A funny thing happened on the way to the liquor store.

To start with I should mention that I have an interesting bumper and back window on my pickup. Most people around here will find at least one thing there that either angers or disturbs them.

With this in mind...

I'm sitting in town in traffic after work this afternoon (crawling through construction zones, and inching my way up to the stop light) when this vehicle pulls in behind me, I mean right behind me, as in inches off by back bumper behind me. I am stopped about 250 feet from the stop light, and I have left a space of about 20 feet between my vehicle and the one in front of me (There is a rather well hidden side street there, and I'm trying to do the courteous thing and not block it). So I'm sitting at the red light, and the driver of the vehicle behind me (the one nearly nestled under my back bumper) starts leaning on the horn, gesticulating and shouting something at me out the window.
At this point the light finally turns green, and we start moving; I'm trying to get a good look at the driver of the vehicle behind me, but the glare on the windshield is too bright.
Now, I should explain that I'm trying to make a left turn in a five way intersection, in construction, at twelve thirty in the afternoon with people jumping off the sidewalks to avoid the dust from the construction crew, and the local chapter of the Octogenarian Road Racing Association jackrabbiting through the intersection at a blistering two miles per hour. So I know that I'm going to be stuck for about three lights before I manage to get through the intersection.
The first light passes, and the vehicle behind me (though still right on my bumper) is behaving itself. The second light passes and I'm just thinking to my self that I will be able to make the intersection on the next light, when the door to the vehicle behind me opens, and a thin (and not unattractive) lady in her late 30's/early 40's steps out of the drivers side and starts walking purposefully (in the middle of a busy intersection with cars passing on both sides of our vehicles) up to my window. She pauses by the back of my truck and I (more out of habit than anything else) check to make sure that my ten inch contractors screwdriver is within handy reach, and prepare for a quick and angry lecture (not the first I've had, but the first in the middle of an intersection) about displaying heresy and obscenity on the back of my vehicle.
As soon as there is a short break in traffic, she walks right up to my drivers side window, leans in and says, "I just wanted to tell you that I really like your bumper stickers. I mean, I'm a christian, but I still believe a lot of those things too, thats great". I mumble something in reply friendly reply, and she turns on her heal and sort of bounces back to her car. The light changes, and as I put my truck in gear three thoughts occure almost simultaniously.

1. A not unattractive 35-45 year old lady just risked life and limb to talk to me about bumper stickers.

2. She must be crazier than I am.

3. I should have tried to get her number.

Mexican Army Invades U.S. !!!(phlegm at eleven.)

Todays Rant:



I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank all those fine people in our nations capitol for taking time out of their busy schedules to go to Louisiana to help those poor folks, now please, (George, Dick, Michael, Condeleza, and the others, you know who you are) either grab a shovel or get the fuck out of the way.

I hate to say it, but in a situation like this the only time I want to see a politician on TV is if he/she is down in the muck pulling up bodies like everyone else. Otherwise they can be of more use in Washington where the people who are actually working won't trip over them, where they won't be in the way, where they won't be wasting space and drinking water, and where their secret service goons can harass people who haven't had such a hard time of it lately.

In the past week the Mexican government has (for the first time since the Spanish American War) dispatched a military convoy across the boarder into the United States. This convoy (containing medical supplies, rescue workers, and portable water treatments plants) was dispatched for the soul purpose of aiding folks in Mississippi, Louisiana and other hurricane devastated areas in the southeastern United States. In addition, 114 other countries have also sent us aid. Not to be out done, Washington D.C. has sent an almost endless torrent of politicians, media dweebs, spin doctors, lawyers, and empty promises.

Seems odd that Mexico should be doing more to help Mississippi and Louisiana than Washington is.

This is the way we cluster fuck.

Todays Rant:

Does anyone else find it just a bit suspicious that duhbyah is going to "personally oversee" the investigation into why the government didn't do squat for almost four days after the hurricane hit in Louisiana? Isn't this a lot like O.J. searching for the real killer?

I see that they are also trying to pin it on the head of FEMA. I hate to be the one to bring this up, but FEMA (unlike most government entities) is not continually active. That is to say that (with the exception of the basic command and infrastructure) the majority of FEMA "members" are employees of other government agencies (D.O.D., D.O.T., C.D.C, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, etc.) and cannot abandon those posts without being ordered to do so (sort of like volunteer firefighters, they have regular jobs and do the rescue work on the side).

Now (leaving aside the fact that FEMA is involved primarily in rebuilding and restoration of infrastructure/ business, and not in emergency response/rescue operations), those few permanent FEMA employees are not in a position to act on their own. If they want to request an action they have to create a document, pass it to their immediate superiors who (in most cases) will pass it to their superiors and so on up the chain of command. If a response is generated it will be passed down the chain of command in a similar manner. The only people who are in a position to act unilaterally are the people at the top of the chain of command, and in the case of a major emergency, most folks are going to be expecting orders from above, and are therefore not going to waste time and resources requesting permission to act. (Gee, who was at the top of the chain of command in this instance?)

In this case, FEMA is an agency incorporated into the Department of Homeland Security, which is a department of the executive branch. Any request for FEMA activation would have had to go from the FEMA head (Michael Brown), through the head of the Department of Homeland Security (Michael Chertoff), to the head of the executive department (George W. Bush), and any response or unilateral request for activation would have to travel in the opposite direction.

These agencies are not allowed to activate themselves, anymore than the Department of Defense is allowed to activate itself...

Orders always come from above.

For more info check out these sites.

http://www.loc.gov/rr/news/fedgov.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/

http://www.fema.gov/

http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/

http://www.defenselink.mil/

Reflections on an old fart in training.

Well its finally happened. No apocalypse or nervous breakdown or major earthly upheaval(all of which I was kinda looking forward to in my perversion), just a passing date on the calendar and I make the not-so abrupt transition from whipper-snapper to old fart. The 20 year old dipshit that we just hired told me that he would have to start calling me "sir", but I quickly divested him of that notion by providing a sampler of the names that I would be glad to assign to him in return (I also mentioned that he shouldn't trust anyone over 30, but I don't think he bought it). Funny, doesn't seem like that long since I was a 20 year old dipshit; guess I'll have to settle for being a 30 year old dipshit. I figure thats not such a bad deal though, men in my family have a tendency to die young so this is almost an achievement (my great grandfather died at 42, and all my grandparents were dead by the time I turned 15). The most important thing about today, however, is that it is my thursday, which means that tomorrow is my friday (and my payday), and I haven't been drunk in a good long while


If life really is a race I'm half way to the finish line, not bad for a guy who doesn't like to run eh?

Up the Rebels!!!

I've got a touch of the logorrhea.

Sunlight on bare dirt,
early morning nip of autumn on the breeze;

Sparks leap in fiery efflorescence from the hair-fine space between cool aluminum oxide and luke warm steel,
dancing off corrugated walls,
cascading down a well worn leather apron,
nesting in gobbets of mink oil and leather laces,
lighting the small world in one single eleemosynary act,
assimilated by the ubiquitous grime.

Isn't he cute...

Have you ever seen a face so remarkable that you couldn't get it out of your head?



















Sometimes it isn't a good thing.

http://www.samugliestdog.com/

September 1st.

Just checking to see if anyone else is going to make a point of not buying gas on September 1st (to support the multinational one day boycott in Canada and the U.S.). We did something like this in a county that I use to live in (where gas prices were controlled by two companies which were owned by two distant cousins, and were consequently 60 cents higher per gallon than anywhere else in the state) and it did the trick for a few months.

Hey, what the hell do we have to lose anyway right?