~RICKIE LEE~

They say that Rickie Lee Jones is the female equivalent of Tom Waits. That pleases me no end. She was on Sound Stage tonight and completely filled my tanks with her special brand of goodness.
All her quiet sadness continues to fill me with the sixties. There are lines around her mouth these days but the voice is still the same. I used to have a picture of her sitting with Waits. Maybe I'll go on a little internet search and see if I can find that. Sound familiar Eric?

Bob

~VIAGRA? WHAT?~

I went down to S. Fla. this morning to get some training using a variable pitch prop that I managed to pick up. This will make it possible to muscle my little Velocity in an ascending power lift. A necessary component for doing arobatic slips. That's a polite way of saying that you can do things that you probably shouldn't... at two hundred miles an hour. Anyhow, the factory wants me to get the training that jet pilots have to do before they'll allow them to centerpunch the home airport FBO. No ejection possible by the way. Anyhow, I talked the guy out of it and I want it... so shut up. The experts took it off the bug this morning and put it on mine. I'm now officially a threat to life and limb. Whee. That's it right there. Nice, shiny, and even as we speak making my Lycoming into a screaming banshee... sort of like putting a supercharger on a volkswagon. Hmmm... I once had a flat bottomed raceboat with a 480 c.i. Rodac (a big block Chevvie engine with an aluminum ramair head... 800 demand horsepower dinotested. Zoomzoom as the kid says. Whee) that generated enough horsepower to make my old flat bottomed raceboat into a Drag boat which would go 200 miles per hour. I've got the same feeling down in my bowels. Oooh, baby. Let's hurry up and get the training in my book. I wanta fly back to Orlando for lunch.

Well, the "expert" previous owner of this mechanical time bomb left some of his stuff onboard. You know, the kind of junk that seems to always find a home in the tray between the seats in the front office. And I was sitting in one of those seats early this morning at 5 AM staring at a pill bottle with three Viagras in it. Hmmm... I thought those things were supposed to get you in and here it is in a machine designed to get a guy OUT of the cockpit.

Hee... hee. Oh, my.

Bob

~JAN./FEB. book list~

Not much free reading in the last two months... but here it is:

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle (this beast is nine thousand pages long. Why did I think that Carlyle would know why it happened? The last time I plowed through this thing I was a college student. Sigh.)

Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis by R.H. Davis (Letters from Davis to his family along with his body of work and novels. He was a famous WWI war correspondent working for Harpers Magazine. Again... four thousand pages long. But.... worth it.)

For some reason I have a copy of Candide in French. So you tell me.... do I have too much time on my hands?

~UH... ERIC~

Hey, bud... maybe you should read this. Here's the link:

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EXECUTION_MANUAL?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

Bob

~12 YEAR OLD "EMO" CUTTIST"

I don't know what to make of this. Where does this come from and what can we do, as parents, to put this kind of foolishness at the end place? Good grief.

Check the link:

http://www.local6.com/news/11026527/detail.html

Bob

~CAJUN WOMEN~

For the last week or so I've been enjoying that cajun guy... his sense of humor, his pictures from work. The real deal.

I have a friend from that wetland. She's one of them good looking coonass women who made Houma the kind of place where a fella can pull up a chair in her kitchen and take his time working through a plate full of catfish pulled up on the bank behind the house. The kind of gal who has a brother who will definitely keep you polite, a mama to teach her how to cook a decent cup of coffee, and a daddy who works a full day every day and has a brother who works on a offshore oil rig as a roughneck and can barely speak English. My kinda people. I'm too old for her, but... but....

Well, she's already got her a regular fella who has a nice boat. Nice fella. Got him a regular job and a slat house full of relatives.

Life goes on. He's a lucky man.

Bob

~HIZ ZONNER~

I'll have to admit... this is one of the ugliest woman to ever run for POTUS. Here's the link:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4IrE6FMpai8


Bob

~WELL...~

I had this idea that if I got closer to my kith and kin that I would have more "quality time" with my family than I had been experiencing. I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, but I don't think that it has been held up to the light of day. Anyhow, my transition from DCF and DJJ to the classroom via Excel is supposed to give me a quieter life but what I'm finding is that the return to the bucolic life of Sanford is mostly been a ride through memory lane. I just went.... without any accompaniment... to eat dinner at the local Chinee buffet joint and the entire time I had a continuous line of old bail bonds clients along with old students from my days at SCC and UCF who had to come by and make sure that I wasn't really dead and to regale me with stories from their youth. I really don't remember all the fun I used to be. Ah, the good old days.

Ah, public dining. There was a whole family of hispanic folks who all had uncontrollable coughing jags. Eating huge amounts of Kung Poo Chicken or some such mystery meats while tolerating having foreigners cough right in your face... then... Oh, dearie! A tiny six year old was leaning on her mother with her ceremonial hand over her hacking mouth... then she heaved twice before shooting a projectile vomitus towards the front window. Oh, my... public dining at its finest. I noticed that the hispanic folks didn't leave a tip for the table full of sick evacuees from Puerto Rico after they all got up from the mess of vomitus leaving me to leave a tip for both of the nice girls who came here from China to earn their fortune.

Yeah... I'm having a wonderful time.

Bob

~FRENCH TOURISTAS~

I got the wine we bought in Provence this afternoon and I went through some of the pics I made of MA and her Mom walking in the footsteps of Cezanne there in the downtown hotbed of Aix. Dr. Mary was oblivious but her New York Mom was terrified of that tall black dude walking behind them. Well, I'll admit to being oblivious too. Of course, the city fathers of Aix knew a good thing when they saw it... they mapped out all of Cezanne's favorite brothels and gin joints and marked them with copper inlays in the sidewalks.... look at that crowd of touristolas out following the footsteps of the famous painter. And there's a couple of typical American girls out looking fer some kulture.

Strange holiday this year. I was eager to get home and get moved into the new house in Sanford... but the pride of UF's contribution to the American Doctors Without Borders (the tired kid cutter on the left who didn't have any comfortable shoes was just amusing her mama, who is a devotee of the French painter). Said daughter/doctor had just arrived from the bowels of the Peruvian slope after driving to Paris to pick up her Mom (the frightened Brooklynite and the aging boyfriend bodyguard..me) and then driving all the way back to southern France in a overly large Mercedes rental car so that we could "relax" in Aix and the ladies could do some shopping... including the purchase of a box of local red along with a case of local olive oil (damned good... believe it or not). You know you are getting old when you're more excited about some wonderfully fresh olive oil and just only mildly pleased with a box of superb grapery. Anyhow.

Well, the ladies survived the paranoia engendered by the close call with the French version of the heart of darkness, and somehow I survived the grimly determined program of well placed hints from the mom-in-law about me making her daughter into an honest woman (oh, lordie) and I left unscathed when I escorted the senior mama back to lovely New York and I went south to don my academic gowns and begin a year of teaching at Excel (a program for naughty high schoolers who have been court assigned to an alternative school for budding Sopranos.

Strange. Me and the Doc have had a summer jaunt nearly every summer for the last twenty years... (my God, we are getting old) ... but this is the first time I have squired the lady and her mother around the south of France, only to leave Dr. MH finish the tour of Cezanne's home town and then fly back to god forsaken Peru without us and leave me to carry her mama home.

And you know what? I felt like a gawky high schooler sneaking smooches from his prom queen date under the eagle eyed supervision of the disapproving mother. And... it was entirely my bad. The senior doctor is one of the original mega-femenistas who graduated from Johns Hopkins in a pre war era when little wemmins just didn't become doctors...is one of the smartest and urbanest and most sophistocatedest (sic?)... babes that I've ever met. Yeah... the first doctor in that family was frightened by a little Mandingo action. Heh! Man.... what's wrong with me?

I'm glad to be back on terra firma (last month now) here in the ole US of A. It all came rushing in at me this afternoon when the UPS guy came up the new house in Sanford to hand me a box of Aix's finest (both vino and olive oil thank you). Now I can just settle down to the dull life of an alternative ed school teacher.

The official daughter has already informed me that she has been talking to MH about a trip to Europe with the maximum allowable grandson. Maybe next year I'll just send the ladies solo with the kidlet and have the mother in law there to play gramma. Hmmm... I'll bet that would lower the heat a bit against me. Hmmmm.

Bob

~CAJUN HOHO~

If you look over to the right you'll see Mostly Cajun. Besides the fact that he is one of those country boys who are honest to God conservatives, the guy has a superb sense of humor. I've already stolen one of his jokes... here's another:


A Cajun named Thibodeaux went to his doctor to determine the source of his malady.

The doctor, after a lengthy examination, sighed and looked Thibodeaux in the eye and said, “I’ve some bad news for you. You have cancer, and it’s very bad. You’d best put your affairs in order.”

Thibodeaux was shocked and saddened. But, being of solid character, he managed to compose himself and walk from the doctor’s office into the waiting room to his son who had been waiting.
Thibodeaux said, “Well son, us Cajun’s celebrate when thangs is good, and we celebrate when dey don’t be so good.. In dis case, dey ain’t so good. I got cancer. Let’s head for the honky tonk and have a few dranks.”


After 3 or 4 shots, the two were feeling a little less somber. There were some laughs and more whiskey.

They were eventually approached by some of Thibodeaux’s old friends who asked what the two were celebrating.

Thibodeaux told them that coonasses celebrate the good and the bad. He went on to tell them that they were drinking to his impending end. He told his friends, “Da doctor dun told me I’m dying’ from AIDS.”

His son’s eyebrows raised and he opened his mouth, but Thibodeaux raised his finger and the frown on his face stifled what his son had planned to say. The friends gave Thibodeaux their condolences, and they had a couple more shots.

After his friends left, his son leaned over and whispered his confusion. “Daddy, I thought you said that you were dying from cancer? You just told your friends that you were dying from AIDS!”

Thibodeaux said, “I don’t want any of ‘em sleeping with yo mama after I’m gone.”


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Go check him out. This is good stuff, eh?

Bob