Good morning,




Quote of the day:



“What's the matter with revenge? It's the perfect way to get even!

Archie Bunker



Hey Edie...It was good to see you again.



I guess some of you read about the young mother out in Oklahoma who was forced to defend her home and child. The 21 year old woman had a three month old daughter and her husband had died of cancer on Christmas Day. A 24 year old man had came by her house right after that and said he was a neighbor and wanted to express his condolences. She did not allow him in the house. A few days ago the same man brought a friend and a 12 inch Bowie knife and tried to break into the house with her and the baby there. She retrieved a 12 gauge double barreled shotgun and a pistol and called 9-1-1. She told the dispatcher that she was there all alone with her baby and there were two men trying to break in. She asked the dispatcher if it would be OK to shoot the men if they gained entrance. The dispatcher said that she could not answer that other than that she had the right to do what was necessary to protect herself and her baby. One of the men finally got in and was greeted with a shotgun blast that sent his young ass to the promised land. The other man ran away but turned himself in to the cops the next day. The local police said that she would not be arrested or charged because Oklahoma has a “castle” law . This means that a home owner has the right to protect his/her home using deadly force if necessary. I like it except the other man did not get his brains blown out. This woman had lost her husband about two weeks ago and these vermin were trying invade her home with an infant there. A woman with a baby can be very close to a female grizzly with cubs...very, very dangerous.



A couple of weeks ago up in the Chicago area a county cop named Chris Collins stopped a car driven by Evangelina Peredez and issued her a speeding ticket. A few days later the cop using police records located her residence and left a note on her windshield. It said “Hi, this is Chris the cop that gave you the speeding ticket. Since that day I could not get you out of my mind. I don't know if a beauty like you could be interested in a man like me but I know the ticket cost you $132 so the best I can do is take you out to dinner. Let me know if you are interested.” Evangelina was “interested” alright, she filed a law suit for stalking and using his position to invade her privacy. I am not sure that she should have went that far, a complaint with the sheriff's department would have got the job done, but it was her call. How do any of you girls out there feel about this?



Down in Brownsville, Texas a fifteen year old kid named Jamie Gonzalez decided to come to his middle school carrying a pistol the cops were called. The cops arrived and they approached Jamie in a hallway and told him to drop the gun a few times and he refused. Evidently Jamie made a false move and he was shot twice and killed. When the cops retrieved Jamie's firearm they found it was a carbon-dioxide powered pellet gun that was closely modeled after a Glock .40 caliber sidearm. In fact, you could not tell the difference without very close examination. The kids parents were devastated and raised hell asking why such deadly force had to be used on such a young person. This kid was raised by his grandmother because both parents had to work to make ends meet. What made this kid think it was OK to bring a firearm of any kind to school in the first place? It is lack of discipline and leadership, y'all. I don't blame the cops, they couldn't take a chance.



This date in history January 9



1493 On this date Christopher Columbus, having sailed from Spain with three ships 6 months earlier, makes an entry in the ships log that he has sighted three mermaids. He was in close proximity to the island of Hispaniola, present day Haiti/Dominican Republic, when he made the sightings. His entry said that the mermaids were not nearly as beautiful as the paintings of them he had seen. Reports of mermaid sightings had been made since the days of the ancient Greek mariners. They were usually portrayed as having a woman’s head and torso and a fish’s tail. There is little question that they were different versions of manatees because the location of the sightings are now known as the habitat of manatees or a version thereof. I now understand why Columbus said that they were not as beautiful as the paintings. Manatees are not the most handsome of God’s critters. It goes right along with reports of Sirens. In Greek legend, Sirens were half bird half woman that lived on small islands and when an unsuspecting ship came by they would sing beautiful and seductive songs to them and lured them to their deaths of shallow reefs or rocky shores. Homer spoke of them in his book “The Odyssey”. Now a days Sirens are found in places like The Trophy Club, Platinum Plus and Nepal’s (all strip joints in Greenville). Only they don’t sing men to their destruction, they wriggle them to it.



1806 In October of 1805 Napoleon Bonaparte was overpowering the whole of Europe and things did not look good for England. A British fleet of warships led by Lord Horatio Nelson met and engaged a combined fleet of French and Spanish warship off the coast of Spain near a point of land called Trafalgar. Even though outnumbered and outgunned, Nelson beat the hell out of Napoleon’s armada thus preventing the invasion of England. Before engaging the enemy fleet, Nelson had signaled to his fleet “England expects every man to do his duty.” During the battle, a sniper up in the rigging of a French warship put a bullet through the lungs of Lord Nelson and he collapsed on the deck. Before dying, Nelson asked if the battle was won. After being assured that the victory was his, Nelson said “Thank God I have done my duty” and then he died. The captain of the ship knew it would be a few months before they got back to England so he put Nelson’s body in a cask of rum to preserve it. From that day forward, the daily ration of “grog” or rum for English sailors was known as “Nelson’s blood”. On this date Lord Horatio Nelson was buried in the graveyard in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. The English people had a park in London named Trafalgar Square in his honor and erected a column with a statue of Lord Nelson at the top. I have been to both Saint Paul’s and Trafalgar Square and both are very impressive. When I was visiting Saint Paul’s I was thinking about the great fire of 1666 that nearly destroyed London and lo and behold, very near the Cathedral is a marker showing the limit of that great fire. On the way back to the hotel we went by the Tower of London and right across the street was the “Drawn and Quartered Pub.” I almost jumped out of the bus to get a tee shirt from that place but I couldn’t. But it just gives me a reason to return to that great historic city. By the way, the tour guide said that the main attraction to the younger tourists is the dungeons and torture chambers. I don’t get it.



1972 Earlier in 1937 in a Scottish shipyard, construction began on the largest passenger vessel ever built, the Queen Elizabeth. The ship was finished just in time for World War II and spent four years ferrying troops from various places to Europe to fight the Germans and Italians. After the war she was refitted into what she was meant to be, a luxurious passenger liner for the Cunard Line. She was retired in 1968 and went up for auction. In 1970 she was purchased by Taiwanese shipping magnate C.W. Tung and he renamed her Seawise University. Tung had envisioned a worldwide traveling university. Unfortunately, on this date just before completion of the refitting she caught fire and sank to the bottom in her moorings nothing more than a scrap heap. What a shame.



1984 Earlier in 1977 New Yorker Kenneth Bianchi decided that he wanted to move to Los Angeles and live with his cousin Angelo Buono. Angelo frequently had prostitutes over to his house and he and Kenneth start talking how easy it would be to kill one of them and no one would ever know the difference. So they picked up a hooker in Angelo’s van, took her to his house and torture, rape and strangle her. Then Angelo insists that she be cleaned so he gave her a bath, took her out to a hillside near a police station and carefully arranged her body into a vulgar position and left her there. The media assumed it was one person and named him The Hillside Strangler. After the police found the 10th corpse, all of a sudden the killings stopped. What had happened was the Angelo and Kenneth had a falling out and Kenneth moved to Bellingham, Washington and applied for a job as a policeman, for crying out loud. He did not get the job as a policeman but he did get one as a security guard. Eventually Kenneth’s bloodlust got the best of him and he tortured and murdered two college coeds. The difference here was that there were witnesses that saw them together and he was arrested soon after. Kenneth had seen the movie “Sybil” about a woman with multiple personalities so he tried it himself claiming that “Steve”, his other “person”, had done the deed. The police called in a couple of psychiatrists to examine Kenneth and they assured the police that Kenneth was putting on an act. The police told Kenneth that they did not believe him and assured him that they would seek the death penalty. That woke Kenneth up and he told the police that he could name the Hillside Strangler if he could be tried in California which did not have the death penalty at that time. The police agreed and he rolled on his cousin Angelo and both were tried and convicted and on this date Angelo was given life without parole. Kenneth is still in the slammer but Angelo died of a heart attack in 2002 and hell rejoiced at its new arrival.



1887 The past few winters had been very mild for the cattle ranchers in Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and therefore the ranchers decided not to raise cattle feed for the winter. In their greed the cattlemen put more cattle on the range that normal and they ate the grass more than normal. The summer of 1886 was a dry and blistering one and the grass died stranding the cattle with no feed. Then in this month a winter storm blew in and it snowed for 16 straight hours. The cattle were up to their bellies in snow and could not readily dig through to the sparse vegetation. Then a warm spell came and thawed the top several inches of snow, then extreme cold came and froze it over into a sheet of ice that the cattle could not break through. With no winter feed set aside the ranchers could do nothing but watch their cattle die. And die they did, to the tune of over a million head. Never again did the ranchers not raise winter feed for their cows and with the advent of barbed wire they could keep the cows out of the hay fields.



Born today:



1886 US writer Arthur Baer. He said “Alimony is like feeding oats to a dead horse.”



1908 French writer Simone Beauvoir. She said “This has always been a man’s world, and none the reasons I have been offered in explanation seem adequate.” Why ask for an explanation, Simone?



1913 US President Richard M. Nixon. He said “If the President does it, that means it cannot be illegal.” That may be true in Haiti, but it ain’t true here, Dick.





Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow