You Can't Make This Shit Up

COLUMBIA, South Carolina A South Carolina man was charged with having sex with a horse after the animal's owner caught the act on videotape, then staked out the stable and caught him at shotgun point, authorities said Wednesday.

But this wasn't the first time he has been charged. He pleaded guilty last year to having sex with the same horse after owner Barbara Kenley found him in the same stable. Then he was sentenced to probation and placed on the state's sex offender list.

Kenley said she noticed several weeks ago that her 21-year-old horse Sugar was acting strange and getting infections. She noticed things in the barn had been moved around — dirt piled up and bales of hay stacked near the horse's stall at her Lazy B Stables in Longs, about 20 miles northeast of Myrtle Beach.

"Police kept telling me it couldn't be the same guy," Kenley said Wednesday. "I couldn't believe that there were two guys going around doing this to the same horse."

She spent several nights at the stables, which are about 4 miles from her home, but didn't find anything. So she installed surveillance cameras, and when she reviewed the footage from July 19, she couldn't believe she was seeing the same man doing the same thing to her horse.

Kenley didn't call police because she was certain the man would come back to the stable, and she wanted to make sure he was arrested. So she staked out the barn and caught Sanford inside Monday night, chasing him to his truck and holding him with her shotgun until police came.

Bombay, USA

Picture this… You’re a diplomat stationed in Bombay, India, late 1960’s. You live in the diplomatic compound, a high-walled community that virtually shuts out the world outside. Within the compound live diplomats and their families from all over the world. The grounds are beautiful. Lush vegetation and colonial-style buildings. Servants attend to their every need. They have all of the amenities and social interaction of any close community. A club with pool and tennis and restaurant and bar and snooker… you get the idea.

By day the diplomats go to their various embassies or consulates and represent their respective country’s interests, which often gets pretty heated. But by night they lounge and enjoy cocktails together at each other’s homes or at the Club.

No one leaves the compound on foot or unattended. If you do stubbornly decide to go for a walk outside of the compound, a couple of Gurkas go with you. Although this is highly unlikely because there is every reason not to walk outside. For outside the walls of the diplomatic compound lie the streets of Bombay, a teeming mass of humanity living on the verge of extinction.

This scenario is true, related to me by my uncle who was a U.S. diplomat working for the U.S. Information Service at the time. Propaganda was his game. He was good at it, because he liked and embraced the different cultures in which he was stationed. People naturally gravitated to this tall, handsome American with gentlemanly manners.

Unk told me he once insisted on taking a walk outside but it took some time for the two Gurkas to open the man gate. Something on the outside was blocking it. It turned out to be a dead body. He said the thing that got to him most was the stench. Even more than what he saw. Filth everywhere. He said that the contrast between the haves and have not’s in India was so stark as to be shocking.

He told me it wasn’t at all unusual to see great old Rolls Royce’s, Bentleys, Auburns or Dusenbergs on the street in perfect operating condition because the wealthy owners simply had new parts milled every time anything broke. He said they were often better than new.

Uncle had the best of everything while there, tailored clothes, the finest medical care, household servants… because he could afford the best of everything. A bureaucrat’s salary made you a well-to-do man there, in that place and time.

Here’s the take-away. Do gated communities and people begging on the street sound familiar to you? Do run-down county medical clinics crowded with the unwashed, or simply unlucky, sound familiar to you? Do people who are simply cast aside because of accident of birth sound familiar to you?

No child in this country should go hungry. But they do. No one who is disabled and unable to take care of themselves should have to fend for themselves on the street. But they do. No one should be left destitute in old age because they’ve been stripped of everything they have by the medical industrial complex. But they are.

The scene depicting India above is happening to some degree or another right here, right now, in the good ole USofA every day. If you think that good medical care, a good education, a meal and a roof over your head is the least we can do for each other, it’s time to speak up.

If you voted for and really want Change, you had better start raising hell people! The money grubbers are pulling out every trick in the book to kill it.

