I just did a search for my son Sean Flora’s name in iTunes and came up with 14 songs.
I have a Colt Combat Commander .45 with a Crimson Trace laser sight, but I haven’t carried it since we moved to Arkansas and my Indiana concealed carry permit expired. And I haven’t felt any strong desire to get an Arkansas permit, mainly because the .45 is just too heavy and bulky to carry comfortably.
And I haven’t seen a gun that I’d be interested in as a daily carry weapon.
Until Saturday, when we went to the local shooting range to pick up a gift membership that a friend bought for her husband.
One of the guys there showed us his .380 Ruger LCP with Crimson Trace laser sight. The gun holds 6 rounds in the magazine and one in the pipe and weighs a scant 9.4 ounces. It’s only 5.16 inches long and you can get a finger extension magazine like the one for the Walther PPK. And the price is amazingly attractive, especially if I can find a used example in good condition.
No, it doesn’t have the knock-down power of a .45. Hardly anything else does. But the .45 is pretty useless if it’s at home in a drawer when you’re out and about and discover you need a gun.
I used to have a motorcyclist’s grudge against Ruger because the company denied health insurance coverage to motorcycle-riding employees, but that issue got resolved years ago.
Giving it some serious thought…
Here’s Deb with her granddaughter Bailey.
And here’s the whole family group.
I soaked these four rubber stamps in glycerin for a week with no significant restoration of the hard, dried-out rubber.
So much for that solution.
Anyone have a better suggestion for rehabilitating old rubber stamps?
Here’s the listing:Bob Dylan and The Band at Assembly Hall in Bloomington, Ind. on Feb. 3, 1974. The 40-show tour in January and February of 1974 resulted in the "Before the Flood" double album, released in June, 1974.
This is Indiana Gov. Otis Bowen speaking at the groundbreaking ceremonies for the ill-fated Old Indiana theme park near Thorntown, Ind. back in the mid-1970s.
I didn’t notice it at the time, but the hard hat the Old Indiana folks gave Bowen misspelled “Governor.”
I shot this photo back in the ‘70s as part of a story I did for The Indianapolis News on the Smith Walbridge Camp at Syracuse, Ind.
The camp offered summer programs for marching bands, flag & rifle units, baton twirlers and drum majors. At the time, it was run by its founders Merl and Margaret Smith.
The Smiths’ son Gary is a retired marching band director from the University of Illinois and runs the Smith Walbridge Clinics at Savoy, Ill.
This is my former Indianapolis News colleague David Mannweiler with his giant moose head lodged in the sunroof of his Audi, en route to my house at 5009 N. College Ave. in Indianapolis.
It was on a summer day sometime in the mid-1970s and David was moving to a new home that had no space for such an enormous wall hanging. So I offered my house as a temporary moose sanctuary. We hung the moose head on the upstairs landing where it cast a glass eye over events in the living room for the next few years.
He eventually reclaimed it.
Okay, call me naïve. I thought the biker types (as opposed to those of us on sport and sport touring bikes) decorated their own leather vests with patches they accumulated one by one.
Then I did a casual search for “biker leather vest” on Ebay and found tons of ready-to-wear, pre-patched vests.
They’ve even replicated the moronic punctuation that’s so common with these patches. Like this one that says, “Bad ass boy’s ride bad ass toys.” If the plural of toy doesn’t take an apostrophe, why in hell does boy?
Reminds me of a guy I saw last weekend who had a patch on the back left shoulder of his vest that proclaimed, “My other rides your wife.”
My son Sean shared this with me. I don’t think the commercial needs any more “flash” than what’s readily apparent, but the flash projection is an interesting gimmick.
I love that bike, but it would be a really stupid choice for the kind of sport touring that I do.
We had a delightful Skype visit last evening with Steve, Nicky and Lisa at their home in Las Vegas.
They opened our Christmas package that included a special quilt that Maria made for Lisa. The back of the quilt was a cheerful pink and yellow print that seemed to impress Lisa more than the quilt top. She’ll have plenty of time to examine that side later.
She wrapped herself in it and seemed delighted with her present.
I’ve got four age-hardened rubber stamps soaking in glycerin, so we’ll know soon enough how well the stuff restores rubber.
As you can see, I put a paper towel into the bottom of a plastic food container, soaked it with glycerin and plunked the stamps down on the towel.
