actual bumper stickers

I wish I had one, or more, of these bumper stickers:

Blind faith in bad leadership is not patriotism.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

If you supported Bush, a yellow ribbon won't make up for it.

Poverty, health care, & homelessness are moral issues.

Of course it hurts. You're getting screwed by an elephant.

Bush lied, and you know it.

Religious fundamentalism: a threat abroad, a threat at home.

God bless everyone (no exceptions).

Bush spent your Social Security on his war.

Pro America, anti Bush.

Who would Jesus bomb?

Feel safer now?

I'd rather have a president who screwed his intern than one who screwed his country.

Jesus was a social activist -- that is a liberal.

My values? Free speech. Equality. Liberty. Education. Tolerance.

Is it 2008 yet?

"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." -- Thomas Jefferson.

Don't blame me. i voted against Bush -- twice!

Annoy a conservative: think for yourself.

Visualize impeachment.

Hey Bush! Where's Bin Laden?

Corporate media = mass mind control.

Stop mad cowboy disease.

George W. Bush: making terrorists faster than he can kill them.

Keep your theocracy off my democracy.

Democrats are sexy. Whoever heard of a good piece of elephant?

Corporate media: weapons of mass deception.

Stem cell research is pro life.

Hate, greed, ignorance: weapons of mass destruction.

Honor our troops: demand the truth.

Rebuild iraq? Why not spend 87 (now 400) billion on America?

Fact: Bush oil
1999 - $19 barrel
2006 - $70 barrel

The last time religion controlled politics, people got burned at the stake.

I'll give up my choice when John Roberts gets pregnant.

Scotland

We are going to Scotland in September. As usual, I have put off the little details like reservations, but now I'm seriously checking out B & B's and small hotels and small castles, and I'm calculating mileage and driving times from place to place. Now that July is almost over with and September starts tomorrow, for planning purposes, it is time to Get Serious and start making those reservations. The big Edinburgh Festival ends a few days before we arrive, which means their tourist season will be winding down, which makes it possible to find places to stay in the city even this late. We like to avoid crowds, and I want to drive around with as few other crazy Americans driving on the "wrong side" of the road as possible.

I've been "flying" around Scotland on Google Earth, flying low to see the hills rise up as I cross the country. I've also started reading Kidnapped, one of those books I should have read as a kid but didn't. Near the beginning of the book young David Balfour goes to Edinburgh and sees an "islet" in the middle of the Firth of Forth. On Google Earth, I'm seeing what may have been the island Robert Louis Stevenson was writing about. When we get there, I'll have to drop by to see if he's sitting out in front of the Hawes Inn, or the ghost of him since he's buried on a Pacific Island. If the Hawes Inn was fictional I'm sure some canny Scots have created one. I'll have to buy a drink for old RLS even if his ghost can't pick up the glass.

My ancestors lived in Scotland, somewhere in the vicinity of Loch Lomond, north of Glasgow. They left, one step ahead of the law, and went to Ireland. After getting pounded between the English and the Irish, between Protestants and Catholics, some of them got brave enough or desperate enough to sail to the New World. That was more than eight generations ago, in the 1700's. One of the reservations I've already made is to spend a night in a modest little castle that once belonged to the clan chief, when my clan still had a chief. I don't think I'll buy a drink for the old chief. His ghost can probably pick up the glass and drain it.

Anagrams

I was never worth much when it came to anagrams, the silly mental exercise of rearranging the letters in a word or phrase to make a new word or phase. My mother was very good at it, but this is not an inherited trait. I am telling you this so you will not suspect that I had anything to do with the following except steal them shamelessly from an e-mail and copy them here while waiting for traffic on Intracounty 275 to thin out.