The Godfather of Rock n Roll

I was pretty much around for the birth of rock n roll. A little too young to really make the scene but, thanks to my older brother, I latched onto the music from the get-go. He had a great collection of all the early stuff… Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, The Platters, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry, etc. All 45’s played on a little Motorola stack box “hi-fi”. Late at night I would spend hours tuning my AM radio into far-away places. If you ran a wire from the radio to the window screen (the screens were copper back then) you could extend the range ten-fold. When all things aligned, I could just barely pick up a station in Chicago, a pretty far piece from Baja Georgia. But my favorite station was WLAC in Nashville, Tennessee. It was a “race music” station and “John R” was my favorite jockey. There, I was introduced to Ray Charles, The Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, James Brown and John Lee Hooker to name a few. I loved it. Couldn’t get enough. If I had to choose the single most influential person on my life musically, it would have to be Ray Charles. He was the man. But this story is about another giant influence, not only on me, but the entire genre, the Godfather of Rock n Roll… Chuck Berry. On a hot summer Saturday afternoon, must have been around 1958, my brother was in a downtown music store when he heard some familiar licks coming from somewhere in the back of the store. He walked back to see who was causing all the commotion and came upon none other than Chuck Berry, sitting atop a Fender Twin, trying it out. My bro recognized the great man and approached him for an autograph. Apparently, my brother was the only honky in the place who recognized Mr. Berry and he must have been flattered because he struck up a brief conversation and invited my brother and his friends out to the club he was performing at that evening, a negro club on the northside called The Palms. When bro got home he was as excited as you might expect and he set about looking for some friends to go with him to the show. It turned out that none of his friends had the nerve to go off into darkest Africa and thought he was crazy to even think about it. Determined, but still afraid to go by himself, he stopped at a neighbor’s house, a black family, and asked the boy there who was about my brother’s age (Everett) if he would like to go. Well, asking a young black kid if he would like to be a guest of Chuck Berry at a show was about like asking him if he would like to meet Sweet Jesus himself. Hell yeah! Only there was a catch. Everett didn’t have a car and my dad wasn’t about to let bro take the family sedan downtown to a negro honky-tonk in the middle of the night. In fact, my dad wasn’t about to let bro go down there at all without an adult going with him. It seemed the whole scheme was on the rocks until Everett suggested asking his older brother, Big Eugene, if he would like to go. Big Eugene was about 25 or so, all grown up, and agreed to chaperone and chauffeur. I happened to be standing nearby when bro approached dad with the idea that they had found an adult to take them. Dad pondered on it a moment. He had no objection to Eugene looking after them, he was level-headed and big enough to look after the president, but he didn’t like the idea of my bro possibly being the only white kid in the place. It was then that I heard the magic words spill from by brother’s mouth…. “Well, Charleston can go with us.” I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Hell Yeah! “Come on dad, please! Please let us go, we’ll be alright. Puleeeeeze!” The ride across town to the club in the back of Eugene’s souped-up ’51 Ford coupe is something I’ll never forget. It was sensory overload to the tenth power. In the back seat of a hot rod Ford on a hot summer night with a couple of black friends and my bro passing a brown paper bag heading to a mysterious honky-tonk on the other side of town to see Chuck Berry. Faulkner should have had it so good. I was scared to death. But not about to let on. The Palms was located deep in Durkeeville. It was a part of town white people just don’t go to without good reason. At least, not decent folk. But here we were. The club was sort of on the outskirts of town on a large tree covered lot. The trees were Live Oaks with lights strung from one to another over the low hanging, Spanish moss covered limbs. It was an eerie, half-lit scene with cars scattered among the trees on the dirt lot. People were gathered in small groups, smoking, laughing and enjoying themselves. Not-so-discrete bottles in evidence. The club itself was a squat wood frame building. It was completely open. It had no glass windows, but large shutters that opened horizontally, propped up by sticks. Colored Christmas lights were strung from the ceiling and I could hear music from a juke box. People were beginning to stream in. My heart was in my throat as we walked up to the front door. Big Eugene told the man at the door we were guests of Chuck Berry and gave him my brothers name. The bouncer checked his list and I’ll be damned, bro’s name was on it! In we went, but not before the bouncer gave me a good once over. Probably wondering what a kid like me was doing there in the first place and if he should let me in at all. But he did, probably thinking me safer inside than outside, and it was the only time the entire evening anyone gave me a second glance. I remember feeling pleased to discover that there were other white people there. It gave me a lifelong empathy for black folks in a white world. It took Chuck over an hour to finally take the stage, but in the meantime we were entertained by a local band that’s since become a regional hit and a favorite at Carolina beach parties… The Hot Nuts. At some point during their show, they stripped off their sequined jump suits and wore nothing but hot pink briefs, very brief. The crowd went nuts, which seemed apropos. By the time Chuck took over it was nearly midnight. He tore the place down. Johnny B. Goode, Little Queenie, Almost Grown, Maybelline, Sweet Little Sixteen, Roll Over Beethoven. He screamed, he sweated, he duck-walked, he flirted with the girls. It was a rock n roll smorgasbord of the first degree. By the time we got home it was past three. Dad was waiting for us. Bro was grounded for a month. I laid awake the rest of the night with a smile from ear-to-ear. I went back to the place twice more, to see Ray Charles and the Howin’ Wolf. My education was complete.

