Archive for January 2014
It’s been another interesting few days. My favorite schizophrenic bitch, Mother Nature, has returned with a vengeance once again. Maine is already well known as being a weather nightmare with constantly changing conditions but it seems to have gotten a bit worse in recent months. Let me explain just a bit.
Four days ago we were in the midst of a blizzard and over the course of a week we received approximately 3- 4 feet of snow. The snow was bad enough but then the temperatures dipped to a really tropical -25° and it wasn’t pretty. I’m not even taking into consideration the wind-chill factor at the time which took the “feel like” temps even lower.
I’ve said on many occasions that I love winter and I love snow but OMG this has been ridiculous. Fortunately those of us living in Maine are normally well prepared for cold weather more than many other places in the country. That being said it’s still difficult to function outdoors during subzero weather regardless of how prepared you think you are.
We waited for a few days for the weather to break and for temperatures to rise to a reasonable level but yet again Mother Nature had other plans. The temperature did rise into the mid 30s which was a relief for everyone because the worry of frozen water pipes finally disappeared. I rolled out of bed as I normally do the next morning and thought I was dreaming. It was raining so hard I thought I was imagining things but I wasn’t. As the rain continued for almost a full day it began to melt the snow and the combination of the two water sources brought an immediate rash of flash flood warnings. Just what we needed to keep things interesting.
After all that, last night after the rain stopped, I walked out of my garage and found my driveway to be suitable for a professional hockey game. All that water and slush had frozen solid and was as hard as concrete. It was then I decided to listen to the experts and I returned to the house, closed the door, turned up the heat and turned on the television. Thank God for our electric blanket is all I can say. I found myself over the last few days spending a lot of time in bed watching TV because it’s the only place in the house that was warm and comfortable enough.
The recent forecasts indicate little or no relief in sight which is the last thing any of us wanted to hear. We’re certainly not alone since most of the country is suffering from similar weather conditions or worse. It’s time to dig into the closet and find those ugly old long-johns, wool socks, and knit caps. There’s nothing more attractive and sexy than climbing into bed with your better-half wearing everything including a parka with a big furry hood and insulated gloves. That’s a centerfold picture no one wants to see.
The wind is howling outside the window as I’m writing and we’re all waiting patiently for the next surprise from good old Mother Nature. Maybe locust! Stay safe and stay warm and welcome to the new Ice Age.
P.S. Bye the way, here’s a big one finger salute to all of you “Global Warning” idiots.
I’m feeling particularly lazy today and I’m also in a good mood and that combination of things almost never happens. I could get into one of my usual political rants or maybe a journal entry explaining to you how boring my life usually is but I won’t do that either. Everyone loves to laugh and I’ll try to make that happen today.
Without a healthy sense of humor life can become tedious. I enjoy a good dirty limerick or a good off-color joke like most people because they help make our existence on this ball of mud we call Earth bearable.
I’ve collected a few jokes that have tickled my fancy in the past and I thought I’d pass them along. Everything is better when accompanied by humor and I do mean everything. People seem friendlier, music sounds better, food tastes better, and the sex is OMFG incredible. Read these jokes and then say hello to a friend, play a good song, eat a good sandwich, and then bang your significant other. Then call me and let me know how much better it all was.
Read on, all of you laughter-starved people. Let’s start off with a reasonable explanation on the differences between men and women.
Friendship among women: A woman doesn’t come home at night. The next day she tells her husband she slept over at a friend’s house. The man calls his wife’s ten best friends. None of them know about it.
Friendship among men: A man doesn’t come home at night. The next day he tells his wife he slept over at a friend’s house. The woman calls her husband’s ten best friends. Eight of them say he slept over. Two claim he’s still there.
Next a joke that takes a while to find your funny bone but when it finally does you’ll love it.
The phone call
((((RING))))
**Pick Up**
“Hello?” “Hi honey, this is Daddy, Is Mommy near the phone?” “No Daddy, She’s upstairs in the bedroom with Uncle Paul.” After a brief pause, Daddy says, “But honey, you haven’t got an Uncle Paul.” “Oh yes I do, and he’s upstairs in the room with Mommy right now” …..
** Brief Pause**
“Uh, okay then, ..this is what I want you to do. Put the phone down on the table, run upstairs and knock on the bedroom door, and shout to Mommy that Daddy’s car just pulled into the driveway.”
“Okay Daddy, just a minute” A few minutes later the little girl comes back to the phone. “I did it, Daddy” “And what happened honey?” he asked “Well, Mommy got all scared, jumped out of bed with no clothes on and ran around screaming.
Then she tripped over the rug, hit her head on the dresser and now she isn’t moving at all!” “Oh my God!!! What about your Uncle Paul?” “He jumped out of the bed with no clothes on, too. He was all scared and he jumped out of the back window and into the swimming pool. But I guess he didn’t know that you took out the water last week to clean it. He hit the bottom of the pool and I think he’s dead”
***Long Pause***
******Longer Pause******
Then Daddy says: “Swimming pool?? .. Is this 486-5731??”
Are you laughing yet? I know it was a little morbid but that’s what makes humor so cool. Even morbid is funny. Next on my list is a little something that’s humorous and irritating all at the same time. I dislike all Unions and never miss a chance to tweak their noses a bit.
Two guys and a union worker were fishing on a lake one day, when Jesus walked across the water and joined them in the boat. When the three astonished men had settled down enough to speak, the first guy asked humbly, “Jesus, I’ve suffered from back pain ever since I took shrapnel in the Vietnam war…could you help me?”
“Of course, my son”, Jesus said, and when he touched the man’s back, he felt relief for the first time in years. The second man, who wore very thick glasses and had a hard time reading and driving, asked if Jesus could do anything about his eyesight. Jesus smiled, removed the man’s glasses and tossed them in the lake. When they hit the water, the man’s eyes cleared and he could see everything distinctly.
When Jesus turned to heal the union worker, the guy put his hands up and cried defensively, “Don’t touch me! I’m on long term disability.”
If you’re like me, visiting movie theaters has become something I choose not to do. Ignorant people carrying on loud conversations together or on their freaking cell phones making it virtually impossible to focus on the expensive movie that’s playing. This joke is for them.
A man lay sprawled across three entire seats in the posh theatre. When the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the man, “Sorry, sir, but you’re only allowed one seat.” The man groaned but didn’t budge. The usher became impatient. “Sir, if you don’t get up from there I’m going to have to call the manager.” Again, the man just groaned, which infuriated the usher who turned and marched briskly back up the aisle in search of his manager.
In a few moments, both the usher and the manager returned and stood over the man. Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move him, but with no success. Finally, they summoned the police. The cop surveyed the situation briefly then asked, “All right buddy, what’s your name?” “Sam,” the man moaned. “Where ya from, Sam?” With pain in his voice Sam replied “The balcony.”
And last but not least I’ll again address the humor rich subject of the “war between the sexes”. I’ll ask all of you married guys out there if this joke reminds you of anyone you know.
A man comes home from an exhausting day at work, plops down on the couch in front of the television, and tells his wife, “Get me a beer before it starts.” The wife sighs and gets him a beer. Fifteen minutes later, he says, “Get me another beer before it starts.” She looks cross, but fetches another beer and slams it down next to him. He finishes that beer and a few minutes later says, “Quick, get me another beer, it’s going to start any minute.” The wife is furious. She yells at him “Is that all you’re going to do tonight? Drink beer and sit in front of that TV? You’re nothing but a lazy, drunken, fat slob, and furthermore …” The man sighs and says, “It’s started …”
I hope this starts your day with a smile.
Another night of weird dreams. I said WEIRD not WET, so get your mind out of the gutter. Over the years I’ve slowly and steadily learned to love my dreams. Everyone loves to take a nap or to sleep soundly through the night but not me. If I don’t have a really good dream as well I’m truly disappointed. I’ve developed the ability over time to remember my dreams and what is even more amazing is returning to an old dream on multiple occasions I remember streets and directions in these dreams making it possible for me to visit them again and and again and actually know my way around. It sounds stupid but it’s really pretty cool.
As I sit here this morning I began to let my love of science fiction kick in. I’m looking for answers as to why dreams are the way they are. How can it be possible for a human mind to create places and people we’ve never known and then revisit them multiple times in dreams. I understand that seeing, meeting, and talking with people from our past in dreams is possible. We carry millions of subconscious memories in our brain that are available for it’s use. Can the brain actually create these weird stories filled with even weirder people without any help from our conscious self? If it can’t then it takes this discussion to a whole new level.
We’ve all seen the movies, The Matrix and Avatar, and enjoyed them. Let me throw this idea out there. Maybe our brain really isn’t creating these scenarios at all. Can it be possible that the life we live and perceive to be our reality is anything but. Could this reality be nothing more than a giant computer generated program populated with we humans who are nothing more than avatars being used by someone else in their own reality. Maybe the portions of our dreams we don’t understand are just fragments of memories from the host person or thing whose avatar we are. They’re living our lives through us and when they’ve finished playing their weird little game they exit from the program and go about their lives. During that down-time is when we in our reality get to sleep and dream. Our brain retains fragments of their lives and combines them with our own for really strange and sometimes scary dreams and nightmares.
It would explain a lot of things that I have questions about. In fact it would be very similar to those computer generated role playing games on the Internet in this reality. People have become so immersed in them at times that their real lives and relationships have been adversely effected. Those computer generated lives become so real to them that their real lives become secondary causing a serious shift in their reality. Is that what’s happening when we dream? Is that why I have dreams and relationships in my dreams with people and places I’ve never experienced in this reality? I really don’t have the answers but I really enjoy asking the questions and exploring the possibilities.
