RIP fuzzy

I had a wonderful experience today.

I was sitting down at the table to start math homework when I began to hear a ruckus out front. Upon investigation I see Janet (across the street neighbor) talking to some lanky guy dressed like a goob, then I notice they are standing over the body of what I only hope is a dead cat. I come out to see what’s happened. At first I am fearful that it’s Darrow, my next door neighbor’s cat, as this cat has a similar coat. Then I notice that it’s wearing a collar and feel relived as Darrow doesn’t wear collars.

Janet is talking to the lanky man as he is visibly shaken after having run over what is obviously someone’s pet. Janet is talking him down. I am staring into the face of death. It was a head shot and there is a lot of blood. I bend down and put my hand on the cat’s chest and sadly there is still life fighting against any hope. The breathing is shallow but the heart is thumping away.

Next out is Janet’s next door neighbor, Diane. She comes up and starts talking with the man as Janet goes to get some towels to cover the body. When Janet returns I cover the cat but keep my hand on its chest. The breathing is barely detectable and the heart is starting to go wonky. Janet and Diane are now both talking to the man who looks to me and states that at least the cat died quick. At this point tell the three of them that he is still breathing, though very weak. The man won’t hear of it saying that the brain is dead.

Janet asks what’s on the tag so I take my hand from the chest, pull the towel back a little and wipe the blood from the tag. Horror. It would seem that the grey love ball next door got himself a collar just this very morning. “Fuck, it is Darrow.” Diane takes the man to Rico and Jane’s house to knock on the door, while I put my hand back to Darrow’s chest just in time to feel his heart go into cardiac arrest from the blood loss. His legs give a little kick and he slips on.

More neighbors are coming out now, it’s like a 50’s sitcom. Everyone knew Darrow and the word is passing down while Janet looks for a box. I look back to Darrow’s house and see Jane holding her 8-year old girl, Sarsha, who is – as to be expecting – balling. Her younger 5-year old bother is confused.

Jane leaves the kids with Diane and comes out into the street to where Darrow is. There’s blood splatter on a parked car. The man is mindlessly following her offering everything then at his limit he exits the scene (he had given number and info). Jane looks to me with a look saying, “are you sure it’s Darrow”. He’s under the towel, I tell her simply that she doesn’t want to see.

Janet’s back with a box, into which I put Darrow’s lifeless corpse. Jane and Sarsha are both crying while little Jack is demanding to know why I won’t let Darrow out of the box. I hid the box in my back yard so the kids can’t get at him and let Jane know where he is so they can get him when Rico comes home from work. While I’m hiding the box I can hear Janet hosing the mess off the street.

A few hours later Sarsha was trying to put on a good face and talking to me about him. She wanted to ask if she could see him but was beating around the bush in a way only 8-year old girls can. I give her the, “I’m being serious adult” tone and tell her simply that she doesn’t want to see him and that you don’t want what’s in that box to be your last memory of Darrow. She’s still curious but fortunately is in the short span of reasonableness that lasts for about 3 weeks between toddlerhood and adolescence, so she excepts that she’s better off. And trust me, she is.

Later in the evening, after Rico had come and claimed Darrow, Helen and I relaxed for a moment on the porch. Across the street we watch Theo, a cat that Darrow was want to keep out of his territory, sniffing and acting odd at the scene of the accident. Theo then comes across the street, up our steps and starts rubbing everything and begging for attention. Theo has never set foot on this side of the street for fear of Darrow, there had to have been something in the cacophony of scents that told Theo’s kitty brain that the coast was clear.

The king is dead, long live the king.

BOTD: Widmer Brother's Hefeweizen

It’s been over a month since the last BOTD, and for that I must beg your forgiveness. I will attempt to drink more beer in the coming weeks to make up for my failings. With that done let’s move onto today’s chilled brew, from the Widmer Brother’s Brewery comes their Hefeweizen.


It looks like a tastey beer.
The first thing that should have tipped me off to a problem is that it wasn’t brewed by the Widmer boys but rather under their, “supervision”. Now I’m not saying Redhook is a bad brewery but it’s just a little on the shady business side of things for me. As for the beer it’s weak. Who knew that an unfiltered wheat could taste weak? I didn’t. No nose, little body with hints of hop, no citrus, no after taste. It was on sale and I know why.

Brewery: Widmer Brother’s (or rather Redhook)
Year: 1984
Origin: American (Portland, OR by way of Portsmouth, NH)
Style: Hefe Weizen
Content: 4.7%
Rating: Lame
Recommendation: None.

An end to enabling

The Year: 1977

The Location: Washington DC

The Event: 12 armed Islamic terrorists storm into 3 buildings, seize control of all three and take 134 people hostage, of which 109 are Jews. During the course of the 39 hour siege the hostages are beaten with fists, rifle buts and one man – Marion Barry, future cokehead DC Mayor – is shot. The incident comes to an end without the loss of life when the terrorists surrendered at the behest of ambassadors from 3 Islamic nations that the FBI had brought in help.

The Motive: The leader of the group, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, was seeking revenge against American Jews for the murder of members of his family, even though they had been murdered by other Muslims. Khaalis also demanded that United Artists to pull the distribution of the movie, Mohammad, Messenger of God.

Eye-Witness Account: A terrorist pointed his gun at one man and said, "If the Lord gives me permission, I'll kill you."

Does anyone in the US, aside from Marion Barry who even in a coked up stupor most likely remembers getting shot, even remember that this happened? Everyday the cry that Iraq is the cause of terrorist acts grows, but what of events that preceded it?

The sad fact is that we in the West have a suicidal narrow minded centrism that only allows for the events in the world to be caused by our own actions, and a furtherance of guilt that requires taking blame for all the ills in the world. It’s a bloody mindedness that borders on racism that simply can’t comprehend the notion that someone non-Western could have motives and desires that don’t conform to Western norms or is at the least influenced by the inherent evils of Western actions.

Thus we have the continued calls for the creation of a world wide caliphate where all four corners of the globe would be put under the boot heel of Islamic law and demands for superstition to be put before science that come from the very mouths of the Mullahs, Imams and terrorist we are fighting completely ignored. All the while we bend over backwards to find the ethereal “root cause” in items that can only be fully blamed on the West.

But regardless of our own tortured self-examination there is a root cause. There is a tether, cord, a certain similarity, a commonality that binds the blind Imam, the billionaire warmonger, the middle class gunman, the well educated student who flies the plane, the illiterate bomber on an Israeli bus, the normal looking bloke on a London tube and all the others out there for whom the killing 20 children to get at one infidel is a fair trade. Deep down in our guts I feel most of us know exactly what the binder is, but we dare not speak its name. Some in the West come close but invariably use an endless supply of qualifiers like, extremist, radical, militant and other invented ist’s and ism’s to muddy the waters while appearing to take a stand.

There is a gorilla in the neighbor’s yard that is snatching kids from the sidewalk and devouring their souls and I for one am done enabling the neighbor to live in denial of the monster in the hope that it will one day just wander back off into the hills.

I will stand in the mirror and say Candyman three times. I will call it by its name, and its name is Islam.

New addition

Monday, about 48 hours ago, a line of powerful storms moved through the area. Later in the evening I was picking up downed limbs when I found two of these.


Pinkie day 1.

At first I saw one out of the corner of my eye as Moving Pink Blob which initially triggered a flight response and a general case of the heeby geebies. Upon investigation I quickly ascertained that it was not a threat, picked the little bugger up and put him in a towel near some warmth.

After a search on the internet I learned much about squirrel pinkies. First is that if the mother hasn’t come for them in an hour or two then she isn’t coming. It had been 4 hours since the storm so I was okay. I found out how to hydrate them and that if they’ve fallen form a tree the first 48 hours is critical to them surviving since the pinkies don’t have fully calcified bones and are very susceptible to internal injury.

I went to see if the little bugger would take hydration and found him dead. Then it occurred to me to check for siblings. And I found a second one crawling along.

At first he wouldn’t take anything. Then yesterday morning he took a little hydration and in the afternoon started taking formula. Yes, formula. Now today he is vigorously taking formula and has learned to suck on the eye dropper. He’s made it through the 48 hour period and is eating and pooping, so it looks like I may have a baby squirrel on my hands in a few weeks.


Pinkie at day two.
If he lives I’ll take him to a rehab place so he can be taught how to be a proper wild squirrel and then released. Helen was at first intrigued by the notion of a pet squirrel but quickly came off the idea after I relayed a few stories from the net about just how unglued “tamed” squirrels become after they reach adulthood. But for now he lives in a box on my dresser and strangely enough the cats are completely uninterested in him.

I guess it’s not sporting enough.

Vote for me!

