Thursday morning Randoms.

--While I agree that we should absolutely brook no foolishness, and should arrest judges and cops alike for DWI --as apparently has been happening in Broward County, FL to three (!) judges this year-- I am impressed at the foolishness of Public Defender Finklestein's comments:

Finkelstein said he doubted Judge Rosenthal’s claim of the Ambien CR affecting her. “I have a little bit of experience with drugs. That is not from an Ambien at 10 o’clock at night,” Finkelstein said. “The fact that she refused the urine and the blood test is gonna keep people wondering.”

Way to get all prosecutorial, Mr. Public Defender! Hope you don't find yourself on the judge's blacklist...

--While watching an old Magnum P.I. episode (Look, don't judge me.), I see Magnum checking his load in his Government model while in the middle of a gunfight in a dock warehouse. He drops the magazine, and we see that he has two rounds left in the magazine. More importantly, we see... that it's a 9mm!  No! Say it ain't so!

In almost the next scene, he's firing, and you can clearly see the muzzle is not a .45.
So disillusioned. This of course is why he almost immediately gets shot and spends the rest of the episode in "Limbo".

--Wait-- Jeff MacKay is dead? But, he was the best sidekick!

--Wait-- Zsa Zsa Gabor is still alive? At 97, she's still ki-- er, ticking. (She lost a leg a couple of years back.)

--My patrol car suffered hail damage last month. The state insurance agency has totaled the car, for minor peens on the top surfaces, which didn't even crack the paint. Yeah, the car has some years on it, but it runs great! I understand the insurance company's math (the cost of refinishing the surfaces costs more than they reckon the car is worth), but this does NOT work out well for the department. The check that we get will nowhere nearly get us a new patrol car.  I wish we could take back the claim. But we can't. The insurance is dropped. That car will never run another patrol. Honestly, I'm thinking about following up on where the insurance company sells it; it's a good vehicle.

--I shot a police pistol match on Friday with my newly-issued Generation 4 Glock 31, shooting our new duty ammo, 147g Hornady XTP .357 Sig. It shot very well. I put the ski-jump big grip swell on the backstrap, and it felt good, so I'm leaving it on. I plan to purchase the Gen 3 Glock 31 that I carried for 7 and a half years. Interestingly, the Glock-branded steel tritium night sights were dead-on. As I have complained for years about the lack of quality of the Glock factory sights, let's hope that this kind of sight quality is the new standard. No scores from the match yet, but I didn't completely cover myself with shame. (At 30 seconds a miss, I shot slow.)

--I'm putting off taking my car in, now that I've cleaned it out to be turned in. Heck, I even threw a little Armor-All on the dash.

--Measles cases are at a 20 year high in the U.S. Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield can choke on a bowl of oversized phalli.

--You know that crazy woe-is-me narcissist who killed people at UCSB? Two observations:
1. When you show his videos and pictures and repeat his manifesto and say his name, you're putting out sugar for the ants (other people with issues who want to go out in a big enough blaze of glory that they reckon will make you HAVE to say their name.).
2. It was people with guns who stopped the rampage. Wouldn't it have been nice if someone had shot at him even earlier? Keep in mind that the shots at the bad guy don't have to kill him. This guy got hit in the hip, and then shot himself in the head.

--I finished The Watchmen, after having slowed my reading to about a chapter a night (well, maybe just a little faster). It was interesting. My brother was excited that we had something to talk about, and wants me to get into Daredevil. I don't see why not. But I'm not buying this over-priced thing.

--We are out of coffee. Except for that canned stuff, which doesn't count. Friday afternoon is payday, when I get more. (We've been paying huge surplus payments to our standing debt, to make it go away, which means that I suddenly long for Friday.)

--The weather is FAR better than what we usually get in late May. It's not even in the 90s. Blue skies with the odd fluffy white cloud for decoration.

--My daughter was inducted to the National Honor Society last night. Lots and lots of good and great kids are NOT so inducted. But I will say that of those NHS members on stage last night, none of them were regular "customers" of mine. Good kids all. I can be pretty glad that my kid is a member of their little local chapter.
 

Place your bets, now.

When I saw on the Yahoo news page that an unemployed west Dallas man had won McDonald's $1 Million Monopoly game, I grinned when I saw the following:

The old saw is that, if all the money in the country were distributed evenly among all the people here, within 5 years it would basically have been re-distributed to the same people who have it now. Call me a pessimist, but I actually suspect (without any real (non-anecdotal) evidence) that this is true.