That’s how my mind spent a few minutes this morning while my better-half was droning on about her schedule for the day. I was deep into this train of thought and almost got myself in serious trouble when I was accused of not paying attention to her. Maybe when she reads this it will give her a better understanding of how weird my mind works at time and not to take it so personally.
I decided to brave the cold this morning just to get out of the house for a few minutes. Everything was fine until I made that one fatal mistake. I turned on a local Maine radio station and within two minutes my blood pressure was soaring. There was a young lady being interviewed who sounded like she might have been twenty-one years old. She was a “Journalist” and I use the term loosely. She was going to explain to all of us in the audience about the eight million senior citizens in this country who are “food challenged”. That supposedly means they don’t have the proper food with the proper vitamins and minerals to maintain a healthy life style. She was also concerned with seniors living in northern Maine in agricultural areas she termed “food deserts”.
Please someone just take a gun and shoot me, please!!! I understand now why at a certain point the very elderly get tired of living. To be in your eighties and to have been force fed political correct crap for 40 years can send you over the edge. What boggles my mind is that everyone you talk to hates political correctness. Many of those same people must be either disingenuous or big, fat liars. If everyone hates it so much why is it thriving in this country?
The following list of quotations are from both celebrities and intellectuals. I realize that the people who fawn over celebrities are more likely to be some of the “politically correct weasels” who say they hate it it but really don’t. Many of these quotes are for them.
“Don’t ever call me mad, Mycroft. I’m not mad. I’m just … well, differently moraled, that’s all.” ― Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair
“A lot of people are bored of all the political correctness.” – Clint Eastwood
“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.” ― George Orwell
“I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.” – Hal Holbrook
“You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more,” said Yo-less. “It’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.” – ― Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Bomb
“I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who went to war against fascism.” – P. D. James
“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.” ― Gore Vidal
“Whether it’s people walking off ‘The View’ when Bill O’Reilly makes a statement about radical Islam or Juan Williams being fired for expressing his opinion, over-reaching political correctness is chipping away at the fundamental American freedoms of speech and expression.” – Eric Cantor
“I know that even now, having watched enough television, you probably won’t even refer to them as lepers so as to spare their feelings. You probably call them ‘parts-dropping-off challenged’ or something.” ― Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff
“The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one’s peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.”
― Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door
“Political correctness has become a straightjacket.” – Gary Oldman
“The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics
“When political correctness first started coming around, it ruined Andrew Dice Clay and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up career. Sam Kinison died at just the right time, ’cause no one was going to tolerate what he was saying anymore either.” – Artie Lange
“The critical importance of honest journalism and a free flowing, respectful national conversation needs to be had in our country. But it is being buried as collateral damage in a war whose battles include political correctness and ideological orthodoxy.” – Juan Williams
“I think you have to judge everything based on your personal taste. And if that means being critical, so be it. I hate political correctness. I absolutely loathe it.” – Simon Cowell
“Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society.” ― Theodore Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future
“Can’t call ‘em zombies anymore,” sighed Manny. He seemed almost wistful. “Now we gotta be all politically correct. It’s like the Cold Wars never happened.” ― David S.E. Zapanta, Posthumous
In my opinion there’s nothing more to be said on the subject. For all of you “politically correct weasels” out there . . . KMA.
Well, the New Year is upon us and all the partying is hopefully over. I wish I had a dollar for every celebrator who made the infamous Walk of Shame is the last two days. I’d be stinking rich I think.
I’m told that now is the time for reflection on the past year both good and bad. It’s supposed to give us a better perspective on things and to help us improve in 2014. I honestly think that’s nonsense but for laughs I continue to go along.
Here’s a quick recap of my last three months. Please don’t get overly excited you might just hurt yourself. As we get into the December remembrances I’ve added a few photo’s to help you understand.
OCTOBER
Grandson’s Birthday Party
One Year Blog Anniversary
A Broken Leg
NOVEMBER
Way Too many Doctor’s Visits
Thanksgiving
Sister’s Birthday
God Daughter’s Birthday
DECEMBER
Better-Half’s Mother’s Birthday
SNOW

