Things I will NOT do before I get old, or, Reverse Bucket List

AllenS: I had to share this --

Sitting on the Trolltunga rock in Norway.

 

Jumping on the Trolltunga rock in Norway.

 

Extreme skiing in Wyoming.

 

Skywalking on Mount Nimbus in Canada.

 

Extreme kayaking at Victoria Falls ..

 

Diving 30 meters through a rock monolith in Portugal.

Standing on the Edgewalk inToronto .

 

Cycling in Norway.

 

Sitting around at Yosemite.

 

Glacier boarding anywhere.

 

Biking on the Cliffs of Moher.

 

Fortunately, I am ALREADY old.
I didn't get this way by being stupid

Tennessee logo

Cost a lot of money for not much at all, but that's government for you. Government didn't draw the logo, they used collective money to pay a firm to do what any employee could have done right there at their government desk in thirty seconds of a regular working day.

"Despite Border Patrol’s best efforts, our border is still wide open"

"It’s a cat-and-mouse game, and the mouse is still winning."

On our second day we caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure disappearing down the back of a mountain inside the U.S. border; it was a cartel “scout.” The “scouts” operate on the mountains and monitor the movement of the Border Patrol and let the smugglers know when it is safe to bring across drugs and human cargo. Keep in my mind they operate in the mountains on U.S. soil as far as 100 miles inside our border.

Sasabe is in the Tucson Sector, which extends 262 miles from the New Mexico border in the east to the Yuma (Arizona) County line in the west. The Border Patrol apprehended 87,915 illegal aliens in fiscal year 2014 in this sector. In the same fiscal year, 479,371 illegal aliens were apprehended across the whole 1,954-mile length of the Southwest Border.

So, how many get through? Chris Cabrera, vice president of National Border Patrol Council #3307, estimates in a recent video that only 30 percent of illegal aliens coming across the border are apprehended.

I asked him, in exasperation: “Why the hell aren’t we stopping everyone coming across the border?”

His answer: “We are waging a war with a shift mentality.”

He was referring to the fact that the cartels operate 24/7 while the Border Patrol, with shift changes, have gaps in their coverage. Border Patrol agents are further hampered by the Obama administration’s “open border” policy, such as the acceptance of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied alien children last year; the suspension of the Secure Communities program in November 2014, the use of “prosecutorial discretion,” and the sharp decline in Interior Deportations from 236,000 in 2009 to 102,000 in 2014.

The drug cartels are well financed, crafty and “they have better intelligence,” according to Sgt. Randy Merrell of the Dona Ana County Sheriff’s Office in New Mexico.

"Can Racism Be Stopped in the Third Grade?"

"An experiment at Fieldston, which starts when 8-year-olds are sorted by race, has some very liberal parents fuming."

The form arrived in an email attachment on the Friday after winter break.“What is your race?”it asked. And then, beneath that, a Census-style list: “African-American/Black,” “Asian/Pacific Islander,” “Latina/o,” “Multi-racial,” “White,” and “Not sure.”

The email, signed by the principal of Fieldston Lower School, urged parents to talk about these categories with their children at home because the next week, in school, the kids would have to check the box that fit them best. “I know there may be some nervous feelings about this program,” the email concluded, but “I am confident that once you hear more details about it … the value and importance of this work will become clear.”

The parents at Lower, as it’s called, are a bighearted, high-maintenance, high-achieving group. They are also, by the standards of the New York City private-school universe, exceedingly liberal — educators and social workers, as well as hedge-fund tycoons. They love the school, and trust it, mostly. But this communication seized their attention. “I was like, Wait. What?” remembers one mother. Another quizzed her 11-year-old daughter as they were driving. “We have to go in our race groups” was how the girl explained it. The mother hoped her daughter had misunderstood. (read more)

Keep your eyes

on the cross.

A friend of mine worked with mental patients for awhile and he told me one day during political season he walked into a room while a group of patients were cracking up laughing at politicians debating on television. I's fair enough to say none of the patients understood much about the issues being discussed but when asked what was so funny to them they all found the outright lies absurd, the way nothing matched was tremendously funny to them. Surely these people were comedians.

I notice a similar thing with this latest television and the way it pauses on frame to change channels. Whenever a man is speaking and the frame freezes his face in speech, wherever the frame freezes and with 100% regularity the visage is frozen in a ridiculous lie. It just is. The women far less so. They lie so beautifully. But when female political pundits are pulling it out of their butts as men do with everything, any sales, and all male television discussions are some form of sales, then the women are bad as the men always are. The very weird freeze-frame ridiculous lie-face thing that is revealed with each channel change makes me feel like a mental patient watching t.v. perceiving nothing but straight up continuous stream of lies.

This is different though, some sort of brain data moshing where the shape of the next face is distorted by predictions from the previous face, and all those are distorted unnaturally with surgery. Lies. You notice it takes a moment to get going. Whereas the channel change freeze-frame lie detector captures real facial expressions delivered in stream.  I'm going to miss that with the next television.

road trip

John Basilone

Military service...

Guadalcanal

During the Battle for Henderson Field, his unit came under attack by a regiment of approximately 3,000 soldiers from the Japanese Sendai Division. On October 24, 1942, Japanese forces began a frontal attack using machine guns, grenades, and mortars against the American heavy machine guns. Basilone commanded two sections of machine guns that fought for the next two days until only Basilone and two other Marines were left standing. Basilone moved an extra gun into position and maintained continual fire against the incoming Japanese forces. He then repaired and manned another machine gun, holding the defensive line until replacements arrived. As the battle went on, ammunition became critically low. Despite their supply lines having been cut off by enemies in the rear, Basilone fought through hostile ground to resupply his heavy machine gunners with urgently needed ammunition. When the last of it ran out shortly before dawn on the second day, Basilone held off the Japanese soldiers attacking his position using his .45 pistol. By the end of the engagement, Japanese forces opposite their section of the line were virtually annihilated. For his actions during the battle, he received the United States military's highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.
Afterwards, Private First Class Nash W. Phillips, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, recalled from the battle for Guadalcanal:

Basilone had a machine gun on the go for three days and nights without sleep, rest, or food. He was in a good emplacement, and causing the Japanese lots of trouble, not only firing his machine gun, but also using his pistol.

Iwo Jima

John Basilone's headstone in Arlington National Cemetery

After his request to return to the fleet was approved, he was assigned to Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 27th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division during the invasion of Iwo Jima. On February 19, 1945, he was serving as a machine gun section leader in action against Japanese forces on Red Beach II. During the battle, the Japanese concentrated their fire at the incoming Marines from heavily fortified blockhouses staged throughout the island. With his unit pinned down, Basilone made his way around the side of the Japanese positions until he was directly on top of the blockhouse. He then attacked with grenades and demolitions, single-handedly destroying the entire strong point and its defending garrison. He then fought his way toward Airfield Number 1 and aided a Marine tank that was trapped in an enemy mine field under intense mortar and artillery barrages. He guided the heavy vehicle over the hazardous terrain to safety, despite heavy weapons fire from the Japanese. As he moved along the edge of the airfield, he was killed by Japanese mortar shrapnel. His actions helped Marines penetrate the Japanese defense and get off the landing beach during the critical early stages of the invasion. He was posthumously awarded the Marine Corps' second-highest decoration for valor, the Navy Cross, for extraordinary heroism during the battle of Iwo Jima.
Based on his research for the book and mini-series The Pacific, author Hugh Ambrose suggested that Basilone was not killed by a mortar, but by small arms fire that hit him in the right groin, the neck and nearly took off his left arm completely.

More than 100 people are on the waiting list

To become caretakers for graves of fallen American soldiers in a small Dutch town called Margraten. 

This is the most beautiful story I ever read. Written by Ian Shapira for Washington Post. More beautiful than the story of Vincent Speranza who tells it himself so humbly, so grippingly and so touchingly about how he delivered a helmet of beer to stricken soldiers against the wishes and under fire from his own commanding officer and against common sense, to have the town name a beer after him with its own ceramic mug in the shape of an American helmet.

At Margraten each grave of an American soldier is adopted by a family and tended. At the annual ceremony 6,000 people pour into the 65 acre burial ground situated next to an orchard, the town near the German border. 

Seventy-year old Arthur Chotlin went to Margraten from Annapolis, Md to meet the couple caring for his father's grave and was awestruck by the devotion of the Dutch to this project. Chotlin was the only American to speak on Sunday.

“What would cause a nation recovering from losses and trauma of their own to adopt the sons and daughters of another nation?” “And what would keep that commitment alive for all of these years, when the memory of that war has begun to fade? It is a unique occurrence in the history of civilization.”

The old man stood in front of his father's grave of Army Staff Sgt. Max Chotin with its Star of David headstone, teary-eyed, next to Boy Naajkens the Dutch health food store who adopted it in 2006 and had tended the grave since. This was the first time they paid their respect together. 

Comments:  allisoncox 8:44 AM MDT

Last summer, while in the Netherlands I went to the Liberation Museumhttp://www.bevrijdingsmuseum.nl/basis.aspx?Tid=746... and our tour guide was a man who was a 5 year old boy when the American planes first arrived. He described running out of his house and looking up at the sky for 2 hours at the constant stream of planes. WWII and the battles that were fought at this time became a life long obsession; his love and gratitude for the Americans who served was constantly bubbling over. Meeting him was one of the highlights of my 21 day European trip.

Dams and Bridges

[originally posted here a few years ago. I changed some the time references as the trip was some time ago now]

A few years ago my wife and I took our kids on a crazy road trip adventure to retrace the history of water conservation in the Great American Southwest. The trip was inspired by our reading Colossus, which retells the story of taming the Colorado River and building the Hoover Dam.

First stop was the Salton Sea which is just a little over a 100 years old and was created by accident when an irrigation canal went awry in 1906. I traced down the exact spot where the accident happened which was right outside of Yuma, Arizona. There wasn't much to see. We drove on a levee alongside the old Colorado River bed, following an old 1906 map and Google Earth. Two Border Patrol agents' trucks were parked nose-to-nose on the levee as we peered into Mexico. We drove the Chevy to the levee but the levee was bone dry. The Border Patrol guys gave us such mean looks that I was afraid to even take a photo.

We stayed overnight in Yuma which is a very old and dusty town bisected by what's left of the Colorado River. I took some high-res ("artsy") photos of an old hotel there which I'll post separately. Heading further upriver, we reached the Hoover Dam:

Hoover Dam taken from Tillman Bridge

The last time I was at Hoover Dam was pre-9/11. In the old days, the main route between Phoenix and Vegas still passed over the dam. We did that journey then with one kid and one in the oven while driving our glorious 1963 Thunderbird (that car deserves more that passing mention so I won't mention it further). There was something new this time that wasn't there in 1999--the new Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge:*

Tillman Bridge taken from Hoover Dam

The bridge is stunningly gorgeous. It's part of the main road now between Vegas and Phoenix, but you can park and walk it too for no charge. I felt a little acrophobic as I took that photo of the dam from the bridge.

____________________

*I dedicate this blog post to Corporal Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976 – April 22, 2004).

Added:  A 1930's artist captured the same view of Hoover Dam from the imaginary bridge:

More old stamps:

KLEM FM

I was in Patsy Cline kind of mood tonight and wanted to post her version of "Crazy" along with a clip of Willie Nelson on Dave Letterman's show recalling how he "sold" that song to her back in 1962. I'd seen the clip awhile ago but the Nelson/Letterman video is now protected and unavailable. Fuck you Letterman.  I'm glad you're gone.

Plan B:

I knew that something like this must exist. So I went looking and found it. It's a video of a guitarist covering the Duane Allman solo from "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed." There is no extant video of Allman playing that version, but that version from their Fillmore East double LP is the definitive version. The solo is longer than most pop songs and is a classic:

Eurovision

Mans Zelmerlow, Sweden's entry won first for Heroes.

My favorite part is "hummingbirds." 

He said go dry your eyes and live your life like there is no tomorrow, Son, and tell the others to go sing it like a hummingbird the greatest anthem ever heard: We are the heroes of our time but we're dancing with the demons in our mind.

Small point, hummingbirds don't actually sing as songbirds do, they more scream territorially, or demandingly, they have flowers to protect. 

Russia won second with Polina Gagarina's A Million Voices. Wrought with Disneyesque or possibly Romani costume of the sort the princess cannot move from her spot. Inclusive, entirely inclusive, nothing whatsoever personal as some other entries, she'd like to buy the world a Coke.

Oh? 

Tell me why when I think, I only think of you

Tell me why when I love, I only love you

Tell me why when I live, I live inside you... great love

A few years ago Amanda Yesilbas writing for 109.com drew together a wonderful roundup of then recent Eurovision musical videos concentrating on the wildest most insane. One of her favorites was linked yesterday on a British site and favored so the Ukrainian act had and held their attention for its bizarre recombinations; sequined lamé, dancing Nazis, folk beer hall type song run through electronics. Verka Serdyuchka is the drag character of comedian Andriy Mykhailovych Danylko. It's quite a video and it makes the point I am about to make better than any of them. Ukraine entry for 2007, Dancing Lasha Tumbai sung in four languages. The performance was controversial at the time. Its title is nonsense.

Commenters to Amanda's piece back then linked to Kpop (Korean) videos along a similar vein. And those are interesting indeed. BigBang, Fantastic Baby and Block B, Nillili Mambo for two examples.

Sensible shoes

Every time I hear any public service announcement my single prevailing thought is, "Oh, shut up."

Because I'm paying for something and getting something else.

So to retaliate after refusing yours I'll deliver my own: always wear sensible shoes and especially for anything public, doubly especially on any uncertain surface. Women, do not wear anything high. Men, don't ever wear flip-flops unless you actually are at a bathhouse.

"One man's trash is another man's treasure"...

"...would be a terrible way to let your child know that they're adopted."

Reddit top voted comments...

Or to say to your wife when she talks about her ex - husband

"All the kids who were not adopted please step forward"
kid tries to step forward
"Whoa there, not so fast Timmy"

But one man's junk is another man's treasure would be great for a penis transplant though.

When I was very young (before knowing what sex was), my parents use to say they found me in a garbage can. Definitely fueled some childhood attachment issues..

"My Son Died for Ramadi. Now ISIS Has It"

"Debbie Lee says she’s sickened that the city her son sacrificed his life defending has fallen—and furious at the Joint Chiefs chairman’s insistence Ramadi is ‘not symbolic in any way.’"

A continuing comfort to her is her son’s last letter, an email that arrived a fortnight before his death. She had been amazed by the depth and power of these words from the homeschooled son who had always needed extra nudging when a subject did not interest him.

“Language was not one of the strong ones,” she recalled on Monday.

His was now a soul seared to eloquence.

“You can feel the deep impact of being in Ramadi, being in the war zone,” his mother said.

In the letter, the son wrote of the elusiveness of glory and of the enormity of violent death.

“I have seen death, the sorrow that encompasses your entire being as a man breathes his last,” he said. “I can only pray and hope that none of you will ever have to experience some of these things I have seen and felt here.”

But amid the worst, he had seen the importance of kindness and decency, moments when America was at its shining best. He urged those back home to do their part in the struggle to make our country realize its full greatness:

Ask yourself when was the last time you donated clothes that you hadn’t worn out. When was the last time you paid for a random stranger’s cup of coffee, meal or maybe even a tank of gas? When was the last time you helped a person with the groceries into or out of their car?

Think to yourself and wonder what it would feel like if when the bill for the meal came and you were told it was already paid for.

More random acts of kindness like this would change our country and our reputation as a country.

It is not unknown to most of us that the rest of the world looks at us with doubt towards our humanity and morals.

I am not here to preach or to say look at me, because I am just as at fault as the next person. I find that being here makes me realize the great country we have and the obligation we have to keep it that way.

The 4th has just come and gone and I received many emails thanking me for helping keep America great and free. I take no credit for the career path I have chosen; I can only give it to those of you who are reading this, because each one of you has contributed to me and who I am.

However what I do over here is only a small percent of what keeps our country great. I think the truth to our greatness is each other. Purity, morals and kindness, passed down to each generation through example. So to all my family and friends, do me a favor and pass on the kindness, the love, the precious gift of human life to each other so that when your children come into contact with a great conflict that we are now faced with here in Iraq, that they are people of humanity, of pure motives, of compassion.

This is our real part to keep America free! HAPPY 4th Love Ya

Marc Lee

P.S. Half way through the deployment can’t wait to see all of your faces 

On August 2, 2006, Lee and his team got into a gun battle with a large force of insurgents in south-central Ramadi.