America's funniest "news" guy

The issues on the home computer are about to be resolved. In the meantime I have decided, after much thought and deliberation, that I shall post a few more memes. Soon I hope to be able to tell a story or two and post a few pictures from the last few weeks.

One of the themes of this week's posting is that Bill O'Really, O'Liely,  O'Reilly is a total douchebag for those of you who didn't already know. He's easy pickings, though, so it isn't much of a stretch.

In the meanwhile, we learn that besides not being in The Falklands, nor witnessing the nuns being massacred in El Salvador, nor attacked at the Rodney King riots in L.A., nor at the house where Kennedy assassination person of interest committed suicide, Bill-O was also not in Northern Ireland during an IRA bombing.

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I just don't know where to end this as there is a plethora of material like this. A puffed up, blowhard, know it all, has endless stupidity and nonsense coming out of his mouth so as long as he is alive there will be endless entertainment. That's the great thing about America. You can be anything you can lie about as long as you are loud and rude.

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Just so you know, there is an explanation backed up by observation, evidence, and years of study with repeatable results. A little education and honesty goes a long way in explaining things, but poor Bill may never understand. Maybe he's been smoking the Devil's Lettuce.

 

There were a few other good ones this week gleaned from around the interwebs.

ENJOY!

I've seen that before

Due to computer issues at home I am stealing a few moments at work to bring you some entertainment. Well, not really stealing as by law I get two fifteen minute breaks and a lunch break which I rarely get any of anyway. I have learned to swallow bites of sandwich nearly whole, without choking, in order to answer the phone. Of course, it takes enormous self control not to belch before the call is finished which brings us to our first meme.



 
 
You can see where I might be going with this. But I have eclectic tastes and a twisted sense of humor, so no need to worry. Just hide it from the kids.

A friend of mine recently loaned me his old bass guitar so I could see if I thought it might be fun to try and buy one of my own. Sometimes I get a bass riff in my head and it won't go away without some encouragement. Until I get it out of my system I'll thump away on my loaner and see if the need arises once again or if it's just a passing phase. So I wanted to immerse myself in the zen of bass playing and found these commandments to guide my search for low down wisdom.

I have learned a great deal about myself since undertaking this endeavor. I am sure there is a man high on a mountaintop who is closer to the Truth ( thank you Eric Burdon).
As an aspiring musician (I have always aspired because I have minimal actual talent) I realize that it was probably a sign of maturity that I always had a "real" job. Take this scene from my early life.

The thing is, I don't feel bad because in this world there are actually very few talented and smart people, many of whom tend to share this fact a bit too often.

So I rarely feel like I am the bottom of the heap. Even those at the top of the heap really shouldn't be there as their arrogance, hubris, etc., makes them seem like the biggest idiots on the planet. Yet there they are in positions of power. Only a few of them understand.

So rather than trying to get you to think that I am a thinking person I just want to take you back to the basics. I mean really. If were smart I would be rich, after all, so rather than look up a bunch of rarely used words in the English language which YOU would then have to look up because you are not all that much smarter than me, I'll get back to the job at hand. For example, I have always wanted to actually SEE a chicken cross the road, let alone wonder why.













Or maybe something like this:

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A little help with the concept on this one.
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Okay, next time I'll do something else, but these were fun.

Death march of '78

Long ago (and oh so far away) I lived and hung out with a extended bunch of guy friends. We combined in many forms, sometimes as roommates, fellow partiers, and fellow adventurers. For being city dwellers we really spent quite a bit of time outdoors and participating in everything from sailing and water skiing to hiking and backpacking. We also played in a recreational volleyball league and even softball in a class A city league.

We were  all in our mid to late twenties, had various professional type jobs, rented a nice lower unit of a triplex next to Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, and nothing to tie us down. Many of our adventures were spur of the moment and there was always enough of us available to just go and do it.

Thus it came to be one Saturday morning that we were all awake at a reasonable hour we hatched an idea over breakfast. We decided to drive up to the Porcupine Mountains of Michigan and do some hiking and an overnight camp out. We didn't need much for an overnighter so it only took us minutes to pack and load up in whatever vehicle would haul all of us.
 

About five hours later, there we were!





It was a beautiful day and we were anxious to get on the trails for some serious hiking. We went into the ranger station adjacent to the campground. We talked to the ranger who was about our age and asked him about the various hiking loops we could take. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon, so we had about seven hours of daylight with a lingering summer twilight. He pointed out loops that were ten miles and fifteen miles and suggested those. They looked easily doable in the time allotted. Then one of the more competitive of our group asked him which one he would do. He pointed to a longer loop and said, "this one." It was about twenty five miles through the woods and then up the lake shore before turning back to the campground. "It might be a little long for you guys, though."
Uh oh.
One of our competitive guys said, Can you do it?" "Yes." "Then we can do it."




 We took the green loop. the camping area is off the map to the east.

I had hoped that some of the testosterone of our earlier years had worn off and that we were able to think more with our upper brain. After being cooped up in the car for hours we had energy to burn off, though. And we were still too young to always think clearly.

We knew it would be tight to do before dark as we had never been on these trails. They looked fairly easy to see and easy to walk on.










We were doing fine until we hit the stretch going along the lake. About halfway along that nearly ten mile stretch we were starting to show signs of fatigue. There was a lot of loose rock and the walking became more difficult as we tried to keep a pace that would get us back to camp before dark. It was another ten miles, though, and there wasn't much happy chatter going on. Our group started to spread out a bit. We stopped to check out some blisters that had formed on our feet, but didn't have the luxury of time to do much about them. Just grit our teeth and go.

It was pretty dark for the last couple of miles, but the trail was still easy to follow, thank goodness and we finally made it back to camp. When we stopped, we flopped. The shoes came off, the legs were massaged and there  was much moaning and groaning. We did more crawling than walking around the campsite and ate the most expedient food as exhaustion would allow. Not much was said and everyone fell asleep on the cold hard ground very quickly.

The next morning was greeted with more moaning and groaning as we took stock of our injuries in the daylight. Rather than describe the various aches, pains, and lesions, let's just say it wasn't pretty.

The trip home was quiet as whoever didn't have to drive just slept.

I survived with just a few blisters and aches. Two of our team needed to see a doctor and one of those needed minor knee surgery from aggravating an old injury. We didn't speak much of that weekend for a few months, but eventually we started laughing about it. When someone would tell us of something fun he thought he could try, the response was, "If you can do it, we can do it!" punctuated by laughter and another beer. Eventually, most of us (not all of us) settled down with women that would help us keep from hurting ourselves and we lived happily ever after. 

Addendum: These are all stock photos.
Every time I look across the Big Lake, some 70 miles, on a very clear day I can see the Porkies. It is similar to this side, but the rocks are a little different. Here is a shot of the Slit Rock Lighthouse I got on the way home from Duluth about a week and a half ago. Click to embiggen.

Summer in the Adirondack Mountains

My first summer in the Adirondacks was my first summer away from home with no family anywhere nearby. I was alone in the woods with total strangers. Sort of. The McKennas were familiar with my family, however. Both of my father's younger brothers had worked for them in the 50's while attending Case Western Reserve in Cleveland where McKennas were social workers.

Mr. McKenna was head of social  work for Cleveland when he retired. They were both from old money, descended from Mayflower settlers, but they both worked anyway. They were also socialist/liberal politically which nearly got Mr. McKenna disinherited. He also had some robber barons in his background which gave him an interesting bunch of relatives, many of whom I got to meet, eventually. Joe and Pat were a bit quirky, but they were great readers and correspondents. Joe had picked up an advanced degree at Cambridge University (yes, that Cambridge) in English literature which made conversation totally fascinating. Pat was similarly educated and when we had guests, which was most of the time, there were interesting discussions which I found myself soaking up while doing my assigned chores. We got the NY Times, but being 300 miles north of the city it was always a day late.

This was where I learned to play cribbage. The coffee table was a slab of pine about 40" in length with holes drilled in it to keep score. The pegs were turned aluminum and brass. These people were serious. An old retired boy scout executive named Morse Lowry would paddle his canoe across the lake at least several nights a week for cribbage. He always paddled properly, on his knees near the center of the canoe, and always wore his big ol' brimmed boy scout hat when he paddled.  They kept score of their games in a notebook and the notebook was older than I was.

Other good friends of theirs, the Gorhams (descended from Nathaniel Gorham of the Continental Congress, etc.) were from Buffalo, but had a place down the lake a mile or two. They were extremely nice people with about four children all older than me. The daughters were awesome and I had a crush on the youngest, even though she was married with two kids. (If you see a pattern here with crushes on older women you are observant.) They had known Joe since childhood as Joe's mother had owned a Chrysler foundry in Buffalo.

It is understandable then that the car I drove for Joe and Pat was a Chrysler product. It was a coupe with a 383 and a 4 barrel carburetor, so it wasn't a great car for running around the north woods doing shopping and errands, but on my day off it was a hoot. Stomp on the accelerator and it would roar to life while inhaling gasoline at an incredible rate. I had to be careful though as $50 a week needed to go toward college and I couldn't afford to burn up a lot of money on 40 cent per gallon gas, and beer was a luxury, too. Remember, you only had to be eighteen in New York to drink.

I saved money well and also saved up a 3 days off by working every day for three weeks.  I decided to go on a little adventure and see where it would take me. I headed to go North and cross the Canadian border for the first time. I picked up a hitchhiker from New Orleans, while going through Watertown, who was headed for the Strawberry Fields concert across the border. Having been in the woods for a couple of months I hadn't heard a thing. (the previous summer my girlfriend's brother was headed to a farm New York for another concert and wondered if we wanted to come along, but we had to work. College ya know.)  I was planning a trip through Algonquin Park so when we stopped at  at the Thousand Islands border crossing we parted ways. I didn't realize the road only goes through a small corner of the park and I wasn't prepared to do any serious camping, anyway. I was pretty much rolling without a plan. I ended up spending the night in a cheap hotel in Hamilton.

I started driving back toward New York the next morning and picked up a couple of guys hitching to Niagara Falls. One guy was Swiss and the other German and they seemed pretty cool so I joined them and we toured Niagara Falls together. It was fun and then they headed out toward the West Coast, hitch hiking across North America. I headed to Rochester to take up an invite of a young friend of Joe and Pat. It was the only time I've been to Niagara Falls.

Mike was a professor of psychology and had done some post-doc work under Piaget in France. He took me to the Faculty Dining Club at the university for dinner as his wife wouldn't be home until later. I had met them before when they were guests at camp. I had three days growth of beard, a chamois shirt, and jeans,so even though I was under dressed I was not underfed. It was awesome food!

After we got home Greta also arrived. Greta was about ten years older than me and had had a crush on my both of my uncles when they had worked for the McKennas years before. I returned the family obligation by having a crush on her. We had a lovely evening of conversation before retiring for the night.

 You realize that I have never told any of those women about my feelings so as not to make anyone uncomfortable. I just admired them all from a safe distance. As the Cooker's mother once said, "He wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful!" That is how I stayed out of trouble all these years.

I had a leisurely drive back to the Adirondacks the next day. I got to the landing, threw my bag in the canoe and paddled back to camp. A quick three day adventure was now one for the books.

One more guest of Pat and Joe and a genuinely fascinating guy was Dr. Donald Griffin. He was a second cousin to Joe through one of their robber baron ancestors. He was working at Rockefeller University at the time I met him, but his claim to fame was discovering echolocation in bats. During the end of WW2 he was working on bat-guided bombs. He studied animal behavior and animal consciousness and when I took him on a hike to a nearby abandoned beaver pond he pointed out things and demonstrated beaver archeology. His wife was also a research scientist, but with fiddler crabs in the Caribbean. She had a nice tan!

For a guy who had turned nineteen in July I had an amazing summer and I had only spent about a hundred dollars! I think those days are long gone.