and the Giants are O and Three.  At the hands of the Arizona Diamondbacks, or Razorbacks, or whatever they are.  O and Three. Pathetic. Today, I watched the whole thing.  The Giants had a 6 run lead.  They lost 7 to 6.  One of the plays went something like this:  Bases loaded (by Arizona, of course) less than 2 outs.  Grounder to third.  This is CHILD’S PLAY!!  Sandoval (the third baseman) fi...

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man. Mark Twain

Major League Baseball needs Bud Selig like a fish needs a bicycle.   Opening day used to be opening day.  Everybody started at once (except the Reds).  Every fan was optimistic and every team was tied for first. Selig.  Let me count the ways: -An All Star game ends in a tie. -No more presidents of the National and American leagues. -No more American and National league umpires (they’re all MLB umpires now). -Playoffs into infinity and beyond with no end to the wild card concept in sight. -And now--"Opening Week", or something like that. Crap.  I didn’t even like it when they made East and West Divisions.  So you sort of know where I stand. Doesn’t help that I root for the Cleveland Indians (a painful experience in oh, so many ways), and the San Francisco Giants (only slightly less painful).   I think I’ll just go get a paper cut and then pour some nice lemon juice on it.

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It all happened like this--5 or 6 years ago, we moved into a two-plus story house with a full basement.  Truth be told, the basement is bigger than most of the houses and apartments I've lived in most of my life.  This place is HUGE.  Old, but huge.  Needed some, um, upgrades due to deferred maintenence and such, but that's a story for a different day.  Made of brick, like the smart little pig might have built.  5000 square feet or something like that. So we moved in.  Needed a phone, some TV, and some Internet.  I'd had a wireless network in my old place, and wanted it again, but, like I said this place is HUGE.  The house we had left behind was less than half this size, and all on one level.  The wireless network here needed to cover three floors (when you count the basement, and I do) as well as part of the grounds.  I already had some wifi networking gear that I arrived with, so I called the local cable company (Time Warne...

Being both a military veteran and a retired law enforcement officer, I have a reasonably strong sense of right and wrong.  That said, however, I see most of the world in shades of gray rather than black and white.  Some issues are, indeed, black and white, but most are not.  Some people see folks like me as ignorant, brutal, and corrupt.  While it may make their view of life simpler and more comfortable to see things in that manner, not all of us are stupid, corrupt, or brutal.  We just have a conditioned view of life.

Once the badge goes on, it never comes off, whether they can see it, or not. It fuses to the soul through adversity, fear and adrenaline and no one who has ever worn it with pride, integrity and guts, can ever sleep through the 'call of the wild' that wafts through bedroom windows in the deep of the night. Author Unknown