Happy Birthday, Steve!

My younger son Steve drew his first breath on Oct. 31, 1970.

He’s grown into a fine man, good husband and terrific father and I’m very proud of him.

They know what (or who) they like

Here are a couple of signs (boxed in red) that I noticed on the door of a rural Mississippi gas station where we refueled en route to Sturgis, Miss., yesterday.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of these “We have the right to refuse service to anyone” signs, but they were not uncommon – even in Indiana – when I was a kid in the 1950s. I remember seeing one in a little café on Main Street in Delphi, Ind.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it was code for “We don’t serve black people (or any other racial or ethnic group we don’t like).”

The “No sagging” sign refers, of course, to the fashion statement adopted by many black youth of wearing their pants below their underwear line.

The place also sells guns, ammo and fishing supplies.

Amazing day

I rode shotgun with BMW friend Charlie Parsons today as we drove 244 miles down to Sturgis, Miss. and Craig Vechorik’s Bench Mark Motors to pick up Charlie’s 1939 BMW R12.

The bike needed transmission work and new tires and, in the process, Craig fixed a whole bunch of other things that weren’t right, including the exhaust headers that didn’t let the centerstand fold up properly.

Vechorik is the premiere restorer of pre-1970 BMW motorcycles and his personal collection is a wondrous thing to behold.

The first thing I noticed when he led us into his display room was this 1942 R75 with sidecar done up in the livery of the Craig Vechorik's 1942 BMW R75 in the livery of the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

It’s painted a panzer gray with a special flat finish paint.

 

Here’s the distinctive sign out front of Craig’s place.

Somewhere, Charles Kuralt is smiling

Reality can be scary

It’s so easy to think of abortion as a women’s rights issue… until you confront the reality of this callous and cowardly destruction of human life.

I’m not going to waste my vote on Randall Terry, but I applaud his crusade against abortion.

GTFO, U.N. observers–you have no authority here

The United Nations plans to send 44 election observers to look for human rights violations all over the U.S. on Nov. 6.

Texas has already said they’ll be arrested and jailed if they try to interfere with the voting process in the Lone Star state.

They apparently don’t know we invented the concept of modern free and democratic elections.

No Arkansas cities are on the list, but they apparently think voting in Indianapolis bears watching.

Here’s the list of observers and cities.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/110874123/United-Nations-Election-Observer-Deployment-2012

I fervently hope President Romney will get us out of the U.N. and get the U.N. out of the United States.

We’ve seen this before…

This is how a cult of personality works. In Germany, they called it the Führer Principle.

Close, but no cigar

Scrolling through my online copy of the Carmel Pine Cone this morning, I noticed this story about the Nov. 1 performance of the perennially reconstituted Glenn Miller Orchestra in Pacific Grove, Calif.

Unfortunately, whoever put the page together didn’t realize the photo of Glenn Miller isn’t Glenn Miller at all.

It’s a promotional still of Jimmy Stewart in the title role of the 1954 movie, “The Glenn Miller Story.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when your staff is too young to know the difference between one of the most famous actors of the 1940s and ‘50s and one of the most famous big band leaders of the 1940s. And this is why you need older eyes to look for details like this before you go to press.

I suspect the paper has already been deluged with reader comments about this gaffe.

Here’s the photo of Glenn Miller that the Stewart pose copied:

WTF?

I just got a look at the way the presidential candidates will be displayed in the voting machines for my county and am wondering how the order was decided.

Obama is listed first and Romney is listed fourth out of five. The candidates are not arranged alphabetically by name or by party.

Who the hell came up with this arrangement?

More straight talk from Clint

Nasty

I bought a two-pack of Hostess Cupcakes yesterday as a dessert for my Subway sandwich.

I imagined I was in for a rich chocolaty treat because they look so damned inviting.

I was wrong. It tasted flat and nasty. So nasty that I threw the second cupcake away.

It was a singularly unsatisfying experience.

No wonder the Hostess Company filed for bankruptcy – for the second time in two years – in January.

Ever use one of these?

This is a Keuffel & Esser slide rule, just like the one I have in a box in my closet and am too lazy to drag out and photograph.

I’ve had it since my high school days when my physics and chemistry teacher Charles Geheb taught us how to use this handy little calculating device. Serious science geeks wore one of these on a belt scabbard, just like an SA or SS dagger in the Third Reich.

The reign of the slide rule as a scientific calculating tool ended abruptly in 1972 with the introduction of the HP-35 pocket scientific calculator by Hewlett-Packard. My brother-in-law Bob Teerman was in architecture school at Purdue University at the time and had the first HP-35 I ever saw. I recognized it as the breakthrough product that it was at the time.

I’m hanging onto my old K&E slide rule out of nostalgia and the realization that it doesn’t need batteries and will still be functional if a nuclear magnetic pulse or solar storm wipes out all of our electronic devices.

Poor sensitive, neurotic Pete

Pete, who will be seven next month, is the sweetest, most affectionate dog I’ve ever known.

He was born Nov. 6, 2005 on a farm just outside Crawfordsville, Ind. His dad was a miniature Australian shepherd and his mom was a full-size Aussie. We brought him home six weeks later on Dec. 17. He was Maria’s Christmas puppy and was full of fun. He drove Ruthie, our older dog, crazy but probably added some years to her life by forcing her out of her couch potato ways.

But Pete has always been timid and easily spooked. Maybe if he’d had a few more weeks with his mom and his littermates he would have had more confidence.

Over the years, he developed some quirks, like studying the sky and going into a frenzy of barking if a jet contrail defaces an otherwise clear blue sky. And when he hits the back yard, he almost always heads for a spot on the chain link fence on the west side of the yard where he bites the fence and barks hysterically for a minute or two.

He has also developed a habit of pacing back and forth on the back porch, peering into the dog-level windows at us and barking non-stop.

We’ve worried that his barking is disturbing the neighbors and one of them mentioned it the other night.

So Maria determined we need to fit Pete with a bark collar that will shock him into comparative silence.

We used one of those on Ruthie and she resented the hell out of it. In fact, she went up to our bedroom and pissed on our bed in protest. Fortunately, it was a waterbed and was easily cleaned, but we got the message and used it sparingly.

I think we sold that bark collar, or it quit working and got thrown away. Anyway, I found a $120 unit on sale for $26.99 at SportsmansGuide.com today and ordered one.

I wish it hadn’t come to this because I’m afraid that Pete will decide we don’t love him anymore. Yes, he’s that sensitive.

So I’m going to let Maria put the thing on him. I don’t want my little buddy to blame me for it.

Foward, indeed

The compound stupidity is amazing. Who’s the bigger moron – the person who produced a bunch of Obama t-shirts misspelling “FORWARD,” or the unconscious sheep who are willing to wear them in public? Or the rally organizer who put them behind the speaker?

Or maybe it’s ebonics.

I can hear Liberal heads exploding already…

This piece in American Thinker by Steven Rittenberg, M.D., should be required reading for every Liberal. An excerpt:

An important aspect shared by liberalism's true believers is their self-flattering conviction that they are good, smart, better in every way than non-liberals.  Infantile rage results when infantile fantasies go awry.

Almost any Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd column is illustrative of the grandiose self-regard and rage of frustrated infants in grown-up bodies.  Notice the glee expressed when Joe Biden, the "elder statesman," behaved like a six-year-old.  They loved it!  Tantrums are a way helpless children sometimes force concessions from adults.  It is the effort by the powerless to coerce the powerful.  Bullies who compulsively smile and address the objects of their bullying as "my friend" are actually cowards.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/big_bird_liberalism_and_perversion.html#ixzz2A5v8XfXQ

Back in business

The replacement 64GB solid state drive arrived in this morning’s mail and now, after about six hours of loading Windows XP, 116 updates, and a shitload of other software, I have my netbook close to where it was when the last drive crashed after less than a year of use.

This is my first blog entry on the newly revived netbook.

It comes on the 5th anniversary of the day we closed on our Arkansas house and on the birthday of the late great Timothy Leary.

Renate’s album (continued)

Renate Schmidt’s inscription on the back of this photo identifies the woman as “My beloved teacher, Fraulein Essen,” along with the notation “K.L.V. Lager Buchdovnetsch (sp?) 1942.”

KLV stands for Kinderlandverschickung and Lager means “camp.” The KLV camps were created for two purposes – to provide safe refuges for children from German cities that were being bombed and also for the indoctrination of youth by the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls.

I haven’t been able to pinpoint the location of the camp Renate references here, probably because I can’t be sure of the spelling, but I suspect it was in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic.

“Kinderlandverschickung”
In September 1940, the National Socialist regime launched a program of “Sending Children to the Countryside” (Kinderlandverschickung, or KLV). The main goal was to get children out of cities and away from strategic bombing, much similar programs in Britain. But the KLV also served the revolutionary transformation of youth: at KLV-run camps and hostels, children were exposed to paramilitary drills and political indoctrination, often for months on end, well away from the influence of parents, teachers, school principals. The National Socialist Welfare (NSV) was charged with arranging the transportation children in the first four grades of school; the Hitler Youth took in children in the fifth grade and higher.

This poster dates from 1943 and was published by the Reich Youth Leadership (Reichsjugendführung). The original is 60 x 40 cm.
Source: Deutsches Historisches Museum, http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/20001281/index.html

Renate’s album (the detective work continues)

Here’s yet another image from Renate Schmidt’s photo album from Germany.

I bought the album at a militaria show or an auction several years ago. It contains 40 black-and-white 3½” x 2¼” snapshots.

It’s starting to look like Renate may have lived in the Sudetenland – the portion of Czechoslovakia populated by a majority of ethnic Germans that was ceded to Germany has part of the infamous Munich Agreement in 1937.

The inscription on the back of this photo says, “This is how high the snow was in the winter of 1941 - 1942 in Bohemia.” The road signs are bilingual – the German place name on top and the Czech place name on the bottom.

At the time of the photo, the Sudetenland had become the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This road junction was in southwest Bohemia about 65 miles east and north of Regensburg, Germany.

If Renate and her family lived in Bohemia, I suspect they fled to the west as the Red Army struck deeper and deeper into the Reich. Otherwise, her album probably wouldn’t have fallen into the hands of an American soldier to turn up years later in the United States.

This is where the road signs were photographed. The map shows today’s national boundaries.

The horror. The horror.

Blogger Laura Ledford found these at a supermarket in Charleston, S.C.

This is not food. I don’t care what anyone says.

Oops!

I get the online version of the Carmel (Calif.) Pine Cone every Friday. I signed up for it after the weekly paper ran an exclusive interview with Clint Eastwood about his appearance at the Republican National Convention last month.

I scan the whole paper, even the obituaries since I noticed that a recent obit subject had a Martinsville, Ind. connection.

There are two obits in today’s paper – well actually only one, since Donald Robinson’s obit was repeated under Merle Murphy’s headline.

This is the kind of screwup that gives editors fits because families tend to freak out over it.