Thursday - April 23, 2009

Czech troops in Afghanistan seen as cowards.  Refuse to fight leaving Brits to do it.

FROM, THE HINDUSTAN TIMES.

Czech troops in Afghanistan seen as cowards:

Agence France-Presse
Prague, April 22, 2009
PLEASE MR. CUSTER. I DON’T WANNA GO

Czech soldiers in Afghanistan have let their British command down by refusing to fight terrorists several times, the Czech daily DNES wrote on Wednesday. When asked by the Britons to attack Afghan rebels, the commander of a special operations unit (SOG) said “we’re not going to, it’s dangerous,” then ordered his men to get in trucks and return to the base.

On another occasion, an SOG commander decided that the task the Britons had set ran counter to the unit’s mission. Yet another time, a commander said he could not help as his soldiers were on vacation. “I find it hard to recover from the news I get about this unit. It harms the reputation of the army,” Czech Defence Minister Vlasta Parkanova told the daily.

Her ministry is now investigating the commanders of the SOG unit of up to 35 soldiers, currently deployed as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Logar province in eastern Afghanistan. The daily said SOG should not be confused with an acclaimed special unit of 100 soldiers serving in the southern Kandahar province within the Enduring Freedom operation.

The Czech army, which has lost three soldiers in Afghanistan since 2007, has another 275 people working in the Logar provincial reconstruction team, serving under ISAF. The SOG commanders argued that Czech laws did not say clearly whether their unit, trained to free hostages, should also help fight terrorists or protect humanitarian convoys.

The daily added the army was looking into the relevant law, but it was too late to mend its reputation now that that the Britons had started to work with Danish troops instead, leaving the specially trained Czech soldiers to serve as ordinary guards or bodyguards for diplomats.

A Czech soldier who was left guarding the base recalled how the Britons and Danes “left to fight and only laughed at us with contempt.”

Posted by peiper     on 04/23/2009 at 09:18 AM   
Filed Under: • Health and Safety • War-Stories •  
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A 400-year-old mummified cat has been found in the walls of a house.

They do have some very olde houses here.  This musta been somewhat creepy to uncover. Looks like the poor thing was alive when it went in.

A 400-year-old mummified cat has been found in the walls of a house that was being renovated.

By Richard Savill
Last Updated: 2:28PM BST 22 Apr 2009

The cat, which is in recognisable shape and still has its claws and teeth, may have been placed in the walls of the house in Devon, to ward off evil spirits.
Richard Parson, a funeral director, who owns the house in Ugborough, near Plymouth, said: “The builders were stripping one of the bathrooms upstairs and this little fellow came to light.

“It is quite scary looking and is a lot bigger than a normal domestic cat.  “I cannot throw it away so we plan to put it back on completion of the building work. But my wife is not all that keen on it, as she says she will have bad dreams.”
He added: “Apparently 400 years ago people put cats behind walls to ward off witches. It clearly works as, since we have lived in the village, we have not seen sight or sound of any witches.”

Mr Parson said neighbours have told him the cat was previously found behind the wall 20 years ago, but was put back by another resident.
He added: “There has been a local myth, a legend, that there was a cat buried in the house but of course we had no idea where that was.
“We were also told about a child’s boot left in the house because it was once used as a cobblers’, and was supposed to bring luck.

“I am not a superstitious man but the cat is a little bit of village history and adds charm to the property.”
Marion Gibson, a witchcraft and folklore expert, from Exeter University, said: “Cats were often put into walls as some kind of good luck charm. It seems to have been quite a widespread practice across the European continent.

“They seem to have been designed to keep away witches, the evil eye, bad luck, vermin, or anything that can be seen as a threat to the house.”

MEOW

Posted by peiper     on 04/23/2009 at 08:17 AM   
Filed Under: • Animals • UK •  
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ALL IS WELL AS THE HEALTH AND SAFETY MOONBAT CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN.

I’ve banged on enough in the past about this topic but far from through sharing the lunacy.
So without further ado lads and lassies .... eers to yer elth ...

What a joke! Now health and safety bans circus clown from wearing his big, floppy shoes

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 1:00 AM on 23rd April 2009

Roll up, roll up! The health and safety circus has come to town.

And it has made one clown very sad indeed.

Valerik Kashkin has been told by his bosses that he can no longer wear his giant comedy shoes because they are a health risk.

Mr Kashkin was performing in Britain with the Moscow State Circus a week last Saturday when, while wearing the shoes, he fell from a 10ft-high wire, hurting his left foot.

He continued with the show in Liverpool’s Sefton Park but was still in pain and when he went to hospital later that evening he was told he had broken his metatarsal bone.

After a week’s recovery he returned to the circus but was told by management that his size-18 clown shoes compromised his health and safety and would have to go.

In his routine, Mr Kashkin - who has been described as a Buster Keaton-type performer - dresses himself first while walking on a wire, then within a hoop of fire, and plays a drum-kit, trumpet and double-bass all at the same time.

The 40-year-old, from Temruk, in Russia, said: ‘The shoes are an important part of my costume, and I was disappointed to be told I couldn’t do this part of my act.

‘I feel fine, and think I could do it in the shoes - the impact might be lost on the audience now.

THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

Posted by peiper     on 04/23/2009 at 06:08 AM   
Filed Under: • Nanny State • Stoopid-People • UK • work and the workplace •  
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   Wednesday - April 22, 2009

It’s a plumb job

I get to work as a plumber today. And as a display case builder. Hey, anything for money. I’ll be back later.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/22/2009 at 12:56 PM   
Filed Under: • work and the workplace •  
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I was right of course

Ah, the sweet sweet taste of validation. I knew my brain wasn’t completely fried yet, but it’s nice to have some proof.

From: Drew Pearce
To: rules “at” bowl.com
Date: 04/20/2009 03:25 PM
Subject: Rule 110c questions

Dear USBC

Is it impossible for teams with vacancies to forfeit by not showing up?

Our league allows for forfeits. We use the Earn The Points method when a forfeit occurs. As league secretary, I consider a team to have forfeited when a) none of the people on that team show up to bowl and b) nobody on that team has prebowled for the night and c) nobody called either the alley or any of our officers to say they wouldn’t be coming in and asked for a postponement.

We are a struggling league, and I’m trying to be flexible: if even one person shows up or prebowls, that’s good enough for me for a starting lineup.

Our league allows teams to have vacancies. We have only one team with vacancies, but that team has two of them. Our bylaw for vacancies appears to consider them part of the team, at least for “legal lineup”: “A legal lineup shall consist of two regular bowlers. A vacancy is considered a regular bowler.” Since we actually have 4 members per team, I guess this bylaw is talking about a starting lineup? It seems a bit vague.

There is an opinion, held by our president and vice-president, that a team with one or more vacant members can never forfeit by absence, because the vacant “people” are “always there”. But if a team has a full roster of human members, they can forfeit by not showing up. This seems very wrong to me, because the rules are not equally applied.

I guess their reasoning is that with multiple vacancies, both are “regular bowlers” and thus this team never has a no-show, even when the human members are absent?

please help!

sincerely,
Andrew Pearce
Secretary, league #845145

Nyaa nyaa, nyaa nyaa nyaa!!!! Pffbbttt!!!! Neener, neener neener!!! 

Posted by Drew458     on 04/22/2009 at 11:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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OH THEY’LL LOVE HIM IN EUROPE.  Barack Obama: Bush officials could be prosecuted.

That’s the headline people.  But then I guess you already know.

Question ... if things work out here and we can sell this place in say a year.  Will I have a country to come home to?
Will I want to?

This is really getting scary and I don’t mind tellin’ ya I’m worried more now then I was after the election.  I knew things weren’t gonna go our way.
We all expected that.  But man oh man this is really the start of some very bad news.  Sure hope I have it bass ackwards and am shown to be wrong.
But how can I be unless that line about bowing to the left is wrong.  And come on, how many of us believe that the line is not correct?
Oh damn.  “bowing to the left.”

Enjoy the read.  Comrades.

Barack Obama: Bush officials could be prosecuted over ‘torture’ documents
US President Barack Obama has bowed to pressure from the Left by opening the door to Bush administration officials being prosecuted for approving alleged torture by CIA interrogators.

By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 12:20PM BST 22 Apr 2009

IN A DRAMATIC SHIFT by a White House that on Monday had brushed aside questions about the issue by insisting the American president was “focused on looking forward”, Mr Obama indicated that officials could be called to account for the US losing its “moral bearings”.

Last week, Mr Obama made public four memos written by officials in President George W. Bush’s administration that contained explicit details of the CIA’s methods of extracting information from al-Qaeda suspects between 2002 and 2005.

On Sunday, Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama’s chief of staff, told ABC News that “those who devised policy ... should not be prosecuted”.

But Mr Obama on Tuesday drew a sharp distinction between CIA interrogators who believed they were acting legally and the officials who had approved the advice.

“For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it’s appropriate for them to be prosecuted,” he said.

“With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the Attorney General within the parameters of various laws, and I don’t want to prejudge that. I think that there are a host of very complicated issues involved there.”

Mr Obama’s dramatic u-turn raises the prospect of the three men who wrote the memos - Jay Bybee, a former assistant attorney general who is now a federal judge, and his deputies John Yoo and Steven Bradbury - and others facing congressional investigations and even criminal charges.

The president has faced an uproar from former CIA chiefs and deep concern from current operatives but also a fierce reaction from Left-wing groups and Democrats on Capitol Hill determined to pursue the authors of the memos and other senior Bush officials.

Mr Obama visited the CIA on Monday in an attempt to placate the agency. But there was no sign of the anger on the Left subsiding as as it emerged that the highly controversial technique of “water-boarding”, a type of simulated drowning, had been used 266 times on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two senior al-Qaeda prisoners.

Mr Obama’s abandonment of his previous position that the US should “move forward” and put the “dark and painful chapter in our history” behind it came after he was urged by Democrat senatorsSenator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged him not to rule out prosecutions.

On Monday night, Dick Cheney, the former vice-president, told Fox News it was “disturbing” that Mr Obama’s administration had released some documents “but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort”.

Posted by peiper     on 04/22/2009 at 09:09 AM   
Filed Under: • Commies • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Insanity • Obama, The One • Outrageous •  
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   Tuesday - April 21, 2009

Son of Gun

Ordered it online from Oklahoma on Thursday, paid for it on Friday, picked it up in New Jersey on Tuesday. It’s a keeper.

This is a 5 shot stainless steel double action .357 Magnum revolver with fixed sights and a 3” barrel. At 27 ounces, it weighs about a third less than my big Ruger GP100, but you can tell both models have an awful lot in common. Same internals, same locking concept, same hammer. If not two peas in a pod, they’re at least as close as cousins. Or as I’m thinking of it, Gun, and Son of Gun.

It took me quite a while to make this simple post, because I never knew how hard it was to take good pictures of polished oiled stainless steel with a digital camera that wants to use the flash all the time. So these aren’t the best snapshots, sorry.

This is a great little pistol. Even with the “big” 3” barrel it fits right into a jeans pocket and doesn’t imprint ...

It’s quite a bit smaller in the hand than the mid-sized frame GP100, but the SP101 is still big enough to get a good grip on. None of that extra finger off the end of the grip nonsense going on here.

You only get 5 shots, but that’s 5 shots of .357. Which is enough to utterly deafen an attacker, if nothing else. .357s are amazingly loud. Pull the trigger and the blast pushes the air right out of you lungs. Cool, auto-exhale!

It’s very easy to see just how similar the SP101 and the GP100 are. Ruger came up with a good idea, and they’re sticking to it.

For people with smaller hands, the SP101 should fit perfectly. The grip is shorter and thinner, and a bit more vertical, so the distance from the backstrap to the trigger is much less. About 1/2” I’d say. A bit more than half a dime, which is that blurry round thing in the next picture. This shot came out lousy, but come on. YOU try stacking two revolvers on top of each other, then zooming in for a close up when everything is shiny. It ain’t easy to do.

My wife and I have had this running joke for ages now. She calls my GP100 her pistol. At a slender 5 feet tall, her hands are quite small. I put the SP101 in her hands and her first reaction was “So when are you going to buy a pistol? Cuz this one’s mine now.” Which is pretty much exactly the reaction I was looking for.

Right out of the box the trigger on this little thing was a bit rough. There is a pronounced “flat spot” in the pull. You can both feel it and hear it. This is the gun telling you it’s about to fire. Pull the trigger just a tiny bit more, and SNAP! it goes off. Trigger pull is a bit heavy, but the pull is even throughout the range of movement. I like that. After dry firing the gun a few hundred times most of the roughness was gone. But it’s a Ruger after all ... which means you take it apart, carefully and gently polish the burrs off the internals, clean everything with mineral spirits then alcohol, then give the parts a dip in Mili-tec and an hour in a cool oven. Then coat everything up with Tetra-Gun or CLP and put it back together. Things will be much smoother after that. Wolff makes a spring kit too, which will take the trigger pull down a couple of pounds. I went through this process a decade ago with the GP100, and made that pistol work glass smooth. And Trausch makes a set of custom grips for only $25. So now you know my plans for the next few days.

More good news from Gun World - my dealer says the little Ruger LCPs are starting to come in now, in quantity. So if you’ve been eyeballing those online, stop thinking about paying the high prices, don’t! In another month you should be able to get them for well under $300. The LCP is a really tiny .380 semi-automatic, hardly any bigger or thicker than your wallet. I’ve got one of those on order too, so it’s time to go get another permit from NJ. The gun shop out in Oklahoma were I found this SP101 has more of them, but right now they only have the 2” barrel snubby. With or without the hammer spur. Same gun, just a shorter barrel. But it’s still a Ruger, and that means it’s a keeper. If you really want one of the snubbies, for the best price in the USA right now, email me.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/21/2009 at 03:45 PM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
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not sure BMEWS is ready for this: Indian business students snap up copies of Mein Kampf.Good Grief!

Hey ... I’m only the messenger.  Boggles the imagination but really. This is the report as it appeared in the morning paper.  Bizarre. To say the least.

Sales of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and apologia for his anti-semitism, are soaring in India where business students regard the dictator as a management guru.

By Monty Munford in New Delhi

Booksellers told The Daily Telegraph that while it is regarded in most countries as a ‘Nazi Bible’, in India it is considered a management guide in the mould of Spencer Johnson’s “Who Moved My Cheese”.

Sales of the book over the last six months topped 10,000 in New Delhi alone, according to leading stores, who said it appeared to be becoming more popular with every year.

Several said the surge in sales was due to demand from students who see it as a self-improvement and management strategy guide for aspiring business leaders, and who were happy to cite it as an inspiration.

“Students are increasingly coming in asking for it and we’re happy to sell it to them,” said Sohin Lakhani, owner of Mumbai-based Embassy books who reprints Mein Kampf every quarter and shrugs off any moral issues in publishing the book.
“They see it as a kind of success story where one man can have a vision, work out a plan on how to implement it and then successfully complete it”.

Jaico Publishing House, one of the publishers in India, said it reprints a new edition of the book at least twice a year to meet growing demand.
“We were the first company to publish the book in India and there are now six other Indian publishers of the book, although we were first to take a chance on it,” said Jaico’s chief editor, R H Sharma, who dismissed any moral issues in publishing Mein Kampf.

“The initial print run of 2,000 copies in 2003 sold out immediately and we knew we had a best-seller on our hands. Since then the numbers have increased every year to around 15,000 copies until last year when we sold 10,000 copies over a six-month period in our Delhi shops,” he added.

Senior academics cite the mutual influence of India and Hitler’s Nazis on one another. Mahatma Gandhi corresponded with the Fuhrer, pro-Independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army allied with Hitler’s Germany and Japan during the Second World War, and the Nazis drew on Hindu symbolism for their Swastika motif and ideas of Aryan supremacy.

Dr J Kuruvachira, Professor of Philosophy of Salesian College in Nagaland and who has cited Mein Kampf as a source of inspiration to the Hindu nationalist BJP, said he believed the book’s popularity was due to political reasons.

“While it could be the case that management students are buying the book, my feeling is that it has more likely influenced some of the fascist organisations operating in India and nearby,” he said.

India is not the only country where Mein Kampf is popular. It has been a best-seller in Croatia since it was first published in while in turkey it sold 100,000 in just two months in 2005. In Russia it has been reprinted three times since the de facto ban on the book was overturned in 1992.

In Germany the book’s copyright is held by the state of Bavaria where its publication is banned until 2015, 70 years after Hitler’s death.
In India, any book more than 25 years old is free of copyright, which has paved the way for six separate publishers to print the book.

the Nazis drew on Hindu symbolism for their Swastika motif and ideas of Aryan supremacy.

I’m not too certain about the Swastika comment because I know for a fact that the Swastika also was a part of Mongolian Buddhism that goes back hundreds of years. But I guess it could be Hindu as well though I never saw it there. Didn’t look for it either come to that.  My reading on the subject in one book years ago claimed that AH got the symbol from a church decoration. And btw ... right here in Winchester,England, at the museum in town, there are ancient Roman artefacts including floor tiles that have been dug up here.  And there it is. Plain as day.

Posted by peiper     on 04/21/2009 at 02:41 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous • News-Briefs •  
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Vermin gang with youngest age 12, kill student in mistaken identity. Hell of a reason to die.

Some of ..."these vermin” got life but we all know what that translates to. Right?

OK, that’s my crime coverage for today.  But if you want I can fill the blog with more of the same. Nah, this and previous story paint the picture as things sadly are.

Boy, 12, among four gang members jailed for beating and stabbing student to death in case of mistaken identity

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 4:56 PM on 21st April 2009

A 12-year-old boy was jailed today with three other gang members for beating and stabbing a university student to death.

The ‘pack’ of killers were part of a group of up to 25 hoodies who attacked 22-year-old Yasin Abdirahman because they wrongly thought he was from a rival street gang.

All of them were members of the ‘MDP’, which stands for ‘Money Drugs Power’, which terrorises the streets of west London.

Mr Abdirahman, a Somalian pharmacy student at London Metropolitan University, was confronted by the MDP and accused of being a member of rival gang the ‘Grit Set’.

The gang chased him with sticks, broken bottles and knives, before stabbing him three times in the head. Mr Abdirahman died a week later from a brain injury.

Following two Old Bailey trials over four months, 10 youths were convicted for their part in the horrific attack on September 3, 2007.

Sheldon Lewis, 19, Andre Mason, 15, and Joshua Williams, 15, were all jailed for life today for murder.

Ringleader Lewis was given a minimum of 15 years, Williams 14 years and Mason 13 years.

Carlos Cyrus, just 12 at the time of the attack, was convicted of manslaughter and was today sentenced to a seven year jail term with a further four years of extended supervision.

Judge Peter Beaumont, Recorder for London, told the killers: ‘The attack was not only violent, but took place in a residential estate, a place where people live and who are so entitled to believe that within yards of their home they won’t be set upon by what can only be described as a pack raiding the estate to settle some grievance of their own.’

Another boy, also 12, who cannot be named for legal reasons, will be sentenced at a later date for conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm with intent and violent disorder.

The MDP were responsible for the murder of 16-year-old student Kodjo Yenga six months earlier.

Posted by peiper     on 04/21/2009 at 02:04 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • UK •  
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Teenager who robbed girl, 12, at knifepoint had been freed on bail after stabbing fashion designer

Freeken business as usual in the land of hope no hope and glory gory.

Just another yoot I suppose. And because of tender age he will be sent to jail but then out in time to continue what his kind do best. Assault people and especially the unarmed.  Which most here are as you know.

These “youths” need killing with no second guessing.  But this culture, or their legal system at any rate, just does not seem to me to have public safety at the very forefront of their legal thinking.

Here’s an example.  A story from yesterday’s paper. Haven’t decided to post it or not but in brief.
A number of years ago this foul low life murdered three cops in cold blood. Just took em out and was cold as ice about the whole thing.
So, he goes to jail right?  Yeah but ..... he’s also been allowed out on work release and some other sort of crazyness. WTF? HE KILLED THREE COPS FOR GODS SAKE! And then he started creating all sorts of mayhem and made life miserable for a witness over a five year period. Killing pets, chopping up a horse and blinding another in one eye.  This miserable excuse for a human is alive an well and I believe back in prison.  BUT .. had they hung the bastard to begin with .... as they should do with feral teens .... the problem could be solved to some degree.

To my way of thinking, it’s ALL ABOUT FUTURE VICTIMS of these kinds of criminals. And btw, I do not buy mental illness either.  And that’s yet another story.  Another creep let out and set free .... and coming to a neighborhood. Soon.  Perhaps yours?

TEEN ROBS YOUNG GIRL WHILE OUT ON BAIL FOR STABBING

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:00 PM on 21st April 2009

A teenager arrested for the ferocious and unprovoked stabbing of a budding fashion designer was freed on bail to rob a 12-year-old girl at knife point two weeks later, a court heard today.

Nazrul Islam, who was locked up for 10 years today, left Oliver Hemsley paralysed from the neck down when he attacked him on August 28 last year.

He was discovered hours later with his victim’s blood on his clothes and arrested, while the kitchen knife he used was found discarded with his DNA on it.

But the 15-year-old was freed on bail pending the results of forensic tests, and on September 14, threatened and robbed a terrified 12-year-old girl of just £5.

Islam pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm with intent against Mr Hemsley at Inner London Crown Court last month.

The 20-year-old victim had just been accepted for a design course at the prestigious St Martin’s School of Art when he was attacked as he walked along the road in Shoreditch, central London.

He nearly died after being stabbed from behind through the heart and lungs, and was paralysed after the knife sliced through his spinal column.

Sentencing Islam today at the Old Bailey, Judge Roger Chapple said: ‘This was an entirely motiveless, mindless attack. Its ferocity makes my blood run cold.’

The court heard that just a couple of weeks after being arrested, Islam, whose street name was ‘Mad Maz’, robbed a child in east London.

Catherine Milson, prosecuting, said he punched her and pulled out ‘what appeared to be a knife’.

He reached into her pocket and took the money, before telling her to ‘f*** off to your own area’ and she ran off and hid as he chased her off.

The court heard he was on bail for the previous attack at the time.

Miss Milson said: ‘He was only remanded in custody after the forensic analysis results.’

Islam, of Upton Park, east London, later pleaded guilty to the robbery.

The judge lifted reporting restrictions in place because of his age after hearing he still revelled in his violent self-image.

‘He speaks with a degree of pride about his reputation with the boys, with the local community,’ he said.

The court heard that Mr Hemsley, now 21, whose family live in Ely, near Cambridge, was confined to a wheelchair.

Islam attacked him as he went out in the evening with his friend Emma Wright to buy gin and tonic from an off-licence.

A group of youths approached them and pushed her to one side as they began punching and kicking him.

‘One of the group appeared to be jabbing the back of Mr Hemsley’s head around the area of the neck,’ said Miss Milson.

As they stood around him, Miss Wright screamed at them to stop and heard the ‘thudding’ noise of punches and kicks, the court heard.

Mr Hemsley fell to the ground and his attackers ran off laughing.

When his friend tried to help him, he told her: ‘Emma, don’t touch me, I don’t want to be paralysed. I can’t feel anything.’

He was saved by emergency surgery but remains paralysed and is being treated at a rehabilitation centre in London.

His brother Will, a 26-year-old bank worker, said in a statement read to the court: ‘Oli will never fulfil what so many expected, he will never fulfil the life he was supposed to live.

‘This life sentence of misery has been meted out to not just Oli but his family and friends, all of them have been affected in some way or another.’

The judge told Islam: ‘Oliver Hemsley was, it is clear, a gentle young man with a bright future ahead of him. He posed not the slightest threat to you.’

He said it was ‘worrying’ that the knifeman appeared to remain ‘indifferent’ to the suffering he had caused.

Police have been unable to obtain enough evidence to charge anyone else with the attack so far.

Outside court, the victim’s brother said he was disappointed with the sentence.

He added: ‘No sentence could ever be enough, however, the judge today sent out a message to those who carry knives and more importantly those who are prepared to use them.

‘In the last eight months we have been through more pain and suffering than any person should have to and unfortunately for Oli and those supporting him it is set to continue for the foreseeable future.

‘At the end of this custodial sentence this animal will be free to go on and live his life, unfortunately the same cannot be said for Oli, who has been given a life sentence for no real reason.’

Will said he and his friends had raised £12,000 sponsorship for spinal cord charities with a planned cycle tour of France.

LAW AND DISORDER

Posted by peiper     on 04/21/2009 at 01:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • UK •  
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A TINY UPDATE:  FRENCH MAYOR SAYS BRITS TOO EASY ON IMMIGRANTS. BRITS SAY NO WE’RE NOT.

Hmmmm.  All depends on what you mean by easy?

ok…

Nuff said I guess ...
This was an easy post ...

DAILY MAIL

Posted by peiper     on 04/21/2009 at 11:34 AM   
Filed Under: • Illegal-Aliens • UK •  
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bang bang

I gotta go pick up my new toy. It’s in. See ya later!

Posted by Drew458     on 04/21/2009 at 11:00 AM   
Filed Under: • Guns and Gun Control •  
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Welcome to the NEW USS Truxtun!

I served for four years (1982-1986) aboard the last USS Truxtun CGN-35. She was decommissioned in 1994, and scrapped in 1996. Thank you Bill Clinton…

Anyway, the previous incarnation of the ‘Tommy T’ was a nuclear-powered guided missile cruiser. I was a reactor operator (RC-div). Yes, one of those ‘nuke ETs’. NavVets will know what I’m talking about. I operated the nuclear power plants that made the ship go.

I received an official invite to the commissioning ceremony of the NEW USS Truxtun DDG-103. It sounds like a pretty powerful ship. I really wanted to attend, but couldn’t convince the wife to go. So I won’t be there this weekend. Damn!

Thought I’d leave you with this, though.

How To Simulate The Life Of A Sailor

* Buy a steel dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.
* Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.
* Repaint your entire house every month.
* Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the showerhead to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.
* Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head everytime you pass through them.
* Disassemble and inspect your lawn mower every week.
* On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turne the waer heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water during the week, so not bathing will be allowed.
* Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling, so you can’t turn over without getting out and then getting back into bed.
* Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and say “Sorry, wrong rack.”
* Make your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house - dishwasher, blender, mixer, etc.
* Have your neighbor come over each day at 5 AM, blow a whistle loudly, and shout “Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.”
* Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in your back yard at 6 AM while she reads it to you.
* Submit a request chit to your father-in-law requesting permission to leave your house before 3 PM.
* Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not.
* Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering it to you.
* Watch no TV except for movies played in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch then show a different one.
* Make your family menu a week ahead of time without consulting the pantry or refrigerator.
* Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.
* Bake a cake. Prop up on side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly. Spread icing really thick to level it off.
* Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (Midrats)
* Set your alarm clock to go off at random tmes during the night. At the alarm, jump up and dress as fast as you can, making sure to button the top button of your shirt and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose. Stand there for an hour. Then re-roll the hose and go back to bed.
* Every week or so, throw your dog in the pool and shout, “Man overboard port side!” Rate your family members on how fast they respond.
* Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup “Stove manned and ready.” After an hour or so, speak into the cup again, “Stove secured.” Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoebox.
* Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4 hour intervals. This is done for three days, once a month.
* When there is a thunderstorm in your area, get a wobbly rocking chair, sit in it, and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. Make sure to have a supply of stale crackers to eat in your shirt pocket.
* Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and allow the pot to simmer for 5 hours before drinking.
* Have someone under the age of ten give you a haircut with sheep shears.
* Sew the back pockets of your jeans on the front.
* Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you are going to take them to Disney World for “liberty.” At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been canceled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.

Gosh, how I miss being a sailor! (sarcasm)

Actually, I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I learned to live ‘lite’, ie, had very few possessions to weigh me down. Got to travel, meet interesting people, without killing them (though that was always an option in the event of war…)

Then, there was a spiritual side to Navy service.

You are on a ship observing ‘darkness’ rules (no lights, don’t want the Soviets to see us easily…), it’s midnight, you’ve just gotten off the 8-12 watch, You and a couple of shipmates are out on the flight deck, doing some amateur astronomy. Why? Because you’re from the USA, and you’ll never get another chance to stargaze in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from any city lights. There, above you, is the grand beauty of God’s creation. Stars, like dust, shining with colors! You can’t make out the colors from home, but they stand out in the darkness of the South Pacific.

Add in the fact that Halley’s Comet was visible to the naked eye in ‘86 if you were in the Southern Hemisphere…

Actually, if I weren’t married, I’d go back to being a sailor.

Posted by Christopher     on 04/21/2009 at 04:53 AM   
Filed Under: • Adventure • Daily Life • Editorials • Fun-Stuff • Personal •  
• Comments (11) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

   Monday - April 20, 2009

7th, maybe 6th

Phew. That one was too close.

We finished off Monday League tonight, bowling the 7th place team again. And we beat them 5-2, again. That means we fought our way up out of 8th place, into at least 7th. But if the 5th place team laid a 7-0 smackdown on the 6th place team, our 5 points will be enough to float us up to 6th. Either place is fine with us. This is only our first year together as a team, and we’ve really hit it off. Next year maybe we’ll be more competitive. Too bad that league’s Secretary had to go away for a wedding, so it will be several weeks until we get together again to pass out the awards and money.

I screwed the pooch in game one. We lost that one by 115, and at least 50 pins of that was my fault. I just couldn’t focus, because just being in the alley made me think about Saturday league, and I’m really pissed off about that. No, not my teammates. I’m pretty much used to their level of major suckage. One beer after getting home and I’m over their weekly fiascos. What’s got me cranked is that the way the rules in that league are written, an imbalanced situation exists, and that such a thing might be entirely legal. And that raises my Porcupine Quills Of Injustice into Slash Position. Seriously. I got into a very short and loud argument with the league VP last week, and was within a step of clobbering him. Real RCOB moment for me. Tables were knocked over, chairs kicked. That’s bad. I have an explosive temper. I’m usually the most easy going guy, but tell me something asinine and insist it’s the truth and interrupt me every two words without even listening when I try to give my opinion, “none of us like it but that’s the way it is” ... that’s pushing several of my big red buttons all at the same time.

I have contacted the USBC looking for clarification. See, this is the issue. This league’s rules consider a vacant position to be a regular team member. Because of that, they feel that a team that has one or more vacancies can never forfeit by absence. I think that’s a lot of hooie. If you don’t show up, screw you. You don’t win anything. The other team doesn’t automatically win, they have to earn their points by bowling against their own averages. That part at least is standard USBC policy. But under this league’s current rules, a team that has no vacancies can forfeit by not showing up. So one team can forfeit, but another team can’t? That ain’t right. But the rule is written “A legal lineup shall consist of two regular bowlers. A vacancy is considered a regular bowler.” “Aha!” I hear you saying, “that means that one person still has to show up anyway!” Ordinarily yes. But our team, the notoriously unreliable Team 5, has TWO vacancies. Actually at this point they have THREE, since the one guy hasn’t been seen or heard from in 5 weeks. So if vacancies are considered regular bowlers, then the first vacancy is one regular bowler, the next vacancy is another regular bowler ... and, ta da!, you have a nearly empty team that can never forfeit by not showing up, since the vacancy bowlers are “always there”. It’s total crap. And I debated against it back in August at our start up meeting. And it was the vice president who insisted that’s the way it had to be, or else he and his wife were quitting right then and there. So he got his way. And now 35 weeks later he’s telling me “none of us like it but that’s the way it is”? You ... you Democrat. You’re the one who absolutely insisted that the rule be written that way. Just you. And you wouldn’t listen to reason then either.

Since I’m the Secretary for this group, the keeper of all the scores AND the keeper of the rules, I realized the error early on, and I’ve run the whole season my way. I didn’t ignore their stupid rule, I just interpreted differently. Which is: no wins for no-shows. But I’ve been very flexible: if even one actual humanoid person on the team shows up, or pre-bowls, or even calls and says “I can’t make it, can I bowl later?"[nobody has ever done that one] then I don’t treat it as a forfeit. Many, if not most, leagues have rules about what they call a “starting lineup”: 2 out of 4, or 3 out of 5 of your team members had better either show up or pre-bowl, or else your team forfeits. Period. I set the bar as low to the ground as possible: one person. But I guess that wasn’t low enough. And I guess I’m a bit touchy at this point, having fronted this league $300 worth of software and supplies over the course of the season, having asked at least 10 times for some reimbursement and gotten none, having been called a “lyin cheatin mothafucka” to my face by one team because I was decent enough to point out their math errors because they couldn’t add 3 single digit numbers properly ... etc. It’s been a lot of work, since August, without any thanks at all. And now I’ve got some ornery drunk telling me I’m doing it all wrong, he who hasn’t done one single thing the entire year [tits on a shovel are more useful, and better looking, than a vice president of a bowling league. It’s not a paying job, and there is no work at all]. Bad move.

Even more aggravating is that he might be right. Well, too late now. I made the decision, that’s how I ran things, and they can do it their way next year. Even if I go back and change the rules in the software, I doubt if it will make a big enough difference to change who is in what place. But I don’t care. Even if I did the wrong thing. I’m the one doing every last bit of work here, above and beyond any expectation. So shut up and stay the hell out of my way. Now pay me my money, pay me my prize winnings, and I’m out of there. Find some other sucker next year, if you losers even have a next year.

So that’s what I had to get past tonight, and when I did I bowled Ok. Not great, but not awful. And that was good enough.

Woo hoo, summer league starts soon. And no Air Doug this year, because he’s too poor to spare the $13 per week. Good. And good riddance.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/20/2009 at 09:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Bowling Blogging •  
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