Daily lesson

Good Morning,


The skies are partly cloudy and the temperature is 80 deg. with the humidity at 90% at 7:30a. This means that the outside of the windows and sliding glass doors are fogged. I opened the sliding glass door and it felt like opening an oven. They are expecting a high today of 91 but about 83 for the rest of the week. The wind is from the west at about 8 MPH.

I have a good friend that lives in Black Mountain, North Carolina that has a problem. She lives in an average populated neighborhood but on occasion a black bear will show up and raid her bird feeders. I have looked at her neighborhood on "Google Earth" and cannot find any wilderness within what I would consider a reasonable distance. She also has as a roommate, a Manx cat named Keegan. Keegan has a mind of her own and will go on jaunts to who knows where for days at a time and show up at the door when the mood strikes her. I wonder what would happen if Keegan met up with Blackie the bear at the bird feeder. My money is on Keegan.

Your friend and mine Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina has suspended Union County Supervisor Donald Betenbaugh. Betenbaugh has been charged with multiple crimes including drug distribution. Among the charges are witness tampering, lying to federal agents and illegal distribution of Prozac. Prosecutors also say that this jackass along with tax assessor Willie Randall used Randall's office to store cocaine and other drugs. At least five other Union County officials have already been indicted on a variety of offenses. The Governor said that Betenbaugh would remain suspended until convicted or acquitted. What the hell is going on in Union, South Carolina?

I went to dinner with a friend and a few of her friends yesterday evening. We all met at Peg Leg Pete's for cheap oyster night. Last night raw oysters were $.35 each. These girls have traveled together all over the globe. I asked my friend where she would select as the best place she had ever been and she said that it would be the British Virgin Islands. She is a sailor and a diver and she has never regretted going to BVI and spending a week on a dive boat. I thought about that. Spending seven days on a relatively small dive boat would be tough for me to accept but she said that she loved every minute of it. I might have to try it in the future.

After dinner I went to one of my watering hole to experience karaoke. I did not stay long before heading to the house. A group of girls came in that I had seen at Peg Legs that were out celebrating one of their birthdays. One of them was from Anderson, South Carolina and was an RN in a local hospital. We discussed the difference in the pay from Charlotte to Pensacola. She said that there was a hell of a difference in pay but they always say, "This is what you sacrifice for living in paradise". She has been here for nine years and has no intention of leaving.

I met Dan last night. He is the second "healer" I have ever known. Dan can stop pain with just the touch of his hand or the slow movement of his hands over the point of the pain. Some of you will say that I am full of shit, but I have seen Dan in action, I will not deny that he has some kind of unusual power. The first "healer" that I have ever known is in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It can happen, y'all.

Good News:

39 year old Greg Klause from Chicago wanted to do something to raise funds to help the orphange in Zambia that his parents has founded. Last month he saw a promotional ad by Jetblue that for $599 you can buy a "Jet Pass" ticket and fly unlimited miles for 30 days. Greg got out world maps and planned an itenerary and bought a Jet Pass. He left Chicago on September 8. On October 8 he landed back in Chicago from Costa Rica. They did not say how much money he raised but he estimated that he had covered about 55,000 miles. I'll bet he has the mother of all jet lags. I cannot sleep aboard an airplane. I had a little jet lag flying from Newark to London and the same thing coming back.


This date in history October 8


1989    Operation Sealords is initiated by US Vice Admiral Zumwalt whereby a combined force of American and South Vietnamese river boats named Task Force 194 would patrol the smaller and lesser used tributaries of the Mekong river delta in an attempt to prevent incursions by the North Vietnamese from Cambodia . Needless to say this operation was a failure because incursions continued unabated until the end of the war. In 1971 the total responsibility for the patrols was given to the South Vietnamese navy. What a fiasco the whole war was.


1862    The Battle of Perryville, Ky. happens on this day. Two Confederate forces commanded by CSA Gen. Braxton Bragg and CSA Gen. E. Kirby Smith having entered Kentucky earlier in an attempt to recruit support for the cause and to draw Union forces away from the Chattanooga area. They succeeded in drawing troops from Chattanooga when a union army commanded by US Gen. Don Carlos Buell left Chattanooga and began a chase to catch Bragg and Smith. He caught up with the Confederates at Perryville. Buell dispatched 58,000 to confront Bragg and 20,000 to handle Smith. A ferocious battle ensued and the Union army prevailed from the sheer force of superior numbers. The Union army suffered 4,200 casualties and the Confederates 3,400. The Confederacy could not well afford these numbers of casualties and the Union could because the Kentuckians could not be swayed to the Confederate cause and there were 80,000 Union troops in training in Cincinnati .


\1918    On this day US Private Alvin York in one engagement kills 25 Germans and captures 132. Earlier, York and 15 others had been sent to capture a railroad depot in the Argonne Forest and gotten lost and found themselves behind enemy lines. There was a brief firefight and in the confusion a number Germans surrendered. On their way back toward their lines, a German machine gun nest above saw how small York ’s unit was and in German yelled to the captured Germans to hide and then opened fire. Half of York ’s unit was killed almost instantly. York , being a backwoodsman hunter from Tennessee , started picking off the Germans with his rifle with deadly accuracy. After a while York jumped up and charged the nest with the other following close behind. A detachment of 6 Germans were sent to intercept York but all were cut down by York and his .45 automatic. York kept up the killing until the rest of the Germans surrendered. On the way back to his lines many other Germans surrendered thinking it was a general surrender. Alvin York was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.


1871    A fire starts in the barn of Patrick O’Leary in Chicago and the flames, fanned by winds off the prairie, spread quickly and the Great Chicago Fire was underway. After the fire finally burned itself out two days later an area four miles long and 2/3 of a mile wide was incinerated. The fire took the lives of 300 and made over 100,000 homeless. The upside of this catastrophe was that the fire did not reach the many grain silos and stock yards on the outskirts of Chicago and the great city was back in business in a short while.


1780    On October 7 the Battle of Kings Mountain occurs with the destruction of British Major Patrick Ferguson and his detachment. Ferguson had been sent by British General Cornwallis to make sure that there would be no guerilla tactics against his army while moving from Winnsboro , S.C. through North Carolina into Virginia . After hearing about the destruction of Ferguson and his troops, Cornwallis reverses course and goes back to Winnsboro to await reinforcements. The strange thing about this engagement was that Ferguson was the only British subject in the battle. All the others were American Loyalist and Patriots. The beginnings of this victory had begun on September 25 when Patriot leaders Colonels Charles McDowell, John Sevier, Isaac Shelby and William Campbell met in western North Carolina and decided to eliminate Ferguson and his troops. They marched for 5 days before stopping at the Quaker Meadows Plantation in present day Morganton , N.C. there they were joined by many frontiersmen. In the mean time Ferguson who was in camp at Gilbert Town near present day Rutherfordton , N.C. decided to move on to Kings Mountain . The Patriots found out that Ferguson was not at Gilbert Town and followed him to Kings Mountain . Ferguson camped on a plateau about 60 feet higher that the surrounding lands. The Patriots surrounded the base of the plateau and the battle began. After about an hour of ferocious gunfire Ferguson raised a white flag of surrender, and yelled out “I am an officer in the King’s army and will be treated with dignity and respect”. That was greeted almost instantly with eight musket balls and Ferguson was dead before he hit the ground. The second in command raised the white flag of surrender again but the Patriots kept killing for a while remembering that when some Patriots tried to surrender to the infamous British Colonel Banastre Tarleton at Waxhaw, North Carolina he continued to kill them anyway. There were no British/Loyalist survivors at the Battle of King’s Mountain. British General Henry Clinton recognized this as the beginning of the end and said so. About a year later Gen. Cornwallis hands his sword to Gen. George Washington. There were a few skirmishes after this but essentially the Revolutionary War came to an end and this great ship of liberty and freedom was launched on the sea of blood shed by our ancestors.


Born today:


1912 US writer John Gardner. He said “All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.” That sounds like a football game to me.


1890    US aviator Eddie Rickenbacker. He said “Aviation is proof that given the will, we can achieve the impossible.” Tack onto that “and the understanding of the female mind.” I’m just joking.


1915    US writer Bill Vaughan. He said “Perhaps the crime situation would get better if we took the police off television and put them on the street.” Careful there Bill, I am a “Law and Order” fan.


1920    US writer Frank Herbert. He said “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe that nothing can stand in their way.” That sounds like Jimmy Swaggart and Hillary Clinton entertaining each other.


1926    German actor Klaus Kinski. He said “A man should be judged by his depravities. Virtues can be faked, depravities are real.” See the previous paragraph.


1938    Hell’s Angels founder Sonny Barger. US writer Hunter Thompson spent a year with the San Bernardino branch of the Hell’s Angels gathering information for a book. After he left Sonny said “Hunter turned out to be a real weenie, and a stone f**king coward. He was a total fake.” If you read Hunter’s book about his experience here, you would have thought that he was a Spartan at Thermopylae . Hunter blew his own brains out recently.


Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow