Awesome Time Waster

This is just great. Try positioning the chick atop a few conjoined balls, so that she doesn't fall off. You can make her adopt the most fascinating positions, and she seems to be unconscious, but with a 'hump' reflex active. I'd love one like that...

Yeah, yeah... I'm a closet necrophiliac, who knew?

A few days off...

Well, I took a few days off of work to catch up with a friend who came to visit. Of course, real life intruded in many ways, not the least being a rescue over the weekend on the mountain. A hiker took a tumble, broke a few bones, and was unable to come down on his own. He never did come down, technically, as he was airlifted out. I spent 7 hours on that piece of rock, in sweltering heat, no less, and had many an adventure during that time. Enough to merit a good sized post. But not today. I'll write that one down tomorrow, if you all don't mind. Oh, and my dog died. Or my kids' dog, rather. They called me up crying their little eyes out, poor tykes. I actually liked that dog. I could make her go frantic just by thinking at her, she'd start keening like a banshee. I used to charge money to do that as a parlor trick, when I first met that pooch, at my then mother-in-law's house.

R.I.P., mutt...

Tectonic Plates

I feel a nice rearrangement of the tectonic plates making up the base of my reality gearing up. The grinding noise and the quakes can be a bit nerve-wracking at first, but ultimately, isn't geology wonderful?

Still Here

I'm mulling over a couple of posts, but haven't had time to spew them out through the keyboard. One will be an analysis of why most humans are perversely unpredictable and usually end up letting their baser instincts prevail. The other one will be a tale of a heart attack victim and how bodies jiggle when electroshock is applied, reminiscent of dear Dr. Von Frankenstein's experiments.

But they'll have to wait till I'm not so busy. Issues with the mainframe at work, and my customer's obtuseness, has kept me tied up for the most, on one call after another.

Then I have a buddy I haven't seen in years coming to visit, he arrives tomorrow.

Busy, busy, busy....

Objective Reality

Seeing as it's clear that we do create our reality, and that in this, if in nothing else, democracy does work as a driving principle, at what point does a hoax cease being one if it suddenly does become real?

Suppose a group of entrepreneurial minds, wishing to create a specific reality, or sub-reality, yet cognizant that they lack the power to do so as a small group, start spreading their supposed beliefs. Suppose they recruit enough people to this 'belief' and thus make it a reality. Does it cease being a hoax if suddenly it's tangible?

Now, the internet would seem to be a fine device for perpetrating something like this. In the remote past, you were limited by the area you could cover by word of mouth. Then empires arose and those at their head could reach wider areas, and did. Then Gutenberg allowed more common people to get their views out. And now the internet has given us an almost instant, global audience.

Our society's mass religions all started out as the views held by a small community, which then, over centuries, sometimes millennia, spread to become the unwieldly monsters they are today. Belief in each of them has allowed miracles of different sorts to happen, fueled by the combined belief of each congregation.

What's the tipping point? How many minds are required before a particular belief becomes real? And is each mind equal or are some minds more equal than others^*? And at what point will lack of numbers cause a belief to collapse unto itself in much the same way a black hole does? It's a pity Academia has blinders on, as this would make a fine subject for research.

The Gods of Ancient Greece were once all too real. The Oracle at Delphi was well known, accurate and beyond doubt at one time. At some point, any belief must fall into disuse, as it's replaced by a more exciting one. Heck, maybe the world was flat, and the seas full of sea monsters. Until some enterprising folks convinced enough of their peers that it was otherwise. That would certainly explain a lot.

The key point, though, is once a belief has grown roots and become 'real', how is one to know whether it was manufactured on purpose or not? And if one detects something of this sort happening. Should one try to stop it, or ride it, seeking advantage in the new world order?

Am I close, folks? This rings very true in my mind. You know who you are. Email me and tell me if I should:

a) Do nothing
b) Block
c) Support

I'm really on the fence on this one. Convince me before I do something we may all come to regret.

^*Tip of the hat to Orwell.

Apology

This one may or may not be a legitimate letter written by the retired serviceman if purportedly comes from (Snopes is still investigating it as of this writing), but it nevertheless reflects my precise feelings, as well as those of any rational American (there's still a few of us left). For that reason alone, I felt it fitting to copy it here:

A Letter of Apology from Lieutenant General Chuck Pitman, U.S. Marine Corps, Retired

"For good and ill, the Iraqi prisoner abuse mess will remain an issue. On the one hand, right thinking Americans will harbor the stupidity of the actions while on the other hand, political glee will take control and fashion this minor event into some modern day massacre.

