08:55 – Colin let us sleep in this morning. When we woke up, Barbara asked me what time it was. “Eight o’clock,” I told her.
My mind can be a very strange place to live. For some reason, a fully fleshed-out scenario flashed through my mind, a meeting where a bunch of marketing droids were sitting around discussing what to name their coffee.
MD1: “How about Eight O’Clock?”
MD2: “Nah, that’s too late. Most people have their first cup by 7:00.”
MD3: “I always have mine around 6:45.”
MD2: “That’s way too long a name. We need something shorter.”
MD4: “I usually don’t have mine until I get to work at 10:00.”
MD5: “How about Early Morning Blend?”
MD4: “I think Dunhill trademarked that for tobacco.”
MD6: “I usually have tea in the morning.”
MD1/2/3/4/5: “We don’t sell tea, you moron.”
Eight O’Clock Coffee was created by The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company in 1859, which is also that company’s founding year.
When you jump out of bed, what’s the difference between caffeine or nicotine? My favorite doctor (now moved to Utah) maintained that no one over 50 should have caffeine of any kind. In my parlance, it subtracts ticks from your life. He also believed that no one should smoke — ever. That definitely shortens one’s life, he maintained. I have not touched caffeine since my ’30’s. I drink decaffeinated Typhoo tea (British product) every morning. Nothing but water from this contraption with a lime in the bottom after tea time (16:00).
http://www.crateandbarrel.com/citrus-zinger/s111349
‘Comedian George Burns is not only a living legend, he’s living proof that smoking between 10 and 15 cigars a day for 70 years contributes to one’s longevity.
“If I’d taken my doctor’s advice and quit smoking when he advised me to, I wouldn’t have lived to go to his funeral,” deadpans the 98-year-old comedian from a chair in his Hollywood office…’
I’m too civilised to drink (much) coffee, but I am quite partial to tea (Dilmah, if you must know). Has it got caffeine? I don’t know or care. I like it.
Quit heroin cold-turkey in 1975.
Ciggies likewise in 1978.
Pot in 1989.
Booze in 2009.
I don’t drink coffee or tea.
Don’t sing or dance or go to the movies, either.
Cuss like a drunken jarhead on shore leave, though, and I’m trying to cut down on it to no avail so fah.
Also have fantasies about mining the shore road out past us and this street and sniping at motorhead douchebags who like to rev their engines, wind them out for mile past us, and scrub out. More fantasies about using a neutron device on IRS HQ and tipping the UN into the East River along with the New York Times. Wild fantasies about turning Mordor into the fetid stinking swampland and bog it once was, with the buildings falling into ruins like ancient Greek and Roman edifices of Late Antiquity (un-pc phrase now).
I have two cups of eight o’clock Colombian coffee each morning, fresh ground:
http://www.amazon.com/Eight-OClock-Colombian-Coffee-11-Ounce/dp/B0068ZWMFC/
I agree, being a heart patient, I shouldn’t but we all have our issues in life.
OFD, you paint such a wonderful picture, it brings a tear to my eye. For what it’s worth, I can drive a bulldozer. I’ve never handled one of the really big dozers, but I’m sure I could figure it out well enough to help plow the megalopolis under.
For the motorheads, how much traffic is there along the road around the time they’re doing their assininity? Would it be practical to scatter caltrops before they get started? Failing that, is there anyplace with good cover near the road? You could heave cinderblocks at their windshields (or front grill, if you’re feeling merciful) as they blast past at well over the speed limit? Failing that, can you quietly get to their cars and remove the valve stems/knife the tires/put sugar water in the gas tank/bury landmines by the driver’s doors?
I am considering all those techniques and methodologies at present and will be conducting evaluations and testing accordingly over this next couple of warm months, when they come out, like bugs from the woodwork, just as in the big cities.
The main problem, whoops, I meant “challenge,” is to do these things while other regular traffic is on the road at the same time; I’ve thought of decibel-triggered land mines, for instance, but if one vehicle blows up, the wreckage and shrapnel are liable to hit someone else following or sumthin.
My main efforts now will be intel-gathering and surveillance. Once we have positive ID’s on vehicles and operators we can commence other operations; we’re pretty sure we know already where a bunch of these dickwads live, about three miles up the road, in a big ramshackle farmhouse with what appears to be a parking lot full of vehicles, some of which we can clearly see are among the main perps. Local law enforcement probably knows them also but so far as we know leaves them alone, ’cause it would look bad doing MV stops and locking peeps up in front of the touristas, who bring the revenue, etc., etc.
I also see them parked at the local gas station/creemee stand and other points occasionally, and am considering a couple of other options for those times and places.
Another challenge is making them understand somehow that what is done to them and their cars/trucks/motorcycles is connected to their shitty behavior here in the village.
Also have fantasies about mining the shore road out past us and this street and sniping at motorhead douchebags who like to rev their engines, wind them out for mile past us, and scrub out.
Shit, let’s fire up the ‘Hawk, install a Containerized Delivery System, and drop mines from above. I like it when they just sit out, makes people curious, BOOOOM!!
I’ll spring for the gas if you fly it out this way, it’s only, what, couple thousand miles? A breeze; you can drop some bug-out supplies at the Leavenworth crib on your way. Side run to Chicago to spray a few blocks with cannon and mini-gun ammo, maybe some gas.
One of the fave vids I’ve seen on the net is of a small group of hadji cretins placing an IED somewhere over in that flat wasteland mess, by a road, and they’re now tamping down the dirt on top. Looks pretty good but one genius decides it needs a bit more tamping down and KA-BOOM, just a little puff of smoke left, wafting away in the air…
I used to provide close-ground-coverage for EOD guys sometimes over on Uncle’s SEA plantations and normal SOP was to stand off a ways with the 60, but I liked to watch them work and set up right next to the buggers; they thought I was beaucoups dinky-dao, but hey, gotta get some entertainment somewhere. None of us ever got blown up, so it was cool.
There was a man who worked for my dad & I for many years who was a retired USAF freight handler. He used to talk about his days at Cam Ranh Bay, where his seniority meant that he had to be the one to load the Big Bertha bomb of that era into a C-130. He never minded that job so much as watching a 19 year old, fresh out of EOD school, who liked to play bongos on the thing before he armed it.
Sigh, I see the Mooslims are burning Paris to the ground again. How long are the French going to put up with it? WTF did Israel do to France? It’s the Arab Spring Part Deaux. Israel should just get it over with. Lock and load 1000 bulldozers and level the fucking place. Why do they keep it going decade after decade?
“He never minded that job so much as watching a 19 year old, fresh out of EOD school, who liked to play bongos on the thing before he armed it.”
Ha, ha, that’s pretty good; my EOD guys were pretty wack, too, and I used to smoke a cig or a doobie with them while they futzed with the stuff, like the double Bouncing Betty, always a gas. Cam Ranh Bay was mainly a Navy base but of course like almost all the sites had more than one service at it. After we left, the Sovs got it and enlarged it, not sure what’s been done with it since they left.
I don’t care what the hadji mobs do in Europe; let the Euros deal with it. Let’s be honest; how long would this chit last if a couple of Waffen SS divisions rolled in, or for that matter, Spetznatz.
The French sold the nuclear technology to the Israelis to build their three breeder reactors. At one time in the 1950s, the French and the Israelis were best buds. The Brits never really forgave the Israelis for the King David hotel thing.
Yah, but the hadji mobs are baying for blood and burning down the place ’cause the Israelis rolled into Gaza again, after first being rocketed more or less continuously by the so-called Palestinians, who were rocketing after the Israelis…and so on and so on…
Who cares? Let them slaughter each other and wade in blood, as it’s apparently their favorite activity.
It is WAY past time that U.S. foreign policy was run by the Israeli war hawks and the Likud Party and its “amen corner in the U.S. Congress.” And the nutball fundies in this country need to quit fantasizing that the Book of Revelation is in any way related to current events, which any decent study of the historical era would indicate. There will be no “Armageddon” on some desert expanse in Israel and no conversions and all that other rot that keeps being dispensed by such wack vehicles as the Jack Chick publications and various lunatic millionaire tee-vee preachers and snake-oil hucksters.
So we need to quit bowing down to whatever Likud wants us to do and “supporting Israel,” poor little defenseless Israel, no questions asked and bottomless pockets.
I don’t get the protests either. I’m not particularly a fan of Israel, but what are they supposed to do? They make it clear enough: for every rocket shot at them, they send two back, with better targeting. Want to stop the hurt, just stop bombing Israel. Once in a while, like now, and make a little excursion to demolish some terrorist infrastructure. What’s to protest?
‘And the nutball fundies in this country need to quit fantasizing that the Book of Revelation is in any way related to current events, which any decent study of the historical era would indicate. There will be no “Armageddon”…’
Dave, come off it. The first three chapters of Revelation is historical. Chapter 4 and onwards is mostly future.
Revelation is coded language for the contemporary Christians of Domitian’s bloody reign, period.
Israel has put itself in pretty much the same position the Boers had in South Africa, with their own form of apartheid; Jimmy Carter was right about that, at least. And the demographics are even more against them than they are against the dumbass cretin Repubs here. Why we care is not a mystery, unfortunately, thanks to, once again, a tiny percentage of the population.
Most biblical scholars don’t think Revelation should be in the New Testament. It was just the most popular of a number of apocalyptic texts circulating at the time. And the Rapture is not even in there, but is an interpretation of a number of scattered verses. In the view of some, the Tribulation that is supposed to happen before/after/surrounding the Rapture, has already happened – in 70 AD with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.
“It was just the most popular of a number of apocalyptic texts circulating at the time.”
It’s also real popular now. Doncha know that it’s all about US right now? And the coming war with the AntiChrist? And the mark of the Beast? Etc., etc.
“…the Tribulation that is supposed to happen before/after/surrounding the Rapture, has already happened – in 70 AD with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.”
Exactly. When Titus sacked the city and finished the job his dad Vespasian had started. Followed by his brother, Domitian. Just another apocalyptic text that has been seized wholesale by fundamentalists to the exclusion, usually, of the rest of the books in the Bible, much like the snake-handling cults focus on “ye shall take up serpents” and Cotton Mather got all hot and bothered by “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” and the strident anti-gay types love to recite “for a man to lie with another man is an abomination.” All this makes regular ol’ Scripture-reading Christians get a bad name with everyone else.
Have you ever read Revelation Dave? A lot of that stuff hasn’t happened yet, so it’s not pure history.
Of course I’ve read it; and “a lot of that stuff” that “hasn’t happened yet” is simply code and metaphor for the cognoscenti and refugees fleeing violent persecution; they needed to know where to go, who to see, and some hope for the future. I never said it was pure history; far from it. It’s more like contemporary dissidents using the Tor network and keeping one step ahead of whichever State’s terroristic secret police.
Go read the book of Daniel. There is way scarier stuff in there that only half has happened so far.
Daniel is, of course, the O.T. apocalyptic book.
And if you like apocalyptic stuff, then watch Mel’s movie from a few years ago, haha, “Apocalypto,” it rocks. Life in central Murka wid no dam Christers around, eh?