Happy Veteran's Day, Dad - Connie's Last Flight

Dad in the ball turret on the way to Dresden

From the inside - Connie sustains major structural damage from flak

 

Shell went through the plane and exploded above. The crew donned their chutes and prepared to bail. The pilot, Walt Shultz, regained control, fell out of formation and limped back to Kimbolton Air Base at low altitude..

Connie, her spine broken, settled to the ground overnight and was towed to a nearby field for fire suppression practice.

Connie's crew with a new plane - all gone now except for my dad

The Rat Ladies of Pacific Palisades

“I’ve lived with rats since 1958, honey.... When I got the house in [1958], that’s the day I started feeding all the animals. And I fed them as long as I lived there.”

Funny about the interwebs, you can be minding your own business, wandering through the comments on a coyote hunting forum and end up finding a weird story about spintster twin sisters and their thousands of four legged companions. Apparently the only sightings of these two were their weekly forays to the store to haul bags of dog food home in a shopping cart to feed their rats or as PETA calls them, sewer kittens.. Also, apparently, the neighbors who moved in next door objected and sued the realtor and previous owner for failing to disclose a little thing like a colony of 10,000 rats living next door. Follow the above link for an unbelievable story of mental illness and governmental malfeasance. One of the twins uses Revelation to explain her behavior. Maybe she means this:

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!" I looked and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.— Revelation 6:7-8 NIV

Now I'm all for live and let live but I have to say that I'm against trying to hasten the End Times plague by feeding and sheltering thousands of rats. Particularly in a nice neighbor hood like Pacific Palisades.

Tom Tancredo - American Hero

Memo to Republicans: If you are a chickenhawk talking to some guy about what veterans want - make sure that other guy is not an actual veteran .

Coyote Attack

Strange story. Pretty unusual for a coyote or even a pack of them to attack an adult. Most of the attacks on humans involve children or adults trying to rescue  a child or a pet. It hard for me to imagine that a coyote or even two would attempt to take down an adult. When I lived outside Seattle I'd hear them far more often than I'd see them. They kept to the woods line at the edge of the field and were extremely skittish and the ones I did see couldn't have been more than 30 or 40 pounds. We heard stories that they would lure a dog into the woods and gang up on it and kill  it but that never happened to ours. Of course they were pretty big dogs, a pointer/dalmation, a big lab, a great dane, and a shepherd cross and they'd run together a lot. Tough as coyotes are, I imagine they would have trouble with that particular pack  but as far as I know they never got one. I ran the pointer (good old Fred) behind the car once  and clocked him at about 30 so he could move pretty good. He took off after a coyote once and it left him like he was standing still. So that's my limited experience with them.  I never even got a shot off at one.
The NE coyotes are bigger, possibly crossed with wolves and weighing up to 70 lbs which is a whole other scenario. I imagine even a large man may have a problem dealing with two animals that size. So far the information is sketchy. The size of the coyotes, the nature of the attack and the exact cause of death seem to be either unknown or not made public. Maybe it's just morbid curiosity but it seems like information like that may be of some use. If I see one in front of me, I'd kind of like to know whether I ought to be looking out behind me, too.

The Governor Gets Rand-y

I'm glad he does because I sure don't. I read one of them, either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. That was enough. Stilted prose and a philosophy totally ignorant of the human condition is a bad combination. At least I don't find it appealing. Governor Sanford appears to be a fan and wrote her a little love letter that Newsweek, for some reason, decided to publish. Now I'm not going to run down the Governor for his transcontinental booty call. In fact, I think he's a true lover boy. A powerful, successful man with the emotional development of a smitten 13 year old. It was an epic fail, flaming out for all the world to see. Much better than the tawdry mud wrestling adventure of that Ensign guy, what with the best friend's wife and the payoff and all. Like the difference between jumping off the Empire State Building holding two lit road flares and choking to death in a pool of your own vomit.
The Governor must have had some time to hone his political philosophy during those long, lonely nights in the doghouse. He quotes from  The Fountainhead:

Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."

Right on. Spoken like a man who can fill his own teeth, change his own tires, and give himself a colonoscopy while cooking a bitching quail egg omelet on his custom made solar stove. C'mon, I know this gives all those Libertarians living in Mom and Dad's basement a little chub, but if  you're going to blow up your own shed because your wife hung the wrong color curtains in it, they're going to take you away. And well they should.

The Governor goes on:

Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another's achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.

The Governor is full of shit. More conservative fever dreams of an America that never was. What? No taxes? No collective societal efforts to build roads, provide water, or drain away the shit? Our hardy pioneer forefathers were always screaming for the government to bail them out of some jam or another - fight the Indians - build a railroad - the roads are too muddy - my kids are dying of Cholera. Whiners. It's only government benevolence when someone else is receiving it and if one man's "achievement" is based on child labor in a sweatshop or slave labor, well I guess that's just too bad. Sometimes society needs fixing

Still Here?

Me too. Another Rapture has come and gone and not only are we not perfect, we're not even forgiven. The Lord's Universal Spam Filter has kicked us out once again. Me, I'm gonna amp up my sinning, at least for the winter months. I don't want to accidentally fall into a state of grace and get Raptured up into that cold January air, leaving my clothes and fillings behind. I can just hear those Left Behind losers laughing as me and my shrunken willy are wafted into the stratosphere. It wouldn't be worth it.

What If They Gave A Rapture And Nobody Came?

So you missed it.  Or maybe not. The godless may scoff and point to another failure of Biblical prophesy. I know better. Not only did the Rapture happen on September 23, it's going to happen again on October 20. It is a matter of Biblical history that the Rapture has occurred every month since 33 AD. Kind of God's monthlies. You don't see people ascending to heaven, leaving their clothes behind on a monthly basis for one simple reason. No one is worthy and no one is saved. Not the Catholics or the Jews or the Mormons or the Lutherans or the Pentacostals or the Hindus or the Atheists. Not nobody. You're all a bunch of sinners and none of you can get it right. So the Lord is going to keep Rapturing till you figure it all out. As for the Tribulation? C'mon, take a look around you.

The World's Worst Catholic™ Explains the Church's Position

                         It's missionary. And don't enjoy it. And whatever you do, don't wear a raincoat.

                Although I may not really be the World's Worst Catholic™, (I sure there are a few priests who out-worst me), it's my trademark and I'm sticking to it. It doesn't help that the Church's position on birth control, abortion, captital punishment, embryonic stem cell research and war is so convoluted as to give even Jesuit apologists a headache, I'll take a stab at hashing it out. This latest survey from Guttmacher Institute further muddies the waters. According to this study the legality of abortion has little to do with whether women seek out abortions. It has a lot to do with how many die from botched abortions, approximately 70,000 per year. Worldwide the number of abortions have fallen from 45.5 million in 1995 to 41.4 million in 2003. It is doubtful that this is due to countries passing more restrictive abortion laws, only three have done so, but it may well be correlated to increased use of birth control, especially in areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America where abortion is highly restricted. Now the Church, having lurched far to the right, has been careful to differentiate innocent life, which includes the unborn and terminally unconcious, from the rest of us. While Catholic politicians (and voters) have communion withheld and are threatened with excommunication for supporting abortion rights it appears to be a lesser sin to pull the plug on a condemned criminal and no sin at all to rain death on civilians from the skies during wartime, whatever side you happen to be on. My dad talks about mass dispensations before particularly nasty raids over Europe during the war. You were covered for what you did and what you were about to do. But that's always been a tricky moral dilemna, solved only by the Mennonites and Quakers. Nobody has ever accused the Catholic church of evidence based anything but the continued fight against contraception is particularly troubling. And contradictory. Of course, as Scranton's Bishop Martino found, American Catholics are going to do what they're going to do anyway. Particularly regarding birth control.  Now I perfectly understand how abortion can be seen to be tragic, maybe even murder, but I also believe that until the fetus is viable, it more a part of the woman's body then an independent human and it is her choice whether to carry the pregnancy to term. And under no circumstances should a women be forced to bear a child having severe birth defects or conceived as a result of rape or incest. The tragic part is that most abortion is unnecessary and the Catholic Church plays a large part in the fact that, per capita, catholic women are more likely to get an abortion than protestant women. Probably because of its Medieval stand on birth control. You think the Church could take a hint. For once.

You Would

Admit it. A little blush, a lot of Nair, a push up bra and a bikini wax or two. C'mon, you know you would. I'm not the only one.

4.4 million year old Ardi or Ardipithicus ramidus drives another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design creationism. The Ark is getting pretty crowded. What is interesting to me is that some of the chimp like characteristics that we have always assumed belonged to the common ancestor may have evolved in chimps after the split. If that translates to behavior we may be less ape like than is generally believed. You can get the real skinny at John Hawks Weblog and Laelaps. If you prefer your science faux with a dash of stupidity here's Casey Luskin's take on the whole thing. The release of this information was 15 years in the making. About the same amount of time the Discovery Institute has been in existence. Hmmm. Fifteen years, multiple papers from one team of scientists for just one fossil on the one hand and absolutely nothing worthwhile out of the echo chamber that is the Discovery Institute on the other.

Ghost Adventures Part One

           My grandson roped me into watching Ghost Adventures which is kind of a low budget, semi-retarded Ghosthunters with a dash of roid rage. Now you may think that television could not get any more moronic than Ghosthunter. But you would be wrong.  My impression is that the lead paranormal investigator Zak needs to spend a little more time in the library and a little less in the gym. A couple of acting classes wouldn't hurt either. Maybe it's some kind of joke. It is just that lame.
          Normally, I don't find this kind of stuff too interesting  unless it's local but my grandson was so excited he insisted we watch it. Now, I don't believe in ghosts and he knows it. Maybe he was anxious to have Zak and his buddies prove me wrong or, more likely, my grandson and his friends were excited about an episode dealing with mass slaughter and a haunted fort. He was so excited he was practically shaking. It would be kind of neat to feel like that again. My little brother and I shared a room and we'd get all worked up hearing strange noises coming from the basement, particularly after watching something like The Curse of Frankenstein. We'd get so scared we felt duty bound to do our own paranormal investigating. So we'd sneak downstairs until we got to the landing above the rec room, my brothe would flickon the light and at the same time I'd leap down the stairs yelling "hi yaah!" and waving my scout knife. Good thing Dad wasn't coming through the garage door. He would have lost a nut. We weren't fucking around.
          What's the harm in sharing a little critical thinking with the lad? Eight isn't too young to develop a little skepticism. Besides, he values my opinion. He's about the only one. I don't want him to spend the rest of his life chasing things that don't exist. Like Zak.
        Part two later.

It's a White Thing

You wouldn't understand. Wrong camera angle for a frog snuff film. Ha! Ha! mainstream media. Fakeout. The lesson is that you can't believe anything Glenn Beck shows or tells you. But I knew that.

Coming up: Glenn uses a real baby and scalding hot bathwater to explain bank bailouts.

Everybody Needs a Cause

I got mine. Bumper stickers and a tee shirt, too. Wonder why my party of stupidheads didn't frame the argument this way from the start. Everyone knows what it is, how it works and by gosh, it's pretty popular. Why get the health insurers involved at all? We could always negotiate down. I learned that in labor negotiations. A golden opportunity missed. So I've tried to get this letter published twice now and sadly, I'm reduced to running it here. The Man is keeping me down (or ignoring me). Here it is:

Medicare needs to be part of the health care reform debate. As it stands now, the government is responsible for insuring the health of the elderly and disabled, those who are most likely to need long term extensive care, and private insurers get everybody else, the young and healthy where a profit can be made. This is unsustainable in the long run. It is unfair to the working taxpayer and employers who are on the hook for increasing premiums to fund privately insured health care and increasing taxes to fund Medicare. It is unfair to our seniors who are facing reduced Medicare coverage because the program is running out of money. As a society, we have made a commitment to our senior and disabled citizens to provide them with affordable health care. One way to save this program and provide the best care for the most people is to open up Medicare so that all American citizens are eligible to participate. Opening up the risk pool to include the young and working taxpayers would go far to stabilize Medicare's long term prospects.

