Guilt

I have a personalized Google page that opens when I open my web browser. It has stuff on it that I find intresting and informative. Usually. One of the things I have is a “How To” of the day—by none other than wikihow.com. Of course. Once in a while it's a something good, but mostly it is, well, for lack of a better word, stupid. Today's “How To” was about how to construct a tire swing. Lots of good advise like: -Find a tire -Find a tree -Buy some rope -Tie some knots I know that not everyone has my breadth of life experience, but.........find a tire? OK. At the end of the article is a list of warnings, including the advise to supervise children while they are using the tire swing to be certain that they're using it properly, and to be certain that no one stands on it. Too dangerous, apparantly. You can only sit.  While being supervised. C'Mon. It's a tire swing. The article also lists a related article titled “How To...

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. Other dangerous months are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. Mark Twain

I'm an active member of the Fraternal Order of Police—The FOP—and have been for decades. I've always been proud of who and what I am. Therefore, I have an FOP star on the back of my car. Since I have that identifying emblem on my car, I carefully follow traffic laws. No, really. If it says 35 MPH, I go 35. I signal my lane changes. I follow at an appropriate distance. I do these things all the time. Part of it is my nature—I'm sorta rule oriented like that—and some of it is the fact that I do have that FOP star on the back of my car.  The rest of it is that I'm a driving instructor--I teach teen-agers how to drive. When I go out of my way to identify myself as a Cop, I'm obligated to adhere strictly to good conduct ideals. Goes with the territory. On Friday, 8-10-12, I was nearly hit by a black Escalade who was tailgating, speeding, and driving recklessly on Highway 224 in Boardman, Ohio, heading towards Poland near the intersection with ...

Back in the olden days—that would be in the mid 60s, children—I worked in a Shell gas station in Windsor, California for a man named Joe Woodard. I learned quite a bit about being a man and about life from Joe Woodard, and I owe him for that, but that's a story for another day. I also went to High School in Healdsburg, California, and played football and trumpet, had a girl friend, went to the county fair............ But what I'm talking about here is the gas station. We sold gasoline for somewhere in the neighborhood of 35.9 cents a gallon. Could have been 25.9 cents a gallon.....I just don't recall exactly. Point here is that it made sense to charge something and 9/10ths of a cent for a gallon of gas. Look—you could buy 10 gallons of gas, and that extra 1/10 th of a cent per gallon totaled up to a penny. American currency and coin had not yet been completely decimated in value back then, and that penny could be given to your young child, and that child cou...