Parents worst fears.

Yesterday was a day of travel and I got a fairly early start. I didn't even get enough time to take care of internal business before I hit the road.

I was literally sitting on the john at the Sidling Hill rest plaza on I-76 when I heard a conversation that interested me.

"Going to let you kids go trick or treating?" asked one guy to the other.

"Yeah, sure," answered the other.

"Aren't you afraid of some sickie tampering with the kids candy?" the first guy asked.

"My wife asked me about that so I Googled the hell out of it. Believe it or not there are only two confirmed cases of that happening and both of them took place in the '70s" said the second.

That doesn't surprise me very much.

While I didn't search around to see if he was correct, I believe it.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other rumors going through suburbia that have made the rounds and keep returning.

I suppose that after every Halloween the rumor gets restarted after some parent finds a candy bar with a factory torn wrapper on it or some other damned thing and freaks out and calls the police.

The police report it as s suspected case and rumor control confirms it and the paranoia starts back up again. 

My favorite all time rumor was the "Jeeps for $50. They come in a big wooden case and you have to put them together yourself" rumor that has lasted since late 1945. It still pops up from time to time.

I suppose the rumor of poisoning kids candy is one of those things that has kept parents scared spitless for the past 40 years, but I have to give credit to the guy I overheard in the men's room.

He got off of his ass and researched it and found out the truth.









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Let's get our tax money's worth.

There is no reason whatsoever that I shouldn't have the nicest lawn and prettiest flower bed on the block without having to go out and bust my ass to make it happen.

After all, I'm supporting another family with my tax dollars and it isn't right that they sit around and do nothing all day. They ought to send one of these families over to my house to weed, mow my lawn, paint and maintain my place.

In fact there are enough of these people to go around. There are now more people on government assistance than there are people working full time. Every full time worker can have one...or maybe even two if they pay enough in taxes.

It'd be a pretty good deal. I go to work and get to take a break afterwards and not have to bust my ass around the house with household chores and they get to do something to earn the money the government gives them.

I could go to work and come home to lawn looking like a golf course and a home freshly painted every spring. As seen on TV!

It wouldn't be slavery nor involuntary servitude because they could simply leave when they felt like it. Of course, if they did decide to leave they get their governmental benefits taken away but that's their choice.

Getting those that are taken care of by the government tit to do something useful for those that foot the bill isn't a bad deal if you ask me. I wouldn't be as hacked off as I am over getting whacked with taxes if I got something for it. At least I'd be getting something out of my tax money.

Of course, I suppose that it wouldn't last very long. I'd imagine that the people working for us would decide that they could do better somewhere else. They'd simply get a job in the private sector and start taking care of themselves.

Then again that would be OK, too. After all, if they did that I would no longer have to support them.

I suppose if you are on the government tit you don't think this is a very good idea but that's OK. Just feel free to use the piece of mistletoe attached to my shirt tail.

After you finish up painting my house and weeding my flower bed.


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Another trophy story. We may have been financially scratching our a$$ but we looked GOOD.

After I got out of the service I lived pretty close to the earth. I moved into the tipi for about 14 months When I left the tipi there was a period of insane living situations I won't get into here but things eventually settled. I moved into an apartment with a room mate.

It was dead basic spartan place I shared with another vet (a grunt) and anything I had in the way of furnishings was whatever we could dig up. 

The two of us both knew a guy that worked in a trophy place and one night over beers asked him what they did with returns and damaged trophies. He said they threw them away.

I laughed. "Put my name on them and send them here," I said.

The following weekend we scrounged some boards and made a crude set of shelves and over the next couple of months trophies started coming in at a pretty good clip. My roomie and I were surprised.

It was pretty good. I was now a kick boxing champ, a winner of swimming meets, drag races, martial arts showdowns, shooting matches, bull riding contests, marathons, skydiving contests, you name it, I had won it. I was even the hot air balloon champion of New Mexico.

Or at least had the trophy to prove it.

My roomie and I laughed over it and he was amazed that I could keep a straight face when people would ask me if all of the trophies were mine.

"They sure are," I'd reply. It wasn't a lie. The trophies were all mine. They had been lawfully given to me.

If someone asked me if I had WON all the trophies I'd reply, "They're all mine," which again was no lie. They were mine.

It was pretty neat, and to tell you the truth it impressed a lot of the local women that came into the apartment. They were so impressed with the trophy case they didn't even notice the stuffing coming out of the sofa.

When I eventually moved out and headed to Alaska I simply left the for my roomie to use as chick bait and heard later he had gotten a good job somewhere else and moved on.

I suppose they ended up in a dumpster somewhere.

Still, 35 years later it's amusing to look back on because I got the wall full of trophies simply by asking what they did with returns and damaged trophies and asking if I could have them.

I learned that it never hurts to ask.

I also got to see how easily people are fooled with a bunch of foolish shiny trinkets.



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I suppose I'll take a break

 and tell a shooting match story about my trophy.

Many moons ago I realized that I wasn't going to win anything of consequence for reasons I won't get into here. I will say that I am cursed with something that keeps my offhand scores down. I was doing OK in the sitting and prone, though. I did bronze in the Police Olympics our club used to host.

Anyway, I gave up trying to win anything serious but decided that it would make a good tool for self-improvement and decided to work hard have a little fun with it.

I awarded myself a pretty good sized trophy and put it in the blockhouse next to the firing line at the club.

When I would show up for a match I would bring the scorecard from the previous match I shot. If I beat that score I would award myself the trophy and take it home and put it on the mantle. If not, it stayed in the blockhouse.

If I had taken it home, I'd bring it to the next match and put it back in the blockhouse and either award it to myself if I beat the previous score or leave it there if I didn't.

The time I broke my previous record by five or six points was kind of embarrassing beacuse the range officer looked over my shoulder and saw what I had done.

He got everyone's attention and grabbed the trophy and made a big to-do out of it. He got to the blockhouse before I did and grabbed the trophy and started making a big speech as he presented it to me.

Of course, I didn't do as well the next time so the trophy went back in the blockhouse and stayed there for quite some time until I had a good day and took it home again.

I sort of dropped out for a while and the trophy is still in the blockhouse but I'm starting up again and we'll see what happens.

In the meantime I'm shooting a different discipline as my eyesight isn't what it used to be. I'm shooting with glass off of my belly now and enjoying it more.

