Today is Veteran's Day

Today is Veterans Day here in the land of the Double Whopper with extra cheese. I honestly did not realize this until about 5 minutes ago. Today is a day in which we are all given an opportunity to express some sort of gratitude to all the men, and recently more and more women, who have sacrificed of themselves to serve our country and defend our freedom. I suppose this day is all the more poignant following the recent deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as the mass murder of soldiers at Ft Hood by a Muslim terrorist who himself was a member of our armed forces.

My father was a veteran. He was a graduate of West Point military academy. Oddly, he was not proud of this. When West Point came looking to recruit me, due to my high grades and test scores, my father fought tooth and nail to stop me from going. I have never fully understood this, and considering where I ended up going as a result of his interference, I can't help but wonder if I'd have been much better off had I fought a little harder. Who can say? I might've ended up in the Middle East and been killed. I'll never know. Regardless, following my father's death I took as much of his remaining West Point items as I could find and stored them away. He may not have been overly proud of his achievement, but the rest of the family is. His sheepskin West Point diploma hangs on my wall.

I cannot say that I fully understand why we invaded Afghanistan and have remained there for the past 7 or 8 years fighting a random and rambling enemy. I cannot say that I fully understand why we invaded Iraq other than that our President was informed that Saddam had acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. We did eventually find evidence that supported this, but it appears that most of whatever he had was quietly shipped off to Syria to avoid capture. Whatever the case, and whatever the reason, I want to express my support of our military for the sacrifices they are making in going to these Godforsaken places and risking their lives every day.

Happy Veterans Day!

Veterans Day

Veterans Day
It's Veterans Day, a day for honoring those who served. It was once Armistice Day, a day to celebrate the veterans of the War to End All Wars, but time and experience forced that lofty ideal to be changed. It would appear that there is no war to end all wars. At least not yet. As long as evil exists there will always be war and a need for war.

My father graduated from West Point many years ago. I still have his sheepskin diploma and his gold graduation ring from there. When they came calling for me I considered going. But my father wouldn't hear of it. He said it was a terrible place to go and insisted that I'd hate it. I had no idea at the time that he'd already planned to trick me into a position whereby I was left with no choices and would have to go to the college he'd chosen and become what he wanted. Ironically, this is how he said West Point treated him and the reason I shouldn't go.

We have a lot of idealists here in America, people who think that if they elect the 'right' leader then we won't go to war anymore and our soldiers will never leave to go fight anywhere. Interestingly, every single one of these 'great leaders' has gotten us involved in military conflicts that cost American soldiers' lives one way or another. One of them sold our greatest military secrets to communist China in exchange for cash and reelection assistance. It was treason, but politics being what it is, nothing was done about it. He later launched a missile at the Chinese embassy in retaliation for the embarrassment that resulted from the American People finding out about his betrayal of us.

We have a low tolerance for war here. It seems that no matter how viciously we're attacked we can't stay angry enough to fight back for longer than a few short months. After that we're all stressed and whiny and want our soldiers to surrender and come home. Our soldiers don't appreciate this lack of resolve much and openly say so.

We have a considerable segment of our population who actually despise our soldiers, even as those soldiers are giving their lives in defense of ours. Many of these haters hold highly paid positions in our most prestigious colleges and universities where they take full advantage of the daily opportunity to proclaim their hatred of America and its fighting forces. Others hold public office and use their power over the military to sabotage it with social experiments and lack of supplies wherever possible.

Still, a shrinking, but loyal segment of America remains resolute. We stand by our soldiers. We salute them for their sacrifices and their integrity. We wish more Americans and especially American leaders had as much integrity as our soldiers do. We wish America would wake up before it gets blown up.

This is my salute to our veterans and our current soldiers. You deserve better than you got. You deserve better than you're going to get. Thank you for what you've done and what you're doing.

Memphis Monday

God smiling

It's Monday morning and I really don't have much to say. Last night I spent most of my time laying on the bed with a headache from hell, trying not to throw up. I felt like my left eye was going to explode. I had the fascinating experience of discovered that if you lay an ice pack across your eye until it's frozen, and then roll your eye around in your head, you can feel the cold moving in there. Whee, that was fun.

While I was doing this, My Wife was watching the one hundred millionth rerun of Perry Mason. It was the episode where a very '80s writer throws his secretary off the roof of a building and makes everyone think it was he who died. But the secretary yelled his name, "Daaaaaaavid" as he fell. So that blew the whole thing. Dang it!