ICE

More Doctors Appointments
More SNOW

More ICE
Christmas Eve Dinner
Much More SNOW

ICE Storm

Christmas
Much Much More Effing SNOW

Effing Black ICE
New Years Eve
SNOW

New Years Day
MORE SNOW

What have I learned from all of this? One thing immediately comes to mind . . . SPEND THE FREAKING WINTER IN FLORIDA ! ! !
One last photograph for your enjoyment. I took this from my car so it’s not as sharp as I’d like but this guy was hauling ass at the time. One of the last few remaining survivors from the Great Thanksgiving Day Turkey Massacre of 2013. Now you know why he’s running so fast.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t like all the damn snow either.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died on July 7, 1940 in Sussex, England, of a heart attack. Six years and one month later I was born. Approximately 12 years later I read my first Sherlock Holmes story and saw my first Hollywood movie version starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I’ve been hooked ever since. It wasn’t until I was stationed in Korea in the 60’s that I happened upon a complete volume of Sherlock Holmes Adventures in the boudoir of a young Korean women. Since she was unable to read English I took immediate possession of the book and read it so often I wore it out.
In the intervening years I’ve read the entire Holmes collection many times. After leaving Korea I joined the Pennsylvania State Police which also helped prepare me for my thirty years of investigative experiences. I’m not saying that Sherlock Holmes was my total inspiration for my career choice but I couldn’t begin to guess how many times when initiating an investigation I thought to myself, “Watson, the game is afoot”.
Sometimes it’s hard for me to differentiate between Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes. Holmes has always seemed much more real to me as he as does with most of his dedicated fans. The official-unofficial date of birth for Sherlock Holmes has been argued about for years but the general consensuses is January 4, 1854. That would make him 160 years old this month. That’s quite an accomplishment and life span for a fictional character who is widely recognized as the individual solely responsible for the worldwide development of forensics as a tool in criminal investigations.
Just recently I bought myself a new Kindle e-reader and the very first purchase I made was the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes Mysteries. That’s four complete novels and fifty eight short stories. It gives me a sense of security knowing that I have those stories readily available at a moments notice. This new e-reader is small and easily carried in my pocket and I can take Sherlock with me everywhere, now that we’re both retired.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHERLOCK
P.S. If you happen to be in Europe this month why don’t you swing by Riga, Latvia for the Sherlock Holmes birthday celebration.
Check it out at: Riga, Latvia Sherlock Holmes Birthday Festival