I now have a small trophy cup, about six inches tall and it stays in my shooting stool with the rest of my kit and when I do well I take it out and put it on my mantle. 

However, these days it is resting on my mantle and will stay there until I go to Quantico again.

Last March I shot at Quantico and in a string of 20, I put 11 of them into the X-ring at 600 yards. Most people were not too impressed until we discovered the guys in the pits hadn't changed the targets over to the 600 yard targets and that my 11 Xes were on a 300 yard target at 600 yards!

When I did that I took the trophy out of my stool and told a couple of the guys I knew that I was permanently putting it on my mantle and there it stays. I may fish it out the next time I go to Quantico, we'll see.

The truth is I don't compete for prizes, trophies, medals or stuff like that. I compete against my last score and enjoy it as a sport for self-improvement.

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I have a friend about my age that has a zero credit rating.

Zero. 

Not good, not bad. We generally agree that having a zero credit rating can be worse than a bad one because one in that situation is a loose cannon.

It probably drives the system nuts. 

He's never had a car payment, never had a mortgage, yet he owns a decent car and has a pretty good place too live. He paid cash.

When he was younger he went to sea and simply stayed there for a while, being frugal while he was on shore leave and when he had enough to buy a place outright he did.

Actually he bought a lot somewhere and built the place with his hands. The lot was located well, too. It was semi rural but eventually it bacame a sparse residential neighborhood and his real estate value went up expoentially.

He also bought a decent used pickup.

The house is a basic place, a simple Cape and eventually he married and raised a couple of kids in it. He still lives there. 

After he had his house built he switched from deep sea and the long deployments and took a pay cut and worked the harbor tugs for the rest of his career. He took a pay cut of sorts but got more time to be with his new wife and kids and to help raise the kids.

The mortgage is the biggest expenditure one generally faces in his life and this guy got his out of the way early by sacrificing things at an early age and going without.

The second biggest expense for a person is generally car payments and this guy planned that one out, too. While he was running his used pickup he simply made an imaginary car payment to his bank account and considered it something he could not skip out on. He was disciplined.

He took care of the pickup and maintained it well and when it finally gave up the ghost he bought a new set of wheels by paying cash. Of course he continued making payments until he needed another car which he paid cash for.

So now here he is, in his mid 60s and has never taken out a loan in his life. He has a credit rating of zero.

Not bad when you think about it.

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Someone once asked me why I write about

 how I get along with the trash guys. They can't see that the trash guys are very important people for a suburbanite to get along with.

This same person is one of those people that look up to the President of the United States as being someone to look up to.

Well, the truth is that the trash guys have done more for me than any president I cam think of. All the presidents have done is cost me money, time, sweat and raise my blood pressure. Some more than others. The one we have now is a barnacle on the ass of progress but let's not go there right now.

All the elected officials do is steal my money. If it isn't through taxation, they steal my savings through inflation. They live and breathe in Washington, DC which isn't a very nice place because it is full of politicians that might breathe on somebody.

They pollute our lives with their bright ideas. Every single one thiks that the way to make a name for themselves is to try and get a law enacted. They seem to forget that the more laws they pass the less freedom we have.

Too bad one of them didn't have the nerve to report back to the people that they had not tried to have a single law enacted, but have had several repealed. I'd vote for a guy like that.

On the other hand the trash guys remove pollution from our lives. They haul off our trash and make life easier for us. They are good people to know and good people to take care of. They actually do something that makes our lives easier and if you are even halfway decent to them they can make your life a lot easier. A simple styrofoam cup of coffee and a good word and they can make that old set of snow tires that have gotten in your way for months simply vanish.

All in all the trash guys do more for making my life easier than any politician that I can think of. That's why I write about the trash guys. They're far more useful to a person than any politician.



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Someone reminded me about the time

 I had the Reverend call me up to ask why the venison we'd feed some homeless guys dried up. If you recall he found out that an anti-gun sermon he made caused it and he wasn't too happy when I told him that actions have consequences.

I was helping out with a rummage sale a year earlier and had to work with a bunch of church ladies, most of whom were actually pretty down to earth.

I posted earlier about the woman that went into panic when someone found a few shotshells in a coat and called the police. That was another joke.

Later she got into a huff about something someone said about the starving people in Africa and asked why we didn't do something.

"Why?" I asked. "The starving people are not going to see a single bite of the food we send there. It's just going to be stolen by warlords to use to feed their armies. They're still in the tribal stage."

"But we could force them to make sure the people get the food," she protested. "We could send people over there."

"Who?" I shot back. "Police Officer Bill with his whistle in his mouth shaking a finger at the warlord telling hem to behave himself?"

"Can't we send soldiers?" she asked.

"Yeah, maybe a couple of Marine Expeditionary Units to sit there and force the people to eat because if they don't the people will take the food and the warlords will simply take it from them. The people know if they don't turn the food over to the warlord they'll be beaten to a pulp."

"Maybe the soldiers could guard the people," she suggested.

"Yeah," I said. "And as soon as our service people start taking casualties you will be the first one to complain about that. The warlords will have their people attacking our service people shortly after they arrive because they won't want to lose face in front of the people."

"Can't we bomb the warlord?"she asked.

"Sure and before he gets cold you can bet someone will step in and it'll be the same. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." I replied. "Look, sometimes there is no solution and you just have to let things go."

"Well, we have to be good Christians," she said.

"Nobody said good Christians have to be stupid," I shot back. "It is just stupidity getting involved there. It would be a case of wasting food, money and American lives."

"We ought to do something," she said.

I grew tired. "Do what? Hey, your grandson is getting to be of military age. Let's send him. He can join the Marine Corps and ship out at the front of it all and make you proud of him...if he doesn't get killed in the process and come home in a box."

Of course she got pretty upset at that thought and started stammering.

"It's different when you send your own over, isn't it?" I continued. "It's easy to spend someone else's money and put someone else's kid into harm's way, isn't it. It's a whole lot different when it's your child they're sending over to a foreign hellhole on a relief mission that's doomed from the beginning, isn't it?

She went into shock and started to well up a bit.

"I thought so," I said and walked off.

There were a lot of people looking at me when walked away. I started going through the books and VHS tapes, looking for porn to weed out. It generally shows up at a rummage sale because people are careless with what they drop off. I found a couple and threw them away.

