Hasty Ruminations

A 42 year old man and a 29 year old women were rushing to the airport in Maine, when they were clocked at 108 mph on I-95. They got arrested.

Then they got to the plane, where they became “unruly”. The pilot returned to the gate, where they were arrested and charged with criminal threatening, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct and violation of bail conditions.

Stay tuned. I don’t think this duo is done yet.

This is from one of my favorite newspapers in Helena, Montana – The Independent Record.

“After 23 years as an emergency room physician, Dr. Mark Rabold still takes his business seriously but can’t help but wonder in amusement about some of the situations he’s encountered involving rattlesnake bites.

“One of his favorite stories involves an anesthesiologist who had just recently moved to Montana. The guy ran over a rattler with his dirt bike, but the tire spun up the snake, which hit the biker in the stomach and bit him.

“Then there’s the one — Rabold’s had so many patients he can’t remember if he treated this guy or just read about it —where a man was struck by a rattlesnake, and the guy’s buddy tried a home remedy to treat the wound.

“His buddy got the jumper cables and hooked him up to a giant battery for his semi, then fired up the engine. He probably had to put down his beer first to put the clamps on each side of the snake bite,” Rabold said, laughing. “The guy is screaming, yelling and seizing from this treatment; they thought it would somehow break the venom down.

“Someone actually did a study, and found that electric therapy doesn’t work. It’s just an interesting layman’s myth. This guy ended up with third-degree electrical burns.”

A Milwaukee man was accused of shooting his lawn mower because it wouldn’t start.

Keith Walendowski, 56, was charged with felony possession of a short-barreled shotgun or rifle and misdemeanor disorderly conduct while armed.

According to the report, Walendowski said he was angry because his Lawn Boy wouldn’t start Wednesday morning. He told police, ‘I can do that, it’s my lawn mower and my yard so I can shoot it if I want.’

The cops disagreed.

A woman who lives at Walendowski’s house reported the incident. She said he was drunk.

Walendowski could face up to an $11,000 fine and six years and three months in prison if convicted.

But, Milwaukee prides itself on being a beer capitol, so if he was snockered on beer, well…

Actually, he has a very nice lawn. It’s just a litte long. But if the cops dig it up looking for murdered tractors or farm implements, it could be ruined.

Senator John McCain is having a a bad week or two. The latest: The New York Times scribbled all over his draft Op-Ed piece, just like all of his perfussers used to do back at the Boat School … uh, the Naval Academy.

One can imagine John fuming, “What do they think I was, a STUDENT?!”

Senator Obama wrote an Op-Ed piece for the Times last week, and it was published. McCain’s staff fired off a rebuttal piece, but the Times Opinion Page Editor, David Shipley, rejected it. “I’d be very eager to publish the Senator on the oped page. However I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written,” Shipley is said to have written.

McCain has had six or seven Op-Ed’s published by the Times. Just imagine: every time, they must nag him on spelling, sentence structure, and basic grammar. Probably smudges, too; I wouldn’t put it past them. Don’t they know he graduated fifth from the bottom of his class?! How unfair.

Cut him some slack, Shipley!

I got this from a friend:

Win Tickets to the Olympic Games….

IT’S TRUE !!!!!! YOU GET 8 TICKETS TO ALL THE EVENTS, 4 HOTEL ROOMS, FOOD, CAR & FREE ROUND TRIP AIRFARE FOR 21 DAYS IN CHINA .

GOOD RUCK! uh… LUCK!

Answer the following questions about the picture to win tickets to the Olympic games:

1. Which student seems tired or sleepy?
2. Which ones are male twins?
3. Which ones are female twins?
4. How many women are in the group?
5. Which one is the teacher?
6. Which two just finished a joint?

I guess you’re not going either.

Watching one of our national leaders on TV the other night, I said “This guy is really simple.” Then, it struck me that maybe this gas thing is also pretty simple.

We have this strategic petroleum reserve (SPR) (plus the Naval peroleum reserve, and the home heating oil reserve). The petroleum reserve is 707 million barrels of crude oil in the ground.

We are debating opening up the coastal areas for more oil drilling. The tree huggers say throw away the cars; don’t drill, because the seashore is pretty. Yeah, right. Let them go live at Al Gore’s house in his extravagant air conditioning to get colds.

But, the pres says that that won’t help much, because it will take ten years to turn newly explored and pumped coastal oil into gasoline. Nonsense. He’s just trying to boost up his Houston, Texas, oil speculator friends so that they pay for his drinks at the club next year.

It won’t take long at all to pull some oil out of the SPR, refine it, and sell it as gas and diesel to Americans. Or, sell it at $1.00 a gallon on the world market and watch the Saudis and Chavez and the other OPECers wet their pants! So, take a few hundred million barrels, and write an IOU to put it back in five years when new coastal oil is brought up from new wells. The Navy is so small now that a few cans of 10W40 ought to do it for them. The big Navy ships are nukes anyway.

What that requires is that we restrain the pres from unilaterally starting any more wars, so we don’t need the SPR for another Desert Fiasco. And shut down Iraq and let Malaki put his money where his mouth is. Oh, by the way: where are we getting the oil, gas and diesel to fuel our Iraqi and Afghani U.S. troops? Seems like we ought to be getting it free fom Baghdad and Kabul. I’ll bet we are buying it at top dollar, paying to have it refined, and shipping it all the way over there. In non-U.S. ships, I’ll bet!

But, we oughta stay in Afghanistan long enough to collapse Osama’s cave down around his ears. If Pakistan tries to keep us out, well we have enough nukes to send Pakistan back to the stone age, too.

I got an email from the U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association last week that one of my classmates had died. It said that while he lived and worked in Kansas, the funeral Mass would be held at his parents’ church in Florida. I decided to take some time off last Friday, and drive to the funeral north of Tampa. I don’t agree with all of the recent policies of the Naval Academy, but the classmate bond is very strong.

Joe (not his name) was my friend, in a small-town sense of friendship. We never double dated, or had more than a passing conversation about anything. I had 700 classmates in a Brigade of about 4,000, so it was like living in a small town. We spent 11 months a year for four years leading the very active lives of Midshipmen, including classes, intramural sports, social events, cruises on ships and exercises with the Marines, parades (called P-raids), and so on. I was active in the drama group (set design and construction), eventually as president of the group. I can’t tell you specifically the occasions Joe and I interacted together, but thinking back those 39 years, I find I knew him better than I thought. He may have sung in the Catholic choir with me, but I’m not sure.

We had no contact since graduation. I left the Navy at nine years after early promotion and command of a ship to raise my three sons (and later a daughter). Joe stayed in for 23 years, getting a master’s degree and command of a ship. He got married, and they had two sons and a daughter. He retired as a Commander, and got a job in charge of manufacturing for a building supply company in Kansas. There were some family problems, and he and his wife broke up.

The boys were grown, his wife was gone, and Joe fell in love and married again. His brothers were not too friendly with wife #1 when she was around, but when I met them they were very critical of wife #2 for not being warm or close with Joe. I didn’t meet her, because she decided to go to her parents’ home in Albuquerque rather than attend the funeral.

Three years ago, his daughter contracted leukemia, and instead of going off to college at the age of 19 as planned, she died two years ago.

Joe had a difficult time coping after the death of his daughter. He said that he had made a lot of mistakes raising his sons, but he had gotten it right with her. He stepped down from the vice-president job at work to a job in their training department. His Navy pension and benefits surely helped in that decision.

The Catholic Mass of Christian Burial is very good, and there was only a small congregation. I am glad that I went. His elderly parents were both there. Burying a son or a daughter has to be among the hardest things to do in life. Joe did it for his daughter, and now they had to do it for their oldest son.

Fortunately, I had a dark blue suit coat and a Mass card in the trailer, so I fit in, and I took the time afterwards to talk to Joe’s brother and his parents. I asked the brother how Joe died (before I knew all of the details, which he then told me). He said that Joe had hanged himself on June 30th.

I don’t think I could have been more stunned.

Trying to recover, I said that I was glad that the Church now allowed a Catholic funeral in these cases (it was prohibited for centuries), and that the Church honored Joe’s wishes to be cremated with the ashes scattered over the Pacific. It turns out that the Church now considers that a person who commits suicide during extreme anguish (and in a few other circumstances) may have reduced responsibility for that decision. The Church acknowledges that God may decide to forgive the mortal sin in a manner not prescribed by Church doctrine, and so out of respect for the dead and particularly as a comfort to the living, the funeral Mass is now allowed. In this, I see the hand of Pope John Paul II, who was strict, fair, but most of all deeply compassionate.

As we left the church, the organist played “Eternal Father”, the Navy hymn. Here’s the first verse, in Joe’s memory:

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm has bound the restless wave.
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep.
Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.

To: Barack Obama
Subject: Just Between Us

Do NOT accept his apology. Ever.

It only encourages him.

That is all.

Did I miss something?

Iraq warns US on withdrawal date

Mr Al-Rubaie said it was proving “very difficult” to set a pullout date
Iraq will not accept any security deal with the US which does not include a date for the pullout of foreign troops, a senior Iraqi official has said.

National Security Adviser Mowaffaq al-Rubaie was speaking in Najaf.

The prospect of setting such a timetable was raised by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki on Monday.

Mr al-Rubaie was speaking after meeting Iraq’s top Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

(Have you noticed that all these guys are named “Al”? How do they keep them straight? What are the women named – Freida?)

Look, guys, I don’t mean to be pushy, but we can stop defending your sorry a–es just about any day this week! OK?