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the presumptive 2008 Democratic presidential nominee, is out stumping – to a hispanic group – to create legislation to allow illegal immigrants to receive reduced tuition at American universities. What the…

Our porous borders are a national disgrace. Our porous borders are helping create an easily oppressed underclass. Our porous borders are a national security nightmare, a ticking time bomb waiting to happen.

Hillary’s answer? Give the illegals access to tuition rates that American citizens don’t. Evil Jeremy moved from Ohio to NC and must fork over “out of state” rates, but if Hilary has her way anyone willing to break US immigration law won’t. A law like her will only embolden more illegal immigration, and offers a financial incentive to those how would enter legally to not do so. The worst though is that her proposed law would create an environment where terrorist operatives that have sneaked into the US could learn more about how to make more effective weapons in our own schools at a subsidized cost that poor Evil Jeremy can’t get to learn about 17th century English literature.

I say, if you aren’t a US Citizen, or have neither a work or school visa then the INS should be waiting for you one the first day of orientation. But then I am just one private citizen more concerned with the health and security of my country than I am about ensuring I get the “hispanic vote”.

Fake car wins show

Many car enthusiasts find themselves living in towns and cities across America where the best they can hope, when it comes to street rods, for is the local “Cruise-in” night. I live on the extreme opposite of the spectrum where my garage is less than one mile from the grounds that host the GoodGuys PPG Nationals. The PPG Nationals with over 6,000 cars covering 360 acres is the largest show for street rods on Earth.

Every year on the weekend after July 4th the streets fill with thundering rolling art. Nearly all of the entries are trailed to Columbus but then must be taken off the trailers and driven into the show. This is the organizers nod to the car being cars and not just works of art.

From the 6,000+ cars in the show one overall winner is selected. The best comparison I can think of would be the Westminster dog show for an idea of just hard it is to win at the PPG Nationals. Many cars get retired from competition or sold after a PPG win. In the past I have always approved of the over all winner, though they might not be my personal favorite. This year, with the crown going to Roy Pigford's 1966 Nova, things have changed.


Roy's impressive, yet not completely all there ride.
I remember seeing this car at the show and I distinctly remember laughing at it. Why? No windshield wipers.

This is akin to ones need to have a willing suspension of disbelief when watching anything but period piece drama movies. Personally I can except quite a bit but once you cross that line, like a band of "evil" ninjas and a dragon defeating the combined modern military might of all the nations on Earth, and the bubble pops it's all over. Sure dragons are tough but what exactly is one 80 foot flying fire breathing lizard going to do against a supersonic F-15 Eagle that can hit it from 20 miles away? The movie never answered that question, it simply dropped you into the “after” world where a mechanized infantry division was match for a band of decidedly bloody ninjas. Right.

For myself cars are to be driven, period. Accordingly certain accommodations need to be made to the gods of practicality to ensure they are drivable. Cars need things to make them fully functional on the road; radiators, brakes, tires and even wipers.


Those bit meaty tires might as well be slicks since this car can't handle the sprinkles.
That the car looks good I won't deny but so do clay design concepts and while his car may still be more practical than a lump of shaped clay without wipers it's just not a real car. Golf carts don’t have wipers.

Just as with the question of the dragon and the F-15 I am compelled to ask, “What do you do when it rains”. There are only two answers to that question. Either, “Pull over and wait.” Or “The car sits in a garage when not as shows, is not ever driven and therefore the question is moot.” In the fist case the answer is simply a unacceptable sacrifice to form at the foot of a rather needed function. If the second answer is the truth then Boo. Boo to you sir.

Undoubtedly there are those out there feeling the need to defend Mr. Pigford’s choice to disable his car, but be wary. I have not claimed he was “wrong” nor have I stated that he shouldn’t have won. My claim is that without wipers it’s not quite fully a car anymore, to say otherwise is pure Sophistry and asking for go-carts on the Interstates.

Notes from HUM111

Today my Humanities class got off to an interesting start with the professor and one other student having a conversation that started with the oppression of women in ancient societies (which is at least relevant to the class) then moved into their personal experiences with marriage and ended with an healthy dollop of anti-war idiocy. After monopolizing the first 20 minutes of class they ended their talk and we as a class then moved onto Oedipus Rex.

Their first two topics I have nothing to comment, as for their views on the Terror War I was dumb founded. Here are their main points, of which they where in complete echo chamber agreement, in no particular order.

