~ LAWYER PICS

I went to lunch with my lawyer this weekend. Needless to say, he wasn't ready to go to court on this occasion. Actually, this is the best lawyer in Orange County. In the twenty years I've known him he has never (yes, never) lost a case. I once dubbed him "The Prince of Darkness" and he's been known as that since.

Bob

~A BAND OF CPI BROTHERS

Just look at this crew! OK... left to right: me, Luis (a retired Airborne Ranger), then RT (a retired Marine officer), and finally Adam (a brand new college graduate with dreams of getting into the military and doing the gung ho thing).

The constant among this crowd seems to be post military. I don't know if that's deliberate or just random, but it does make for a fairly colorful time around the lunch table there at PCC/USF.

Anyhow, we're in the home stretch of the training this week for DCF and then we'll be unleashed on the unsuspecting public. I think that it's gonna be a good work crew. Like Nelson said... a band of brothers.

Bob

~PARADE OF THE IDIOTS

OK... the British cops, I'm sure all dressed up like the Ninja warriors they imagine themselves to be, shoot a Brazilian mechanic and student in the war against terror. Twenty seven years old, described by his neighbors as "a quiet kid", never hurt a fly, 3 years in the country and a nice guy. Well, he walked out of the wrong building and was wearing a jacket on a summer day... hmmm, must be a terrorist.

As I walk out of my refrigerated office building in Bartow I leave behind me a whole bus full of freezing women in sweaters and jackets, all huddled in the air conditioning against the rigors of living through the summer heat in a technological age. Does this mean that they are all at risk? I mean... come on guys! This is good police work? I vote no.

This is something that I know about because I have been a bondsman for the last 20 years. In that role I have often had to go get guys who have skipped out.. estreated a bail is the technical jargon. I have to go get some jerk because he didn't go to court like he should have. Anyhow, I may have a fairly good idea where the miscreant is, and I have to go get the dog.

So there I am with my little band of brother bondsmen standing on the front stoop of some house in the projects, just about to kick the door in and rearrest the guy. Suddenly, I see my guy walking down the street from hovel next door. Yikes! Wrong house! Then I reflect on the liability associated with kicking in the wrong door. Hmmm.

Over and over and over the cops make that mistake. Here in Florida a couple of years ago a kid shot and killed a sheriff's deputy while the cop was trying to kick in his family's door, only to discover later that the cops were at the wrong door. Then the cops had the nerve to arrest the kid for murder. Only later did the defense attorney point out that the cops were morons and the kid was just protecting his family from a home invasion.

You see, the authorities figure that they can kick in any door they want to and if they screw up that a sorry is sufficient to wipe away the error. Well, taint so sports fans.

OK... now we've got a bunch of Keystone Kops in London shooting first and asking questions later... with egg of their faces. Oops. Tell the widow sorry, OK? And tell the guy's mother that it was all a big mistake and part of the "war on terror".

What a herd of maroons (as buggs bunny would say).

The Brits just learned a lesson that American doorkickers have had demonstrated to themselves over and over again: If you're gonna cut corners with due process and civil liberties you'd better be damned sure that you're right because there is NO MARGIN for error in civilian combat. The cops simply can not kill innocent civilians. Can't. The streets may often seem like a war zone but this IS NOT combat in the traditional sense. All these Al Quida thugs are just that... thugs, criminals, hoods. They're not soldiers and the streets of London look nothing like real combat, even if they are littered with the corpses of innocent civilians.

To think otherwise is to be more than stupid... it's bad police work and frankly, bad soldiering as well. These Keystone Kops are giving real soldiers a bad name.

Now there's gonna be a big ass investigation and the cops are gonna all lose their jobs because some bumbling moron of a group leader wanted to play Rambo and get out there and get tough with the rag heads... and all he succeeded in doing was make his unit look like the amateur dick heads that they are. For Christ's sake, they managed to shoot some kid from Brazil wearing a coat on a hot day. No bombs, no anarchist manifestos or crappy translations of a morally degerate creed of blood soaked Koran gibberish. Give me a break!

What a bunch of idiots.

Bob

A PARTING SHOT

A guy from Tallahassee called me this afternoon asking about the ex-boss. Interesting. This gal was sufficiently scary to run me off and apparently there have been enough people complaining about her that someone from corporate has decided to investigate. What surprises me is that the toads in Tallahassee could be curious about this nightmare. Most of the interaction I've had with the sucktoad politicians in that shop leads me to believe that they couldn't care less that the nutjob ex-boss was making life a nightmare for a whole office of public servants. I figure that the fact that she was a monster is maybe one of the things that they like about her.

Well, we'll see. Of course, ole Bob has moved on. I'm not stupid enough to go back after having been shown the door, but it was kind of nice to reflect on the possibility of poking a stick in the evil monster's eye. Maybe there is a God after all.

Bob

RIP

Well, Scotty is dead. We'll all have to face the fact that the characters on Star Trek are essentially geriatric these days, but for me I've successfuly maintained a facade of denial for some time. If Scotty is gone... then I may be next. Dead from pneumonia and Alzheimers at the ripe age of 85. Jeez... 85.

He once told an interviewer that he didn't watch Star Trek because the reruns ran opposite his favorites -- Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. Yeah... the old Scotsman was still lusting after the lovely Vanna. My kinda guy.

Bob

More kid pics. For some reason Blogger is repeating the photo. I'm probably doing something wrong. That's the usual thing.

Anyhow, we went down to Tom and Sandy's place in St. Cloud Sunday so that Kathryn could show off the baby to Sandy. Sandy is important to Kathryn because she is a nurse (a lactation specialist of all things) and is the 'font of all knowledge' as far as baby stuff is concerned. Katie is a smart kid and ordinarily very self confident, but she watches every word from Sandy to learn mothering. The gal is so afraid that she might make a mistake. Birddog. And Sandy gives all that reassurance that the new mother needs. It'd be funny if it wasn't so deadly serious. I dare not kid her about it.

On other fronts, the training is going well and ends this week. Then it will be sink or swim. I'm looking forward to the new challenges. And.. I'm thinking about getting an apartment down there in Bartow. The hike down to Bartow is not a terrible distance but the run back to Orlando on I-4 in the afternoon is terrible. I came back on the back road yesterday and did OK, but the interstate is the pipeline. When that thing plugs up then it turns into a very long ride home.

We'll see. This weekend I'm going over to the boat so see if it has sunk at the dock. Surely not.

Bob

~ FOR THE GIRL WHO HAS EVERYTHING

Now here's an idea -- orgasm ringtones for your cell phone. Hmmm. I once had a girlfriend who liked to call and have me talk her off. I could have automated the process if I'd had this.

Bob

~ GRANDPA VALIDATION

It's amazing. I guess that this is what they call the 'Circle of Life'. Kathryn and Matt (and Stanley the Sperm Donor... can't forget him) came to visit the elder Bob. I can distinctly recall this kid's mother, my 24 year old daughter, zonking out when she got into the car seat. Best way to get her to sleep was to put her in the car. The truth be told, that is still the best way to put her to sleep.The kid has doubled (!) in size since I last took a picture.

Amazing.

Bob

~ WAKEUP CALL

This business in London has done one useful thing: it has reminded us of the unfinished business. We've been patty caking around trying to "manage" the war on terror and try to be calm and rational about things.

You can't be calm or rational with people who will strap high explosives on their children and then blow them up in the streets. These people are loonies and are scary in the same way as Ebola is scary.

We don't need to play political correctness games and try to look good on the Sunday news talk shows. We need to quietly and systematicly begin to exterminate these guys. Black Jack Pershing understood how to deal with militant Islam a hundred years ago: kill them all.

Bob

~ SIGNPOSTS ON THE GYRE

Well, my summer is about over. You wouldn't know it from the weather. It's been 95 degrees plus all week and the Gulf is swirling with storm clouds and my little office air conditioner has been doing yeoman's service 24/7 for the last three months. High summer. How did people survive here before the advent of AC?

Nope, the end of summer comes when ole Bob gets back into harness. I took the job down in Bartow. CPI job... that's Child Protective Investigator. Truth is I'm all atwitter. New job, new people, new town. No more DJJ with its killing workload. And management by microcephalics. Anyhow, new stuff and the usual package of benefits from the state. That is a comfort.

And... the whole deal has me thinking about my boat. I've been avoiding the old girl because I didn't want to start any new projects while at loose ends, but now I want to talk to them about the possibility of replacing the old Atomic 4 gas engine with one of those Jap diesels. Like most things in life, it's just a matter of money.

So Bob is back in the useful column. Time to get back to business. For one thing, I have gotten into the very bad habit of reading all night and ignoring the phone. Can't do that and stay connected to the shore line. Some of these girls will come around and demand explanations. Can't have that.

Bob

~ BEAM HIM IN THE BUTT, SCOTTY

As you may know, tasers have been a fairly controversial system. Here in Florida, there have been a long string of complaints of abuse. The cops use the taser to get some kid to get control of himself and then next thing you know... here comes Channel 9.

Now the cops like tasers because they are not lethal force. A point all those irate parents haven't thought about. Some 180 pound 18 year old goes off on some cop and gets himself tased. The alternative is for the cop to shoot his ass. Hmmm. Those unintended funerals do have a sort of finality, don't they?

Well, take a look at this thing -- a microwave gun system that gives the perp a zap without any wires or bullets or darts. Just microwave zingers that the developers say is like grabbing a hot skillet. Only penetrates the skin about a 64th of an inch. Shazam!

It's like that adjustable handgun that Captain Kirk had on Star Trek. Set it on stun Mr. Sulu. We can always crank it up if things get too out of hand. Right?

Bob

~ WHAT THE...

July 4th has always been one of those mixed blessings celebrations. Now, more than ever.

I have a little list of blogs that I glance at daily. That's it over there on the right. One of the regulars has been Kim DuToit. Well, OK. Today I am plowing through the list and come to this: closed till further somethingorother. Sigh.

I suppose that it is just part of the medium as message, or some shit like that. Bloggers fade in and out, depending on how much energy they can bring to the process. Lots of the guys on my blogroll have taken a break. Jim at Smoke on the Water. Alice, that Brit trapped down in Texas. Rachael Lucas. The guy at Clueless. You miss him too? He's doing something with anime now. What is that?

Anyhow, change is an inevitable part of the process. But I have to admit that du Toit surprised me. I suppose that it shouldn't. He's gone through a lot of changes in the last year or so. Slugging it out in the capitalist maush pit.

Well, maybe he's just giving it a little tweak. Most of those other guys have come back to the lure of the bully pulpit. The Acidman regularly threatens to hang it up... but I figure that is mostly ego talking. I'm gonna take my ball and go home!

July 4th. What a cheerful day. Actually, yes. This is the anniversary of the death of JoAnne Y.... the Very First. Yup. Guys always remember that first. JoAnne and I did it in the back seat of my mother's Buick in the parking lot of Sportstown, a pool hall behind Colonial Town Mall, in Orlando. Not that Joanie's death is the celebration, but that she went out with that punctuation mark beside her name in my memory.

Joanie was an adventurer. She was one of those victims of the 60s. Skin popping Number 4s and playing Neil Young on the 8 track (I hear you knocking on my back door, I love you baby can I have some more.) while the whole world swirled around us. Oh, the damage done.

JoAnne and I were friends through the years. She used to write me steamy letters when I was in VietNam. Smut to show my buddies while dreaming of getting back to the world. It's amazing how important that kind of foolishness is to an 18 year old soldier hunkered down in a mudhole in southeast Asia. I know that young guys still do that because one of my bailbond office workers is a young sniper in Iraq today and he sent me a picture of his quarters and he has a clinically explicit photo of one of his early conquests ductaped on his locker. Nothing changes.

Since that hot afternoon behind Sportstown I bonded JoAnne out of jail on 5 separate occasions, always for possession of controlled sustances. She went to prison twice. We both knew that if she got busted again she would be a habitual offender and would be in for life. But that didn't ever deter her from "getting well". Both times she went to prison I put her on an allowance. It's amazing how expensive it is to be a woman and you don't realize that until you have to go get girl stuff at the commisary. Shampoo and tampons, soap and that universal lubricant cigarettes, the medium of exchange inside the joint. I used to take her daughter and my daughter up to see JoAnne on Sundays at the Lowell State Prison of Women near Ocala. There we were like a couple of aging parents watching the girls playing in a sand box with a gaggle of other criminal's kids. Oh, damn. That little girl (my god child.. her dad dead from a dope deal)... graduated from UF last year. Top of her class. Drug free. I suppose that it is like genetic diseases. Skips a generation.

So off we go, stumbling through the darkness. I'm sorry that Kim is wearing out. He's a good guy. I'm also sorry that JoAnne isn't here to celebate the 4th today. She and another old friend decided to switch from the usual Dilaudids to some Oxycontin a few years ago so that they could get a little edge working for a big party culminating in the fireworks show in downtown Orlando. Joanie was always what I call a "prescription junkie". No Mexican tar of this girl. She wanted to get her connection at the Eckerds store. No horrorshow of big city dope fiends, no Traffic movie nightmares, none of that Moment of bliss and a lifetime of regret crap. Junkies with money don't suffer. Hell, this is America!

Anyhow, nobody explained to these idiots that Oxy is one of those slow release things and you can't cook them down and shoot them like the old Ds, so her and her friend Hurricaine Lorri just cooked a couple of the things up and milked some blood with them.

Taking a shot of arsenic would have been just as effective.

Well, damn. Come home Kim. Somebody needs to continue the good fight.

Bob

~ COLLAPSE

I got a copy of Jared Diamond's new book Collapse. This is the same guy who wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel". That book was a real eye opener and I'm looking forward to this new one. So far, it's a good read. More proof of the fact that if you give me too much spare time that I'll get myself into trouble.

By the way, I was down with Leete's family yesterday celebrating his birthday. By all reports he is still older than I am. Hehehe. His youngest Ashley, who works for Intl. Paper as some sort of bigshot, showed me the code for an amazing machine which consists of a fully automated milling machine whch can put together an entire bundle of a house's framing plus fully completed roof trusses (no fitting.. fully completed and ready to go in the air), in something like 2 hours and put the whole package on the truck in the order that it should be framed. Amazing. I've seen automated metal milling machines before at my friend Dave Fauver's shop in Sanford, but this monster is an assembly line that is about a mile long. Jeez!

Ashley... you're the Kind!

Bob

~WELL DURN

I managed to solve the problem of having a space between the date and the post.... but I managed to lose my comments. I suppose I'll have to go back to Haloscan and re-shuffle it too. I suppose that this is fun, but I'm an old guy and I may not live long enough to get this thing to work seamlessly.

Bob

~ THE ENZYTE HUSTLE

I have been sitting on my butt for the last month. I decided to go get a teaching job next year and encouraged DJJ to put it where the sun doesn't shine. Anyhow, I've been office bound for the last month and this has made me a regular with some of my neighbors.

One of them, a guy who is an accountant across the hallway from me, is a VietNam refugee who had his wife come in about a week ago and lit off a 12 gauge through his door because he had been visiting a "pleasure house" run by another neighbor. The upshot was that I wound up bonding his old lady out on a weapons charge. As often happens, I have suddenly become the guy's best friend. Sigh.

He tells me that he has been taking Enzyte and couldn't help himself. He's a middle aged accountant for Christ's sake. And he was afraid that he was not getting it up as he expected so he got a bottle of this Enzyte so that he could get some of that Viagra boner medicine. And it got out of hand so he was going upstairs to sample some of the charms of the "pleasure girls". There's a bakua game and whore house in the neighborhood. Don't ask. It's just one of the facts of life for VietNamese culture.

Now, this is a respected professional man in the heart of the Southern Dixie Cracker Belt, not some Oriental Getto outside of Peking. Orlando, Florida for God's sake! Now, his wife has apparently made the complete conversion from VietNam to Cracker seamlessly. Most of the women in my life would have exactly the same reaction if they were confronted with the same set of facts that he presented to her. He's lucky she didn't do a Bobbitt on him (that's what my resident experts on Women's Rights... the team of my daughter and the surrogate Mom).

Since then I've noticed some of the Enzyte ads on TV. This is some kind of herbal supplement. It doesn't promise anything but it has a real cute ad campaign... wierd, but effective. A goofy guy fondles penis symbols with a maniac grin on his face while his sexless spouse hovers nearby with a stunned look on her face. He gets new clothes, new golf clubs, and a new lease on life.

Fifty bucks a bottle for an herbal supplement. Amazing. And this guy is paying a bondsman, and a lawyer, and maybe a divorce too. All because he is getting a little older and is afraid that his pecker might be older than his memory.

I started thinking... the guy is younger than I am, and I don't seem to have any trouble in the sex department. Of course, my daughter and the surrogate mom both agree that like most guys, my imagination is active in excess of the realities. But I haven't started trying to manufacture any chemical hard ons.

And... I don't think that false hardons are such a good idea. First of all, all the women in my life who wanted to have sex with me actually "wanted" to do the deed. If I were to just show up carrying a chemically induced boner you could't get my girl friend to welcome sex with that thing if you were to put a gun to her head. So what are these guys supposed to do with these boners if only the guy wants to do the deed? Suddenly, the guys finds himself wandering into a whorehouse. What the hell is that all about? Is he so afraid of dying? Afraid of not getting it up. Too old? Can you get too old to get it up? I think not. You just don't believe that the thing will work. My grandfather was proof of the fact that sex is all between your ears. He was an old guy with very sexy ears.

The simple fact is that 99% of sex is between your ears, not between your legs. And age? Well, my grandfather died when he was 106 years old. One hundred and six! Nobody knew how old grandma was, but my mother once told me that grandma had once told her that after Grandpa's death the biggest thing she missed was the sex. Yup.. those old codgers were in there doing the dirty and he was 106.

Who the hell needs Enzyte?

Bob