Mr. Jimmy

Way back a long time ago, early in my career, I was the manager of a chamber of commerce in a small west Georgia textile mill town. Small mill towns are really interesting places because they are a microcosm of the greater world but, being small, the players and their roles in the economy and society are more easily identifiable and more clearly understood.

There’s the King (the mill owner) and his court. The tradesmen (inner-circle and outer-circle), clergy, government and peasants. Everyone who isn’t, or doesn’t work for the aforementioned, works for the King. They lived in tiny mill houses and got their pay in envelopes with their mortgage and company store expenses already deducted and noted on the outside of the envelope.

In this particular town, the King Jr. was actually pretty benevolent and the community had beautiful and excellent schools and libraries and a terrific community center with an auditorium and tennis and a large pool. A similar, but much smaller, version also existed in the negro part of town. The King made sure he supported all of the churches, you don’t want anything negative coming from the pulpit now do you?

When I first moved to this otherwise really pretty little town, a couple of the mills (there were seven of them) still had eight-foot chain-linked fencing topped with barbed-wire surrounding them from a fight with union organizers 20 years before. There were guard towers at each corner where armed Nation Guardsmen were posted with orders to shoot anyone attempting to enter who wasn’t employed there. By and large, the textile mills in the South were never unionized and a lot of blood was spilled in the many efforts to do so. Finally, the government gave the textile industry to the Japanese and Chinese following WWII in an effort to rebuild their economies. Fuck the South. But that’s another story. I have many good stories from my time there and over the weeks and months I’ll share them with you.

This story centers around the attempt by the community to diversify industry in the town so that all the kids graduating from college would have something to come back to and end three generations of out-migration. I was employed to lead the chamber because of my success at economic development elsewhere. When I arrived on the scene there was a fight brewing.

The King, being old, rich, and with no kids really interested in running the mills, had recently sold the whole kit and caboodle to Mr. Big, a South Carolina mill baron who was, at the time, the largest company owned by a single individual in the nation and reputed to be Nixon’s biggest financial supporter. The tradesmen of the chamber of commerce had been working diligently to attract a new industry to the town and had finally landed one, a Delco battery plant.

When Mr. Big got wind of this, he called up his buddy who was president of General Motors (Michael Moore’s Mr. Smith) and got him to nix the plant and then sent an Atlanta attorney to town to talk the community out of it because he knew that the plant, being a General Motors subsidiary, would certainly be unionized, and that ain’t good. The attorney delivered this news to a gathering at the chamber of commerce and met objections by saying, “That’s the way it is, and if it comes to a fight you know who’ll win.” and he left the meeting. Needless to say, the citizens gathered therein were pissed.

We got together a committee and headed to Atlanta to see the governor, Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy invited all of us into his office and listened attentively as the story was relayed to him. Now don’t forget, Mr. Jimmy is from Plains, Georgia and knows a thing or two about mill towns. Georgia was pretty much covered up with them back then.

After considering for a moment, Jimmy asked his secretary to get the president of GM, Mr. Smith, on the phone. Jimmy engaged each of us, including myself, in conversation while we waited and when you were speaking with him, you had his undivided attention. I have rarely met such a gracious person, much less a high ranking public official. Soon the phone rang and Jimmy had Mr. Smith on the line. The conversation went something like this…

…”Mr. Smith, we're very pleased you decided to locate one of you plants in Georgia. I understand there’s been some outside intervention as regards the plant’s location. (pause) Well, I understand. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, however there are many other communities in the state that I am sure will suit you fine. (pause) Yes, that would be very much appreciated, thank you.”

Jimmy had confirmed the intervention and also managed to save the plant and its jobs for the state. It was located in Fitzgerald in the southern part of the state. Next he called into his office the head of economic development for the state. He told the man the story and asked him to make every effort to help our town find an industry to replace the one we had lost. (The result was the placement of 12 new industries and 4,000 new jobs). But what happened next is the kicker.

Mr. Jimmy asked his secretary to get Mr. Big on the phone, which she did. I honestly don’t remember the conversation because I was so shocked, but it ended something like this… “Don’t you ever let me hear of you pulling another stunt like that in my state. You hear me!?”

The last time I saw Mr. Jimmy to speak to him was at Warm Springs when he kicked-off his presidential campaign. He pledged to reform and cut the size of the federal government. He made the same pledge when he ran for governor.

When Jimmy Carter became governor of Georgia, the state constitution was the longest written document in the English language. The state was rife with nepotism and corruption. Jimmy waded in with a chain saw, starting at the top. He was relentless in cutting the budget and the bureaucracy and at the end of his 8-year term, he was about 75% towards completing his goal.

I remember thinking as I stood there on that cool drizzly day, Jimmy making his speech from the front porch of Roosevelt’s little white house, if it took 8 years in a state with a population of 4 million people to get 75% of the reform completed, how long will it take to reform the federal government? Hasn’t happened yet, has it.

The Party's At Mr. C's Place

Some time ago in one of my posts I mentioned a low-country dish that's been a family staple for generations here in Baja Georgia, shrimp perlow. Now I've always spelled it perlow but some know-it-alls think it should be pelou or some such other foreign name from Nawleans. But us Crackers call it perlow, or maybe perloe. Either way, JadedJ picked up on it, as Baja Georgia is his original turf, and said just thinking about it made his mouth water. Since the Peach Tart and Mr. Condescending have had dinner parties lately, I thought that sounded like a good idea and I would to, with a recipe right out of the family cookbook. We'll have a cooler of iced-down beer, plenty of sweet tea, and a little white lightnin and weed. That oughta git us off on the right foot. Gonna invite some of my musician buddies over so the music will be live and will range from bluegrass to jazzgrass to blues and will be a jam, no sets. Anybody can pick up some spoons or whatever and join in. It's a joyful noise. We'll mostly hang on the porch and deck. For appetizers I'll steam some oysters and have plenty of soda crackers, cocktail sauce and red devil to spice things up. No paper plates though. We got some class afterall. We'll use the good plastic. But real silverware... and fine linen napkins right off the roll of Bounty. Now there's two very important things to remember in making a killer perlow; first, you must use a heavy pot. A cast iron Dutch oven is best. Second, keep it simple stupid. Beauty is in the sublime. More people screw up things like perlow, gumbo and jambalaya by trying to make them "nuveau" than any other single cause. This is peasant food and trying to make it fancy will ruin it bigger'n shit. Now a perlow is simply a rice based dish. You can pretty much put any kind of meat in it, but the kind of meat determines how you cook it. With a short rib perlow, either beef or pork, you braze the meat first until it's good and seared before adding the other ingredients. You want the flavor of the sear but you also want the meat to fall off of the bone. Shrimp is different, as you'll see. Ingredients you will need: Shrimp, salt pork, onions (yellow are fine), garlic (2 cloves), and rice (I like basmati but Uncle Ben's works just fine). That's it. You can add some bell pepper or a little cilantro if you like, and, of course, salt and pepper, but be very careful of the salt as that's what the salt pork is for. And finally, a touch of cayenne pepper and a healthy splash of Pickapeppa sauce. If you don't have, or can't find, Pickapeppa, a dash of liquid smoke will do, but be sure you get pure liquid smoke with no additives and it only takes a dash. Cut the skin and most of the fat off of the salt pork and dice it into small pieces. You only need a cup or so. Cook it until it's real crispy. Pour off the grease. (I cook mine in the microwave as it comes out nearly greaseless.) Dice the onion and garlic and throw it in the pot with the salt pork. Add the Pickapeppa and cayenne and enough water for the amount of rice and bring to a boil. Stir in the rice and cook it over low heat. When the rice is done, stir in the shrimp (peeled of course) and let the heat of the rice cook it for about 5-10 minutes. (Boil the shells and the heads and use the broth in the perlow for an extra kick.) Ooooweeee, that's good. Don't really need a side dish but a salad or corn on the cob complement it well. And a good bread if you like. Cornbread would be the country choice but I prefer a baguette. When you're finished eatin, get ready to shake a tail feather cause the music's just gettin started. Ya'll come back now, heah.