But I chastised myself for having smirked, and thought, "maybe this guy has some good plans for the ~$600k+ that he'll get out of the giant cheque, after taxes." I mean, we all could fall on hard times. We all could find ourselves living with our folks for a few months after a lay-off. We all could end up extending that stay for years. And years. Could happen to any of us.

Now let's see-- he plans to repay his folks. He plans to take his nephew to Yellowstone Park. He plans to... um... get a tattoo of a McRib sammich.


He thinks that properly-utilizing this money, he could be set for life.


Bless his pea-pickin' little heart.

Reviewing childhood entertainment.

It's no secret that I have kids in the house. These children do, in fact, watch some age-appropriate television, and see movies. This of course means that Mrs. G and I watch them, too. I've come to some sudden flashes of realization, lately:

1. Speed Racer wasn't really the star of the show; Racer X was.

2. Remember that black and white scene toward the beginning of The Wizard Of Oz, in which Zeke the farm hand (played by Bert Lahr, who also played the Cowardly Lion) jumps into the pigsty? Remember how, after he jumped in and carried Dorothy out, he mopped his brow with panting anxiety? Remember how the others chuckled at the scaredy-man, who was afraid of a few pigs? I saw that scene the other day while my daughter watched it on DVD, and I realized something: he didn't hesitate to climb in and get Dorothy out. I asked my 10 year old daughter if she though that the character Zeke was a coward. She said that he was. I corrected her, because for the first time it struck me: Zeke overcame his fear to do what was needful. Only afterwards did he show his fear. This is the very definition of courageous. How had I missed that for so long?
Oh, and my daughters and I agree that the over-heavy male vibrato in the Cowardly Lion song "If I Were King Of The Forest" sucks dirty rocks. We also agree that troupes of giant flying monkeys are still a terrifying concept. We also note, having read the original book, that the Witch had sent packs of giant wolves to kill the traveling group, but that the Tin Woodsman had slain them neatly with his axe. Funny how that didn't make it into the movie.

3. The Electric Company, a TV show on PBS that used to come on after Sesame Street when I was a kid, had an amazing array of talent on it. Morgan Freeman and Mel Brooks each did 780 episodes. Gene Wilder (and the lesser talent Joan Rivers) did 650 episodes. Bill Cosby did 260 episodes. Repeat guest stars like Carol Burnett and Lily Tomlin. Wow. That show only lasted six seasons? Huh. You mean there were other reasons to watch it besides Spider Man?

Am I the only one...?

Am I the only one who sees the 25 year old footage of a bunch of white folk beating on a black man's head, and immediately thinks of the bee scene with Steve Zahn and Martin Lawrence in National Security?

This Just In:

Generalissimos Miguel Jackson and Francisco Franco are still dead!

______________________________

Hat Tip to Tam.

What a difference that last 0.56% must have made.

Marylin Chambers, the most famous model ever to grace a box of Ivory Snow, was found dead on Saturday night.

Interestingly, she was a 2004 write-in candidate for VP on the Personal Choice Party ticket, which is said to be a libertarian party. Well Marylin, we hardly knew ye.

Lost an icon.

We lost the best pinup girl who was ever pinned up, yesterday.

Bettie Page's appeal, to me at least, was not in her portrayal as a dominatrix or such. It was the fact that she genuinely appeared to be having fun. Nothing is sexier, to my simple mind, than a lady having fun. Whether or not people judge her for the rather pedestrian act of taking her clothes off before a camera, it's indisputable that the most stable point in her life was when she was employed to do just that.

Some might have a chicken/egg quandry as to whether that period drove her later unsettled life or if her troubles drove her to posing. I wouldn't bother. In a time when models were already attempting to melt cameras with sultry glares, Bettie was smiling. You get the feeling that you would have liked this person.

Confession of ignorance.

I don't *get* the obsession with Andy Warhol.

I regularly see many superb artists, who are about as obscure as any homeless person on the street. Then there's Warhol, who for about a quarter century had undue sway over what and who were considered artistic-- especially in New York.

Maybe I've just got so much hayseed in my hair that I just can't see. Hell, I've never even been to NYC. (And I could carry a pistol there, so I don't have that excuse going for me not having gone.)