The tricky part was finding glycerin. I used to buy it back in the ‘70s to formulate massage oil and it was easy to find at any drugstore.
So imagine my surprise when I found Walgreens doesn’t carry it. I spent several minutes looking in all of the likely and unlikely locations before I cornered a young employee and asked her where they keep the glycerin.
Deer-in-the-headlights blink. Blink.
“What is it?”
“It comes in a small bottle and, among other things, can be used as a lubricant.”
Girl calls the manager. Manager says they don’t have it, but they do have glycerin soap.
They have no clue what I’m talking about.
So I phoned my friend Charlie, who manages a Super D pharmacy in Paragould to ask if they stock glycerin.
“I do, but I don’t know if the stores in Jonesboro do,” he said. “I’ll check and call you back.”
Moments later, he calls back with an affirmative answer and, sure enough, they have four bottles on the shelf at the Super D at Nettleton and Stadium. So I bought two of them.
Charlie always comes through.
Besides restoring rubber stamps, glycerin is widely used in pharmaceutical formulations, personal care products and food products.
Back in the late 1980s, a friend who knew of my interest in World War II history, gave me a packet of letters she had received from her aunt when she was a child.
The aunt was Ruth Wampler, who was a high school girl in Bicknell, Ind., in the late 1930s.
The letters, with one exception, were from Gerhard Müller, a German teenager, growing up in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Gerhard was a member of the Hitler Youth (Hitler-Jugend) and was a true believer in the National Socialist cause and the cult of personality that surrounded the Führer.
The correspondence ran from January, 1936 to August, 1938.
The one letter not from Gerhard was written to a friend of Ruth’s named Martha by a 17-year-old boy named Werner Mickenberger, who lived in a village southeast of Leipzig. Werner was a member of the Hitler Youth too and likewise worshipped his Führer.
Here’s what was on Werner’s mind in the spring of 1936, just three years after Hitler and the Nazis came to power:
Holzhausen, the 14th of April, 1936
Dear Martha,
A few days before the holidays of Easter a friend who is going in my class gave me your address. I was very gay, for I had already for a long time the wish to write with an American young lady. Now I must beg your pardon, that I was obliged to let wait you for such a long time without writing you. But you know, that on the 29th of March there was the electing of the Reichstag in Germany. The two weeks before that day I was little time at home because we had much to do in the Hitler-Jugend. And in the holidays the following two weeks I was off by bicycle. But in Germany there is a saying that means, “What lasts for a long time, that shall become good.” And I hope that our friendship only exercised by letters will become good. At first I shall give you some details of mine and of the surrounding in which I live.
I am seventeen years old and go to the Liebnizschule in Leipzig. I go now to the U1 (the school is divided into the classes (VI, V, IV, UIII, OIII, UII, OII, U1, OI). I am in the Hitler-Jugend. I don't live in Leipzig, but in a little village with 4,400 inhabitants nearby called Holzhausen. The very environs of Holzhausen is not very interesting. No hills, no forests, no views are in the neighborhood. But I live on historical ground. Surely you know, that Napoleon Bonaparte had submitted nearly all nations of Europe, until in the year 1812, he was not successful in defeating the Russians. The emperor of Russia, the king of Prussia and the emperor of Austria had then made an alliance. The battle which followed now was struck round Leipzig. Napoleon was defeated and he had to (retreat) to France. In the environs of Leipzig, there are many monuments and boards that remind of this battle. And the most famous of all these ones is the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Probstheida,(an eastern suburb of Leipzig), the photographic of which I send you. If you are interested in these things, I shall describe or send you the pictures of some of the most remarkable buildings of Leipzig in each letter. Now I will write you something of what I made and saw the two weeks before the 29th March.