1) If the people in Afghanistan and Iraq had wanted to change their governments then they would have done so themselves through peaceful means. By not overthrowing the Taliban or Saddam the people of Iraq and Afghanistan were giving their complicit support to their “leaders” and it was wholly wrong of us to attempt any change.

To believe that one has to have a deep inability to step outside of a narrow jaded Western view were you either “vote the bums out” or shut up about it. As if the people in Iraq or Afghanistan ever (until now) had any say in choosing their form of government. And what of the Northern Alliance that was fighting the Taliban, and had been for years? I guess that comes from the “This fact doesn’t support my thesis so I’ll just ignore it” school of reasoning.

2) Here’s a quote, “More Iraqis are dying each day at the hands of gung-ho American GI’s than Saddam ever killed.” The student stated this and the professor merely nodded her agreement.

Saddam is estimated to have killed over 2 million of his own people during his reign in power. We currently have about 135,000 troops in Iraq. So that means each and every member of the US military is killing at least 15 Iraqis every day. Oh, and Iraq will be totally cleansed in less than a fortnight since the population is only 25 million.

3) The professor finished with the ever so sound logic that since we didn’t go after Stalin, or Pol Pot, or August Pinochet then we had no right to go after Saddam no matter how many people he killed, as long as he confined his murders to his own people.

Sigh.

To be fair the professor is quite old and I feel having a bout with creeping dementia. (she confused the Dardanelles with the Hellespont, pointed to a Thracian village hundreds of miles away from the Hellespont and declared it the site of Constantinople, constantly confuses Greek names – for example referring to Platonian Logic as Homerian Logic and just today stated that Greek theaters where built in “semi-squares”)

Her dementia and lefty thinking conspired to keep my mouth shut. She’s not evil, just old and confused, I shant breath fire on her… I have liberal friends for that.

A message from Greece

I am currently reading Thucydides history of the Peloponnesian War. Just yesterday I came across a passage that gave me chills. The passage is from a speech given by Pericles, in 431 BC, to honor those who had fallen in the first year of the war. The passage reads:

“If we turn to our military policy, there also we differ from our antagonists. We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our openness, trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. In proof of this it may be noticed that the Lacedaemonians do not invade our country alone, but bring with them all their confederates; while we advance unsupported into the territory of a neighbor, and fighting upon a foreign soil, usually vanquish with ease men who are defending their homes. Our united force was never yet encountered by any enemy, because we have at once to attend to our marine and to dispatch our citizens by land upon a hundred different services; so that, wherever they engage with some fraction of our strength, a success against a detachment is magnified into a victory over the nation, and a defeat into a reverse suffered at the hands of our entire people. And yet if with habits not of labor but of ease, and courage not of art but of nature, we are willing to encounter danger, we have the double advantage of escaping the experience of hardships in anticipation and of facing them in the hour of need as fearlessly as those who are never free from them.”

I was stunned by how closely the words of Pericles could be correlated to the US fight against the Islamo-Fascists in the first half and then to the defeatism and attempt at the Vietnamization of the entire War of Terror by both the leaders of the Democratic party and the Main Stream Media in the second half of the passage. You have to admit that it’s rather eerily similar. Though that’s not what gave me the chills. What gave me the chills was the thought, after noticing the similarities, that Athens lost.

UPDATE: I have decided to make this my "official" July 4th post.

Don't get mad, get even.

Just deserts is right.

After a Supreme Court ruling last week that gave local governments power to seize private property, someone has suggested taking over Justice David Souter's New Hampshire farmhouse and turning the property into a hotel.

"The justification for such an eminent domain action is that our hotel will better serve the public interest as it will bring in economic development and higher tax revenue to Weare," Logan Darrow Clements of California wrote in a letter faxed to town officials in Weare on Tuesday.

Why if I had the money I’d try to steal, err, appropriate for the public “good” the houses of all 5 of the justices that voted in the majority. (For more click here)

I would also like to mention that this is the second time in as many weeks that all 4 of the “liberal” judges, including the 3 Clinton appointees, voted in favor of a more powerful government at the expense of the “little guy” the Democrats so lovingly pretend to care about. First all 4 of them decided that states don’t have the right to allow even terminally ill patients access to medical marijuana and now that a city can simply steal privately owned land, peoples homes, and transfer ownership over to a second private party, just so land as the second party will end up paying more taxes.

These are things to consider now that O’Connor is retiring, especially since she did vote for the little guy in both cases.