Memorial Day 2011

This captures it all --

In Oregon, the USPS Really DOES Give a Crap

I guess when ya gotta go, ya gotta go, but . . . .

I wonder what he used as toilet paper.  No, I don't think I want to know.

Don't you just love the neighbor's disgusted facial expressions?

What has this world come to?

H/T to ReasonTV.

From the Inbox -- A Practical Solution to the Birther Issue

In today's email -- now, why didn't I think of this?!?!

Dear President Obama:


I am writing today with a somewhat unusual request. First and foremost, I will be asking that you return the United States of America to its August 20th, 1959 borders, so that Hawaii is no longer a state and thus you are no longer a citizen...


With utmost respect,


Bibi Netanyahu
Prime Minister - Israel


It'd be a sacrifice, but I'd be willing to dump Hawaii . . . .

Southern Mothers Corps Still Needed at the White House, Along With a Real "Leader"

Our darling mainstream media folk went apoplectic over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's alleged "school-boy scolding" of the Young President yesterday, after the Young President had blind-sided Israel yet again about the Palestinian thing the day before.

My, how quickly they forget.

Remember Moogie's observation about how PM Netanyahu was treated by the Young President over a year ago:

Wanted at the White House: Southern Mothers

The accounts of the Obama-Netanyahu Close Encounter are downright embarrassing.

I can just hear my mother's voice, scolding the Young President for his wretchedly poor display of how NOT to host a world leader at the White House. Leaving a guest unattended while the host goes to have a meal with the family?!?! I think not. I would've been grounded for weeks had I treated a guest in that fashion.

Maybe that's the solution to the Obama bad-manners department -- we need a corps of strong Southern Mothers to move into the White House to "shake a knot" onto the Young President's head and to teach him some rudimentary etiquette. I envision many hours of chores assigned as punishment along with the admonition, "Now, you just go and think about what you did!"

And I can just hear the motherly counter-arguments: "I don't care if you thought that making him stew for awhile would 'soften him up' for negotiations. You will not treat a guest that way under this roof!"

I hope Mr. Netanyahu was at least offered some cheese straws and iced tea.

Nah -- I don't think Michelle has that recipe.

I think maybe ol' Willie Shakespeare nailed it with his description about revenge and taking one's time to savor it, n'ces pas?  Slick move, Mr. Prime Minister.

And, I still think we need a Southern Mothers Corps in the White House.  You know, a Corps populated with those strong, southern women who have been schooled in both etiquette AND protocol; those who would also have enough common sense to show a cop-killing-advocate rapper the door before he could soil the White House linens.  Those who would unflinchingly sit the Young President's fanny in the corner when he gets too big for his britches, and find a corner spacious enough to accommodate Michelle's when she busts the seams.

I also like this photo that was making the rounds on Facebook yesterday, juxtaposing the Young President and Netanyahu at the same age:

Pictures speak words.   Pictures are words, spoken with an accent of experience.

For Your Post-apocalyptic Needs

Since it's already Sunday in New Zealand, I suppose we can assume that the Rapture has been put on hold for now.

That's a good thing for many reasons, but especially for the additional time we will now have to register our left-behind pets for post-apocalyptic care.

For real. See AfterTheRapturePetCare.com.

This thing reads like a Saturday Night Live skit. (The video is really reminiscent of SNL videos from days gone by!)

I especially like the "Frequently Asked Questions" section. The one question I'd like to ask, though, is whether we can trust all these volunteer pet-care-givers? I'm just sayin'.

People are actually sending money to these folks! Sheesh.

We're the Government and We're Here to Help You

So.  The Young President signed the "Plain Writing Act" last fall, and it will become effective in October.  Apparently, the measure will require federal government entities to use straightforward words when communicating with John Q. Public, and to avoid "pompous gibberish" and jargon, according to the Associated Press.

At first blush, I thought how very refreshing that idea was. 

Then I read the rest of the article.  Check out what the motive behind the Act is:

"It is important to emphasize that agencies should communicate with the public in a way that is clear, simple, meaningful and jargon-free," says Cass Sunstein, a White House information and regulation administrator who gave guidance to federal agencies in April on how to implement the law.


Bad writing by the government, he says, discourages people from applying for benefits they should get, makes federal rules hard to follow and wastes money because of all the time spent fixing mistakes and explaining things to a baffled populace.

But can clarity and good grammar be legislated?

That remains to be seen. The law lacks teeth. You won't be able to sue the government for making your head spin after October. And regulations are exempted.

Good grief.  Discourages people from applying for benefits they should get?!?!  If it would continue to discourage people from applying for benefits, I'd applaud Shakespearean or King James verbiage!! 

And regs are exempted?  That's where most of the boilerplate and convolutions live!

I wonder how one gets a job as "a White House information and regulation administrator who [gives] guidance to federal agencies?"

Oh, yeah.  Now I see.  The administrator is renowned Communist, Cass Sunstein.

We're doomed.

The Death Knell of the Educational System

I can't find it now so I can link to it, so they must have pulled the original version of the story.  At least that's to their credit (and some sharp-eyed editor's.)

Earlier today, I was perusing news snippets on the Associated Press app on the iPad and came across a piece about the flooding along the Mississippi.  The "journalist" described the source of the flood waters as the Mississippi River "and the smaller rivers that spring from it."  That concept was so bizarre that I re-read it several times to be sure that's what it really said.

That's what it really said.

To borrow Andy's favorite epithet, Crud. 

The passage referred to flood waters north of the Morganza spillway, so the "journalist" could not have been thinking about the southernmost delta where the river just kinda dissolves into a bunch of fingers and swamps.  So now America's educational institutions are teaching today's "learners" (seriously -- I've seen students referred to as "learners" in some recent literature) that the Mighty Muddy spawns smaller rivers. 

Crud.

The Great Crisis Moratorium of 2011

Do you know what I'm sick and tired of?

I'm sick and tired of being in the big, fat middle of crisis.

I mean, I was born during the Cold War -- I remember having "Civil Defense Drills" in addition to "Tornado Drills."  Really, like "duck and cover" under your school desk would have had any deterrent effect on a nuclear weapon.  We even had to have plans to get home from school without transportation after the atomic explosion! 

(It's a good thing we never had a real atomic attack because our plan obviously wasn't very good.  On the day of the practice run when I was in about the 4th grade my friend, Susan, and I got lost on the way to her house where my Mama was to pick me up so we could begin life in post-apocalyptic central Arkansas.  Definitely not a good plan.).

There were the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of JFK, the assassination of RFK and MLK (and the ensuing riot in my junior high courtyard by the few neighborhood black students because the flag was flown at half-staff for only 3 days to mourn Dr. King).  There were the Vietnam War, Apollo 13, and school desegregation.

Ah, school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Now there was a well-thought-out plan if ever I lived through one.  Not.  Seriously.  Really not.

Having fought against actually doing the desegregating part since 1957, and doing only piecemeal integration in the interim, the LR School District finally got around to integrating the public schools in the early 70s.  But, instead of starting at the elementary level, where young kids could grow up going to school with people whose skin color was different, and learning to be friends the way that kids learn to be friends, they chose to start at the high school level.  With pleasant, easily accepting-of-change adolescents. 

And they didn't just bus everyone around to mix up the races.  No -- they chose to wreck the black community by closing down their high school, Horace Mann, and divvying up all the Mann students among the white high schools via long bus rides.  They also gerrymandered the attendance zones of the white schools, thus messing up all kinds of extra-curricular activities.  And of course, this pleased no one. 

So, there were race riots at my high school and I was in the big fat middle of them.  My parents almost shipped me off to All Saints Boarding School in Vicksburg to finish high school, but my "cooler head" fortunately prevailed.  (Actually, it probably wasn't my cool head -- it was probably my screaming, crying hissy fit at having to leave the high school honey and cheerleading squad).

I lost my mother's mother in September 1977, then I lost my own mother the following month.  She was a few months shy of 46; I was barely 23 and an only child.  That's a crisis.

Crises seemed to die down when I was a young lawyer, wife, and mother -- or maybe I just chose to ignore them.  Well, there was that one incident with our baby daughter in intensive care with meningitis for several weeks, and we had our fair share of bad weather and stock market "corrections" during those years, I suppose. (Yeah -- that was a pretty spiffy little "correction" that landed us a 13% adjustable rate mortgage when we moved into our second home in 1983.)  There were probably lots of natural disasters, too.

But, holy cow!  Skipping over the Clinton years (and the teenage years of the daughters), since 9/11 it seems like the crises are non-stop!

International markets fluctuating wildly. Popes dying.  Volcanoes erupting and stopping trans-Atlantic flights.  Pirates.  Wars in far-away places.  Funky viral illnesses and super-bugs.  Tsunamis and earthquakes and tornadoes.  The Oil Spill and shut-down of drilling and fishing in the Gulf.  The Obama administration.

Katrina.

And now, the Great Flood of 2011.  (And the "survivors' guilt" that comes with it.)

And the termites are swarming, which means they're busy making all kinds of new, baby termites.  These are freaking termites, not snowflakes.

I'm sick and tired of feeling anxious.

And, despite being on 5 doses daily of 2 different antibiotics for 5 days, I still can't knock out this stupid infection, and if I wind up in the hospital on IV antibiotics I'll ruin my baby girl's wedding shower next weekend (and if I wind up on steroids, I'll swell up and will look like a sausage stuffed into my Mother of the Bride dress, and we. just. simply. can't. have. that!!).

So, from this moment forward (until after June 8th, at least) I am calling for a moratorium on Crises.

C'mon! Who's with me!  Seriously, I'm a little cranky here -- who's with me?!?!

The Monkey on my Back

With all the Blogger nonsense going on yesterday and today, I apparently picked a good day to play hooky.

And I'm apparently addicted to blogging and commenting. Whew! I was really needing a fix.

April Showers Went a Little Overboard This Year

There's been a little excitement around here the last few days.  We get a little over-anxious in New Orleans when the "F" word is being bandied about.  No, not that "F" word, the "Flood" word.

The Bonne-Carre spillway is slowly being opened to divert Mississippi River water into Lake Pontchartrain (which causes its own problems with fish and other marine critters, both salt and freshwater varieties, but I digress), but we've already hit flood stage here.  So, by Tuesday, the Morganza spillway northwest of Baton Rouge will be opened, thus dooming lots of land in the Atchafalaya Basin to flood, but the most densely populated areas of southeast Louisiana should be spared.  If the Morganza stays closed, this is what the Corps projects:

Moogie's Mansion, at 10 blocks from the Mississippi River, would be in the yellow 15 to 20 foot flood depth level.  Not a pleasant thought because the Mansion's dirt is 8 feet above sea level, and the actual structure sits another 3 feet above that.  Even math-challenged Moogie can cypher that (8 + 3) < (15 to 20).

But, even though we got a pretty good preview of what's coming as we drove home by a different route last weekend that tracked the Mississippi and spat us out in Vicksburg near the Yazoo's confluence, I don't have that "impending doom" feeling like I did before Katrina, and the ghosts aren't acting up, so I believe we should be just fine here.  My heart breaks for those who aren't so fortunate.

From an historical and intellectual perspective, this website contains more than you would ever want to know about controlling the Mississippi and flood protection.  It is kinda interesting, though.

Let's say a few prayers for those in the waters' path.

In the Navy!

Been out of town again.  More wedding stuff.  Food porn post still in the works.  Saw this today on Facebook and had to share.

Obama's contribution to the death of UBL:

Now, that is one wicked water hazard!

Today's New Cocktail Recipe

There's a new cocktail out called "The Bin Ladin." To make it, take two shots and add a splash of salt water. (Insert rim shot here!)

(H/T Milford M.  ;-P )

Oh, Canada!

The headline reads, "Canada Elections: Conservatives Win Coveted Majority."

The article goes on to reveal:

While [Prime Minister] Harper's hold on the 308-member Parliament has been tenuous during his five-year tenure, he has managed to nudge an instinctively center-left country to the right. He has gradually lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, promoted Arctic sovereignty, upped military spending and extended Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.

And this comes from the HuffPo! 

I don't know about you, but Canada's lookin' pretty good to me these days.