I knew the women were looking at my back and from a mirror on another table I saw most of them were thinking about what I said.

It was Joyce that spoke to me first. She came up behind me and said, "I see you threw a couple of books out."

"Yeah," I said, cheerfully. "Can't have the church selling a VHS tape of some trashy looking bleached blond having sex with a goat, now, can we?"

She blushed and then grew thoughtful. "Sometimes there's no solution, is there?"

"No, there isn't." I replied. "Smart people try and find one, wise people know better."

She changed the subject. "How do you know about the ammunition Lois found in the coat?" she asked.

I told her I was a soldier once, and I'm a hunter and a shooter. She nodded and asked me if I had been a rifleman.

I grinned. "If I had to use a rifle it meant I hadn't done my job. My job wasn't to shoot the odd enemy soldier. I was trained to engage in wholesale saughter of my fellow man. I was an artillery spotter." I said, dryly.

She left and Dottie came by. Dottie had a few brains, too. She asked me if I'd take a look at the leak in the kitchen sink. She was trying to get me out of there. 

I did and when I found the leak I rooted through the rummage that was out there and found a couple of rolls of black tape and Mickey Moused the drain. They thought that was pretty neat.

While I was finishing the job up Joyce came in. 

"Did you really find a VHS tape of a woman having sex with a goat?" she asked, with a touch of blush.

"Yeah," I said, enthusiastically. "Why? You want it? I'll fish it out of the trash for you!"

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Over the past few years the number of charities I have donated to has gone down.

I attribute a lot of that to organizations getting their monies from the government ot the charities taking a political stand on things.

I used to help out a church out as a volunteer helping out feeding people at a homeless shelter. I was part of a few of us that supplied venison and paid for the processing out of my own pocket.

The instant the preacher started carrying on about trying to outlaw firearms I stopped supplying venison. When the program started taking government money I dropped out altogether. Why bother? They're already getting my money.

The United Way got put on my list of ignored charities a while ago when they dropped the Boy Scouts. It was funny a while ago when someone asked me to donate and I told them that they get nothing from me since they dropped the scouts. He looked confused.

These days about the only thing I do donate to is are the scouts, Girl and Boy. It's realy a shame but when government goes into the charity business it means that charities are already getting my money.

Besides, the more money the governnment takes from me the less I have to give to someone else.

It's a shame but that's the way it is.

Sorry 'bout that.

*************************

A while back I ran into a guy that told me he was hungry. He asked ma for a couple of bucks and told me he wasn't going to spend it on beer. (That's what they all say.)

His pack told me he was on the road and when I asked he told me he was headed to Florida because he had a job lined up there.

I asked him if he'd rather have $2 or $10 worth of food. He opted for the $10 worth of chow which was really the right answer.

It told me he really was hungry. 

There was a market half a block away so I walked down to it with him and we grabbed him about $15 worth of basics that he could eat on the road without cooking.

A lot of the stuff was the kind of food the EBT crowd would turn their noses up at but worked for a guy on the road. Canned stew cold isn't very appitizing but it works when you're hungry. Been there, done that. It works. 

Seeing I was returning to work and heading south I told him to hop into my pickup and took him to an exit that looked hitch hiker friendly and dropped him off.

That is charity.

I don't recall giving him my address but about a month or so later I got an envelope in the mail from Florida with a $20 bill in it and a scrap of paper with 'Thank you' written on it.

That is gratitude.

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Short post

Now I have to sit down at this keyboard and crank out another post in short time because time is short.

One of the things I have noticed about some management types is the way they act around blue collar guys. It's certainly not all management types, but a few of them. They seem to think that guys that work with tools for a living speak in total profanity.

A number of years ago I was working at another job during my time off and wound up working with a sheet rocking crew in a mall. We were remodeling a store in a busy mall. One of the rules is that we were supposed to wait until the mall closed until we hauled our scrap out.

Some dope didn't get the word and hauled a cart out the side door and got caught. Mall management sent someone down to let us know we were not supposed to do that.

The guy they sent down was one of those types that apparently wasn't comfortable around blue collar types and with a particularly foul mouth started talking to us like we were a bunch of second graders.

I really had nothing invested in the job and therefore nothing to lose. I was a day worker and knew that if I got bounced out of the job it just meant I would go home early. In short, I didn't really give a damn.

"Sir," I interrupted. "Most of us here are good Christian men and don't use language like that. Would you please civilize your tongue."

"Yeah, really," added one of the guys. "My mother would have washed my mouth out with soap if I spoke to someone like that."

Of course the man was humiliated and quickly left after mumbling something about hauling our scrap out.

It doesn't take a whole lot to cut a pompous ass down to size.

Of course, after he left we all had a pretty good laugh.






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Most people are unaware

 that our original gun control laws were enacted after the Civil War to keep recently freed slaves from obtaining firearms to protect themselves.

Of course, it made things a whole lot easier for the forces of evil to do what they wanted to the recently freed slaves and for that matter all blacks, including those that hadn't been slaves.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/1/for-some-blacks-guncontroldebateraisesechoesofsegregatedpast.html

It is funny how those supporters of gun control seem to forget a few things like that.

Unarmed blacks were pretty easy to handle and take advantage of. Truthfully they still are, but not because of their color. Unarmed anybodies are easy to push around and intimidate. Armed people are not pushed around as easily.



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Interesting.

This might just be a third party election in 2016.

I just ran a poll on an internet forum I am on fairly often and as I write it looks like a third party candidate has a pretty good chance of winning.

The three choices for POTUS are Hillary, Christie and Jesse Ventura. 

While Hillary and Christie are likely candidates, I simply picked Jesse Ventura out of a hat because he ran for governor in Minnesota on the Reform party ticket and won.

Out of the now 116 votes posted, Jesse Ventura is ahead with 63.8%. Christie has 21.6 and Hillary trails with 14.7%. I expected Hillary to take third place as the internet board is pretty much right of center.

While I do not seriously think that Jesse Ventura is going to run, the point is that people are pretty disgusted with both parties. This election in 2016 very well be an opportunity for the American people to put in a serious third party candidate as there are a lot of people pretty angry at both parties these days.

Frankly I am not surprised as the public has been disgusted for years. There is no party representing the rapidly dwindling middle class. There is the party of the rich and the party of the low-life. 

It's a duel between the fat cats and the Free Stuff Army now and that is simply the way it is. The disappearing middle class, of course, is footing the bill for the FSA and simply can't afford it and the powers that be are taking on massive debt to keep the FSA fed in free stuff.

Something's got to give and it looks like the system is going to implode soon.

I'm 62 in a few days and used to look forward to retirement and don't anymore. Retirement is now something I look forward to with fear and trepidation because I realize that the FSA and their insatiable greed is getting the government to take on more and more debt.

Coupling it with the fed throwing a lot of paper money into the economy and you have a recipe for massive inflation which will steal the savings I have put aside for retirement.

It's a scary time and I see no retirement in sight because of that.

The way to pay off the 17 trillion and growing debt is by inflation and that means the buying power of one's savings dwindles.

Having a million bucks in the bank doesnt mean a whole lot when the price of a loaf of bread is now $2500.

Americans are now looking for someone to step up to the plate and take on things and give us some kind of a hopeful change. 

With both parties putting forth status quo candidates, the time is ripe for someone belonging to neither party to step in.

2016 is some time away but it sure looks pretty good now for a third party to come to life.  






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I am running out of ideas to write about after 1600+ posts

 but I'm sure something will come along and give me something to post about. My nephew said I had more $hit than a Christmas turkey and maybe he isn't off course.

Oh, yeah. I thought of something.

Someone earlier on a forum was telling the rest of us about some activist that would not let him get out of his car to sign a petition. 

Someone else suggested that the person open the window and when the protester stuck their head close enough they poke the protester in the eyes Three Stooges style.

Sounds good to me. I have done this one special time I can remember and it wasn't to get past a protester. It was because someone tried to kick Tokie, my cat.

I will say that Moe Howard taught me a pretty good lesson as did the rest of the stooges. The trick bought me enough time to sack the nasty little thug with a well placed punch.

The Stooges taught me a lot.

Back in the service I sneaked past a guard position during a training exercise using a Stooges trick of hiding behind and rolling a tumbleweed. I led a squad across a field doing that and we got away with it.

Some people say the Stooges are stuid and I suppose they are right. However, i guess I'll just have to say that if something is stupid and it works it isn't stupid.

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Sometimes a bonus isn't a good deal

At a place I worked at many, many years ago they gave a $500 safety bonus if you didn't get hurt or bust something up for the year.

Or supposedly.

Truth is it had nothing to do with safety and everything to do with having just one more thing to hold over a guy's head and threaten to take away from him.

The workplace was somewhat adversarial in that some members of middle management were complete jerks that had a chip on their shoulder towards the guys in the trenches.

They were constantly looking for little reasons to take it away from you and sometimes they would threaten to take the bonus away from an entire crew.

The bonus was nothing but a spiteful tool and when you got down to it, was not worth the time and effort to earn it, or at least I thought so.

You had to fill out a form at the beginning o the year to be eligible and one year I simply threw my form in the trash. Later it came to the attention that I hadn't filled out the form and was handed another one which I instantly balled up and threw away.

"I don't want the $500," I said. "It's not worth the trouble."

The port captain was stunned. "You can't use an extra $500?" he stuttered.

"Nope. It'll put me in another tax bracket," I said. "I can't afford to take it."

He didn't know what to say and eventually someone else started pushing me to sign up and I refused, citing the tax bracket fib I had told the other guy. He persisted and I threatened to take the issue to the union. They relented.

(I always wonder how the union would have handled someone that didn't want $500 from the company)

Some time several months later one of the adversarial middle management types came looking to start something with anyone and I happened to be handy. He was upset because I was holding a paint brush in the wrong hand or something meaningless and told me that if I didn't shape up I'd lose my bonus.

I shot back that I wasn't getting one to begin with because I hadn't signed up for it. They could keep the money because it wasn't worth the trouble.

He went into shock and wandered off stunned.

My shipmates asked me what that was all about and I explained to them that I had refused to sign up for the bonus because I was tired of having it thrown in my face all the time.

Some of them thought I was crazy that I would refuse $500. Others thought I was pretty sly. They figured out that I had an interesting plan. I told them about if a lot of people refused to sign up for the bonus they would likely stop throwing threats to take it away from us every five minutes.  

At the end of the year they paid me the $500 anyway. I took the check to payroll and explained I was ineligible as I had not filled out the paperwork and the payroll lady simply told me to take it. I refused and put the check on her desk and walked off.

Five minutes later my port captain was begging me to take the check and I simply tossed it in the wastebasket and walked off. He fished it out and then both my port captain and my port engineer chased me down pleaded with me to take the money.

I told them I would take the check and cash it only after I had checked with my accountant. Of course I took it and laughed all the way to the bank.

A couple of weeks later the forms came out again and I tossed mine as I had done the year before. This year I was not alone. Over 20% of them were not filled out and the office kept resending them and demanding they get filled out or you would not get your bonus.

On a couple of tugs the forms were tossed out by the entire crew. Port captains that chased people down were told by crew members that their tax people told them not to accept the bonus.

On one tug the port captains boarded and demanded they fill out the forms they were met by steadfast refusal to sign up for the bonus program. Finally they gave up and left.

During the year they stopped threatening to take the bonus away from people as a threat and at the end of the year everyone got one if they had signed up or not. I quietly took mine but several guys (cleverly) complained bitterly about having $500 forced upon them.

A couple of weeks later the forms came out again and everyone quietly filled them out and turned them in, but this was different because management started using the bonus as a positive tool instead of a negative one and things went along a lot smoother with less resentment.

Some of the lessons learned are that when someone gives you something he can threaten to take it away from you.

When you refuse to accept something from someone he has nothing he can take away from you and he loses that power over you.

The loss of $500 wasn't worth being threatened constantly over when you looked at the big picture.



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The TEA party is headed down the tubes

One of the things I have noticed about the Tea Party is that the usual gang of moral policemen have jumped on the bandwagon and are trying to impose their morals on everyone else.

While I admit that I have a beef with a handful of the gay community over one issue, most are free to go in peace and do whatever it is they want to do behind closed doors. Government has no business entering the house of the good American citizen without a warrant based on the proper procedure.

The Tea party is pretty much doomed because of that. Nobody likes being told what they can and can't do behind closed doors. Yet the usual gang of self-righteous people have hopped aboard.

Women do not like having people tell them what to do with their reproductive systems. Personally I am no fan of abortion but I'll be damned if I'm going to tell a woman how to run her reproductive system. It's between her, her physician and her maker. Many woman that would never have an abortion under any circumstances feel the same way. They don't like being told how to run their bodies.

Come to think of it, I don't think govermnent has a whole lot of business telling women what to do with their bodies in general. If they want to rent them out it's their business.

The TEA party had a pretty good chance of survival a while back before Bachman and Santorum and company decided to hop on the bandwagon and drag their family values into things.

Just about every time I see the term 'family values' I want to ask, "Who's family? The Addams Family?"

While I agree that liberal policies have had a lot to do with the destruction of the American family as we used to know it, I have to admit that people do have the right to have whatever kind of family they want.

The truth is that the way I see it the TEA party isn't going to last very long because of everyone dragging their moral values into it and demending other people live that way.

What is needed now is a party that is more like the TEA party was a couple of years ago when it began.

A party based only on a return to a Constitutional based government and financial responsibility.

We are going down and going down fast because of two things. We have spent ourselves into murderous debt and we have started to stray from the Constitution.

I am very willing to overlook a lot of repugnant things to achieve that.




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The truth is that the money

 one has saved goes down in value as the dollar inflates.

One of the things I keep hearing is that the fed is putting a pretty hefty amount of money out to keep the economy rolling which is no surprise.

They just keep pumping more and more money into the system and it lowers the value of the once proud dollar.

It seems to be rapidly getting to the point where it isn't really worth it to save money. The dollar I saved in 1960 is worth about 12.6 cents today, not including interest. At 5% over that time I would have about $3.65.

When you consider that the $7.90 I saved in 1960 would be worth $1.00 today I'm losing money.

Since about 1793 until the 30s and FDR gold stayed at about $20 an ounce and the dollar was pretty damned stable. If you saved a buck, over time you saved a buck and that didn't count interest. You could loan your money out and get ahead.

These days at 5% over time you are still losing 54% of the value of your money over time.

I am not an economist or an investment banker but it sure looks to me like saving money is a pretty lousy investment unless you can find some sort of a way of getting a damned good return on your money.

For years the epitome of having amassed a fortune was to make a million bucks but these days having a million bucks saved for retirment is a shaky thing at best with inflation on the rise. The million bucks isn't going to last someone their lifttime if inflation eats it away. The way things look we're headed straight for it at runaway rates.

Anybody that does their own food shopping can see it every time they go to the grocery store if they even pay the smallest amount of attention. Prices are climbing at a pretty alarming rate.

I grub shop for the boat and I used to buy all of the grub we needed and have some money left over to split up with the guys. These days the extra money simply isn't there to be split and it won't be long before we're going to have to start paying for part of the grub bill out of our own pockets. Actually, to an extent, we are now. Any middle of the trip extras come out of out pockets.

A couple of the younger guys have asked me for advice and I really don't have much to give them. I suppose that one could spend his money on tools and other durable goods so they can have them as they age. When an economy goes sour you have to be able to take care of yourself. Tools enable one to do this.

Simply saving money seems like a losing deal to me. I suppose if you just spend it on hookers and blow you'll at least have the memories to look back on you when you get old.

Truth is I don't know what to tell younger people anymore.

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One of the few mistakes

 the geniuses that created this country made was they allow just about anybody to vote.

As I sit here I can see that there are an awful lot of people permitted to vote that have nothing invested in this country.

In fact, there are a lot of people that are nothing more than leeches and have no business being given the right to vote. They have nothing invested in the country whatsoever. They serve only to drain our coffers.

The first requirement should be American citizenship, either by birth of naturalization. Illegals and non citizens have no business voting in American elections. 

Sufferage should have been limited to contributors and should be denied anyone on relief because it is plain and simple that someone on relief can't take care of themself. If they can't even take care of themselves there is no way they should be permitted to have a say so in how the taxes they add nothing to are spent.

There also should be a basic educational requirement, too because if you can't get a basic high school education in this country you're too ignorant to vote. After all, a high school education is free.

I suppose a lot of people will cry that it isn't fair limiting sufferage to contributors, but it it's also unfair to permit people that are getting aid and sucking from us to vote themselves a raise. In short, they have no investment in the nation. They serve only to drag the rest of us down to their level.

Still, when you see someone go down to the section 8 housing and load a bunch of vans it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that it is just another case of leeches going to the polls to drag the rest of us down. They'll do this by voting to increase their welfare benefits at the expense of the rest of us.

These people do nothing whatsoever to put anything into the cofffers of the common good. They only draw from the rest of us that do add to the coffers.

Sufferage should be limited only to the people that put into the pot and denied those that draw out. 

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Tough teachers TEACH.

I listen to teachers go on and on about how they contribute to the well being of society and yada yada yada but in this day and age there are very few teachers in the business that are worth a kettle of over ripe fish.

I look back on my public school education and there are few teachers I considered worth their salt.

Yet after I got out of high school I started running into a lot of damned good teachers. A lot of these teachers barely had high school diplomas and one or two of them likely didn't even have that. One of my favorite ones was a guy that had a 6th grade education and taught spherical, trig and physics. He was a character and sounded like a hillbilly of sorts. 

People that sold him short were humbled pretty quickly. I saw this sergeant totally humiliate a pompous major by simply asking him a simple question.

I screwed around in community college after high school and the teachers there were so unremarkable I don't really even remember many of them but I can sure remember a teacher I met shortly after.

His name is Staff Sergeant Sylvester Mack and I figure he was just another high school grad that found a home in the army. His job when I met him was to teach a bunch of semi literate kids to become soldiers and he did one hell of a job.

He was ruthless, loud, profane, physical and accepted nothing but perfection. He took people of all backgrounds and did whatever it took to turn us into soldiers. He demanded perfection and got it simply because he would tolerate nothing less.

He wasn't too generous with the  compliments so when you heard him roar, "Outstanding, troop!" you felt pretty damned good about yourself.

While I did well in basic training, I well remember that he took some of the slower recruits and pushed them. I remember hearing him tell one guy "You don't think you have what it takes to be a soldier, but I do! We're going to turn you into one!"

He did, too. The kid turned out pretty good after he got the hang of things. When you think about the fact that there were quite a number of borderline Special Olympians in the platoon that he managed to teach it is nothing short of a miracle. 

I remember him shouting, "You can do that, Trainee! You don't think you can but I know you can! Now do it!"

To this day I use things I learned from him on a daily basis.

I was gabbing with another guy about my age about school and he told me about one of his science teachers that got his attention. Seems my friend was having a bit of trouble understanding dissapated energy and absolutes.

The teacher suspended a steel ball from the ceiling and dragged him up in front of the class. He swung the ball up and placed it against my friend's temple, held his head in place and let the ball go.

It swung to the end of its arc and returned toward its starting place and ended its swing about an inch away from my friends head and started the backswing away from him.

My friend laughed and said it was one lesson he's never forgotten and the way I look at it the teacher did one hell of a job.

I asked him if his parents ever found out about it and he told me he never bothered to tell them, but if they had found out they wouldn't have said anything.

Of course, the teachers of today would be appalled to watch some of these guys teaching that way in this day and age, but those that criticize really ought to keep quiet or get a towel to wipe the egg off of their faces because the system worked.

The teachers I learned from were not all military instruuctors. There were a lot of civvie teachers I've seen that are excellent. I took a firefighting course that had a great pair of teachers, a man and a woman. Both of them were very hands on. They started that class with a demonstration that made us pretty uncomfortable to get our attention.

That class was half classroom, half doing field work putting out fires. I remember that they allowed me to experiment. I held off opening my hose until well past overflash and the whole class was screaming at me to knock the fire down and get it over with. 

I kept asking for the OK to hold off a little and my teacher agreed. he said it would serve to show the class something.

I waited and finally just gave a quick, short squirt of couple of gallons of high velocity fog from the nozzle and we all marveled at the way the heat turned the water to steam and knocked the fire down quickly.

I learned a lot that day.

Another day I learned something was when I was learning to call in artillery fire in the service. I had taken a piece a bit too big to swallow by calling in 155s too close.

The sergeant took the radio from me and told them to hold off a minute, did some fast mental arithmitic and called them back and told them to fire the mission correction I had called in. He also told everyone to hunker down and in a few seconds the impact of the huge rounds shook our fillings out.

He told the class that calling the guns in that close was suitable for a combat emergency only and that everyone had to be dug in beforehand. He explained to the class that I had called the guns in too close for training purposes.

He went on to explain that the reason he allowed the mission to be fired is because the guns were pointed at us and therefore there was no danger from a short round.

We all learned a lot that day.

The best teachers are the ones that give you the basic  information and then make you produce. They let you experiment. They give you the know how to do something and make you do it. They get angry with you when you don't put 100% into something, cheer you on when you try and share your victories.

The VERY best teachers are the ones that make you THINK.




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A quick post

A couple of days ago I drove past a federal park and it looked like a large motorcycle club had decided to open it on their own. God Bless them.

Right now I am thinking that it is time to tar and feather 537 people, meaning the president, the veep and all of congress. All of them and then have the governors replace them with people that are not political animals. 

If such and such a state sends senators with previous political experience than tar and feather them, too. Then we can reelect a normal citizen as president.

Congress is no place for politicians, it is a place where successful people from around the country can serve as a way of paying back the country for their success.

The first thing the new congress can do is to appeal the laws that make them exempt from the laws they pass. The second thing is pass a Constitutional amendment making it so congress is subject to all laws they pass.

Watching Martha Stewart sit in jail for something congressmen can do with impunity just isn't right. (Even though I am no fan of Martha Stewart)

There is a Chinese restaurant nearby owned by an immigrant. He has two restaurants,, one is downtown and I guess a lot of federal employees eat there.

On 9-11 a Federal agent walked in and asked him if he could go to the site of the flight 93 crash and set up shop to feed the crews involved in the investigation and he promptly shut his doors, rented a couple of trucks, packed up and went.

When it was over he conveniently FORGOT to send the government a bill. He paid for the whole thing out of his pocket. He told me it was his way of paying the country back for allowing him to be successful.

THAT'S the kind of guy I want in congress, a man that wants to serve the people instead of have the people serve him.

Tar and feather them ALL.





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Yesterday I met a kindred soul.

He was a guy that has a camp in the rural part of the state and it's pretty much self sufficient.

He built a pretty good rifle range on it and hosts a few matches each year. The place didn't start out as a rifle range, though. The neighbor nearby got that started by being a jerk.

When he moved into the acreage the neighbor came by and told him that a right away for power was going to cost him dearly. It was outright extortion and the camp owner refused to be taken advantage of. He simply bought a generator.

Later when the neighbor complained about him sighting in a deer rifle he simply decided to open a rifle range and sponsor a couple of matches every year. The matches are open to any legal firearm, and the policy seems to be the noisier, the louder, the better.

Of course, the neighbor has called the police any number of times, but no laws have been violated and the police generally hang around and watch the festivities. Several times they have complimented people  on the way the range is run.

I will admit that I love to see the laws of unintended consequences play itself out.

The clown wanted to play his new neighbor for a sucker and wound up getting blighted as a result.

Frankly I don't think the camp owner went far enough, though. I would have found a motorcycle club and rented the camp to them once a month for a nice weekend bash.


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An interesting day at WallyWorld.

Yesterday was a shopping day and I was wandering around the aisles lost because they change everything around all the time to make you walk through the store and buy impulse goods.

A young lady about thirteen or fourteen accidentally bumped into me and immediately apologized politely.

"Apology accepted. Someone raised you right. Your mother ought to be proud of you," I said and her face lit up.

I turned and there was a woman in her forties looking at me curiously. "Are you this young woman's mother?" I asked.

She said she was.

"You're doing one fine job raising her and you ought to be proud of yourself. Polite peope are a joy to meet and are getting increasingly rare." I said to her and watched her face light up.

"Incidentally, I'm not a kissass," I added. "Recently I stopped being nice and started to speak up. You earned what I said."

A couple of minutes someone was griping to a stocker that the EBT cards were not being accepted. 

Someone interrupted and told the griper to get a job.

The griper looked offended and looked in my direction for support but got none because I was laughing too hard.

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Well, it looks like the Republicans are caving in on Obamacare.

Oh, well. I expected no less.

People get upset over gridlock, but the truth is I like it because it means that Congress won't do any more damage.

One of the things I saw happening is the president showed what a mean spirited, petty little tyrant he is. When the government shut down he ordered his people to make the shutdown hurt for the little guy.

The park service actually removed the handles from drinking fountains. That's pretty low. 

I have not gotten reports of park service toilets being closed, though. I wonder it they had enough stupidity to do that, though. The results of that trick generally are not too pretty and it costs a lot more to clean up after something like that after the fact.

Fact is the majority of the people in this country do not want Obamacare. 

In fact there are an awful lot of people in this country that are getting fed up with the way the government handing out money to people that do nothing to earn it.

As of now there are a lot of people out there with a few brains that have decided not to pursue a career in medicine just because of this. Pay now or pay later.

Oh, well. I'm getting old and with any luck I won't be around to see what kind of a damned mess my generation has made of our great nation as the whole thing caves in.

There is an unused bucket of roofing tar in my basement and I think I am going to buy an old feather pillow somewhere and when I do I am going to make a provision in my will that they are free to anyone that wants to use it on a politician. 






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Obamacare, People are now thinking about it

http://dcclothesline.com/2013/10/08/democrat-voters-confused-i-didnt-realize-i-would-be-the-one-who-was-going-to-pay-for-it-personally/

You were expecting a free lunch?

Surprise! There's no such thing as a free lunch. Somehow, somewhere along the line someone is paying for it.

I suppose a lot of people think it's OK to have someone else pay, though.

The person griping about this can take her mask off because she ain't the Lone Ranger.

I have already heard a number of stories from a lot of other  people telling about how their insurance policy premiums were going through the roof.

Why am I not surprised?

This, of course, is called the AFFORDABLE Care Act.

Affordable for who?

Affordable for the Free Stuff Army, the group in this country that is driving us to the poorhouse and working overtime to collapse the middle class.


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ANyone out there a computer whiz?

This machine is acting up and needs to have someone go through it.

I'm done after about a week of flailing weeds and knocking down a year's worth of briars, brambles, weeds and other growth and the way-back has a peaceful look to it.

As I sit here with the rig on monitoring the YL net I see that propagation is weird today.  I can't seem to get down to Alabama to say hello to the Mouth of the South, one of the YLs there that is funny. She actually answers to that name proudly. She has a good voice for this hobby and is a good operator.

I used her QSL card when I turned in mine for my Worked All States award. It's a pretty card.

Last winter she told me to send her some snow but it was a mild (read GOOD) winter so there wasn't really enough to do it right. 

I would imagine she would flip if she got a Styrofoam box full of snow kept cold with dry ice.

If any of you out there are hams and are familiar with the YL system I'll pass on that Jda has had a stroke and it's going to be a while before we hear her back on the air. If any of you hams out there want to send her a card, her call is KB5YQ.

Back to the yard which looks great. I busted my ass for an entire week to get things looking good down there. A few falls ago Mrs Pic busted her ass for a couple of months to turn it into a fairy land and the following summer it grew in again. I whacked the weeds and have done so every fall since. She made it look good and I like it that way.

What happens in the spring is that things grow, new, fresh things and the grass on the hill grows up nicely and gives the deer a nice place for does to have their fawns. They have done so for the past few springs. It's nice seeing a doe give birth about 50 feet from where I am sitting now.

In other news I'm going to have to cut this short because I have to get some blood work done. I can't have breakfast until they finish drawing blood.

Maybe when I get home I'll start cooking ribs or something. We'll see. 



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Getting testier and testier

Sometimes it just takes time.

I looked at the spot that the old goat griped about last spring when I tore out the hedges. He said it looked like hell.

I told him to go to hell and mind his own business.

Someone commented that the gravel I bought last summer and put in the driveway looked sort of dirty.
I said it sure did look muddy.

Today I walked in the driveway and looked at the spot where the hedge used to be and the gravel under my feet.

I remembered filling in the holes that used to be the hedges and planting grass seed on it and I remembered spreading out the gravel in the driveway.

The old hedgerow looks like part of a golf course and the gravel looks bright and clean.

All it took was time, the rain, the wind and the sun.

Sometimes there is no use busting your ass when you can just let time and the elements do their job.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&


I have observed that the public is getting testier and testier.

I am no exception as I have come damned close to people that dawdle and pay for their purchases with an EBT card. They can have my money or they can waste my time, but not both.

Anyway, I was paying for my purchases, milk, coffee and some fish. The clerk asked me if I wanted to add a buck to my purchase for the United Way. The United Way has been on my list of ineligible for my money charities for some time now.

 I cheerfully told her to get it from President Obama. She grinned.

Out of nowhere, the person I had noticed come up behind me in line told me I was mean.

I turned my head and saw she was some mouthy hippie college chick and didn't bat an eyelash.

"Why don't you buy yourself a new pair of shoes," I said. "There's a blacksmith down the street on the right and he's open until six."

The soccer mom behind her didn't hide anything. She outright broke out laughing.


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I just had an old classmate Facebook post that in about 1915

 or some such time that we paid no income tax, had no debt and everything was paid for.

Really. Who would have ever thought!

Of course he failed to mention that in 1915 we had no social security, no welfare, no section 8, no EBT, no department of education there were a whole lot of every other kind of things we didn't have.

Of course, back then we had something we don't have now.

We had people that knew how to take care of themselves. We were a self-reliant breed then and a proud people.

These days we're getting pretty damned dependent of the government.

What we need now is a dictatorship with me as the dictator.

I'd have the American people back to being self reliant in about two seconds. I'd simply do away with about 90% of the government bureaucracies, all government assistance and sit back and watch the ensuing rioting.

Then I'd simply tell the rioters they can now sleep in the ashes. 

It'd take a generation or two but I would imagine the people would get back .

They'd have to.


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People are pretty ignorant

This morning I had to make a call for an appointment to have someone drop by the house to take some sort of a meter reading. They had scheduled the appointment for a time that I would not be there to let them in.

I explained that I was a merchant mariner and that I would be at sea. The woman asked if there was any way I could sneak home.

"I suppose I could jump over the side of the ship, swim 3200 nautical miles to Hawaii and catch a plane." I said, dubiously.

"Oh, that would be nice," she replied.

"Can I speak to your supervisor? You are so polite and I want him to know they have the right person for you job." I asked.

"Oh, that's all right," she replied.

"Please get me your supervisor. Now." There was ice in my voice.

