Old photos of Paris

Check them out. Century-old color images of Paris. http://www.paris1914.com/

Absolutely brilliant!

Interesting that an immigrant (legal) understands what it means to be a free American better than a lot of folks whose families have been here for generations.

His insight exposes Sen. Feinstein and the other power-crazed gun-grabbers for what they are.

The perfect pie chart

Ambassador Wayne Garrison

Congratulations to our very own BMWMOA ambassador, Wayne Garrison. His motorcycling biography is the best thing in the February Owners News!

It's a well-deserved honor.

I met Wayne at the 1986 BMWMOA Rally in Laguna Seca. It was my first long cross-country tour and I did it under the tutelage of Tim and Linda Balough. I was awed by the fact that Wayne had made the trip to California solo and he became one of my touring heroes - one of those guys whose travels inspire you to get out and do it too.

Now, with more than 300,000 BMW miles in my mirrors, Wayne still inspires me.

Oops

Apparently the advertising folks at Sam’s Club don’t pay much attention to where they ship their advertising inserts.

This morning’s paper had a Sam’s Club insert with lots of great Big Game deals (they can’t use the copyrighted name Super Bowl to promote their stuff), including a couple of varieties of Budweiser and Coor’s Light.

That may work in a lot of other places, but the local Sam’s Club is in a dry county where package alcohol beverages may not be sold. Sorry, Sam’s Club shoppers. There’s no waiver for the Super Bowl.

To be fair, the fine print does stipulate, “Available in select clubs only.”

Too bad ours isn’t “select.”

Who he and I are

My son Steve sent me Pete Townshend’s recently published autobiography for Christmas and I finished it last night.

Pete is a little less than two months older than I, both of us being born in 1945.

We have some parallel experiences – a failed longtime first marriage followed eventually by a deeply satisfying relationship with younger women who happen to be in the same business as us – Pete and Rachel in the music business, me and Maria in newspapers.

We’re both academic underachievers who were too impatient to get on with our lives to work through the tedium of college.

And we both went through an intensely spiritual period in our 20s and 30s – he with Meher Baba and me with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation program.

But we had vastly different childhoods. Pete came from a horribly dysfunctional family and was subjected to a batshit crazy grandmother who abused him horribly. He spent most of his adult life struggling with his demons, drugs and alcohol.

Townshend’s autobiography, along with what I know about the childhoods of many of my friends, makes me all the more appreciative of my parents.

Maria likes to characterize my childhood as something out of “Leave it to Beaver,” a sheltered, idyllic early life where I always felt secure and loved.

And it’s true. My parents loved and respected each other and kept their marriage vows until death parted them. Their only vice was smoking cigarettes, but that was something they both conquered in their 50s. They didn’t gamble and I never saw either one of them drunk.

Dad was an independent insurance agent and a respected businessman who was a founding member of the Delphi (Ind.) Chamber of Commerce and was president of the school board when the present Delphi High School was built in the early 1970s. Mom was a registered nurse who worked for decades in the office of the town’s most successful doctor.

We weren’t wealthy, but we were comfortable and secure and I grew up without the angst and rejection that plagued so many of my friends.

I suppose if Pete Townshend had had my childhood, he might never have become the towering musical giant he is today. So I guess I’m glad for what he became and for what my parents did for me.

Assembly complete!

We got Maria’s longarm quilter set up yesterday, two weeks after I made a flying trip to Indiana to buy it.
The aluminum quilting frame had me worried because it’s easy to bend aluminum and I was concerned some of the pieces might get torqued out of shape in the moving or reassembly process. It appears my fears were unfounded.
The friends who sold it to us had converted the instructional videotape to DVD and it was a huge help in putting everything back together in the right sequence.
Now all Maria has to do is find the time to climb the learning curve and use this beast.

Teaching

Hanging with the dogs

The temperature clawed its way up to around 50 this afternoon, so I Windexed the filthy glass top on the porch table and we sat with the dogs for a spell.