I humbly offer my opinion here:

I am sorry that the last seven times we Americans took up arms and sacrificed the blood of our youth, it was in the defense of Muslims (Bosnia, Kosovo, Gulf War 1, Kuwait, etc.).

I am sorry that no such call for an apology upon the extremists came after 9/11.

I am sorry that all of the murderers on 9/11 were Islamic Arabs.

I am sorry that most Arabs and Muslims have to live in squalor under savage dictatorships.

I am sorry that their leaders squander their wealth.

I am sorry that their governments breed hate for the US in their religious schools, mosques, and government-controlled media.

I am sorry that Yasir Arafat was kicked out of every Arab country and high-jacked the Palestinian "cause."

I am sorry that no other Arab country will take in or offer more than a token amount of financial help to those same Palestinians.

I am sorry that the USA has to step in and be the biggest financial supporter of poverty stricken Arabs while the insanely wealthy Arabs blame the USA for all their problems.

I am sorry that our own left wing, our media, and our own brainwashed masses do not understand any of this (from the misleading vocal elements of our society, like radical professors, CNN and the NY TIMES).

I am sorry the United Nations scammed the poor people of Iraq out of the "food for oil" money so they could get rich while the common folk suffered.

I am sorry that some Arab governments pay the families of homicide bombers upon their death.

I am sorry that those same bombers are brainwashed thinking they will receive 72 virgins in "paradise."

I am sorry that the homicide bombers think pregnant women, babies, children, the elderly and other non-combatant civilians are legitimate targets.

I am sorry that our troops die to free more Arabs from the gang rape rooms and the filling of mass graves of dissidents of their own making.

I am sorry that Muslim extremists have killed more Arabs than any other group.

I am sorry that foreign trained terrorists are trying to seize control of Iraq and return it to a terrorist state.

I am sorry we don't drop a few dozen Daisy cutters on Fallujah.

I am sorry every time terrorists hide they find a convenient "Holy Site."

I am sorry they didn't apologize for driving a jet into the World Trade Center that collapsed and severely damaged Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church -- one of our Holy Sites.

I am sorry they didn't apologize for flight 93 and 175, the USS Cole, the embassy bombings, the murders and beheadings of Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl, etc...etc!

I am sorry Michael Moore is American; he could feed a medium sized village in Africa.

America will get past this latest absurdity. We will punish those responsible because that is what we do.

We hang out our dirty laundry for the entire world to see. We move on. That's one of the reasons we are hated so much. We don't hide this stuff like all those Arab countries that are now demanding an apology.

Deep down inside, when most Americans saw this reported in the news, we were like--so what? We lost hundreds and made fun of a few prisoners. Sure, it was wrong! Sure, it dramatically hurts our cause, but until captured, we were trying to kill those same prisoners. Now we're supposed to wring our hands because a few were humiliated?

Our compassion is tempered with the vivid memories of our own people killed, mutilated and burned among a joyous crowd of celebrating Fallujahans.

If you want an apology from this American, you're going to have a long wait!

You have a better chance of finding those seventy-two virgins!


Semper Fi,

Chuck Pitman, Lt. Gen., U.S. Marine Corps (Ret.)

Jurisdiction

We got a pager for a vehicle accident with entrapment around 2pm today. I was working from home, so I drove to the Firestation, and waited for a full crew to show up. Within 3 minutes we were ready to roll. The accident was a truck that had crossed the bridge from PA into NJ, and it was either going too fast or the driver was asleep. As soon as it hit the first curve on the NJ side, it went off the road, flipped on its side, and skated on the guardrail for a while. There's about one accident like that every couple of months in that same spot.

Anyway, the driver was half out the broken windshield, and some kind, but stupid, bystanders pulled him out the rest of the way. Lucky they didn't finish him off. So we put our power tools back, sadly, as we love to use them, and proceeded to give him emergency medical treatment while the ambulance arrived.

It was decided that due to the severity of his injuries, it would be best to fly him out in a Medevac helicopter. That's when the ruckus started. Our hospital, on the PA side, is all of 5 minutes away by ambulance. The NJ hospital is 20 minutes away by ambulance. A helicopter wouldn't arrive in less than 15. And the idiot NJ authorities were arguing and playing jurisdiction games with the almost corpse, saying they wanted him taken to their hospital.

After a heated argument of 5 minutes or so, and seeing that we'd already loaded the patient into a PA ambulance that had (of course) gotten there first, our Chief waved the ambulance away. They took the patient across the bridge to our hospital. I think it was a good 10 minutes before the NJ morons noticed they'd left.

I hate NJ.

Awakening

I've long wondered, sometimes on this very page, about some of the interests I've had over the years. More and more I've found myself being almost compelled to study a certain subject, master a specific art, research a topic or learn a profession. There's never been any visible plan or design behind this, and I've felt at times almost as if I were being groomed for some position or other, one that mayhaps hasn't been invented yet, but which I'll be right for on the day it opens up.

I may have caught a glimmer of its nature recently, and that's had me doing a lot of soulsearching. Mankind did not evolve (or was not created, if you go for that) within the past few millennia, we've been around for far longer, and with the same basic capabilities we have today. That includes brain capacity and reasoning ability. Every few years, the age of our race is bumped back ten thousand years or so. Creditable researchers have found fossils belonging to modern man which may be a hundred thousand years old.

Now, if I were to walk out right now and say I saw a flying, feathered serpent and that moreover, it had instructed me to make human sacrifices to it, I'd be locked up. Of course, some clueless lawyer like Ron Kuby would probably get me out on a technicality, and I'd certainly gather up a few followers, but I don't see my new religion taking over the whole country. Yet at some point in Mesoamerica's history, something just like that happened. People weren't stupid back then, they had the same mental capacity we do. Someone making up a story like that would have been laughed out of the village.

You can apply the same reasoning to just about every myth, legend and religion our species has conserved or has memory of from our remote past. It's clear that some sort of creatures and entities spawned all those old belief systems, and not that they were made up, willy nilly, by our 'primitive' ancestors, who were as primitive as we are. Von Däniken made a career out of speculating that such deities and creatures came from outer space, that they were aliens. Or rather, he made a career out of plagiarizing someone else's theories, but I'll use his name since he's made it into the popular culture, whereas the other author never did.

I believe outer space wasn't the place these creatures/entities came from. Space travel is bound by Einsteinian physics, as far as we know, and interstellar travel would not only be so tediously slow as to make it rarer than a rational statement from Michael Jackson, but if it did happen it would most certainly be for colonization purposes since a return trip would be out of the question. In other words, the cute little buggers would still be here. And they're not. Despite the many fans of anal probing.

What if all those critters came from somewhere much closer? What if there were a way to pass from a parallel dimension into ours when certain conditions were right?

What if this sort of travel were still possible, for someone knowing how to go about it?

What if, indeed...

Have sword, will travel...

Missing Chick in Aruba

The latest ruckus is over some nice, wholesome, cute, blonde high school chick with a comehither look in her eyes and who, and please pardon my assumptions, has probably shagged half her town.

Not saying that something horribly bad and undeserved hasn't happened to her, just saying that it might not have been that cut and dried.

I again have to wonder, though, if a similar ruckus would have been made if she weren't so godawful photogenic, and, of course, if she weren't American, to boot. Bottomline, people, especially young girls, disappear all too often all over the world. They fall prey to unbalanced individuals, and a few disappear on their own, too. But if you're not terribly cute and American, there'll be no huge search for you. Nor will people be rounded up and arrested without there being significant evidence against them, unless cute and American are factors in the equation.

This breeds resentment against us, as if we needed more. As Americans we're going to have to start recognizing that our country is better than most of the rest, admittedly, but our people are as flesh and blood as the kind they have in the third world, and as likely to suffer accidents.

You move on and get over it. You don't terrorize another country, a much poorer one, into spending their scant resources chasing wild geese. It should not be that country's "Top Priority", as quoted in the article linked above, to find this chick. They presumably have more important things, like the welfare of all their citizens, to consider.

Tomes

I found a dozen old, occult books at a local Public Library sale yesterday. 50 cents each. I almost orgasmed as I came upon each one. I'll have some good reading to look forward to this summer, as a result.

Rollback

Of late, figures from my past seem to be popping up left and right. People whom I'd lost touch with years ago and thought I'd never hear from again. All of them people that I wished I'd kept in touch with but through those vagaries of this thing called life, I somehow didn't.

It's almost as if the Universal database had choked on an operation and was doing a complete Rollback.

Weird, but nice.

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

Rest in peace, dear...

Let him who hath understanding...

Today is the 6th day of the 6th month of the 6th year of this millennium. Blessed Beast!!!!

Koran Abuse

We've become so pusillanimous as a people that we're seriously paying attention to a bunch of people's allegations about our behavior when those same people care not a whit for our mores or preferences, and their behavior is abominable at best. It's as if I should lose any sleep over the lamentations of a burglar who's piteously wailing about the ruin my mastiff made of his gonads, as said puppy cheerfully chewed them down. And the rest of the world, as blind and idiotic as the Lovecraftian deity, Azathoth, chants along in unison in outrage for the burglar's private parts.