As you know that German troops have reoccupied the Zone of the Rhine,which was formerly without troops. I would be bery interested if you would write me your opinion and the opinion of your surroundings about the resolutions of the 7th March. The 7th March, Adolf Hitler also (went before) the Reichstag to give the German nation the opportunity to show that she agrees with his politics and to prove all the world that a nation in his totality is fighting with him for the same rights, which other nations possess. Adolf Hitler himself and his contributors spoke in large towns to show the great meaning of the 29th March. In the school we collected all articles in the newspaper which referred to the electing. Nearly every evening we made marches of propaganda. Wednesday, the 18th of March, Reichminister Dr. Goebbels came to Leipzig. All the days before we lived in joyful expectation because we were said to see him. But we were disabused, for he came not through the streets where we were standing. But this little disabution should be indemnified. For a week later, Thursday, the 26th of March, the Führer, Adolf Hitler himself, spoke in Leipzig. A friend has related me that already since 12 o'clock people were standing in the streets through which the Führer should come (and he should begin speaking at 8 o'clock in the evening). In the evening we were standing in line along a road through which he should come. If we would see him? You can imagine how great our jow was when we heard at some distance the shouts of joy, a sure sign that the Führer was coming. And after a while Adolf Hitler drove slowly past. We were rejoicing and crying. He looked smiling towards us. We saw him a second time, when he came from speaking. That was a very great event for me. The 29th of March, 98.7 percent of the German people have put itself behind the Führer. How Adolf Hitler is loved by all the nation and how popular he is, that will show you the pictures I send you.
Now I come to the end of my letter. I hope that you will write me as soon as possible. (I hope that you can read and understand my letter.)
Your new friend,
Werner Mickenberger
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of my former Indianapolis News colleagues.
This is the official News Christmas card from the paper’s centennial year of 1969.
I haven’t inked a rubber stamp in nearly a decade, but I felt moved by whimsy this morning and dug out my rubber stamp collection to decorate some holiday packages.
This is the 69th anniversary of the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, so what better time to revisit this photo of me shaking hands with Paul Tibbetts, the man who many of us believe won World War II.
Tibbetts, for the historically impaired, was the pilot of the B-29 Enola Gay (named for his mother) that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
Tibbetts died in 2007 at the age of 92. He had no regrets about the mission, nor did he bear any animosity toward the Japanese. In his later life, his car of choice was a Toyota.
He brought 2 and a half dozen Shapiro’s bagels and some Guinness Stout and took home his aquarium and a bunch of his other stuff from the garage, so we came out splendidly in that exchange.
The boy has turned into a man.
I got a call from my Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity brother Oz Morgan in Indiana this afternoon who has a buddy who inherited a Luger and wanted to know whatever I could tell him about it.
I got out my Luger for reference and gave him a guided tour of the waffenamt markings, confirmed that all of the serial numbers on the parts match (including the magazine), walked him through the use of the loading tool and warned him against using any of the WWII vintage 9mm Parabellum ammo that came with it.
The holster was marked for a P38, so it wasn’t original to the gun, but it was still a genuine Wehrmacht issue holster.
I also referred him to Pistole Parabellum for reference information.
I kinda surprised myself with how much I know about these things, especially since I haven’t fired mine in more than a decade.
My stepson Austin and his girlfriend are most likely on the road by now, heading down from Indiana for an extended weekend visit.
Consequently, Maria took today off and we’re doing our grocery shopping to lay in supplies for the visit.
I hung in with her at Sam’s Club but begged off of the Kroger experience, opting instead to get some coffee next door at Books-A-Million. It’s the first time I’ve been in BAM in months, but nothing much has changed.
It’s sunny and warm and I’m tempted to go for a motorcycle ride as soon as we get home and get the groceries put away. I’m eager to run out the 8-month-old gas from the tank on the K75S and replace it with fresh fuel. I think the guys at Grass Roots put fresh gas in the tank, but I want to be sure before I throw fuel stabilizer into the tank and let the bike sit idle for extended periods.
Maria wants some cooking wine for the weekend – something you can’t buy in this dry county – so I’ll probably ride over to the Missouri bootheel and Mr. T’s.
I spent much of today just hanging out and killing time, waiting for Gateway Tire to finish the Subaru tune-up.
It’s done now and the car seems a bit happier for it. It ought to for $279. Merry Christmas, Subaru Forester.
It was AM band only and had a substandard speaker and a single mono earbud speaker that lived in the little leather pouch attached to the strap on the leather case.
I thought it was about the coolest thing in the world because it opened up a whole universe of personal listening. On a good night, it could pull in stations hundreds of miles from my upstairs bedroom in Delphi, Ind. That was back when Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin, Tenn. sponsored programming on WLAC in Nashville. I can still recall listening to Little Anthony and the Imperials doing “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-ko Bop” on KOMA out of Oklahoma City.
I carried it with me on my evening newspaper route, shuffling down snowy Front Street delivering the Lafayette Journal & Courier while listening to WIBC in Indianapolis and thinking it couldn’t possibly get much better than that.