At the risk of insulting your intelligence, for each pair of words or phrases, rearrange the first one to get the second one:

DORMITORY
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER
MOON STARER

DESPERATION
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY
IS NO AMITY

SNOOZE ALARMS
ALAS NO MORE Z 'S

A DECIMAL POINT
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO
TWELVE PLUS ONE

MOTHER-IN-LAW
WOMAN HITLER

My favorite of this bunch:
ELECTION RESULTS
LIES - LET'S RECOUNT

news you can use from the Discovery Channel

My son and I spent quite a bit of time learning all about dung beetles and sharks on the Discovery Channel. We missed the program about how to escape a gator, though. Fortunately, one young man here in Florida was paying attention:

http://www.wesh.com/news/9569904/detail.html

car maintenance - a "whew" experience this time

Today it was time for my car's air conditioning system to get the fishy eyeball from the guys at a shop who repair a/c systems for a living.

I knew this was going to cost me, big time. In the good old days, the mechanic would say it needs a can or two of Freon and that would keep it going for the rest of the summer. Now they don't use Freon and they are smart enough to say there's some reason why your system lost so much of the refrigerant gas. That's the cue for saying that you need a new compressor or condensor or evaporator, or some other odd part they haven't sold enough of lately. . .none of which is cheap. . .plus labor and taxes.

You can imagine my shock upon getting the expected bad-news phone call this morning. The shock was, it wasn't bad news. My a/c is fully charged and working fine, and was blowing cold air. Their best guess was, when the fans for my radiator conked out, that also affected the a/c system. Because I learned long ago that you don't run the a/c when it is low on Freon or whatever they use nowadays, and because I assumed that was why the a/c was blowing warm air, I hadn't given it a chance to prove itself after getting the radiator fixed.

The price for all their trouble: $16.00 including tax.

It is good to know where honest mechanics are. They could have sold me $400 worth of repairs today and I wouldn't have known the difference. Come to think of it, the garage that gave me five pounds of air for a tire on Monday could have sold me a front-end alignment and my ignorance would have been bliss.

Next time I have a problem, I know who to see.

car maintenance - getting tired

There are some stories I shouldn't tell on myself because they make me look like an "idjit." But I'll share this one with you because it may save you some time and money some day.

Our daughter - our West Coast daughter - was home for the weekend. She was driving our new(er) car. Because (unlike her parents) she hadn't gotten used to the "feel" of it again, she noticed something we hadn't noticed. It was drifting to the right. Aha, we thought. It must be the old front-end alignment.

I took it to my garage this morning. I got there early because I'd taken our daughter to Tampa International even earlier. Told him my story. Could be the front-end alignment, I said knowingly. Or it could be the tire, he said.

It was the tire. The right front tire, which had five pounds less air than the left front tire, which naturally makes it want to drift to the right.

Well, as long as you have it, go ahead and change the oil, I said.

At the end of the day the report was, you also need brakes on the front end, he said. Since we are going out of town and I don't like to wait for trouble to come to me, the brake job will be next on the list. Tomorrow. And on Wednesday the other car is due to have the air conditioner repaired.

Sheesh. These are maintenance-free cars, for the most part, but our long hot summer is wearing them down as much as it is wearing their owners down.

dang, it's hot

Last week, my radiator hit the boiling point and I had to shell out big bucks to have the cooling system fixed. Now the air conditoning system isn't working, either. This is the wrong time of the year for the a/c to blow warm air. It's 92 degrees in the shade outside my bedroom window and the humidity feels like 92 percent. Driving around this afternoon I feared the tires would melt into the pavement due to having to stop at every traffic signal. Both windows down and the moon roof open, and it still felt like being inside a microwave oven.

Our daughter is home from San Francisco, where it never seems to get much above 60 degrees, and she wanted to use my car. We didn't coordinate our schedules very well. I didn't get back from running errands before she had to leave, so she was forced to hitch a ride with a friend whose air conditioning works, we hope. It's more fun to drive yourself to a reunion but it is also more fun not to smell like a horse after you arrive.

I've lived in Florida's hellish heat and humidity for most of my life. Maybe, one of these days, I'll get used to it. Maybe the City of Clearwater will synchronize its traffic signals, too. Maybe it will snow tonight, too.

why the news media. . . (cont'd)

Tonight I watched Nancy Grace of CNN go totally berserk regarding the judge who gave up trying to find a jury in the Couey trial. As usual, she looked like she was wetting her pants while shrieking that the judge should have tried harder. Meanwhile, as if to prove the point that the news media make it difficult to find juries in well-publicized trials, she played a recording of Couey's confession several times with his words up on the screen in case you couldn't understand his mumbling. The judge has already ruled that the jury will not hear or see the confession, assuming they ever get a jury. At one point she asked someone to imagine what the photos of the body might look like. . .the body of a girl who was buried alive in a plastic bag. I can imagine. I don't want to.

