The village called, they'd like their idiot back!

How in the bloody hell does America manage to do this with the efficiency and speed that it does?  I'm talking about the amazing amount of idiots that we seem to churn out!  Is there some secret assembly line out there that I don't know about???  Has cloning actually become successful???

That "pastor" down in Florida that wants to burn copies of the Koran.  OK, first off you idiot, it's spelled "Qur'an", NOT "Koran"!  If you're that vehement in your hatred at least do a spell check while you're at it!  And I say "pastor" because he no longer has a church, his parish fired him awhile back because he stealing from church coffers to support his lifestyle.  Yes, he does have "followers" left but so does Charles Manson!  This guy is such a disgrace that his own daughter refuses to talk to him anymore.  I hope that the last thing he ever hears is the sound of several jumbo jets heading at him!

We've managed to create the likes of Jim Jones (Kool Aid anyone?), those two ass wipes that tortured and murdered Matthew Shepard (and then tried a defense of saying their masculinity was threatened by Shepard's advances.  If a 5' 5" twink can threaten your masculinity then you've got  problems WAY bigger than him!), Fred Phelps (haven't heard of him?  Do a Google search, he's a truly wretched piece of work!), John Wayne Gacy (basement full of bodies), Westley Allen Dodd (serial killer and child molester.  He was so reviled that people actually threw a tailgate party outside of the prison the day he was executed! ) and our very own Jeffery Dahmer (serial killer and cannibal!).  I swear, about the only thing we haven't outsourced in this country is lunacy!

Anyone remember Dan White?  I do.  I was still living in San Francisco when the verdict came back on him.  He had walked into City Hall and murdered both mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk in cold blood and then hung around until the police showed up!  He was found not guilty due to temporary insanity caused by his over consumption of junk food.  Two murders and he walks because he liked the drive up window just a little too much???  That's when the riot started, literally. I was in the  protest march down Market Street that night but I never made it as far as City Hall.  I couldn't because I was running for my life.  Swat teams and riot police were everywhere, City Hall was being trashed and about a dozen cop cars were on fire by that time.  It was a fiasco.  Hundreds of protesters were hospitalized and even more were arrested.  The City felt so betrayed it was palpable in the air, even over the smell of the tear gas.  And Dan White was safe at home, watching it all on the 11:00 news.  Eating Twinkies.

Is it just me or do we have the market cornered on this kind of thing?  When did we degenerate into the Grand Central of "watch your back, I'm totally nuts and heavily armed"?  The truly sad part of this is that everyone of these loons was walking around in plain sight and looking normal to the rest of us.  When the hell did full-blown bat shit crazy but still holding down a productive job become the norm here???

When the bloody hell did Castro turn liberal????

Have any of you been following this?  It's amazing.  And as confusing as all get out.  It seems Fidel Castro has invited an American journalist down to Cuba to do some interviews with him and what he is saying is completely shocking.  OK, he's 84 and up to his beard in health problems.  I guess at that stage you do start taking stock in your life but he's making some revelations that are, to say the least, groundbreaking.

A couple of days ago some transcripts were released of the first interview where he admitted that the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960's was the most mishandled thing he had ever seen and that it scared the shit out of him.  A complete pissing contest between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union that put him totally in the cross hairs.  He claims that if the Soviet Union had not totally silenced him he may have been able to diffuse it with a simple speech or two and kept us all from building those stupid freaking bomb shelters.  BTW, my parents actually built one.  Ah, yes, I remember those two weeks in October....

Today another transcript was released in which Castro admitted that the economic policies that the Cuban Revolution installed were a complete failure!  Yes, he actually said that!  Apparently that whole peasant/agrarian thing was a a complete waste of time in his mind.  Can you say free enterprise?  How about a capitalistic based economy?  OK, disregard the U.S. embargo of almost half a century which did nothing for us and absolutely nothing to them.  Except allow the rest of the world to come in and invest.  And build 5-star resorts and golf courses for their enjoyment.  I have met Canadians and Europeans that freely vacation in Cuba and love it down there because there are NO Americans to get in their way.  Which has failed more, our embargo or his revolution?

I remember Castro with a raggy ass beard, a huge cigar and tattered army fatigues rolling into Havana on the top of a Soviet made truck and making the elite scatter to the harbor to board their yachts  to Key West on New Years Eve.  Today he is in a Reebok running suit and Adidas tennis shoes.  What is up with that?  It must be the Canadians that are sneaking all of that stuff down there for him.  I also remember him addressing the UN.  He was as animated and vitriolic as Hitler at a Nuremberg Rally.  He railed on the US with a fervor that was unbelievable.  He scared me more than that monkey in my closet!

What's next?  Does he tell his brother Raul to legalize same sex marriage?  Reopen the Copa Cabana and cover it with rainbow flags?  Or does he just write a tell-all memoir and retire comfortably in Key West where he opens a B&B?

Miss Etta James....

Ever heard of this woman?  My God, she was bloody brilliant!  One of the biggest stars of blues, R&B, gospel, jazz  and even early rock and roll.  You name it and this woman sang it!   She was one of the first cross over stars into "white music" and she literally owns some of her earliest songs.  Any other performer who tries to cover them just fails.  Think Judy Garland and "Over the Rainbow" and you get the idea.  Her most memorable hit is "At Last".  What a fucking unbelievable song!  And enough strings behind her to build a village worth of fishing nets with!  This woman had the most amazing production behind her that it hurt.  And it felt and sounded so good that it made you cry.  We're talking full orchestras here!

She had a voice I can only describe as warm honey.  On a hot day.  It was smooth, it was soothing and it was just heart stopping!  She could rap her voice around a song like no one I have ever heard!

She had the most shitty life imaginable.  She was screwed over by managers and promoters, ripped off by everyone she trusted, beat up repeatedly by husbands and boy friends, left destitute, had lots of chemical dependency issues and even spent some time behind bars for cashing bad checks to support her family.  Yet, still she survived.  And came back.  God love you Miss James!

She has rocked music festivals ever since and received standing ovations for as long as fifteen minutes when performing live.  She has toured, introduced a whole new generation to her sound and won more awards than even she can possibly count.  Five years ago she rocked "Austin City Limits"  to its very foundations with a live performance of amazing quality.  And she still had a voice of honey-like quality.  She has covered songs of some of the leading performers of our day and done them so well that they make the originals pale in comparison.  This lady had so much style, grace and talent it just takes your breath away!

Miss James is now 72 years old.  Two years ago she collapsed on stage and was rushed to a hospital suffering from dehydration and was forced to cancel a tour she was in the middle of.  Last year she raked Beyonce over the coals for doing a cover of "At Last".  Yes, she admitted that Beyonce was talented but then said  that she just wasn't Miss Etta James!  Hey, when you own a song you can say whatever you want.  She didn't even bother to comment on the Christina Aquilera cover of that same song.   Yeah, Christina  just screwed the hell out of it.  Totally.  You just don't mess with perfection I guess...

A couple of days ago her eldest son announced that not only has Miss James retired but also that she is suffering from advanced Alzheimer's disease for which she is now under around the clock care.   We have truly lost one of the greatest talents  of the 20th century.  A career that spanned  6 decades has been made silent by an ailment so horrible that it is hard for me to wrap an understanding around it.  A voice so pure, a soul so unbelievably strong and a will so undeniable is now lost to all of us.  Miss James, you may be "gone" but you are most certainly not forgotten.  Thank you, thank you, thank you for your music!

I remember the first time I heard your voice.  I was eight and in my grandma's kitchen.  Grandma had the kitchen radio on and was pouring me some Kool-Aid.  I stopped dead in my tracks when I heard the opening strings of that song.  They were, and still are unbelievable. It was my first taste of a full orchestra.  And then you began to sing.  The song was "At Last" and I was changed forever.  It was a Kenmore AM radio that only played mono but your voice struck a cord in my young heart that resonates to this day.  You had soul girl!  God, did you have soul!  Of a size that is hard for me to comprehend to this day.  Again, Miss James, thank you for the music...

What the bloody hell was I thinking????

OK, so yesterday I was up to my tits in tomatoes and happy as hell, right? What a difference a day makes!  I'm not up to my tits in tomatoes, I'm up to by bloody freaking eyebrows in the little motherfuckers!  I was up until after 1 am this morning getting the "first" batch processed.  I was up at 8 am this morning starting on the "second" batch.  It's now 8 pm and I have almost finally finished that one.  The shirt I have been wearing looks like the splatter pattern at a multiple homicide crime scene, I've repeatedly washed more stock pots than I ever knew I had and my stove top looks like I've thrown a pig roast luau without the benefit of either banana leaves or a fire pit. I may  have to have it professionally sandblasted to get it clean.   I'm not only running out of freezer space, I'm running out of space to put another freezer!  And I still have three LARGE bags of the SOB's left to go yet!  My grandmother taught me a great love of tomatoes and an amazing wealth of things to do with them but even she had her limits for these damned things, for Christ's sake!

At about 5 pm (and WELL into the second half of that gallon of Sangria I had made for myself) I just gave up the ghost.  I sank to the kitchen floor, sat on my ass and wept like a baby.  About that time my other half came home and found me there, spatula dripping in hand and singing that 1970's Harry Chapin song, "30,000 Pounds of Bananas" to myself.  Yeah, it was that bad.  It couldn't have been pretty for him to find me like that.  My carpal tunnel was killing me, my already blown rotator cuffs had declared war on me and my lower back had seceded completely from any and all parts of me.  There just ain't enough Mexican aspirin in this casa to make me feel better right now!  And lord knows, I have enough of those things in the medicine cabinet to do an organ transplant with!

The truly sad part?  I've cleaned out an entire drawer of storage containers so far.  In the middle of the afternoon I had to put everything on simmer and dash out to the Dollar Store for some more.  Yeah, picture me behind you in line....  splatter pattern shirt, flip-flops, baseball cap, sun glasses, a cart full of RubberMaid storage containers and a jar of minced garlic.  Can you say Hannible Lecter at harvest time?????  Fava beans and nice dry chianti, anyone?

I'm up to my tits in tomatoes!!!

Well, I really did it to myself this time!  Not only did I lose my only reliable tomato connection this year but the blight seemed to have wiped out everybody else's crop as well.  Earlier this week a friend of mine sent me an on-line trade link for a farmer that was having a U-Pick-It tomato thing on Saturday at what I felt were bargain basement prices.  After a couple of emails with him I actually managed to arrange to go out today and raid his crop.  OK, first off, this farm is about 50 miles west of here and apparently in the middle of nowhere so his wife agreed to meet me half way at an intersection on Hwy 151.  Actually, I thought that was quite cool since she didn't know me from Adam and for all they knew I could be an on-line cannibal stalker.  Or an AmWay representative.

So, at the intersection, we head south on State Hwy 78 which would mean that we are only about 13 miles from the final destination.  I'm following her in my car and about 3 miles down the road she takes a left onto County Hwy A.  OK, I think to myself, we're taking the short cut.  A couple of miles later we take a right onto County Hwy H, which by the way, is a true roller coaster of a highway!  A few miles later we turn back onto County Hwy A.  WTF????  Then back onto HWY H again and then back onto State HWY 78 again.  WTF???  At this point the "shortcut" has added about 9 more miles onto the journey!  Then she turns onto Floodplain Road!  Just the sound of that got me worried.  It's about 12 feet wide, has no shoulders and snakes thru a forest, for Christ's sake.  THEN she turns off onto a gravel road that winds up a hill for a couple of miles!  This isn't just the middle of nowhere, it's at least 5 or 6 miles the other side of it!   Finally, at the top of the hill we get back into a semblance of openness and she pulls off to the side and turns into an open field and keeps driving!  OMG, I thought I was about to be taken hostage by the "People Of the Corn" or something!  The only thing this picture was missing was a little cross-eyed boy sitting on a stump and playing a banjo!!!!  So, she hops out of her van, pulls a wheelbarrow out and motions me over.  She plans on dismembering me right there in the field and taking my renderings back to the coven in the wheelbarrow, I just knew it.  Then I look to my left and see a tomato patch that had to be the size of 3 basketball courts!  With enough tomatoes in it to make a Heinz factory drool.

Come to find out, she is a native New Yorker with a degree so advanced I can't even wrap my brain around it.  She's a former software designer for hotel and restaurant POS systems and her husband, who is from Germany, is a financial consultant.  And a home brewer, which explained the 3 acres of hops next to the tomatoes.  They have two young daughters and were both burnt out on the system so they decided to by a hill top in Wisconsin and become hobby farmers.  And moonshiners.

She and I walked the fields, so to speak, and she helped me pick tomatoes until we had filled the wheelbarrow to way over capacity, all the while talking about recipes, cooking, world travel, Mexico, the pit falls of the system, which one of us has the most ridiculous single-use kitchen appliance and how to properly sweeten homemade ketchup with sugar beets.  Oh yeah, and about her brother.  Who designs gloves in the Garment District of New York!  And how he and his partner love to come visit them in Wisconsin because it's so quaint here.  Quaint?  How gay is this dude????  Didn't see that one coming at all!!!!

Then we start weighing up the tomatoes.  She had a scale that a cartel in Colombia would kill for!  Made me wonder what else they might be growing up on that hilltop.  Bottom line:  about 140 lbs of tomatoes for damn near half what they had originally quoted me!  Right now the counter tops and dining room are over flowing with designer plum tomatoes, the sink is full of them soaking, all four burners are going full tilt and the kitchen feels like Equador in freaking July!  Ahh life is good....

Anyone in the market for some homemade ketchup?

Sloth and Avarice: My two favorite flavors!

Yes, I'm responsible.  And dependable.  And on time.   But push come to shove  I'd rather be sitting on my ass and eating  a papaya under a palapa.  Drinking some Sangria Blanca that someone else made for me.    As for the avarice thing, yeah, I want it all.  And I do mean ALL of it!  But you'd better be willing to bring it to me because I can be too lazy to get up off my ass and get it myself,  (RE:  look back  at sloth).   Just bring it to me, it's easier that way.  For both of us.  I get what I want and you don't get caned into a stupor!!!  It's a win-win situation don't you think?  Ponder it for a moment.....  My pleasure.   Your flesh.  Or lack thereof...

Sloth.  The word even sounds lazy when you say it.  Imagine hearing it at 3/4 speed and you get the idea.  There are some things I just DON'T do.  House cleaning is one of them.  I'd rather just move to another apartment when the one I'm living in gets too dusty.  I've even been known to own a large dog with a big tail just so he could dust the table tops so I didn't have to.  Hell, I'm more afraid of the vacuum cleaner than most of the dogs I've ever owned!  And I've had some seriously vacuum-phobic dogs.  Once, one actually hung himself.  My other half made the mistake of asking me why I don't vacuum and I told him that we were out of vacuum cleaner bags.  He suggested that I go out and buy some.  I told him "no".   I'll shop for all kinds of things but vacuum cleaner bags just aren't on my list.

Avarice.  Now that's my kind of word!  It's all about cravings.  And lord knows, there are some things out there that I crave like a crack whore.  Chocolate is at the top of my list on most days.  Milk chocolate.  Swiss chocolate. Dark chocolate.  Bitter sweet chocolate.  Baking chocolate.  Chocolate spiced with chili.  Anything covered in chocolate. Your chocolate.  I'd hold you up in a dark alley at knife point if I thought you had some Lundt's on you.  Taking candy from a baby has a whole different meaning for me and I practice it on a regular basis.  I go berserk in Mexico, their chocolate is totally mind blowing and my carry-on is usually stuffed with it on the flight back home.   I brought back so much one year that US Customs detained me.  They not only x-rayed every piece of chocolate individually that I had in my luggage  but actually brought in one of the drug dogs as well.  Now, I know some folks have been known to do that sort of thing.  Not me though.  The little chocolate bits tend to get caught in the straw.











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How come everybody got to have a mid-life crisis but me????

What the bloody hell???  Everyone I know got to have THEIR chronological melt down, why not me???  Did I miss the bus to temporary insanity town or something???  OK, since I have no intention of living to be 114 years old I suppose it is a bit late for me to be thinking about it at the age of 57 but hey, I got screwed out of my time in the sun.

How come I didn't get to buy a yellow Corvette like they did?  I was probably balancing my checkbook...  Where is my smoking hot tattoo of that luscious babe in the bikini riding a torpedo?  More than likely I was pulling an extra shift so I could put a new set of tires on my Yugo...  How come my nipples aren't pierced too?  (BTW, I have three of them.)  Probably doing my laundry...   Why didn't I get to have a torrid affair with some buxom coed half my age?  OK, that one is obvious...  because I'm gayer than springtime.  But what about the sky diving thing?  Oh yeah, I forgot, I'm afraid of falling...  Embezzling money to support my mistress in Argentina?  Who do I look like, the Governor of South Carolina?

My God, I wasted my chance at a mid-life crisis being responsible.  And dependable.  And on time.  Even early.  I've been the "good boy" my whole freaking life!  I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!  I'm going to start shoplifting.  And I'm going to make it look like you're shoplifting too.  I'm going to start making faces at your baby when you're carrying it around in a back pack and make it cry.  And when you turn around I'm going to tell you that your monkey seems to be upset.  And them I'm going to ask you if you have a license for that monkey.  I'm going to put a mariachi ring tone on my cell phone and set the volume to HIGH!!!  And I'm going to set it to repeat a LOT of times too.  I'm going to start keying cars.  No, wait.  Even better, I'm going to start peeing on cars!  When you pull up next to me at a stop light I will have all of the windows rolled down and the Farm Report blaring so loudly on the AM radio that my spare tire is shaking loose in the trunk.  And if you try to question me I will only respond in Spanish.  Weird Spanish.  ¿Este uste embarsada, por favor, senor?  Then I'm going to start gunning my engine and begin making strange sucking noises between my teeth at your wife sitting next to you.  As God is my witness, I'm going to start making Andy Kaufman look like a respectable Republican!!!  OK, now that's an oxymoron if I ever heard one...

Time in the sun:  Ready or not, here comes Daddy!!!  Beware....