Category Archives: Personal
A week ago Saturday may wife, my sister, my brother-in-law and I drove into New York City for a meal at Carmine’s on 44th and 6th. We’ve been there many times and always have a great time. One needs to understand how the food is served (family style) before ordering and and that you’ll need a suitcase to carry home the leftovers but it is dependably terrific.
Nearly fifty years ago, during my tour of America on a Triumph motorcycle, I stopped at a Civil War Museum and burial ground for Civil War soldiers in Northern Alabama. I’ve been a student of history, and this seemed to be a curious part of America’s history.
The museum was run by the Daughters Of The Confederacy. A group that dedicated themselves to their work and the history of the Civil War Era. Their dedication to the memory of The Lost Cause or War of Northern Aggression and to the heroes of the Confederacy was awe inspiring if not a little frightening to a Canadian teenager. I paid to attend a formal history lesson and was barraged with a mass of history from the Southern perspective.
One of my favorite bloggers has a great writing technique. He has led an interesting life out in the American West which has given him some fascinating experiences involving the great outdoors and with wildlife, horses, and people from outside that environment trying to interact with it. He then takes these experiences and weaves them into some well written blog posts that relate to current events. Growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey and spending my 20′s as a straight laced workaholic by day and bar hopping idiot by night don’t give quite the same rich personal history to draw upon, but I’m going to try to emulate his technique anyway. So sit back and enjoy!
By now, the literate world is well aware of CNN’s news anchor, Soledad O’Brien’s public humiliation during her interview with Breitbart’s Pollak. If there was ever a doubt in the mind of anyone but the most dedicated Socialist sycophants of the Main Stream Media being less than an unofficial propaganda bureau for the president, this should have been the deciding factor.
There is no excuse: child molestation is the murder of an innocent soul, for that soul will never be able to grow and mature into the adult that it was meant to be. We all know victims of childhood sexual molestation, whether they have told you or not, you know them. Some of them have a strong survival instinct and persevere through the shame and confusion to become productive adults: others are destroyed, they are the ones for whom the pain and humiliation were too much. They are often consumed by drugs and alcohol or they become prostitutes to complete their pain and be ground down into the gutters of life.
During the Renaissance and up until the late 19th Century, the Straivarius violin was the standard of the industry. A model by which all others were judged. The Stradivarius and fine sailing ships were built by employing Pythagorean mathematics, a keen knowledge of various woods, and a sense of artistic proportion. The result was an aesthetic marvel that would be admired by generations
Lars used the same Pythagorean mathematics, his love of exotic wood, and an artist’s sense of form and proportion to build his double ended ketch over thirty years ago. Wood makes a sail boat seem alive. The steel cable stays that brace the masts play their own music in different winds and the wooden vessel comes alive and sings beautiful songs on the high seas, but you needed to speak the language of sailing to understand the music of the songs of the sea.
I had a Labrador and my best buddy Knarley Manners had a Chesapeake. The dogs were given to us by people in town, people who found that big dogs make a big mess in small backyards. That was fine by us, we usually had stock dogs and dogs for lion and bear, these bird dogs were exotics to us and really special. There was only one problem; we weren’t bird hunters. Oh sure, we shot prairie chickens (grouse and ptarmigan) for dinner out in the bush, but that was always with a pistol or a 22 and not all that sporting. Head shots at thirty feet or less was the rule, but the skills for shooting ducks and geese had eluded us. Why hunt ducks and geese when you can hunt moose and elk?
Now that we had dogs, we needed to learn how to hunt waterfowl. We made plans, oh how we made plans for weeks and months we made plans; the sort of plans that 13 year old boys make when they are hiding an expedition from their dads.
Friend –
Today I asked for a joint session of Congress where I will lay out a clear plan to get Americans back to work.
Next week, I will deliver the details of the plan and call on lawmakers to pass it. Whether they will do the job they were elected to do is ultimately up to them.
But both you and I can pressure them to do the right thing. We can send the message that the American people are playing by the rules and meeting their responsibilities—and it’s time for our leaders in Congress to meet theirs. And we must hold them accountable if they don’t.
So I’m asking you to stand with me in calling on Congress to step up and take action on jobs:
http://my.barackobama.com/Time-To-Act
Peter Parker Miles Morales, the Amazing Spectacular Ultimate Spiderman….and biracial multicultural hero:
The new Ultimate Spider-Man, who will have the almost impossible task of replacing the late Peter Parker (easily one of Marvel Comics most popular characters), took off his mask and revealed himself to be a young, half-black, half-Latino kid by the name of Miles Morales.
When I read the news, I was beside myself, as if my brain couldn’t fully process the revelation.
My friendly neighborhood Spider-Man was … just like me?
