Takin' it to the streets...

I just wanted to take a moment to heartily thank all the protestors in the streets of New York City. Thanks extreme environmentalists, gay rights activists, transgender activists, anti-war activists, anti-globalizaton activists, anti-Christian activists, anti-Semetic activists and all those who are activists but haven't really figured out what they're so active about.¶ Thanks, because every time I see you on the TeeVee I think.."good job, thanks to you somewhere out there in middle America another undecided voter has made the choice to vote for George Bush".

I know, logically, that all you active sorts are not really for John Kerry. You are more likely to be in favor of electing Ralph Nader, John Dean or Karl Marx and you are linked only by one common philosophy. After in depth study of the serious issues of the day you have decided to pursue the most pressing; you hate George Bush because he's stupid. I think that in the main you could care less about John Kerry, but by default when the great middle of the American public sees your face, your mispelled poster or your juvenile papier-mâché caricature masks on the TeeVee, whether it is conscious thought or a subliminal suggestion, you are to them activists for John Kerry and the Democratic Party. The Repbulican party could not buy better advertising.

Thankfully, and to the protestors credit, most of the demonstrations have been fairly peaceful, but a few broken windows, cherry bombs and burning tires might be forthcoming and we thank you in advance for these, God forbid, should they occur. Papier-mâché masks are good for only so many swing voters. Violent anarchists rampant in the streets could really bring in the votes for Bush.

So once again thank you, have a great time, ACTUP!, and keep those votes for Bush coming. And a special thanks to the large numbers of environmentalists from the Pacific Northwest who in getting to New York had to burn up huge quantities of fossils fuels in order to protest the burning of so much fossil fuel.

¶Disclaimer and statement of political correctness:
Not that there is anything wrong with these. I tend to be an environmental advocate. I have several very close friends who are gay. I have friends who opposed the war in Iraq. I myself am undecided on Globalization. I know people who disagree with Christian religous tenets. I know people who disagree with Jewish canons. I am working hard to befriend any transgendered person I come upon and finally, my own Mother is a liberal Democrat.

The times they are a changin'......

In a prior life I used to spend some time in Minnesota. I like the place. It's mostly a pretty place, clean and the citizens are a nice bunch of hard working Germanic and Scandanavian folks. But living in such a nice place away from most of the worlds real problems they tended to be of an idealistic nature and a liberal persuasion. And so I was somewhat surprised to read this in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune...

The Outpost is a working man's bar in a bellwether piece of a battleground state. These are the voters who elected Jesse Ventura governor and who helped deter him from running for a second term when they fell out of love with him. But if John Kerry had dropped in to seek votes Thursday, he would've run into a wall.

In a place full of carpenters, plumbers, auto mechanics, factory workers and other blue-collar guys who used to vote for Democrats almost as devoutly as they used to drink beer (most were sipping soft drinks), I could only turn up one John Kerry voter. The rest plan to vote for George W. Bush. "This is basically a Democratic place, but everybody seems to be going for the Republican," Hartinger said. "That's what I hear over the bar. Kerry's just too soft and a lot of the guys just don't like his wife. They weren't too impressed when she started speaking all those foreign languages at the Democratic convention. She's not American."

Glad to hear it and it starts on the road to confirming the gut feeling I've had about the election results in November; that the average American has gotten a good glimpse of John Kerry's altered biography, elitist demeanor and below average performance as a national leader and they don't like what they see. And I don't like, nor much trust, his wife either.

Thanks to The Discerning Texan for the tip on this story.

The mysteries of life.....

Even in this advanced technological civilization of ours many unanswered mysteries abound. How can we prove that there is a God? Why can't we more accurately predict hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes? Do ghosts really exist? Is time travel possible?

But perhaps no mystery is more intriguing than the plumbing and electricity in an older home. A home such as ours. Not old really since it is about as old as I am...I meant to say "gracefully aged". The mystery of plumbing and electrical malfunctions reminds us that we are mere mortals and is why plumbers and electricians are some of the wealthiest people I know. They would have been the Shamans and Medicine Men in Native American tribes....the respected elders who "knew" the secrets of life...or plumbing.

Another of those mystery moments came for us tonight. After a superb, but late, supper Julie was washing a few things in the sink while I attended to important matters in another room. I think I was racing Formula One on the PlayStation2. At some point I heard a scream and the clanking of implements from the kitchen. Upon investigation I found that the sink was stopped up and that Julie had tried to turn on the disposal to clear the drain whereupon she received a significant, but thankfully not fatal, dosage of voltage through her disposal-turning-on finger.

Thinking that probably since she was jolted so quickly that the disposal didn't have time to do it's duty in clearing the sink, I used a towel to again run the In-Sink-a-Rator© hoping to solve the clog problem. No dice. We had a major clog sitution on our hands, peeving me greatly as we had just paid one of the aforementioned rich plumbers to clean the line out. Doubly peeved because this line also drains the dishwasher and so now it was fast filling up with soapy scum water too.

While pondering my options I remembered...."AHA"....that we have a drain cleanout valve for this area of the house outside. I also quickly remembered another axiom of home repair. "The easier the apparent solution.....the harder it is to find the right tool". Most guys have been here. This is a simple screw valve with a hexagonal nut type head. But a nut that would in the Army be called a GP Large version [General Purpose-Large]. To make matters even more difficult the GP Large nut is located in a little tunnel in the side of the house surrounded by the cedar shake shingles that coat our Mission Style estate.

Not to be detered, I went through all five of my tool boxes. Yes, I said five....complete ones too. I've had one forever, then my brother apparently forgot and gave me versions of the same high quality 300 pc. German tool set for two Christmases running and recently my Dad cleaned out his garage and gave me two more sets. I looked in his first, as he had some GP Large tools. To shorten the story, let me say that I went from tool box to valve and back many times in about 45 minutes, even finding a ancient tool in my Dad's box that I think was made for this exact purpose. It had a GP Large hex head and a stem with a hole in it for inserting a turning device. Great, except that it wouldn't fit into the tunnel housing the valve. And so do you think that I gave up after this close call? You betcha' I did.

So as Julie was putting Jack to bed, I went to the kitchen to clean up what I could and to plot my strategy for tomorrow. That being either to construct a tool for the valve or more likely just take the drain line under the sink apart and run a "snake" thru it. And here, as I ruminated over my options, is where the mystery of plumbing rears it's head, for the standing water in both sinks and the dishwasher was simply gone. Vanished....poof! An hour+ of consternation solved by doing nothing.

I know that there are logical explanations for this event, though I'm not sure logic is the correct discipline to describe man's relationship to plumbing and electricity. This is my point. It's more aptly described in the realms of the occult or the mystical. And so here is my final and most important axiom regarding plumbing and electricity. "Those things that you think that if simply left alone will get better....won't. Those things that you spend hours busting your knuckles on....will".

The Silver Star....

The Silver Star is awarded for gallantry in action, and as the regulation states, "The required gallantry, while of a lesser degree than that required for the Distinguished Service Cross, must nevertheless have been performed with marked distinction." I know many fine individuals who wear the Silver Star, and from what I know of their actions they certainly were deeds of marked distinction. John Kerry wears the Silver Star and asks voters to believe that he is worthy of the office of The President because his deeds were of a marked distinction also. I ask you to compare his deeds against another Silver Star recepient, my good friend Will Parish.

John Kerry's Silver Star:

While in command of a three-boat mission, his Swift boat was ambushed; he ordered his men to beach the boat so he could pursue the attacking Vietcong; a teenager with a grenade launcher popped out of a hole a few feet away; one of Kerry's men shot and wounded him in the leg, but he ran; Kerry, fearing the youth was trying to get far enough away to fire a grenade, chased him and shot him dead. Kery was awarded the Silver Star for valor.

Will Parish's Silver Star:

Specialist 4 Willard Parish, 24, of Bristow, Okla., was a Charlie Company mortarman, but this morning [at LZ Xray] he manned a machine gun. "I looked to the front, and it seemed like the North Vietnamese were growing out of the weeds," he remembers. "The training took over. I just fired that weapon, totally unaware of the time, the conditions. I remember a lot of noise, a lot of yelling, air strikes. Then quiet." When he ran out of machine-gun ammunition Parish stood up with a .45-caliber automatic pistol in each hand and kept shooting. Later, they counted more than 100 enemy dead in front of his machine gun. Parish was awarded the Silver Star for valor***.

Which of the two awards do you think should be called a "deed of marked distinction"? Just asking.

***Account from "We Were Soldiers Once...and Young" by Gen. Hal Moore and Joe Galloway

The Band of Brothers.......

I have refrained from writing publically about John Kerry's Vietnam service for a variety of reasons. He did, after all, serve when so many did not. However, I do have strong opinons about Kerry's motives, his actions and his subsequent betrayal of those he now so proudly calls his "band of brothers". The band of brothers from whom he chose to cut and run using an obscure regulation and three minor scratches. In the band of brothers I know, this would be unthinkable.

Among the band of brothers I know well are those men of the 1st Cavalry Division who fought in the horrendous battles in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. Some of their units lost more than half their troops killed outright over a five day period with many more of the remainder wounded. Many of the wounded [some grievously] heroes, of my band of brothers chose not to pursue the road back to home and safety to which they were rightly entitled, but instead defied orders by doctors and superior officers and simply left the hospital in their bandages to go back to their units where they were desperately needed. Back to their brothers. Other brothers I know personally from my time suffered guilt beyond reckoning when the time came for their allotted 365 day tour of duty to end. The guilt and grief born of leaving their brothers still in harms way while they went home to safety, family and loved ones.

Whether John Kerry pulled a man from the water under fire, whether he was in Cambodia or not, whether his purple hearts were deserved or not....these are secondary to me. What matters and is a matter of record without a doubt is that John Kerry abandoned his brothers in Vietnam and then again in Washington with his public outcry against them. He has lost the right to be included in the "brotherhood". Period.

Kudos.......

CNN reports that President Bush has decided to bring home at least 10,000 troops from overseas non-combat stations, mainly in Europe and most particularly Germany. This would mean that an estimated 100,000 American troops, families and support personnel would be coming back to US bases. With German unemployment hovering at around 10% this will undoubtedly create further severe economic hardships on the Reich. Tough Noogies!

Update: Read more from Davids Medienkritik German [conservative] perspective. A, soon to be, new additon to my list of fine reading references.

Profile this.....

Several weeks ago in order to leave a comment on someones blog site, I filled out the Blogger "profile" information on myself. My thought is that this is a little teenagerish, but here it is. The info is the run of the mill drivel of my likes and dislikes, favorites and hobbies. The hardest entry to complete was the "favorite movie" section. I'm not a big movie goer, at least I don't self-generate the interest to go, but there are many films I do like once someone else coerces me into going. Or, as it is in modern life, once the bride and child bring home a DVD. A recent case in point being "Second Hand Lions" which I thoroughly enjoyed. How could I not like a film about crusty old Texans sitting on their front porch shooting shotguns and chewin' Redman. I could have played the part. And, of course, any film that contains a pack of dogs in it's cast is top rate with me.

But concerning the "profile", the interesting thing I noticed is the word counter displayed on the page that shows just exactly how many of the Queen's own nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and dangling participles one has written in the life of the Blog. In my case, as of this very moment [excluding these words] I have set to digital paper the grand sum of 132,011 words. Now I have been at this, a proud Blogger, since June of 2001 and in those 3+ years all I've come up with is a tad over 132k of words. I wasn't counting as I went but I would have thought that it would have been more...something along the lines of 133k. However, come to think of it, if the average word typed was 5 letters in length that would mean that my fingers have tapped the keyboard over one-half million times setting Streams to digital print. That sounds better! Doing something one-half million times sounds a lot more impressive than writing 132,000 measly words.

A Thing of Beauty....

I made a short day long business trip to Houston on Monday and as I returned home from the airport I phoned Julie from the car to tell her that I was on my way to her loving arms. "Whatever" she said, but added that I'd had a phone call just minutes before saying that an old college frat brother was in town and would like to stop by. You could have knocked me down when she told me his name. Jeremy, a.k.a. "Butch", a.k.a. "The Troll" Cooper. Butch, as I'll always think of him, was an older guy, a senior when I was a freshman, a mean taskmaster when I was a frat pledge and a cool guy to us youngsters. He drove a humongous '58 black Chrysler New Yorker knicknamed, "The Pig". That about says it all.

Adding to his mystique, we knew that he had raced cars and motorcycles and had crashed his fair share of both. He drove The Pig at breakneck speeds around San Antonio, usually with a gaggle of terrified frat pledges as passengers. With all this stuff of masculine legend, what I learned later was that Butch was a terrific, very intelligent and very sensitive guy. I saw him rarely until just this last decade when I learned more about him.

He was born in England where his dad was a senior banker and advisor to the government and had, during WWII, been on the team that cracked the super secret German "Enigma" code. At an early age his family moved to Canada where his dad ran the North American offices of Westminster Bank. Butch had an aptitude for things mechanical and financial and went into banking in New York while building cars and motorcycles as a hobby. He later relocated back to San Antonio in banking but at some point in life decided to follow his heart and worked full time building cars and cycles.

Which brings me to the image of the Chaparral 2H in the photo above. Knowing that Butch would be interested in seeing our new museum dedicated to Midland's Chaparral racing history we paid a visit on Tuesday morning. What I hadn't known about Butch was that for several seasons after college he had worked with McLaren Racing...the prinicple competitor of the Chaparrals in the glory days of Can-Am Series sports car racing. Butch regaled me with first hand racing stories of the Chaparrals along with the awe and respect they were accorded.

The Chaparral 2H is a thing of pure beauty built in 1968 and looking to us to be ahead of it's time still, 36 years later. For all it's beauty however, the car never did perform well and the driver hired by Chaparral to pilot it, John Surtees, refused to race it. I knew the basics of the story, but Butch filled me in on the details of the mismatched front and rear airflow, braking and visibility problems.

What a pleasure to see Butch again, get reacquainted and to have a visitor to our fair city who truly appreciated one of our new attractions!

Ben Stein....on what matters

I've always liked Ben Stein. His dry wit, humor and intelligence are like an oasis in the desert of the gliterazzi entertainment world. I like him even more after reading his farewell article for E-Online Magazine. I hope Whoppi reads it..

The "Real" Stars
By Ben Stein:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "e-online FINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end. It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again .

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world. A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him. A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The police men and womenwho go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me.

This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

Ho Hum.....!

I believe that I've run into the summer doldrums of blogging. I've just not been inspired to post any snide comments, interesting news or stories from the past to take up space here.

Actually we've been busy too. I helped Julie put special effort into a burst of housecleaning late last week for her "church ladies" meeting, party and gambling extravagnza which was, I understand, a rousing success. I got the information second hand as I was summarily thrown out of the house for the duration of the event. At the same time my sister and her family from Philadelphia arrived for a visit so when I was asked to remove myself from my residence, I got to spend the evening with them playing miniature golf. Where.....I'm proud to say, I got my name once again on the low score board by shooting a 38. I was good that night, but also it's my home course, it having not changed since I started playing there in 1962.

Friday evening we had my folks and sister, with family, over for a wonderful meal and then the next morning Julie and I left for Comfort, Texas and a birthday party/family reunion centered around her Dad. A nice trip at a lovely B&B and I got to meet many of her multitude of cousins who I'd known by name only. Nice folks....even the black sheep portion of the family...the Democrats.

Sunday evening upon arriving back from the whirlwind trip we immediately started in again visiting with my sister before their departure back to Pennsylvania. Jack had been away for two weeks so he got to meet my 14 year old nephew for the first time and Julie and I got to entertain the lads until 10:30. Today it was back to work, the regular schedule and trying to convince Jack to start studying his cirriculum for the Duke University gifted student program he was selected for. He watched TV all day. What's new.

That's about it, but here are a few, very few, pictures from Comfort. I was in the photographic doldrums also. Comfort Trip