Good morning,







Quote of the day:


“The trouble with cats is they have the same expression on their face whether they see a moth or an axe-murderer.”


Paula Poundstone






Trivia question answer: It was Henry Fonda that was awarded the Bronze Star for action in the Pacific in WWII. Eddie Albert won a Bronze Star also, for his service at the bloodbath known as Tarawa. This fact escaped me until an eagle-eyed subscriber pointed it out. I will try to be more diligent.






Trivia Question: What famous actor was awarded six battle stars while serving aboard B-24 bombers over Europe in WWII and was awarded an Oscar in 1966. Hint: It ain't Jimmy Stewart even thought they were in the same bomber group.






Over the weekend a city cop down in Aiken. SC was shot while investigating a suspicious vehicle report. It was a 47 year old female cop. A person has been arrested for this outrage. If this person is convicted I can assure you that he will at least get life without parole...or worse if the cop dies. The lady cop did indeed die which means that if the suspect, Joshua Tremaine Jones, if convicted is looking at that pesky needle. Not only that, he is the prime suspect in the murder of his 21 year old pregnant girlfriend over in Georgia. If found guilty, he does not deserve to walk the Earth with the rest of us...hell awaits him and good riddance.






Out in Santa Maria, Calfornia (wine country) it was found that a charge of one of the city cops had a charge of improper sexual contact with a minor (17 years old) filed against him. At the time, this cop was manning a license check point on the edge of town. Three other cops went immediately to arrest him. The cop wanted to fight and a physical altercation ensued and eventually he went for his service weapon. His fellow cops were looking for that and capped him with a single .40 caliber round into his chest. He died on the way to the hospital. That is what lust will do for you...among other things.






Down near Columbia, South Carolina an obviously disturbed woman had barricaded herself into a closet and was threatening to kill her self. The cops came and a negotiator began trying to talk her out of it. He found out that she was indeed armed. The negotiations seemed to be going nowhere so they did the honorable thing...they shot her in the leg. She was subsequently captured and sent her to the hospital where it was determined that the wound was non life-threatening. The message I got is if a person is extremely depressed and seems to be at the end of their rope, you shoot them. There is a plethora of ways to disable a human being without shooting them with a bullet and the cops have them all. If they could shoot her in the leg with a firearm, they could shoot her with a bean bag shotgun, stun gun or Taser, Mace, pepper spray, tear gas, etc. What's up with that jackass that shot her? I wonder if he had on bib overalls?






This date in history January 31






1865 Earlier United States President Abraham Lincoln had declared that the purpose of the Civil War was to preserve the Union. But after the major ass-kickings the Union army had received during the first year of the War, the northern public said “To hell with it, let the Rebs have their own country, stop the bloodbath.” So Abe had to take another tack to get the country back together so he now changed horses and said the purpose of the War was to free the slaves. It had been noticed that when the Union Army infrequently won a battle, the slaves nearby would join-up with the Yankee soldiers and they would not give them back to their owners. Then Abe issued the Emancipation Proclamation which allegedly freed the slaves in those states in rebellion. Abe’s advisors had in mind that those slaves in the Confederacy would rise up in rebellion upon hearing of the Emancipation but they were wrong, it did not happen and Abe stood there with egg on his face. The Confederacy did not consider themselves “states in rebellion”. They considered themselves as a separate and equally sovereign nation. Not only that there were four states that had slaves but had not seceded. What happened to those slaves? And finally, the Proclamation was not enforceable. I don’t know what Abe was thinking but the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t worth paper it was written on. It took the 13th Amendment to the Constitution that was ratified on this date to get the job done and it read in part ...”neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist in the United States nor any place subject to their jurisdiction....” Now the law had some teeth. This amendment passed the Senate and a House vote of 119-65, barely enough of a majority. The bill was introduced in 1864 but failed to pass the House vote because of “states rights” issues.






1923 One of my favorite writers is born on this day. Norman Mailer is born in Long Branch, New Jersey and raised in Brooklyn, New York Norman was seen as a gifted child at an early age and was given a scholarship to Harvard during WWII but delayed his education and joined the army. After the war he attended the Sorbonne in Paris. While there he was encouraged to pursue his obvious writing skills and gave us one of the greatest war novels ever written in “The Naked and the Dead”. It is very unusual for an author to deliver such a blockbuster on their first try. He wrote a couple of more novels that were not as successful as his first. Norman joined the peace protest march in Washington in 1967 and wrote about his experiences in the book “Armies of the Night” and received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for this one. Later he gave us another winner in “The Executioners Song”. It is the story of the last few days and months of convicted serial killer Gary Gilmore before he met his maker in front of a firing squad in Utah. Again, Norman received a Pulitzer Prize and another National Book Award. Norman is known as a two-fisted drinker/brawler and avid anti-feminists. He has written about nearly everything and everyone. He has written about politics, war, religion, etc and written biographies on people like Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon among many others. He wrote about the Chicago police riot during the Democratic National convention. His irascible nature and anti-feminisms has made him one of the most controversial in the entire literary world. It had been reported that he got into an argument with actor Rip Torn and the mother of all brawls ensued. He got into an argument with his wife at a party and chose to stab her in the arm. But no matter, Norman Mailer is one of the most versatile and talented writers this country has ever produced. Not that it matters, Norman is Jewish.






1945 During the later years of WWII the United States were running out of soldiers and lowered the draft requirements. Eddie Slovik had originally been rejected because of a Grand Theft Auto conviction. Since the lowering of the standards Slovik was re-classified as 1-A, trained and sent to France to join the 28th Division as a private. Slovik got lost in the turmoil of battle and ended up with a Canadian outfit. Slovik was a hater of guns and a pacifist and refused to fight. The Canadians finally got fed up with Slovik and turned him over to MP’s of the 28th Division. Slovik tells his commanding officer that he does not want to fight and runs away to the Canadians again. He is again returned to the MP’s of the 28th Division. This time his commander gives him a choice to go immediately to his combat team or face a firing squad. Slovik refuses and a date is set for his execution. He appeals to General Dwight Eisenhower but this is a bad time for this because the Battle of the Bulge was underway and American soldiers were dying by the hundreds. Eisenhower rejects Slovik’s appeal and on this date at dawn, a firing squad of twelve riflemen ends the life of Private Eddie Slovik for cowardice and desertion. He was the first man in the United States military that was executed since the Civil War. It was reported that the men in the firing squad never flinched because they believed he was getting what he deserved. Maybe so, maybe not.






1872 Future western writer Zane Grey is born to a wealthy family in Zanesville, Illinois. He is encouraged to become what his father is, a dentist. He also develops a good fist fighting technique because of his given name. In their wisdom, his parents had named him Pearl. It was later that he changed his name to Zane. Zane had a talent for baseball and is given a scholarship to Penn to play baseball while attending a school for dentistry. After graduating he moved to New York and opens a practice. Zane quickly determines that he hated the dentistry business and is on the alert for any other vocation so he tries writing. He wrote an unsuccessful novel about his ancestry and it looked like it might be a boring life of dentistry for Zane. Then he met a man named “Buffalo” Jones, an explorer of the American west. Zane was encouraged to write by Jones and so Zane wrote a novel about the life of Jones called “The Last of the Plainsmen” The novel received little attention so Jones took Zane on a tour of the great American west. This tour formed Zane’s life forever and western novels became his forte. In 1912 he delivered to the world the eternal western novel “Riders of the Purple Sage”. It was similar to the famous novel by Owen Wister “The Virginian” whereby a tenderfoot easterner comes west and learns what it takes to survive in a hostile environment and finds out things about himself that he did not know before. Zane wrote 78 western novels which made him a very wealthy man. He loved to big game fish and some of his records for big fish have never been broken and he fished on many an expedition with Ernest Hemingway. It was his descriptions of the great southwest like the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest that makes me want to go for a tour there to this day. His death was a loss for us all, but his books endure.






Born today:


1892 US entertainer Eddie Cantor. He said “Every time I see a Most Wanted list I have this thought. If they had been wanted in their youth, would they be wanted now?” I wonder if Atilla the Hun, Vlad the Impaler or Hitler were wanted as a youth.






1905 US writer John O’Hara. He said “So who is perfect? Washington had false teeth, Ben Franklin was nearsighted, Mussolini had syphilis, unpleasant things have been said about Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, Tchaikovsky had his problems too, and Lincoln was constipated.” That is really ironic that thousands of troops on both sides in the Civil war died of dysentery.






1921 US actor John Agar. He said “Hell I don’t drink anymore than John Wayne or Ward Bond or Spencer Tracy or Alan Ladd or Robert Walker but I got in hell of a lot more trouble.” John, that is because you got into the acting business only because you were married to Shirley Temple. You are really wimpy.






1938 US Secretary of the Interior James Watt. He said “Hell, we don’t have to protect the environment; the evangelicals say the Second Coming is at hand.” They are right ya’ll. If the Second Coming is at hand, why do we need to worry about the future?






Thanks for listening I can’t wait until tomorrow.