14:13 – I’ve spent today catching up on things that Barbara wanted to do but needed me available for. We went out to Home Depot to look at deck materials and pick up a few items. Then we spent some time cleaning up and reorganizing the basement. There are several small and medium projects we haven’t started yet, but we’ll get to all of them over the next few weeks.
Sunday, 27 May 2012
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Spent a lovely day yesterday doing the usual AM dump run, a pile of dishes, pots and pans left by the Army platoon that barracked here and had a food fight with that fat turd-breath junkie Belushi looking up approvingly from wherever he is. Then it was off to see a guy about fifty miles northwest to drop off my S&W Model 57 for a professional re-blueing and possible sandblasting. His main bread and butter is fixing and customizing AK’s and AR’s. Not too far away is a heavy weapons testing area that gets used by various DOD personnel and agencies, been there for many years.
Watched the last episode of Season 4 of The Wire, which was pretty good; I like the Omar character and also Rawls.
Today is more cleanup and organizing around here and also disassembly of my old Winchester 1200 for some repair, refinishing and customizing a bit.
Tomorrow, the phony Memorial Day holiday set up by the State to give Boobus Americanus a nice long weekend and the semi-official start to the American summer season of BBQ and heavy drinking. I will apparently spend it loading up the truck with various flotsam and jetsam from various construction projects at MIL’s place and then getting up extra early on Tuesday to haul it off to the dump and recycling, thus cutting short my wonderful holiday weekend appropriately enough.
And on the actual, genuine Memorial Day this next week, I will be at work, of course, though I’ve a bloody good mind to take the day off and visit, in order, the VA hospital down the road and the local boneyards where all them thousands of little American flags decorate the resting places of the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen who served in one or another of this country’s mostly unnecessary wars, some of them, like old OFD, in more than one, sad to say.
The last few days have been very nice weather-wise, but tomorrow, natch, will probably be a series of boomer t-storms and showers and humidity, perfect for hauling truckloads of junk.
Hope everyone is well here and having a good time; peace out from FB Vermont.
A hot Indy 500, but not the hottest on record. From my former TV employer: “The National Weather Service out of Indianapolis says the record has not been broken for the hottest Indy 500. The record set in 1937 still stands at 92º. The high today reached 91º, just shy of it.” Predicted high was for 97ºF.
Something like 39 turnovers of the race’s first place during the 200 laps—sometimes twice in the same lap. The male drivers were happier this year, because Danica Patrick was not racing. They felt she stole all the media attention from the men, then did not really place competitively, and the real race stories were with the men.
Meanwhile, (this is good) a couple weeks ago, a naked gunman shooting into a house in Hoosierland’s Bloomington (home to Indiana University—consistently Playboy’s #1 Playskool over the years) was cornered by cops and shot several times for pointing his gun at them. My son asked whatever happened to him, so I just looked it up.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2884178/posts
http://www.wibc.com/news/story.aspx?ID=1704489
My impression has always been that Bloomington cops are like Boston Irish cops—they use compassion and brains, instead of testosterone. Now, even though this kid was pointing a gun at them, they just shot him in the legs, instead of killing him, which would have been the likely result anywhere else. So he is alive and in jail on multiple felony charges, that will likely keep him in jail for a good while longer.
Comments in the first link are priceless. One of the best is from TV’s golden era: “There are a million stories in the naked city . . .”
Some of best fallout from these kinds of stories are the comments made by readers, which is also true up here in northern Vermont. A lot of times the story ain’t shit compared to the hilarity and wit displayed by the comments, and often so dead on target, too, pun intended.
Up here, though, the kid woulda been deader than shit, instantly; cops here will blow your ass away on whatever pretext, even if you are clearly non compos mentis and armed, at worst, with a pen knife or something, and there are three or four of the cops, all twice your size, with the usual shaved heads, wrap-around mirror shades and aggressive-hostile roid ‘tudes going on. If one is old enough and has seen enough movies and read enough history and looked at enough pictures, it ain’t a huge stretch to imagine the scene taking place with burly jackbooted stormtroopers with them funny totenkopf insignia stuff on their nice brown or black shirts.
One look at that kid’s eyes out there and you know he’s way non compos mentis, I gotta say, if I was still on The Job and he’s taking shots at me and my buddies, he’s gonna look like a Swiss cheese right away. And head shots, too, fuck that shooting at his legs.
Just sayin that if it was up here and he didn’t even have the gun but maybe made a threatening run at the cops here, they woulda dropped him on the spot. Back in my day on The Job I would have had to handle the kid all by my lonesome and no one thought twice about it.
I thought this comment in response to Chuck’s first link was relevant:
“Where do you keep your spare mag…NO DON’T TELL ME! I DON’T WANNA KNOW!!”
I’m afraid the same thing would happen in Canada. One used to expect the Mounties to be Dudley Do-Right to, well do right. Today the opposite is true. Expect them to kill at the least provocation, and likely be drunk while doing it.
We’ve had numerous “close-calls” with kids and paintball guns or cap guns and cops over-reacting. The last was four Indo-Canadian visiting basketball players from Surrey (consider it BC’s version of New Jersey) with cap guns. It took fourteen cops to swarm and disarm them. “We don’t have the time to assess the situation, we must react quickly in order to maintain public safety” is the official line, that and “what if it was a real gun?” (to which I answered to myself “You would have shit yourself, Junior”).
Funny… well not really, perhaps oddly is better? Oddly, a few years ago, when a frazzled government worker went postal and killed his supervisor and then himself, it took the Revenue Collecting Money Patrol four hours to assess the situation, long after the building had been evacuated by the others. Four hours to consider how to approach a building that is solely occupied by the dead. Interesting the juxtaposition of toy gun = no time to assess and real gun = hours to assess, is it not?
Yeah, that sounds about right for down here, too; many hours to “assess” non-threatening situations but nanoseconds to unleash death and destruction on somebody at the slightest pretext, and then the various excuses and ‘justifications’ afterward, investigated, of course, by the same department or agency.
I tell people that they are better off never calling the police for *anything,” if it’s an emergency, they will arrive too late to help you. If it is something else, they will arrive and then complicate, escalate, and generally make the situation much, much worse.
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Huh? W’ud I say?
Plenty! 😀
I suspect this kid was both drunk and drug-spaced, with little actual ability to kill anyone—especially after being shot once. Still it is scary to hear him say–just after he was taken to the hospital—that he was thinking of shooting at the cops’ chest. Although what he thought, in his drug-induced state, was the chest may have been their feet. I doubt the kid would have lived had I been one of those cops, but they are really no-fear farm boys turned dads, and they mostly deal with the students on campus as if they were children (which most in trouble are).
Police in that town have taken a lot of heat, because a 20’ish girl disappeared totally a couple years back (google “lauren spier bloomington”). The criticism is because they did not follow up on every single tip given them, but here is what my son and his friends think. The girl had a confirmed heart problem; she was known to do drugs and alcohol on the heavy side. Kids speculate that she OD’d (may not have taken much with her heart condition) with one or two guy friends, whom it is known she met that night. Both she and the guy friends are from quite wealthy families. In the company of the guy friends, she dropped dead. They confirm she is dead. They panic. One or both drive her body somewhere (one left to visit ‘home’ in another state that night) and dumped her body somewhere. Since she rode regularly in their cars, evidence that she was in the cars would not mean much. She was last seen with friends, not any stranger. She has yet to be located.
I suspect the local police surmise the same thing as the other kids on campus, and did not investigate every tip super-thoroughly because of that. In the naked gunman case, that kid is lucky he is alive, and he owes it to those cops. I hope he makes something of his life.
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An anomaly, then, I guess. Strange. Popped up just as soon as I bloviated about trigger-happy cops and how it’s better not to call them for anything.