That’s my glass of Indiana-grown Red Gold tomato juice on the table, seconds before Jack lurched to his left and put his lips on the rim. I drank the rest of it from the other side of the glass.

Presently, we went out into the yard where I filled the dogs’ watering tub with fresh water.

And then I noticed what Jack and Sam had done to a couple of crepe myrtle bushes Maria planted last year outside our bedroom windows.

I posed Jack next to one of them (what’s left is in the red box) but he clearly has no remorse.

But then maybe it was Sam who ravaged the poor bushes just to have a stick to chew.

We’re guardedly optimistic that the bushes will revive in the spring, especially if we put tomato cages around them.

Freitag

I finally got the correct contact lens prescription this afternoon, so now I can order a 6-month supply. This concludes a process that began with an eye exam on Jan. 5 and dragged on for another 20 days.

Even though I professed a strong dislike for my glasses, I found myself liking them more and more since they alleviated the need to carry reading glasses around. Now I’m back in contacts with reading glasses for close-in work and it seems kinda cumbersome. I guess that’s the price for living 67 years.

The weekend is upon us and, once again, we find ourselves with no particular plans. No gun shows, no jaunts to Memphis. Might be a good time to clear a space for Maria’s long-arm quilter which lies in pieces in the dining room.

I rather expected to see more photos of Sean and Ruth’s new dog, Honey Pie, by now. I hope she’s working out. A rescue pit bull can acquire some bad habits in its first couple of years that may pose a challenge to its new family.

This morning’s mail delivery included the Wallace Pioneer Trails creamer I bought last Friday on Ebay. It was advertised as a gravy boat, but at 3 1/8” tall, it’s a little small for a gravy boat. I have one just like it in the Westward Ho Rodeo pattern, but I lacked one in the Pioneer Trails pattern, so I jumped on it.

Now I have to do a little china cabinet shuffling to accommodate it.

It can never be easy

I drove down to the mall and picked up my new contact lens prescription on Monday.

I got around to ordering lenses this afternoon, but when I examined the prescription, I noticed that the stupid bimbo at the optician’s office entered “40” for the axis of the Toric left lens instead of “50” as I instructed her after trying both lenses for a few days.

Naturally, the doc isn’t available until 10 a.m. tomorrow, so the lens order will have to wait.

Random thoughts on a Thursday morning

I wake up some days with a headful of thoughts, none of which merits a lengthy treatise here. This is one of those days.

I took a couple of melatonin caps before bed last night and slept like an oak log until Jack started scrabbling around in his kennel at 6 a.m., announcing he was ready to go out and do some dog business in the back yard. I put him out and crashed back into dreamland until my iPhone alarm went off at 6:30.

So, what’s on my mind?

I’m more than a little pissed off at the Republican congressmen who let Hillary off the hook after her faux outrage yesterday, jabbering “what difference does it make” whether the Benghazi attack was spontaneous or planned because we have to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It was obviously intended to deflect attention from the elephant in the room – the question of why did the administration withhold military support when the embassy was under attack. And why were the Seals at the CIA compound ordered to “stand down?” And why did the administration keep pushing the lie that it was a demonstration against the bullshit anti-Muslim video when everyone knew it was a well-planned attack?

The obfuscation makes more plausible the notion that the Benghazi operation was a bungled effort to kidnap Ambassador Stevens (who happened to be an Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity brother of mine) and exchange him for the Blind Sheik – something the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has been calling for – to make Obama look like a foreign policy genius on the eve of the election. That’s why the Seals were told to stand down and that’s why the plan came unglued when the Seals disregarded the order, rushed to the embassy and kicked some terrorist ass until they were killed.

I can only guess why the Representatives and Senators ignored the elephant and let Hillary off the hook.

But on to something else.