Let's make a list of the so called abuses that the Pentagon, it seems, has today admitted to, and let's compare them with some abuses from the other side:

U.S. Abuses
===========

1. A soldier deliberately kicked the Muslim holy book
2. An interrogator stepped on a Koran
3. A guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Koran
4. Water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Korans to get wet
5. In a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Koran

Islam Abuses
============

1. A bunch of stupid towelheads deliberately crashed a plane into the Pentagon
2. A bunch of stupid towelheads deliberately crashed a plane into one of the WTC Towers
3. A bunch of stupid towelheads deliberately crashed a plane into the other WTC Tower!!!
4. A bunch of stupid towelheads were going to crash a plane into the White House, but brave Americans almost regained control of the plane, so the towelheads crashed it into an empty field
5. Towelheads show videos of how they decapitate our captured people


People really need to get a grip, and a sense of perspective, before paying attention to all the stupid stuff WE are suddenly supposed to be feeling bad about. And, yeah, I know that not all the towelheads are murdering bastards. Still, kill 'em all, is what I say, and let God sort ' em out. I can't be bothered to do it.

Idiots

Yesterday in the morning there was a small fire in one of the rental houses in town. These houses are small, 2-story jobs, built in rows of contiguous houses, about 8 on each, with no space between each house. The vents, attic and crawl space in them are shared, but separated by a thin wall so you can't actually crawl from one house to another. Unless you have some very special tool, like a screwdriver, or a nailfile. :|

At the firestation we've always known that when one of those houses catches fire, the whole rental community is going to go up in flames. They're tinderboxes, all hooked up to be one nice, domino effect blaze.

So, to continue, one of those houses had a fire early in the morning and the stupid morons never called 911, or let us know. The rental community administrator put it out with an extinguisher, or by spitting or peeing on it, or whatever half-assed way he came up with on the fly.

Problem is, a fire can stay 'alive' within the walls and crawlspace for hours, sometimes days, even if you think it's out. Part of what we do after putting a fire out is overhaul, which is part cleanup and part making sure the fire is completely out. We also have equipment which helps us detect fires smoldering within the walls by sniffing out some of the byproducts of combustion.

So we had no idea there'd been a fire. Fastforward to last night, when I was about to order a nice, Greek meal at a local Greek Orthodox Church which was having a festival. Suddenly the frigging pager goes off, while I was at long last at the head of the line. I was set to ignore it, thinking it was a special assignment, or traffic control, or some other activity the probies could take care of when I heard those blessed words! "Structural fire." I bowled over a couple of fat ladies who looked like identical twins to the mother in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and made it to my car. I was in a nearby town, 15 minutes away from the station. I made it in 5.

I took the mountain road which has a long stretch of single lane where you're not allowed to pass cars. About halfway home, I passed an intersection doing about 90mph. All this on a winding mountain road. A car with blue lights blaring got on behind me, from that intersection. One of my buddies from the fire company, also responding to the call.

An SUV was in front of me. I saw that there were no cars coming from the other direction and I swerved into the incoming traffic lane, passed the SUV, and got back into my lane, still doing 90mph. I have no cop lights on my car. I'm allowed to have them, but I've never gotten around to buying some. Then my buddy, cop lights blazing, tried to pass the SUV. Normally, cars will pull over for vehicles flashing lights. Not this SUV, God bless their revolutionary hearts! As best I can figure, whoever was driving that SUV must've thought my buddy was chasing me and they did their best to give me a good head start so I could get away. LMAO

I pulled into the firestation a good 30 seconds before my buddies did, after they finally managed to get past the SUV. I made it into the 2nd truck, along with my buddies and a couple of other guys that had arrived about at the same time. My buddies congratulated me on my driving, and bitched about the SUV. That's when I came up with my theory on why it hadn't pulled over for them.

When we arrived at the rental community and started to assist the team from our 1st truck that had already been on site for a few minutes, we were filled in with most of what I already said above, that there'd been a fire and the idiot administrator had put it out and kept mum about it. That story had been relayed to us by the people who lived in that row of houses.

Said idiot administrator wasn't around, he'd left for parts unknown earlier that day. Someone had noticed smoke coming out of the vents in that row of houses and had finally called 911 about it. Luckily, it wasn't a blaze, but it could easily have been one. Pure luck. My Chief was looking for the idiot administrator to tap dance on his head for a while. Fortunately for him, he never showed.

I saw him this morning, walking around and talking big, as if he were worth more than dried cat puke, too. How he'd been a hero and had put out the fire in the morning and how unfair it was that he was now being held as a scapegoat bla bla. Asswipe.

I finally made it back to the Greek Festival, close to 10pm, which was their closing time, and at last managed to get some food and beer. If I ever became Jesusified (not that I ever will, just saying), I'd go Greek Orthodox. They rock. Their food is awesome and their eyecandy's not too shabby, either. Plus, they're polite and easygoing.

Out of Touch

I've wondered for a while now why our version of the Royal Family, and by that I mean our celebrities, are so out of touch with the rest of the country. Most of them go on the record constantly about how evil America is, and how we're ruining the rest of the world, and how they sympathize with every allegedly oppressed (by us) people on the planet. We saw how Jane Fonda befriended the Vietcong during the Vietnam War, to the point of betraying and humiliating her imprisoned-by-the-enemy, fellow countrymen. We saw how people like Gwyneth Paltrow say they wouldn't raise a child here in the U.S. because of the "weird over-patriotic atmosphere". There's websites dedicated to boycotting these morons and bestselling books denouncing them.

Nevertheless, instead of celebrities being the pulse of the nation, it seems they're getting more and more out of touch with everyone else, to their dismay, as well as to the dismay of the whole liberal intelligentsia. Sure, there are exceptions. Mel Gibson comes to mind, and Ted Nugent. But they're truly outnumbered among their peers.

Reading a very good, and free publication called Imprimis yesterday, I found a pretty well thought out theory on how Hollywood's disconnect happened. The article is actually a condensed version of a speech delivered by Michael Medved at Hillsdale University. It's well worth reading, and may be found online here. I've found Imprimis to be a veritable cornucopia of wisdom in these troubled times, and the good people at Hillsdale mail it to you for free, too, so anyone appreciating intelligent discourse may request a sub here.

Till Next Time

Sweet Ianus, your heralded return to our plane has been thwarted yet again. Please keep trying...

Is it just me?

Or is Google a bit too oblivious as to what exists below Mexico? All that's missing is a "Here there be dragons" legend for the southern hemisphere.

Google Map

Oh, and don't forget to pan that map eastwards so you can check Europe. Google did manage to preserve the important bits.

I think we (the U.S.) as a country do wish the world were as Google represents it, too. At least sometimes. I'm more worldly than that, of course, but I do sense my countrymen's general feelings.

Difference between U.S. and U.K.

In the U.S., we'd use an antibiotic of some sort to cure the condition. In the U.K., they apparently microwave it:

Deep Throat

There's a huge ruckus in the news today over the supposed discovery of who Deep Throat really was, and they apparently think it was some old gaffer called Mark Felt.

That's pretty amazing, albeit patently false. As all educated readers of this blog know full well, Deep Throat was actually a woman, our dearly departed Linda Lovelace, may she rest in God's grace.

Memorial Day (cont)

On Monday our Fire Company was scheduled to march, as we do yearly, in a nearby town's Memorial Day Parade. You can see a picture of the majesty of that event in yesterday's post. We managed to get through that ordeal uneventfully, and then retreated to our hometown, where we each went to our respective houses and changed out of our parade uniform and into something more suitable for what we had to do next.

We'd decided to paint the inside of our firehouse in the last monthly meeting, and Memorial Day had been chosen as the best time to do it in. Paint and other necessary supplies had been bought beforehand, using fire company funds, and we had all agreed to volunteer our time and do the painting ourselves. A cookout had also been planned, so we could eat some hamburgers, hot dogs and similar Americana while we worked.

This, too, proceeded uneventfully, except for everyone ending up covered in different hues as a result of the paint fights that broke out every now and then, some of them resembling veritable campaigns, with individual battles, skirmishes and melees.

Eventually, painting, eating and combat subsided, as everyone ate their fill, the firehouse got painted, and digestion commenced. Of course, there was beer being handed out quite liberally, too.

At one point someone, I forget who, presented the group with a football and suggested a friendly game outside. We split up into teams, designated the bounds of the field, and everyone quickly started having great fun. Everyone, that is, except for the luckless fellow who snapped his knee a half hour into the game, during a brutal tackle.

Luckily, he was at a fire station, where almost everyone has EMT training, and so we knew exactly what we had to do. We laughed at him. Mercilessly. After seeing that there were actually tears running down his face, and that his leg was at a very unusual angle, a few of us decided that maybe a little bit of first aid might be in order. We got him on to a back board, and called for an ambulance. We also put some ice on his knee.

After the ambulance arrived, we piled into our cars and went to the hospital with him, where our main contribution was to make more jokes about our hapless friend while relaxing in the waiting room. Sick people actually opted to crawl outside in order to get away from us.

And that, my friends, is the story I promised yesterday.