Was God Ever a Real Person?

That came out of the blue and stopped me in my tracks, danger signs flashing in front of my eyes. This was asked by my grandson as he and I were walking up the beach. He's a bright, inquisitive, sensitive boy with a big heart. But he keeps asking me shit that I can't answer. I don't know how I became the go-to guy for matters supernatural and theological. I suppose it's because I temporarily fixed his Nintendo DS. I know in the world of avuncular grandfathering, I'm supposed to have this all figured out and, with a chuckle and a twinkle in my eye, tell him exactly how it is. Put his mind at ease so that he knows there is some sense in the universe and everything is as it should be. I don't have the heart to tell him that the older I get, the more confused I am and less and less of it makes any sense. Add that to the fact that I have no idea what sort of religious training, if any, his parents have given him and I found myself in quite a pickle. So I did the only thing I could think of - I channeled Sister Mary Joseph and what I could remember of the Baltimore cathechism.

"Well, in the Catholic tradition, Jesus, as one of the three parts of one god (look, I didn't think this stuff up by myself), was born a man so I suppose you could say that God was a person, at one time."
He looks up at me exasperated: "No, Jesus was the son of God."
"Well, yeah, but..." and at that point the spirit of Sister Mary Joseph left me, metaphysically rulerless and unable to drive my point home."

So we walk along a bit in blessed silence and he comes up with this:

"You know, the Bible is always right"
This sets me off. No grandson of mine is going to be a creationist, even if I have to kidnap him and send him to Camp Quest.
"No, it isn't. Lots of stuff is wrong. Nobody got swallowed by a whale, there was no worldwide flood and the earth wasn't created in six days."
That does not convince him. This does: "And you don't find dinosaurs buried with people so they couldn't have lived at the same time."

So Ken Ham is right about one thing. If you lose them at Genesis, you might as well kiss that whole Bible as history thing goodbye. Goodbye, literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Morning Joe Rubs Weiner the Wrong Way

So I had (well, I accidently chose) to sit through another round of the dial-up intellects on Morning Joe giving their take on epidemiology. A typical monkey/football scenario. C'mon, people, it's a broadband world. Don't you have some staffer with a laptop that can Google the government's response to the H1N1 epidemic? Could you at least try to be moderately informed on a topic before you open your yaps and could you please, on issues of public health, make an attempt to get the facts straight? Take this reaction (please) after a relatively dry, fact based report on the status of the vaccine (government has ordered 150 million doses, vaccine will be ready in late October). The reporter looked a little stunned as some former Bush security advisor, who still resides in Stupid City, asked this perceptive and hard hitting question: "I heard there is some problem with mercury in the vaccines." Heard from who, dipshit? Your wife who heard it from Oprah who heard it from Jennie McCarthy? And Mike Barnicle, master of the anecdotal non-sequitur, chimes in with: "And how will this affect the public option?" Right, Mike. And why do tangerines smell so darn good? Mika, perpetually confused, looks confused. Willie Geist, who I believe actually has a brain but is careful to conceal it so's not to appear uppity, says nothing. Joe Scarborough takes the ball and heads straight towards Crazyland, mumbling something about "So much for government efficiency" and do you want these people running your health care?. Well, Joe, yes...Yes I do. Who else has the resources to do the research to isolate the virus, develop a series of vaccines, test those vaccines on a massive scale to insure safety and efficacy, and stockpile and distribute them to the population? Here's a hint. It ain't Aetna or Blue Cross. Typical conservative fever dreams: The government is too busy trying to figure out how to sneak Belladonna to grandma in her Glycolax to gear up their secret vaccine factories buried under the FEMA concentration camps just next to the black helicopter landing sites and save America from H1N1. The government is too inefficient to run a single payer health care system but they're efficient enough to watch your every move and take away your guns. By the way, a brown guy is president. Stock up on Depends.

Posted above for your amusement and edification is my new favorite congressman, Rep. Anthony Weiner D-NY, handing Joe his ass on the topic of single payer health care.

Thinking of Ending It All

Wonder if I can swim to Ireland and freedom before the jellyfish sting me to death?

Hey Get That Frisbee, will ya?

I got the rest of this stuff.

Next Year I'm Bringing Two Beach Towels

Twenty by eight feet, one bathroom, ten people - you do the math.

Town Hall Beatdown

The conservative blogosphere are wetting their panties about jackbooted union thugs tossing a bunch of teabaggers out of a townhall meeting in Tampa. The beatee, one Mr. Arthur, is interviewed looking rather perplexed that that he tried to push his way into a meeting and got pushed back. Now I don't want to belittle the trauma that poor Mr. Arthur, who's only crime was to try to enter a public meeting and shout inanities in an effort to destroy any semblance of reasoned discourse, suffered during this horendous takedown. And I sure none of this was covered in Rush's playbook. You surely don't expect to be bullied when you're intent on bullying someone else. During the fracas Mr. Arthur lost almost all the buttons on his shirt, giving him more of a South Beach than Panhandle look, and suffered a moderate to severe Indian burn (which really stings) on his arm. I'm sorry, but this doesn't even qualify as a beatdown in Chevy Chase, let alone Tampa. The UMW organizers of my Grandaddy's day are looking down from that Tavern in the Sky and rolling their eyes at what they're calling a beating these days. They gave out way worse at their own meetings, to their own members.

So I'm urging everyone to calm down and take a step back. We're all Americans here, even the stupid ones. Yeah, I'm talking about you, Grandpa, waving your Medicare supplied cane and screaming about socialized medicine. Chill out. Cooler heads need to prevail before something far worse happens and someone ends up with a Texas Wedgie or a Purple Nurple.

Ch-ch-ch Changes

The American Psychological Association has determined that programs designed to ungay gays do not work and do not change the sexual orientation of gay men. Gayness is incurable. So is blond hair, blue eyes and strawberry allergies. It may be hard to exactly pinpoint what constitutes being gay. It seems to be a sliding scale ranging from drag queens to art handlers to megachurch pastors to orthopedic surgeons to Republican senators to the guys back in D&E to married with children to polygamists to Double Y's. Maybe the scale isn't linear but curves back on itself, kind of like, um, a circle. But I don't want to think about that.

Reaction from recently outed public figures has been swift:

"I'm so furious I could slap somebody. I took the cure and I'm one hundred per cent fabulous heterosexual man meat. I'm living proof it works."
Ted Haggard - unemployed former holy man

"See, I told you. But I'm still not gay."
Larry Craig - former Senator and current men's room attendant

But Scripto, you say: Being that you have no knowledge of genetics and even less of embryology, how can you be so sure that homosexuality is innate rather than a choice? Here's how, doofus dear reader. When I was a lad there was a pair of twin boys that lived across the street. Let's call them A and B (B really was kind of a B, if you know what I mean). A liked girls. B liked boys. Now either B made this lifestyle choice sometime in kindergarten or he really didn't have any choice in the matter. What do you think?

Public Service Announcement

Mirrored this video in hopes of preserving this moment in sports history for posterity. Evidently David Feherty wandering around the Buick Open farting on mike is copyright protected. The PGA is no doubt worried that this will increase the popularity of televised golf and attract the wrong demographic. People who appreciate a good fart joke are unlikely to need Viagra or be inclined to buy a Buick.

UPDATE: The PGA has determined that Tiger Woods was not the source of the mysterious fart as he has a caddie that does all his farting for him. David Feherty is now identified as the likely culprit, although he has neither admitted nor denied his role in this affair. We at Woo University call on David to man up and come clean regarding his involvement in this unfortunate incident.