FOR FOLKS LIKE ME WHO COULD ALWAYS USE A LITTLE BALANCE IN OUR LIVES...

        And I can't walk from the kitchen to the office without spilling coffee on my socks...

 

OBAMA'S DRUNK WITH POWER (says the sot with the scandal sheet talking points...) A MINI-GUANO SET FOR YOUR SATURDAY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE NICOTINE DEVIL MADE HER DO IT...

        I've read stories where drunken fools have called 9-1-1 to report an emergency, then asked the dispatchers to have the responding police officers bring a pack of cigarettes when they come to the scene... basically using the emergency number to have cigarettes delivered.

       Those idiots are usually surprised to find themselves being arrested for making false emergency claims, and sometimes get hauled off to jail.

        A woman in California found a quicker way to get cuffed, but for an entirely different reason.  Etta Lopez, 31, allegedly waiting outside a police station, then deliberately stepped up and slapped a police officer as he was leaving the building.  She later told investigators she wanted to be arrested so that she would be put in jail where she would be forced to stop smoking.

                            "Out!  Out nicotine devil!"


        That's right... She wanted to quit so badly, she slapped an officer to get placed in a jail cell where her habit wouldn't be allowed.

 

THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES WOULD HAVE CONFUSED EINSTEIN ( but Freud would have diagnosed them perfectly)

 

          "Insanity:  Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

          That quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, who was able to see quite a few things clearly that we're only now beginning to understand as reality.  I have no idea how Einstein was able to predict our current House of Representatives.

           For the 37th time (yawn...) the House, under the 'leadership' of John Boehner, has voted to repeal part or all of the Affordable Care Act, and each time their bill has been deemed dead on arrival the moment it was passed.

 

 

 

           In what might seem to be an equally insane quest, I've been purchasing the exact same Powerball number for every drawing since 1995, with the exact same results:  dead on arrival.



          Of course, the difference between House GOP insanity and my pie-in-the-sky Powerball dream is that my number MIGHT be selected in the next drawing, whereas the Affordable Care Act is still going to be the law of the land no matter how many times the House votes to repeal or defund the measure.

 

 

             I was listening to NPR yesterday afternoon when one of their reporters asked John Boehner why the House would waste its time passing bills to defund or repeal Obamacare, knowing it was an exercise in futility.  He responded by saying that many of his caucus members had run on the promise of repealing Obamacare and hadn't yet had the opportunity to have a vote against the law on record.  Another GOPer told the same reporter that he thought periodic votes to repeal the law were a great idea, because if you do the same thing over and over again, sooner or later the public comes around to your way of thinking.

            Einstein would have probably been perplexed by the current House of Representatives.

            Freud would have understood them perfectly.

 

LOUIE GOHMERT OF TEXAS AIN'T GONNA LET THE ATTORNEY GENERAL CAST ASPERSIONS ON HIS ASPARAGUS (by god!)

          They must be so proud of this guy down in Texas...

          Rep. Gohmert, one of the most entertaining idiots to hold elected office in my lifetime, has done it again.  During Attorney General Holder's testimony before the House committee, Gohmert went into one of his patented spittle-spewing, vein-bulging rants (this time concerning what Holder had asserted about Gohmert's knowlege of the FBI's investigation of one of the Boston Marathon bombers) and managed to do what he always does:  make an ass of himself on national television.

          Gohmert went into full-blown asshole mode, arguing with both the witness (Attorney General Eric Holder) and his own committee members when they tried to enforce parliamentary procedures to move the hearing along on a more sane and relevant path.  Finally, little Louie tossed out this gem as he relinquished his microphone:

        "The Attorney General will not cast aspersions on my asparagus!"

         Something tells me this guy was dropped on his head when he was little...

 

WHILE WE WAIT FOR THE GOP'S LATEST FAUX SCANDAL DU JOUR, LET'S POKE THROUGH THE GUANO...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WORSE THAN WATERGATE (or Pearl Harbor, or Hitler, for that matter....)

             The most obvious problem with hyperventilating over every perceived "scandal" that comes your way, including the daily doses of faux outrage expressed over every hiccup in the news, is that after a few years people begin to yawn and ignore your cries that "the sky is falling!"  You can only cry "Wolf!" so often before your warnings are seen as background noise, an annoying minor chord droning on behind the scenes, there only as a reminder that your party is still out of power and pissed about it.

              So it goes with the scandals du jour being trumpeted on the cable news networks.  Remember Fast and Furious?  Remember how it was "worse than Watergate"?  Remember the Socialist overreach of The Affordable Care Act?  How it would end democracy and the free market as we know it?  Remember those Death Panels the individual mandate would cause?  Remember Shirley Sherrod at the Department of Agriculture?  Remember the ACORN "scandal"?  Remember when Obama used executive orders to stop deep-water drilling in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil rig disaster?  The War on Christmas?  The War on the Easter Bunny?  The bailout for General Motors?  The Dodd-Frank financial reform law?

              "OH MY GOD!  HE'S RUINING AMERICA!  WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE?"

              And in every single one of those cases we had talking heads pointing back to the darkest days of America's most corrupt and paranoid political administration:  It's worse than Watergate!

               Even if Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hunkered down in the Situation Room and watched the Benghazi attacks in real time (as some suggest they did), and even if they concocted an elaborate scheme to obfuscate and then cover-up the real reasons for the attack in an effort to protect both his and her political ambitions, this wouldn't be worse than Watergate.  Even if Barack Obama directly ordered the IRS to target teabagger groups (and why WOULDN'T the IRS look into the tax exempt status of folks with "Taxed Enough Already" in their damn name?) it wouldn't be worse than Watergate.

              Heavy sigh.

              So out from under his rock in his undisclosed, Google-Earth proof location crawls the Dark Lord himself, to point to the Benghazi tragedy and grumble, "I think it's one of the worst incidences, frankly, that I can recall in my career".

              For Dick Cheney, the guy who helped out an active CIA operative, the guy who helped orchestrate the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq, the guy who signed off on our Guantanamo Bay gulag, the asshole who smugly shrugged off the torture and abuse of detainees from Abu Ghraib to a hundred dark op sites around the globe, the guy who got stumble drunk and shot a friend in the face, then flew back to an undisclosed location while his aides sobered him up and hid him from public scrutiny, the guy who... well, I could do this all fucking day and not have time to eat.

              So it's worse that Watergate?  Where the White House directly ordered the break-in of a rival Party's headquarters to gain inside information, then micro-managed the ensuing cover-up.  It's worse than Watergate, where the President of the United States had the director of the FBI conduct unconstitutional probes into that President's political enemies lives and finances.  It's worse than Watergate, where a special prosecutor resigned after mass firings at the Justice Department left him no option to proceed with his duly-appointed investigation.

              You can only cry Wolf, or Watergate, so often...

              And you can only ignore your own Party's crimes against humanity for so long.

              At some point, history will provide the needed perspective on the day's events, and when those books are written this administration's worst offenses will seem a whiter shade of pale next to those of the last.

             

         

A WEBSITE FOR ALL YOU ARTSY-FARTSY TYPES... (or anyone who wants to have fun!)

         I stumbled across a site that's just WAY COOL!  Go to www.weavesilk.com and give it a try, but take a few hours of play time with you, 'cause you're not coming back anytime soon.

         Once you're there, click to get started, then find the little color orb icon in the upper left hand corner to bring up the color pallette.  There are symmetry controls, mirror effects, etc.  Once you've played around with it for a minute you'll start to amaze yourself.

         If you click on the camera icon you can save your image to a folder, or print the thing.

Here are a couple our niece Sarah (seven years-old) did in her first two minutes playing with it:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OUR REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR STEPS UP, VETOES AG-GAG BILL DESIGNED TO PROTECT ANIMAL ABUSERS FROM CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS (tip of the hat for doing the right thing, Governor Haslam)

          When the so-called "Ag Gag" bill was proposed in the Tennessee legislature, it had all the trappings of a typical bidness friendly GOP no-brainer.  It would call for the prosecution of anyone who surreptitiously filmed animal abuse on corporate farms or at horse training facilities if they didn't turn over their evidence within 48 hours, thus making complete long term investigations impossible.  One of the sponsors of the bill is a big time hog farmer.  Go figure.

          But the bill had critics from the start, many of them coming from the entertainment industry, as well as the Humane Society and PETA.  In the state of Tennessee, the walking horse industry is big business, times ten.  There are walking horse celebrations in middle Tennessee that draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors and generate millions of dollars for the local economies.  But repeated cases of soring and other abusive tactics meant to "encourage" walking horses to learn their world famous exaggerated gait were exposed due to investigations that required time to collect criminal evidence.  The Ag-Gag bill would effectively limit those investigations by requiring whistle blowers to come forward immediately with their evidence.

          So it came to be that Governor Haslam had to decide between allowing a bill popular among his fellow Republicans to become law, or side with the majority of Tennesseans who found the proposed law offensive.  The Governor stepped up.  For only the second time in his two year term in office, the Governor of Tennessee vetoed a bill.

          I don't say this kind of thing often about Republicans in this state's political circles, so you might want to take note:

          Governor Haslam, we're proud of your decision in this case.  Well done, sir.

          Oh, and hey?  You might want to check out this morning's edition of The Tennessean (motto: "The newest photo of Taylor Swift is in its usual spot on page three today!") because they're running another story about criminal abuse of walking horses that's been exposed through an investigation in east Tennessee.

 

MUD WRESTLING WITH WHITNEY HOUSTON (shooting the Tennessee rugby championship games and wishing for a faster National Anthem...)

            A couple of months ago, I was invited to cover the Tennessee Rugby Association's state title games as the official photographer of the event that was held this past Saturday.  There were six games to be played, from the first middle school matchup to both boys and girls high school championships, and they were all to take place one after another on the same rugby pitch at a local university. 

            Rugby's my favorite sport to shoot, for any number of reasons.  To begin with, the "sirs" (rugby's term for the main referee) don't seem to mind if I wander across the sideline during play to get better shooting angles, unlike baseball umpires or football referees who tend to treat the field of play as some sacrosanct holy ground never to be touched by mere mortals with cameras.  The first time I shot a college rugby match I asked the head official if I could come out on the field during play, and his response was classic rugby-speak:  "It's your ass!"

            We had three or four days of steady rain here in Murfreesboro leading up to Championship Saturday, and the pitch (rugby's word for "field"... they speak another language, really) was more than saturated.  There was about half an inch of water standing on the grass, more in some places than others, so just walking across the field to get to my position on the spectator-free side of the field was all I needed to do to get both feet thoroughly soaked through my sneakers.  Eight hours and six rugby matches later, the field had turned into a shoe-sucking mud pit, and each step back across the pitch required an ankle-deep slog.  It didn't matter what color the jerseys were to start the match, because five minutes into the first period both teams were a uniform color:  mud brown.

              But the rugby games aren't the reason I called you here today, even though I intend to post a few shots from them.  What I wanted to talk about is our tradition in this country of playing the National Anthem before athletic events. 

              I'm as patriotic as anyone you'll meet, despite the snarky tone of most of my blobber posts.  When it comes to loving this country and her flag, I'm right there with the most red blooded Americans cheering for our team in the Olympics. 

              But I have to confess, if I'm subjected to repeated onslaughts of some superstar's rendition of the National Anthem, complete with all of the warbles and trills and interpretive phrasings that superstar might inject into one of Dolly Parton's tunes, I get "over it" pretty quickly.

 

 

 

 

              They played a recorded version of Whitney Houston's singing of the Star Spangled Banner from the 1991 Super Bowl pre-game show before each of the six rugby matches Saturday.  If you haven't heard Whitney's rendition, I'll attach a vid of the moment for you to ponder.  As far as National Anthem's go, Whitney's version isn't terrible.  In fact, it's one of the best, and at the moment she sang it America was duly smitten with teary eyed affection for the woman.

              But it's a long, slow version, and if you have to stand at rapt attention, hand across your heart while facing the flag six times in one day, it almost becomes abusive.

              The first time they played it (before the opening middle school title game) I cringed, because the opening notes let me know they were using Whitney's long, slow-assed version of the song, and having done this kind of thing before I knew (!) they were going to play it over and over and over and over and over all damn day.  The second time they cued it up on the PA was painful.  The third time was torturous.  The fourth time I stood through it I began to have seriously dark thoughts about the people in charge of the PA system.  I wanted to scream, "Why can't you play a military band version that's quick and painless and get it the fuck over with?" 

               But I didn't scream at the PA people.  I just stood there, because that's what we do here in America when they play Whitney singing that song.  We stand there and we look at the flag.  It's our tradition of nationalistic genuflection before Old Glory. 

                But I hadn't eaten all day.  I had arrived at the pitch shortly after 8AM, cameras in hand, and it was about 2PM when Whitney cranked it up for the FIFTH DAMN TIME.  I began to hate the woman.

                When the sixth singing of the National Anthem was announced two hours later, I opened a small cooler I'd brought to the games and ate a chicken and cheese wrap I'd made before leaving the house.  I was hungry, it was the only chance I was going to get between games. And if I had to stand at attention through one more teeth-grinding minute of that song I was going to have a stroke.

                For what it's worth, I was off to the side against a chain link fence, and out of respect I tried to chew in time to the song.

               Like I said, I'm patriotic as hell.