The phone rang and the supervisor answered.

"Your idiot expects me to jump off the side of an underway ship, swim 3200 miles to Hawaii and catch a plane home so I can be there for the annual meter reading," I said. "Apparently she is either too lazy or stupid to reschedule."

"What!?" he said, somewhat dumbfounded.

"I explained to her that I was a merchant mariner and would be at sea at the scheduled meter checking time. She asked me is I could sneak ashore for a while and I told her I'd have to swim to Hawaii and catch a plane and she seemed good with that," I explained.

"Idiot," he said. "Give me your name and address and I'll pull up your file." 

I gave him the necessary and he pulled my file up and looked at it.

"When would be the best time for you?" he asked.

"The sooner the better," I answered.

"I was in the Navy for 4 years," he said. "How's about oh-nine hundred tomorrow?"

"That's a done deal," I replied.

"I guess I have to teach the woman about sailors and truckers," he said.

"Yeah. Get a map of the world or a globe and a little toy ship and explain that they make all of the stuff she buys at Wallyworld in china and he has to come over across the ocean. I said. Go 'toot, toot' as you drag the little boat across the map. When she asks where we sleep tell her Tom Bodett leaves the light on for us."

I suppose I ought to get a little truck and map of the US to teach her about truck drivers," he said and laughed.

"Sounds about right," I answered. and we ended there.









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Sometimes I can't lose for winning.

Yesterday the lawn mower crapped out on me in the back yard so I decided to take a look at it. I'm generally pretty good with things but when I removed a couple of bolts they were awfully long and the minute they came out several layers of parts, including the carburetor fell off into a pile on the mower deck.


I seriously considered throwing the whole damned thing away. In the meantime I wondered what to do about the way-back part of the yard I was cleaning up.

Later on that evening I was visiting a friend and mentioned what had happened and he offered me an old mower. "It ran the last time I used it," he said.

"Where was that?" I asked, dryly. "Appomattox Courthouse to give General Lee a nice place to surrender at?"

"It's been a while," he confessed but it ran OK and you're welcome to it. Try using ether to get it going."

Figuring I had nothing left to lose, I took it.

The next morning I went to the auto parts place and bought a new plug for the mower I had been given the night before along with 4 cans of starting ether.

When I got home I changed the plug, filled the tank with fresh fuel,  squirted a shot of ether into the carb and yanked the cord several times. It lit up and ran for about 10 or 15 seconds. I looked and saw fuel leaking out of the carb and wrote the mower off as junk.

Later in the morning I was running an errand and passed a shop that had a reputation for being gougers but on impulse stopped in anyway. Seems they had new management or something. I described the problem to the guy who stopped me about halfway  and said, "Sounds like a job for the carburetor queen." 

In a second I was describing the problem to a little redhead girl and she simply told me that I needed a new carb and that it looked like a $50-$60 job.

I looked at her hands and they were dainty, small fingered and nimble and knew that she was likely a girl with a mechanical bent and good hands for small parts. I wished my doctor's hands were that small.

I went home and tossed the mower in the back of the pickup and dropped it off after she said it looked like it would be good to go on Monday.

Two hours later I got a call to pick up the now repaired mower and 

I did and took it home.

When I got it home I put it in the garage and looked at the old mower I had been given and had given up on. I noticed that the mower deck had dried off and curiosity overwhelmed me. I looked in the gas tank and it was half full. 

The carb wasn't leaking. I grabbed the starting cord and gave it a half hearted pull and the mower lit right off and ran like a top. I let it run a while and if ran like a top.

I can't win some days and I can't lose other days.

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WHat I can't figure out is how people think a government is capable

of handling health care I can't understand it.

The government has screwed up just about everything thy have laid their hands on and botched it up big time.

Have any of you ever tried using one of those government mandated gas cans? That's a fine example of Uncle Sam screwing up another free lunch by asking for change

I just wish the government would go back to taking care of what is should be taking care of and it is not us as individuals.

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One of the reasons I am not a cop

 is that recently a principal asked a cop not to drop his kid off in uniform. Apparently the parents were upset because the cop had a gun. They expect a police officer to carry a feather duster?

I guess you can't fix stupid.

Strangely enough, for some unfathomable reason, most police departments allow their officers to get married. On top of that they are even permitted to have children. Who would have ever thought such a thing?

Of course, a policeman's uniform doesn't fit in very well with what many parents wear when they drop their kids off. For one thing, it's not sleepwear. For another thing it's pressed and neat so I suppose a cop dropping his kid off sticks out like a sore thumb.

It is stuff like this that makes me glad I am not a cop because I would be fired inside of a week.

I have no children, but if this happened to a fellow officer I would most likely be on my way to making a pair of Academy awards. I'd find the skinniest, most bullied kid on my beat and talk to the parents and offer to take him to school in my squad car.

Picture this: The kid hops in front and a couple of blocks away jumps in back and puts on a pair of handcuffs. We reach the school and Officer Piccolo jerks the kid roughly out of the car and starts removing the handcuffs.

"Now get into the classroom and learn something. The next time you stick an ice pick in someone's ribs you ain't gonna get to go to school. You're gettin' hard time! Now GIT!"

Followed by a boot in the ass to send him on his way.

When school lets out I'd pick the kid up.

He comes up to the car looking full of fear and trepidation. The kid is shaking like a leaf.

"Hands on the car, feet spread!"

Officer Piccolo kicks his feet out so he's precariously balanced, frisks him and finds a pencil.

"You kept this just to stick it in my ribs, Didn't you, boy!"

"No, no!" screams the kid. "I need it to do my homework!"

"Yeah, right!" shoots back Officer Piccolo. "Get in there!" and he starts to stuff the apparently hapless kid into the back seat making it look like he cracked his hear on the door frame.

"Ow!!" shouts the kid.

"You trying to grandstand me, boy!" snaps officer Piccolo.

"No!" shouts the terrified kid.

This is followed by a nightstick blow that hits a pad hidden and a loud crack is heard.

Piccolo stuffs the kid into the back of the car, climbs in and roars off.

Two blocks later, he tosses the handcuff keys back to the kid.

"Take the cuffs off and climb up in front," says Officer Piccolo. " Nice job, Kid! An Academy Award performance! You ought to be in Hollywood. Where we goin' for ice cream before I drop you off?"

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html