Saturday night, The Wife and I went up to Millington, the land where Justin Timberlake grew up and everyone wears gay grandpa hats just like his, for a big get-together. I met a Memphis trial attorney. I asked, "is it my imagination, or does every guilty son-of-a-bitch, or in the case of Mary Winkler, bitch, hire Leslie Ballin? Even Memphis cops know that if they're caught red-handed in something, they need to call this guy."

The answer was, "if you're a murderer, you need to call Leslie Ballin or Steve Farese. Those are the two best at getting people off for serious crimes like that."

Ah, and Mary Winkler had both, bought and paid for by some mysterious Memphis millionaire, possibly named Gail Rose, not that anyone has mentioned her name in association with this miscarriage of justice before now or anything. It's all just pure speculation from a naked Memphis man on a toilet by the roadside. And it could very easily be wrong. But it was clearly someone from the Grrlz Club here in town who paid for them, and who stopped paying for them the minute Oprah Winfrey expressed doubts about Mary's innocence.

Apparently having millions of dollars does not free a woman from the powerful influence of Oprah. Who knew?


Grrl Power means I do all your thinking for you

Have you ever had a friend tell you something in an email while they were upset, and then you sort of halfway mentioned it to their best friend, assuming they knew, only to find out that they didn't have a clue what you were talking about? So then you feel relieved that you didn't flat out say it because they apparently didn't understand you, but now you're scared that your friend is going to be really mad at you for kinda, sorta, almost telling their best friend before they had? Yeah? I did that last week, I think. But I'm not sure yet. I'm still holding my breath.

It's raining and I'm tired and feeling blah. The Stock Market has oh so totally fucked me and appears intent upon continue this ass-raping. I was going to sell some big holdings of mine, but My Wife asked me not to because we have so much other financial crap to deal with before we face a bunch of capital gains taxes on top of all that. So there I sit, holding these stocks, and they go way up, making me happy, and then plunge like Courtney Love's neckline, leaving me screaming in frustration. Now the experts are saying "unless you're prepared to ride this out for the long term, jump ship now!" Yeah, shit! Thanks for the info.

I rode out the crash of 1999-2000 and it didn't do me much good. I mean, to this day I cringe whenever I hear the name Steve Case or anything about AOL. What a fucking loser! And I rode his "social justice" dreamship all the way down to the bottom, too. Fucking dickhead. I've still got the scars. And now here I go on another ride down to 20,000 leagues under the sea. So happy. So excited. Gotta dump this once-great turd.

So anyway, I haven't had my coffee. I left my cell phone at home by accident. My stupid cat, who slept on the couch all night even though she knows she isn't allowed up there, was crying at the back door all morning while I ate breakfast. I ignored her. So sorry about the rain, but you have a lovely covered porch with a chimenea and a nice carpeted bed on top of the grill to keep you comfy, so shut the fuck up.

My Oldest Sister called me on Saturday while I was cleaning up in the garage. She wants to know if I want to take a cat home with me on Thanksgiving. It seems My Nephew brought him a partly Main Coone cat, or rather, he petted him and then the cat followed him home. I told her I'd like to see the cat and then decide. So there is a chance that I may be bringing home another male Main Coone to entertain the Little Girl, who despite enjoying being Queen of the Castle, gets lonely and scared being all by herself.

The other night, while I was out in the driveway in the pitch dark for some reason, I saw the next door neighbor's dog come tearing out of their garage, barking his head off. He never charges at me like that, so I thought maybe he'd gone crazy. Then I saw, just for a moment, something about the size of a coyote, running in the darkness head of him. He chased whatever it was into the trees at the back of the property, at which point his shock collar prevents him from going any further. I don't know what it was, but it apparently knows that the dog gets fed in the garage and thus has food in there. I can't think of any other reason for a wild animal to try to go into the neighbor's garage with a large dog waiting to kill him there.

Stacy the Peanut Queen had surgery last Friday. We're all still waiting to hear from her that she's OK. Steph and Kylie had cocktails and wild Aussie fun. We're all still waiting for photos of drunken girlies falling down stairs or pressing their cooter to some passed out guy's face. Marlena is still trying to save her home and provide for her family and it is stressful as hell, but I can't stop thinking about it and worrying.


It's Veteran's Day. And yet I can't think of a single thing to say about that. We all should be grateful to our veterans for the fact that we still have most of our freedom. My Dad narrowly avoided being sent to fight in Korea, ending up instead at West Point, where he graduated as an officer before being sent to Japan to serve 5 years in the Army. And yet, somehow I can't think of anything at all to say. I am just not here today. I think last night's headache just wiped me out.

I guess if I think of something more to say, I'll be back.