Daily Lesson

Good morning,


Quote of the day:


"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between"

                                          Oscar Wilde

I am looking out the sliding glass doors across Santa Rosa Sound. The sky is partly cloudy with low puffy cumulus clouds, and the wind is from the northeast (naturally) at about 7 MPH. The forecast is for afternoon thunderstorms and a high temperature of 84. It is a typical day in northwest Florida in the Fall. That is why I come down here this time of year, the weather is beautiful.


I went to Sidelines restaurant for lunch. It is a sports bar/restaurant here on the beach. I had a bowl of crawfish chowder and a grilled grouper sandwich, you don't find food like that in the hill country of SC.


I just read that the Governor of Massachusetts has ordered the state employees to not do any further business with the Hyatt hotel chain. The reason is that a Hyatt hotel in Boston fired 130 housekeepers and replaced them with people provided by an employment agency in Georgia that worked for less money. Not only that, before the employees were fired they were told to train the new people that would be used "for vacation relief". They were essentially raped.


Several years ago my brother was laid off by Fluor Corporation in Greenville, SC after working there 17 years. They told him that they could hire two architects out of Clemson for what they were paying him. Fluor laid off several others for the same reason. My brother and many of those that were laid off filed a class action law suit for age discrimination and won.


It is true that a private company does things that save money such as what the Hyatt corporation did, but the state of Massachusetts has the right to boycott them also. I have gotten several messages from people that use Bank of America saying they will withdraw their funds and go to another bank because of the event that happened in Gaffney, SC with the American flags and the dead soldier. I like it.


I met up with a friend last night that lives here on the island. There is a fancy-schmantzy neighborhood on the island called Villa Sabine and that is where my friend lives. A few months ago a truckload (23) of Guatemalans suddenly appeared in the house next door to him. He found out that they had been brought there to help build a new hotel that is under construction within walking distance of the house. My friend knew the owner of the house and called him and asked if he knew what was going on in his house in Villa Sabine. The owner said that he did but the aliens swore they would keep quiet. My friend told him that what he was doing was against the island code of occupancy and he wanted them out of there. The owner did nothing so my friend reported the situation to the Santa Rosa Island Authority who is the governing body for the island. The Authority gave the owner three days to rectify the situation or they would cancel his lease on the property and take the house. On this island the property is leased, no one owns the land except the island authority. So on the third day afterward at 8:30p a big rider truck pulls up and the aliens jump into the truck carrying their mattresses with them. Problem solved. I wonder how many of them had a green card.


I suppose y'all know what a weight bar looks like that is used in gyms. It is a steel rod with metal discs of various weights stacked on each end. Well, recently a dumb ass from Los Angeles had a self esteem issue regarding the size of his penis. He decided to put his penis in the hole of a weight disc and let it hang hoping for a stretch maneuver. He could not get it off and after three days he shows up at an emergency room. The ER people had no clue as to how to fix this problem except the obvious which was unacceptable. They called the fire department which has saws that will cut anything. They came and were able to free the man from the weight. I did not make this up, y'all.


The size of a man's penis has nothing to do with his sexuality just like the size of a woman's breast has nothing to do with it. I have to believe all that.


This date in history September 25


1864     CSA President Jefferson Davis travels from Richmond to Palmetto, Georgia to visit with CSA Gen. John Bell Hood to find out why Hood’s mighty Army of Tennessee got a major ass-whipping at the Battle of Atlanta. As usual when an army gets almost destroyed the military leaders start finger pointing to avoid the blame for the failure. In this case it was Hood pointing at CSA Gen. William Hardee one of his three Corp commanders. From the outset of the war it was apparent that Hardee should have had command of the Army of Tennessee but President Davis would not admit a mistake and left Hood in command. On his way back to Richmond Davis made a speech in Columbia, S.C. trying to pump up the morale of the people and mentioned that Hood “Had his eyes on farther horizons”. US Gen. William Sherman read this in the newspaper and correctly assumed that Hood was on his way back to Tennessee to try to cut Sherman’s supply lines. There was an army waiting on Hood and the Army of Tennessee was eliminated as an effective fighting group. Davis should have kept his mouth shut.


1957    Nine black students are escorted by the 101st Airborne into Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Previously the US Supreme Court had ruled that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional. There were some 500 blacks within Central High School’s district that expressed interest in attending Central. Through a series of interviews and mind-changing the 500 were whittled down to nine. Gov. Orville Faubus being a staunch segregationist ordered the Ark. National Guard to prevent the blacks from entering the school to avoid bloodshed. This ploy did not sit well with Federal District Court Judge Davis and Davis ordered the black kids be allowed to attend the school, National Guard not withstanding. Finally President Eisenhower had had enough of Faubus and sent in the 101st to enforce the law. It was not until the 70’s that blacks were socially accepted and the on and off violence abated. Hatred has no limits.



1942    The damned Nazis invade and conquer Norway looking for that country’s iron ore and it being a good location to mount attacks on allied shipping to England and Russia. The government of Norway had fled and set up a government-in-exile in London. The Norwegians were not happy about this and started giving the Germans some shit. The Germans responded with setting a puppet government with a Norwegian monster named Vidkun Quisling in control. This asshole sucked up to the Germans and even sent some his fellow Norwegians to German concentration camps. To this day the word Quisling means a hated government. The Germans also set up a Gestapo headquarters in Oslo and other cities to intimidate the populous into behaving. On this day the RAF (English Air Force) bombed the Gestapo headquarters in Oslo and sent the Germans running. But it was for naught because the Gestapo pigs came back a murdered innocent people in reprisal. I cannot express enough my hatred for the Germans and Arab terrorists. (See the last sentence in the previous paragraph.) They are all the same pig sucking cowards.


1897    William Faulkner is born in Oxford, Miss. Faulkner was one of the most celebrated authors in American history. His first success was his book The Sound and Fury but he made his mark being a screenwriter in giving us the movies To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart starring and The Big Sleep also starring Bogie. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the next year his book Collected Stories was awarded the National Book Award. He was a true talent but left us when he had a heart attack and died at the age of 55. It is interesting to note that he and his wife Estelle bought an old ante bellum house near Oxford and refurbished it. I can see him now on the columned front porch in a cane bottomed rocker sipping a little Bourbon and branch water.


1958    Little Augie Carfano is shot to death on the street in New York. Augie was a soldier in the army of mobster Meyer Lansky and was caught not giving Meyer an appropriate amount of tribute after a successful score. Meyer didn’t play, ya’ll. It was estimated that Meyer had accumulated over $300M by the early 70’s but even with that the Feds could never come up with enough solid evidence to can his ass. His friend Bugsy Siegel with great vision had borrowed $6M from Meyer and opened the Flamingo, the first casino in Las Vegas. It was an instant success but it looked like he wasn’t interested in paying Meyer back. Bugsy came down with a 30.06 caliber headache from which he never recovered. Almost appropriately Meyer disintegrated and died from lung cancer in 1983.


1867    Cattle baron Oliver Loving dies in Ft. Sumner, New Mexico of gangrene. Ollie was also a great visionary. He and his friend Charlie Goodnight decided that it was a bummer to have to drive their cattle to a railhead somewhere in Kansas where a middle man would be involved and cut into their profits. So they decided to make cattle drives from west Texas through New Mexico and on up into the burgeoning cities and towns in Colorado and sell their cattle directly to the meat houses. On their first drive they lost 400 cattle but were able to deliver about 1,600 and walked away with $12,000 in gold an enormous amount in those days. They had one major problem, the Comanche. They were not happy with these honkies passing through their lands and demanded tribute in the form of cattle. Ollie and Charlie struggled with this problem until one day about 500 Comanche caught Ollie out by himself and hacked on him for a while. Ollie was able to get back to Ft. Sumner with the most severe of his wounds being one of his arms. When his arm started to fester Ollie asked the local doctor to amputate it. The doctor said that he had never done such a thing and he wasn’t going to start now. So Ollie died a few days later because a freaking doctor had no nerve. There are markers out there to this day showing the Loving-Goodnight Trail from New Mexico to Colorado. The trail was used for many years by other drovers.


Born today:


1207    Afghani mystic and poet Jalal-ud Din-Rumi. He said “Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.” That sounds the stock market to me.


1924    American playwright Truman Capote. He said “Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.” As with a lot of people, he got rich and partied himself to death.


1931    US actress Angie Dickenson. She said “I dress for women and undress for men.” She sure is/was a sexy woman.


Died today:


0420    Italian religious leader Saint Jerome. He said “When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.” Jerome, you sound like a wise man but for me fasting is out of the realm of possibility.


1628    English writer Fulke Grenville. He said “No man was ever so much deceived by another as himself.” You know Fulke, I think we all are guilty of that from time to time.


1985    German actress Simone Signoret. She said “Chains do not keep a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years.” That is a very profound and true statement, Simone. I guess I just ran out of thread, or never learned how to sew.


Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow


Goodbye from the land of speech slow as molasses, thought even slower but lots of fast women.