With the massive publicity, all aimed at proving his guilt beyond all reasonable doubt, you have to wonder what kind of people will ever get to sit in the jury box. The dialogue during voir dire will sound like this:

Q: Have you heard about this case?

A: Do I look like a Martian? Of course I have.

Q: Despite hearing his confession repeatedly on CNN, can you keep an open mind and make a decision about his guilt or innocence based solely upon the evidence brought into the courtroom.

A: Well, of course. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.)

This illustrates one reason why I no longer believe in the death penalty. They will eventually find a jury, which will proceed to find him guilty and recommend death by burial alive in a plastic bag. That, frankly, would be fine by me, but as you can see, I am not qualified to sit in the jury when case against the squirrely bastard finally goes to trial.

why the news media drive me crazy

Judge stops jury selection in Couey murder trial
Thursday, July 13, 2006

Judge Richard Howard stopped jury selection in the John Couey murder trial Thursday at about noon.

Jurors were released because Howard said it's impossible to find an impartial jury in Lake County [Florida], where jury selection started Monday. He wants to move the case even farther from Citrus [County].

Couey is charged with the February 2005 kidnapping, rape and murder of 9-year-old Jessica Lunsford of Homosassa.

There was initial skepticism when Howard moved jury selection to Lake County, which is only an hour-and-a-half from Citrus County. With that not working to his satisfaction, Howard released all the potential jurors Thursday.

The widespread publicity about the case, along with Couey's incriminating statements made later to investigators, caused potential jurors to read about the case and hear details on many media outlets.

mystery photos [revised]

One of the cool things about sorting through old stuff is that you run across photos you'd all but forgotten about. These were taken at Pat O'Brien's. For my handful of faithful readers, here's a little quiz: What city? What year? And why ARE these people smiling?

[They were smiling because they knew, many years later, they would have a son who would join the two photos into one, seamlessly, even to the point of removing a white box on the wall above Dad's head. Nice work, ol' buddy! Here's your masterpiece.]

sharks and gators and lightning, oh my

Florida is not a safe place to live:

1882-2005, Florida
Total Shark Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501
Fatal Shark Attacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

1948-2006, Florida
Number of Alligator Fatalities . . . . . . . . 19
Number of Shark Fatalities . . . . . . . . . . . 8

1959-2004, Florida
Number of Lightning Fatalities . . . . . . .428

1985-2005, Florida
Number of Tornado Fatalities . . . . . . . .103

1990-2004, Florida
Number of Bicycle Fatalities . . . . . .. . . . . . 1,401
Number of Bicycle Injuries . . . . . . . . . . . . 91,039
Number of Shark Attacks (not fatal) . . . . . . . 247

2001-2005, U.S.
Number of Dog Attack Fatalities . . . . .113
Number of Shark Fatalities . . . . . . . . . .10

Granted, the numbers are hard to compare because the beginning and ending years aren't uniform, but you could calculate bites per year or maybe bites per hundred thousand population if you know the population data, but hey, you take what you can get where you find it. It does seem that shark bites aren't as fearsome as, for example, dog bites and lightning strikes although dogs seldom remove a whole arm or leg whereas lightning is usually terminal.

missing stuff [revised]

I've gotten used to the idea that things go missing now and again. Little things, like the folding cash that turns up three months later in a pants pocket, or the good ballpoint pen that doesn't turn up at all.

Lately, I am missing a box of slides. This is a big steel box, about 8 by 14 inches, that holds about 750 color slides, all taken in Europe in the late 60's when I was stationed in Germany.

We were burglarized right after Thanksgiving. One of my theories is that the burglar took it, the same guy who left behind credit cards and jewelry, and who almost took an old CD player (not a portable player but the big kind you plug into a stereo system) but dropped it by the window on his way out. Nah, that makes no sense. But he did take my digital camera, so maybe he has an interest in photography. Nope, that still doesn't make sense.