Termites

Favorite Places To Stand

My local daily did a little thing a while back where they asked readers to submit a list of their Favorite Places To Stand in Baja Georgia. I submitted a few photos along with my list, each of which has been published over the last month or so. All the old ladies at my mom's church think them wonderful and clip them out of the newspaper and bring them to church to give to me each Sunday. I thought I would share them with you. Hope you enjoy.

My dock at sunrise

The Timuquan Preserve

Little Talbot Island State Park

The Northbank Riverwalk

My dock at sunset

Mr. C's New Squeeze

The reasons I'm a gearhead.

Your get to rub elbows with the stars

You get to see the most fantastic cars.

You get to see them up close and personal.

There ain't nothing like the smell of ethanol in the morning.

Back By Popular Demand

OK OK, the hiney is back. And a cute one it is.

Today's topic... Duh!

The other night on the evening news, I believe it was CBS, there was a big announcement... a recent study shows that soldiers just back from combat are more likely to commit murder than those who weren't in combat. WHAT THE FUCK! Don't you get fed up with the seemingly endless drivel flowing out of what is supposed to be responsible journalism? People returning from combat are more likely to commit murder. No shit!

Armband: "Patriot Guard Rider"

You talk about a waste of taxpayer money. You want to balance the budget, right after cutting the defense budget in half and snuffing out the thieving elected bastards on Wall Street's payroll, cut out all funding for crap like that, followed by radically reducing funding for mostly worthless pursuits like archeology. Other than satisfying idle curiosity, what good has ever come from archeology? We, mankind, have sure as hell never learned any lessons from the past. My brother-in-law was pilot of a swift boat in Nam. Their job was to cruise the Mekong delta looking for trouble. They had little trouble finding it. His stories will curdle your blood. Stories of what was done to them and what they did back, often to innocent civilians. I'll give you an example with a story that wasn't even combat related, at least not directly. Chaz and his buddies were drinking one evening at a sidewalk cafe in Saigon. Across the narrow street another GI was walking by when he was suddenly surrounded by small children begging for money. Children begging was a common occurrence then. They were ragged and hungry. The GI tried to chase them away but they persisted, some of them even trying to take his watch and poking their hands into his pockets. Finally, the GI got annoyed to the point that he started grabbing every child he could get hold of and breaking their arms over his knee. Chaz said he and his buddies were laughing their asses off at the sight of the little urchins running in all directions, crying, their arms hanging at grotesque angles. I won't even go into some of the combat stuff, at least not now. Before Chaz went to Vietnam he was as sweet and gentle a boy as you would ever want to meet. He came back a killer. You can tell a killer when you meet one. You can see it in their eyes. It's primal. When he came home he would go into bars drinking, looking for a fight. He would beat the shit out of anyone who crossed him, many who didn't. My brother and I once happened onto him at a local drinking establishment and had to jump on him and wrestle him to the ground to keep him from beating some guy who thought he was tough to death. He used to hang with the Outlaws, Florida's Hell's Angles. Finally, he overcame his demons but fought a life-long battle with alcohol. I just saw him at a family picnic this past 4th of July and had a great time visiting with him and his wife and their grown kids, now again, a sober and gentle soul. I don't need some dumb ass study or half ass news report to tell me something everyone but an idiot already knows. I imagine more than a few of you don't either.

Once upon a time, in your prime you threw the bums a dime Didn't you?

It being Sunday morning, it was again my day to spend some time with my elderly mother by taking her to church, followed by lunch. Today, as usual, we dined at the Piccadilly Cafeteria. I had the white meat fried chicken, she the chicken and dumplings. Upon leaving this noble establishment I was approached by a rather scruffy looking guy on one crutch asking for money to buy a meal at the nearby Burger King. Not having a single dime or dollar in my pocket, the church collection plate and follow-up children's fund having fleeced me of every single type of coin of the realm I had on me, I said, "Sorry pal, but I don't have a dime on me." He persisted. Could be he wanted my mom's go-plate I was carrying but I didn't feel like it was mine to give away. After all, it was mom's dinner. I usually give a bum a dollar whenever asked, but not this time. I shushed him away. Driving out of the parking lot I saw him joined by a partner who was carrying a plastic shopping bag full of stuff at least some of which I could recognize as a six-pack of beer. It seems the church wasn't the only thing trying to fleece me today. I was once at a party and ran into a guy who had graduated high school with several of my friends at the party and there was much ado because no one had seen him in quite some time. He was an affable fellow so I engaged him in conversation during which I found that right out of high school he'd decided that he wanted to see the country and simply packed a duffel and took off. He told me he paid for his adventure by panhandling at bus stations. He would simply walk up to people, give them some sort of bull shit line and ask for a dollar, He said he usually got it. Incredulous, I asked him how much money can you make panhandling? He replied he made about $30,000 that year. Now this was in the late '70s or so, which, in today's dollars, would be the equivalent of $50-$60,000 a year, tax free. I've recently been informed that I am about to become one of the millions of Americans whose jobs have been eliminated. Maybe I should start hanging out at Piccadilly.