But it did, didn’t it?
I was looking through some of the thousands of images on one of my external hard drives this evening and came across this shot.
It’s Ruthie the Wonder Dog standing on the couch and looking out the front window and waiting for Austin to come home from school back when we lived in Thorntown, Indiana.
My daily routine is off a bit today and will be tomorrow thanks to problems with the Subaru.
It reverted to its nasty cold-weather habit yesterday of faltering and stumbling and filling the interior with exhaust fumes. Maria wasn’t 100 per cent confident that it would get her home from work last evening, but it did.
So I drove it down to Gateway Tire this morning to let them hook up their diagnostic computer and ask the car what’s bothering it. Naturally, it ran fine and there was no trace of exhaust fumes.
The technicians concluded it just needs a tune-up, but explained the necessary parts couldn’t be found in Jonesboro and the earliest they could have them in hand would be 2 p.m.
I decided to just reschedule for the first thing tomorrow morning and let them have at it then.
We’re in the middle of a thunderstorm and I noticed Pete the Aussie wasn’t flopped down on the living room carpet with Ruthie.
So I checked his kennel, which is his “safe place,” and found him bedded down and looking a little worried.
Pete hates thunderstorms because he got left outside during a particularly violent one when he was about six months old. Maria and I were out of town and my stepdaughter Morgan was at home, but she was up in the attic, cataloging her stuff and had music cranked up on a boombox. She had no idea it was storming.
Ruthie stayed on the back porch, but Pete fled in terror. A neighbor said he saw Pete streaking down the street amid flashes of lightning. He was gone all of that night and the next day and the next night. Early the following day, a woman who works at our vet’s office was driving her son to school when she recognized Pete along a road about a mile north of town. She called us and we sped out to get him.
He ran away for three days about two months later when a beefwit neighbor shot a bottle rocket across our property and it exploded over his head.
Pete followed me up to the office a few minutes ago. He’s now huddled under my desk after a loud lightning strike hit about 2 miles from here.
I got in a 45-mile ride on Maria’s K75S yesterday afternoon and was reminded anew what a fun bike it is – light, nimble, low center of gravity, and lots of power. It was sunny and 55 degrees, but I was reasonably comfortable throughout. I rode up the Crowley’s Ridge Parkway from Jonesboro to Paragould, making loops through Frierson Lake and Crowley’s Ridge state parks.
Charlie became a mug holder a year ago. For a modest fee, you get your own personal numbered beer mug that stays at the bar – in numbered rows on shelves above the bar. When you visit and order beer, it comes in your mug and in a greater quantity than the mere mortals get with their glass of beer. At the end of the year (yesterday), the mugs get retired and you can take yours home and get a new one with a new design for the new year.
I decided I’d like to join that beer fraternity and I supposed I could buy a mug at yesterday’s event. I was wrong. I missed my chance by a week or more and discovered the available mugs were all snapped up in a period of 20 minutes. So it goes.
I had a couple of glasses of Midtown Brown and a splendid Reuben sandwich, so it was a good day.
I was looking at Pete the Aussie the other morning as he gazed out the bedroom window to the back yard. Watching the yard seemed really important to him and I found myself wondering what he was thinking. And for a moment, I wished he could talk.
Then I realized it’s a good thing that he can’t talk.
If he could, it would probably be something like, “Give me a treat, I want a treat, gimme a treat, treat, treat, Oh how I want a treat, give me a treat, pleeeeeeeease!”
Or, “Open the door, open the door, I gotta go outside, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, open the door, I gotta poop, open the door, open the fucking door. Hey, open the door.”
This kind of prattling would drive me nuts. But it would be even worse if Pete started jabbering libtard talking points, going on about man-caused climate change, or how Republicans are racists, or that Sarah Palin and George W. Bush are stupid and evil.
Yes, that would be much much worse. I can respect a dog who has normal doggy concerns, but not one who worries about carbon footprints, Walmart, and the rights of jihadists. I love my dog, even to the point of excusing the occasional accident on the carpet, but I couldn’t bear to think of him like that.
So I’ll be content just to wonder what’s on his mind.
My mother made the best pumpkin pie I ever tasted and I am deeply thankful that Maria has Mom’s recipe and can replicate the experience for me.
And, of course, a scoop of vanilla ice cream completes the treat.