I've challenged my wife to find it. I am famous for not being able to find things that threaten to trip me as I walk by them.

It must be around here somewhere.

[The burglar didn't take it. I know I looked at it in March of this year. Now the Big Q is, where could I have mislaid a big heavy steel box full of slides? New theory: The house is haunted. The same ghost who spirited away, so to speak, my new electric sander decided he, or maybe she, needs some cheap entertainment during the day when we aren't at home to provide such entertainment. That makes more sense than the burglar theory.]

lawyer competency

Now and then a news story makes you want to read it at least twice. Here's one, which is not so much a newspaper item as a summary of an appellate court decision from Michigan:

________ [name omitted to protect from further embarassment] v. City Attorney for the City of Ann Arbor. An applicant for an assistant city attorney position asserted his veterans-preference priority, but he didn't get the job. He sued, but didn't win his lawsuit, either. The appellate court explained that he failed to demonstrate his ability to perform the job at the level of skill and with the expertise required by the city attorney.

This doesn't explain whether he represented himself in the lawsuit. Whether he did or not, this will not look good on his resume.

everybody loves fireworks

a few words about the Fourth and the flag

There's going to be a lot written and said this week about the American flag, now that the Senate has (narrowly) refused to go along with the big push to amend the Constitution to prohibit burning it. Much of it will come from people who never wore the uniform.

American veterans have seen our flag flying under dramatic, unforgettable circumstances, often overseas. For me, it was at Checkpoint Charlie, where the American flag stood as a beacon of hope against the backdrop of a lifeless, dismal-looking East Berlin.

The words on this sign chilled the marrow of people who passed by it:

Looking over the Wall, an East German "VoPo" ("People's Police") officer looked back at me, reminding me why the American Army was in Europe.

I've sometimes wondered what he was thinking. I'm sure I looked like an American. He knew I was free to leave (after my tour of duty ended) and go back to a nation where, unlike him, I am free to speak, engage in symbolic protest, and make a jackass out of myself, without fear of jail thanks to a Constitution and its First Amendment. The United States has survived flag burnings. Where is East Germany? It is now part of a free Germany.

Time travel, and more

I've been on a trip back in time (about 80 years) and halfway across the country (Florida to Kentucky). It started with the re-discovery of an old photo. I'm on another "toss-it-out" project involving stacks of old paper and a "let's-get-organized" project involving bushels of old photos, but this one photo (see below) sent me off on a mission.

On the back of the photo is written, "Fourmile District School, Emberling, Ky. -- about 1923 or 1924" and a note saying Chester Casey is on the far right, near the top row. Chester, or "Check," was my mother's brother, probably her favorite sibling because they both were talented artists. He became a commercial artist in New York City but he was about 12 years old when the photo was taken.

A Google search turned up the fact that the school was in Harlan County. I e-mailed several school officials and, to my surprise (this was yesterday, a Saturday) got a quick reply telling me where the school used to be located. He suggested the local paper would be interested in the photo, so I e-mailed their editor and (again to my surprise) got a quick reply saying yes, they would, because they might be able to publish it in their next Harlan County Heritage section.

Now, go back and look at the photo (below). You can see from the faces of the children that these were not children of affluence. They were growing up in the coal mining region of eastern Kentucky. They were mountain kids. They look like they'd be at home in the woods with a fishing pole or a rifle, girls too. They have character in their faces. I like Chester, standing slightly aloof but with a see-everything look on his face. I like the little girl on the front row with one hand on her waist. I like the principal, a man with a big job and limited resources. I spent some time re-touching the photo to take some spots and creases out of faces, and I felt like they were looking back at me.

My parents taught school here in the 1930's. It was a tough place to live but they loved the kids. After their retirement they loved to go back to class reunions. They were proud to see that many of these children went on to live very successful lives. I hope these kids have children or grandchildren who will see this photo someday.

Fourmile school, Harlan Co., Ky., circa 1924

There's a story about this photo (see above). Click on the photo to enlarge it: