~THE ACIDMAN RIP~

What can I say... I was just ruminating about him the other day. Thinking that he would live forever. Shit.

Bob

~TEMPUS FUGITS~

For some reason, I seem to have lived a whole hell of a lot longer than I ever thought I would. I shouldn't say stuff like that, considering that a lot of these old guys on the visible blogscape seem to be slowly winding down into crippledom (like GutRumble Rob, Cat, et al), while I'm disgustingly healthy for a middle aged fat guy, but others seem to survive as well... and for some reason that surprises and pleases me no end. Frinstance...

Rube put some pictures on his blog the other day that the kid put on his blog seven years ago. Just some travel junk, photos he took when he was playing globetrekker thru Thailand. Jeezus!Seven years ago!

I really didn't expect to live this long. I should have taken better care of myself. Maybe eat some tofu. Maybe buy myself an autoharp. Go score some ibogaine. Some shit like that.

Bob

~LITTLE LEETE~

I finally managed to get a picture of Shannon and Tom Junior. What a cutie. Nine weeks old and growing like a weed.

Bob

~HANDS~

Actually, it's the right hand and the left foot of a thief being carried through the streets of Kabul by a Taliban kid. An old traditional exercise of an article of the Rule of Hammurabi. Definitely a way to get a fellow's attention, but it occurs to me that the pictured character with that fatuous look on his face who is exercising that old dictum of law was just a kid... and it occurs to me that the vast majority of the people we see in the film provided by the MSM are all just kids... and I'm thinking that we really can't fight this like grownups. We are at war with an army of dangerous children. You can't scare them, you can't reason with them, you can't talk to them. Shit... they're just a bunch of idiot kids.

I recall my own time as a soldier. An eighteen year old gung ho Marine. All I lived for was to ride around in my chopper and kill gooks. Nothing in the world is more dangerous than an American eighteen year old armed with an automatic weapon. You couldn't reason with me either. I was a door gunner on an Iriquois gunship, part of a fire team, and a devoted collector of body parts provided by our allies the Hmong villagers... a more bloodthirsty collection of tiny little children from the mountains of Asia you'll never meet in your wildest nightmares. I was proud to wear a collection of VC penises and ears, and added to the collection from time to time. I had that grisley souvenir around my neck for the better part of a year. God knows where it got off to. Like any other eighteen year old, I couldn't hang on to my stuff.

Still can't.

Bob

~CLUB JUANA RIP~

A good friend sent me a link from the paper saying that Mike Pinter was being forced into closing the old Club Juana. I figured that Mike would wiggle out of it... he has a talent for ducking fatal trouble. But it looks like this is it. I'm going to the funeral party tonight along with a few nostalgia lovers then the blue hairs of Casselberry can declare victory. I guess the real question is... what did they succeed in doing? They closed the fantasy factory. Now it's safe for them to lord over us mere mortals. It must be hard for people like that to remain so fucking pure. Or maybe the right word is constipated. Like Dax says.... just damn. Here's the link.

Bob

~ YON SCREWED BY FRENCH~

I figure that the best journalism coming out of Iraq has come from Michael Yon. And I also think that he has been the victim of the freedom implicit in the internet by having his photos stolen by this cheezy French magazine.

I admit to stealing stuff from Yon. In fact, I put the photo in question up on this blog at the time because I thought that Yon had once again proved that "a picture is worth a thousand words". But, like any other academic drudge, I cited the source and did all that bibliophile stuff when I used the pic. I wanted it posted because I thought that it was terribly powerful. You know the picture by now -- an American soldier is holding the body of an Iraqui child, holding him and trying to shelter the wounded kid, unsuccessfuly it turns out. Really powerful image and very revealing of the pathos of the warrior in the midst of the terrors of war, coping. I won't link to it again, if you want to see it go to Yon's website. It's over there on the blog roll.

Now, some sleazy French magazine put the photo on its front page. They are selling magazines and they were moved the same as me, knew that this kind of journalism is what sells magazines, and pirated the thing. The difference is that I'm not selling anything, and I cited my source, and gave due credit.

Now, like the good soldier that he is, Yon is doing his best to deal with this nasty incident. And the French turds are being French. Unfortunately, these miscreants can't be trusted. Here's the link. About all we can do to be supportive is refuse to buy their crappy magazine. Like they care.

Bob

~EARL~

Any time I think that things are supposed to make sense I get out my DVD of the complete first season of My Name is Earl and get a dose of what passes for reality.

One of my oldest friends, Kathryn's Uncle Stanley (an Outlaw biker enforcer), once told a judge in Seminole County that he, a convicted felon but nice guy, had a drinking problem... he didn't have enough money to drink as much as he needed. And the judge let him go. Then Stan didn't leave but stayed behind the podium with the judge so that he could give the judge suggestions on how to sentence the next miscreants. True.

Hell, I could write scripts for Garcia for the Earl saga.

The same Stanley used to park his spare girlfriends at my house until he was ready for them. I once had four (!) women... good looking dancer babes... waiting for Stan at my house. Of course, they wouldn't do anything for me. Just Stan. He would take them for rides on my Harley and take all their money. Hell, he paid the light bill month after month with hooker money. Sigh.

Shit. The show "My Name is Earl" is the only thing on TV that is good. They had a Earl telethon last night. I was there!

Now THAT's Karma!

Bob

~ROSARIO DAWSON~

From Esquire:

When I ask Rosario about her childhood, she starts at the beginning--right at conception.
"I was conceived on Avenue X in Brooklyn with a prison condom that broke," she says (a prison condom being a condom they give you when you leave prison, just to clarify). "My mom was ready to get an abortion. She was at the clinic, had an appointment. And then she says she felt me move, and she fell in love with me right then. But I was just a speck, so it wasn't me moving. It was probably gas."
Okay, but what about after that? What about her life growing up?
Also not so ordinary. Dawson--a mix of Puerto Rican, Native American, Cuban, African-American, and Irish--grew up in a squat on the Lower East Side. When the family moved in, there was no electricity, no water, a hole in the floor, and a crack house across the street. Her mom was sixteen when Rosario was born and kept her in line with an interesting discipline technique: licking. "She'd lick me right across my cheek like a cougar. And it was just so humiliating." --A.J. JACOBS

~NEW STUFF~

OK... it's time to start in on the new transformation of the gyre. Go look at this blog. Awesome. I think that it's the mustaches that do it. Heh.

Bob

~BILLY PRESTON RIP~

He's been real sick for a while, but it was still a shock to know that the fifth Beatle is gone. Damn!

Bob

~THE NUMBER... THE NUMBER... What's the date?~

~TEXAS RANCH HOUSE~

I've waited a few days before commenting on the PBS miniseries Texas Ranch House so that I could allow my ideas to percolate and I didn't just blurt out my first reactions. OK... the premise is sound. The idea was based on the current rage of "reality" shows... people placed in situations where they could show how they would cope with some historically challenging time. The best previous one was the show that carried a family back to Victorian England and had them live as they might have lived in Victorian England. Pretty good, but not terrible difficult. Perhaps the people could have made it more interesting, but it wasn't too terrible that the modern folks had to rough it without any podcasts or microwave ovens. OK. But this most recent offering was a modern family, the Cooks, who were suddenly thrust into rural Texas to make a cattle operation work with no skills, no real planning, no... no hunger for getting on top... none of the things that you still need to succeed in modern Texas, or modern Manhatten for that matter. And they had a cast of dopey teenagers with no personal discipline as workers. Historically accurate? Hell no.

I think that the failure of the ranch was not really a failure of the history component of the show as it was a failure of the PBS guys to cast the ensemble of players. They got a little middle class family of five yuppies to commit to a project that these folks obviously weren't committed to. This corporate type father manages hospitals most of the time, and he thought that management was management and he should be able to make a success of a cattle operation with the same set of skills that made him a hospital jockey. Not so. He couldn't hide in his office there at the ranch, he needed to get out and ramrod the untrained and unwilling workers... who were the only ones who blundered into a success, mostly by mistake and because they were driven by a desire to "become cowboys"... completely without any meanigful leadership... and they ended by becoming successful cowpokes even while they sealed the deadly failure of the Cooks.

Ah those Cooks. In my humble opinion, they had no business being out there in the Texas bushes ever... not then, not now, not ever. Mr. Cook was a nice guy but he had no stones. He kept sounding like a hospital middle manager, even when he was being a cattleman. He was always "addressing personnel issues" and "giving everyone an opportinity to contribute" What crap.

Like I said, the real failure is cultural and it is PBSs. Those Cooks represent the typical PBS liberal... ineffective, whiney, unable to dig in and win, unable to fight for what must be done. I know that sounds hard but I believe that I'm right. Maybe it's a mistake, but I want to think of how I would have done things differently. First of all, I would have made it clear that we were gonna be character perfect for the period. Backtalk the boss? What? I would have had a really good relationship with that crew boss. And we would have a clear and specific understanding between us... man to man. And we would represent the thinking head of a business machine. But I would be the boss and I would have the final say. If there were orders they would come from the both of us... and my wife would not really be a part of that. She would need to run the house.

Mrs. Cook had the peculiar idea that she could bring 2006 values into the post Civil War and that she would have some kind of role to play... and that people would fall into line just because she thought that they were supposed to. Well, OK. My grandmother was the wife of a Sumter County row crop farmer and she kept the books, and she kept his house in order, and he depended on her... and believe me, if you worked on that farm operation and didn't know that you should stay on her good side... then you were more than just stupid, you also had a death wish. But when my grandfather spoke she listened. Just like the foreman did. When you came down to it, he was the boss. The "he coon". And he was definitely the boss. Mr. Cook... he was a pussy. Hell, that wife of his couldn't even keep her own kitchen clean. That was a woman who definitely couldn't manage a household. She was what my grandfather called "a harpie" She had the peculiar idea that she had accomplished something when she had browbeaten that poor weak little Mr. Cook into doing something. What a maroon.

What else would I do? Well, I would have found a way to either kill those damned Indians, or have found a way to steal my guy back from them. Whatever it was, they would have wished that they had never laid their eyes on me. Think about it... that's what the real Texas settlers did. They killed those Indians as if there was no tomorrow. And... I would have made it very hard for anyone to lay around. It's the same as the Marine Corps lessons in leadership. You lead from the front. Lets get up boys, the sun is coming up, time to hit the trail. Follow me.

Did they fail? Yes. But the failure is mostly PBSs because they thought that people wanted to see how a group of typical PBS types, lazy, ineffectual, non-motivated, losers. In other words, just the kind of people that that the PBS leadership sees as their typical viewers. Says something about the liberal left, if you ask me.

Bob

~LILLITH BATWOMAN~

OK... I suspected as much a while back, when the Batbabe had a "friend" with alternate views (remember the detective that she had the hots for?), but it's still a little hard for the usual American testerone driven teenager to deal with when something as hot as this comes out of the closet. Oh well, I suspect that crime fighting is a high stress lifestyle... and a girl just has to do what comes naturally. Here's the link.

Bob