After sitting through a workshop on starting a small business, I have a clearer vision of why most small businesses fail. And a deeper resentment for federal and state government’s obsession with taxing and regulating.

Most of the workshop dealt with the insane labyrinth of taxes and regulations imposed on everyone who just wants to sell a produce or service and make a living for himself and maybe a few employees. It’s absolutely criminal.

On a brighter note, my son Sean and his wife Ruth have been dogless for several months since the demise of their pit bull Daisy.

But they are dogless no more. They adopted Honey Pie, a rescued 2-year-old pittie. Sean gave me a Facetime video call earlier this week to show her off and she looks very happy to be in her new home. I assume her name comes from the song of the same name on the Beatles’ White Album.

Lisa and lunch

My son Steve took granddaughter Lisa to an orthodontia appointment this morning and sent me this photo of her playing the 1980s arcade game Battle Zone.

It’s significant because Steve and I and his brother Sean became masters of Battle Zone after we discovered the ram-back up-shoot technique. Once we had that down, the only thing that could stop us was the hated buzz bombs streaking in.

There was a Battle Zone game at the campground near Hart, Mich., where Northern Illinois University conducted its landmark trail riding course. I took both boys through the course on consecutive summers and we owned the Battle Zone game there.

And speaking of Sean, I feasted on a sockeye salmon fillet that has been waiting patiently in our freezer since he and his wife Ruth sent us a package of delicious seafood for Christmas 2011.

They sent more salmon this Christmas, so I have much to look forward to.

Trying to get the meat thermometer to read 140° I overcooked it a bit, but it was still fabulous.

Checking the trailcam

I put new batteries and an SD memory card into my trailcam on Jan. 5 to see if anything was visiting our side yard.

I pulled the card this morning and found about 75 video clips, mostly with nothing significant in them except squirrels, but some with deer.

Here’s a sequence that occurred at 1:18 a.m. last Friday when two deer got spooked by a coyote.

Proof

I’m going to a small business workshop this week that’s free to veterans.

Although they would probably take my word for it, I figured I should have something to prove that I was in the U.S. Air Force and am, therefore, a Vietnam Era veteran.

I have no idea where my discharge papers and my honorable discharge certificate are, other than to say they’re in a box in the garage somewhere. I have some photos of myself in uniform taken at a BX photo booth at Lackland AFB and the big group photo of me and everyone else in Flight 1405, but those seem silly and tedious when it comes to showing them to anyone.

Then I remembered my dog tag. Originally, I had a set of two, but one was attached to the zipper pull on a camera bag that was stolen from my car in front of the Indianapolis Star-News Building in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s. By the time the bag and its contents turned up in an Indianapolis pawn shop, the tag had been removed and presumably discarded.

The remaining tag lives in a jewelry box in my closet, but for today it’s hanging around my neck on its original chain.

Monday stuff

I took perverse pleasure in the fact that my bank is open today.
Commerce trumps a federal holiday and a coronation.

I discovered over the weekend that there are antique rifles out there with as much firepower as the AR15 and the AK47, namely the .30 M1 carbine, which has been around since 1941.
It uses a 10-round or 30-round magazine and it has an effective combat range of about 300 yards.
While it lacks the punch of an AK47 and the injury potential of the AR15, it can throw lead as fast as you can pull the trigger, as this video demonstrates. It gets really interesting around the 12:08 mark.
Maybe I need one of these instead of an AR or an AK.
This is the weapon I used to qualify as an expert marksman during my oh-so-brief career in the U.S. Air Force, so I have some passing familiarity with it.

Greene County Gun Show

Today was Gun Appreciation Day and we were so appreciative that we drove up to the Greene County Fairgrounds in Paragould and attended the Greene County Gun Show.

Maria has wanted a pistol of her own for a long time – a semi-automatic that would fit her hand and eject the magazine easily for quick reloading. We had seen the Ruger LCP more than a year ago at a local shooting range and, after she tried on several other models, came across an excellent deal on an .380 caliber LCP equipped with a CrimsonTrace laser sight.

So here she is, filling out the requisite paperwork for her new gun.

And since gun show sales are exempt from the three-day waiting period imposed on stores, she brought it home with her along with 100 rounds of target ammo and 25 rounds of hollow point.

Club Idaho

Rooting through artifacts in my top dresser drawer this morning I came across my Club Idaho membership card.

Club Idaho was once a notorious den of iniquity where gambling and other vices flourished. I didn’t know it until I started researching the place online today, but the club was used as a location for the 1959 film version of James Jones’ novel “Some Came Running,” featuring Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin and others. I knew some of the movie was shot in Madison, Ind. but was unaware of the Terre Haute connection.

Terre Haute had a “sin city” reputation during the 20-year (1948-1968) regime of Mayor Ralph Tucker.

By the time I got to Indiana State College (now Indiana State University) in the fall of 1963, things were still very loose.

My first night on campus, my homeboy Dave Johnson, who was starting his sophomore year at ISC, took me on a tour of the whorehouses. We were just browsing and didn’t avail ourselves of their services, but it was a real eye-opener for an 18-year-old boy from Delphi, Ind.

(Dave died of cancer about a year ago in Farmington, N.M. His widow, Joyce, died there a few weeks ago, also of cancer.)

I didn’t look old enough to bluff my way into places like Club Idaho, so I had to be content with stories about the bands and other goings-on from friends and fraternity brothers.

The club had lost its cache as a really wicked nightspot and had become a slightly racy college joint by the mid-1960s.

I didn’t wait long after my 21st birthday to join the club. I turned 21 on July 14, 1966 and, as the card shows, became a “member in good standing” just six days later. I don’t remember being particularly impressed with the experience and I think I only went once. I guess it was just one more item on my Growing Up To-Do List that needed to be ticked off.

Not then, not now

Perhaps this is a good time to point out that the American Revolution began on April 19, 1775 at Lexington and Concord when the Brits tried to confiscate our guns.

From Wikipedia:

About 700 British Army regulars, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, were given secret orders to capture and destroy military supplies that were reportedly stored by the Massachusetts militia at Concord. Through effective intelligence gathering, Patriot colonials had received word weeks before the expedition that their supplies might be at risk and had moved most of them to other locations. They also received details about British plans on the night before the battle and were able to rapidly notify the area militias of the enemy movement.

The first shots were fired just as the sun was rising at Lexington. The militia were outnumbered and fell back, and the regulars proceeded on to Concord, where they searched for the supplies. At the North Bridge in Concord, approximately 500 militiamen fought and defeated three companies of the King's troops. The outnumbered regulars fell back from the minutemen after a pitched battle in open territory.

More militiamen arrived soon thereafter and inflicted heavy damage on the regulars as they marched back towards Boston. Upon returning to Lexington, Smith's expedition was rescued by reinforcements under Brigadier General Hugh Percy. The combined force, now of about 1,700 men, marched back to Boston under heavy fire in a tactical withdrawal and eventually reached the safety of Charlestown. The accumulated militias blockaded the narrow land accesses to Charlestown and Boston, starting the Siege of Boston.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his "Concord Hymn," described the first shot fired by the Patriots at the North Bridge as the "shot heard 'round the world."

Brian’s our man

Brian Smallman, who runs University Auto Center at 1116 E. Johnson Ave. in Jonesboro, is our new go-to guy for non-warranty car problems.

The Honda dealership wanted to pull the fuel tank from her 2012 Honda Fit and drain it to deal with water in the tank. And they figured it would cost more than $500, since water in the gas isn’t covered by the warranty.

Brian used the car’s own fuel pump to draw out the water, then threw in a couple of cans of HEET additive to deal with any residual moisture. His charge? $54 and change. And not pulling the fuel tank avoided doing things that might have voided the warranty.