In Memory of Donnie McCormick 1944-2009

Donnie and "Bear" Sauls

Eric Quincy Tate. Kick-ass Southern rock. Smoke-filled bars. Lots of dope. Lots of whiskey. Lots of fun. Donnie played drums and sang. Bear, guitar. First time I really got to know them was when a little band I played in opened for them at a strange little cafe in Warm Springs, Georgia. Location of Roosevelt's Little White House and where Mr. Jimmy kicked off his run for president. Also the place where they cured polio. This would have been... oh, mid 70's. Sometime, somehow, someone thought it would be a good idea if one block of downtown Warm Springs became an Old West tourist trap and the cafe we played in was like one you see in the movie westerns. A stage, a balcony, a dance floor and a long bar. Anyway, after our band got through fucking around EQT took over and rocked the place down. There ain't nothing like a summer Georgia night and a saloon full of rock n roll. One of the players in my band was the manager of a farm just outside of LaGrange, Georgia, the Rose Hill Farm. About 750 acres or so. In the middle of the farm, on top of a small knoll, was a swimming pool. At least that's what we think it was. In an odd place for a pool and it was an odd pool in-so-far as it had no deep and shallow end, it was all deep and, being spring feed from a deep spring, cold as hell. Cold enough to throw the kegs and watermelons into to get them cold. My friend decided that the pool would be a great place for a 4th of July party. Set up a flatbed truck with a tent over it. Ran electricity out to it and invited everybody. All our musician friends. Of course, EQT was there and so were many of the Capricorn cats. At one point I was privileged to share the stage with Chuck Leavell who played with the Brothers and Sea Level and for the past 10-15 years, keyboard for the Stones. Sometime in the afternoon, someone found a mess of meadow mushrooms and the party really got down. Lasted all weekend. One of the best weekends of my life. Skinny dipping. Fat Shirley screwing in the bushes. Another close friend often played congas with the band, Conga Jerry. He's got some album credits with The Marshall Tucker Band as well. Jerry told me a story once which illustrates why EQT, despite opening for the Brothers, Charlie Daniels and packing out the house, why they never hit the big time. It seems as though they had a gig one night in Chattanooga and rented a U-Haul for the trip. Three guys in the front and three in the back with the equipment. No doubt copious amounts of weed and who knows what else figure into this story, but they loaded up the van and hit the road, Donnie at the wheel. After about an hour and a half, the guys in the back, Jerry among them, needed some relief and started pounding on the wall to get some attention. Finally the boys up front heard the commotion and pulled over onto the side of the road. Everybody piled out and and formed a pee line when Jerry saw the fateful sign. I-75 Chattanooga Right Lane. It seems as though for the past hour and a half they had been driving around the I-285 beltway and had never left Atlanta. The boys just never quite figured out that Show Business is two words. The story is also a good life lesson, half the battle of success is simply showing up. Last time I saw them was a few years back when I happened to be in Atlanta and read that they were playing in some dive out near Tech. I went to check it out and it was like walking back in time. Smoke-filled honky tonk and Southern Rock. Had a great visit with Donnie and Bear, drank to much, and surely lost some more of my hearing in the process. But loved every minute of it. Altogether, the guys played together for 37 years. Rest easy Donnie. Thanks for the memories.

Nana's Watching You

The story you are about to read is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. If this story weren't from one of my closest friends, I might not give it the time of day. But it is, so here it is... My friend and his wife went looking for a house in the historic district of Columbus, Georgia. After several months, they found an old Victorian fixer-upper just a couple of blocks off of the Chattahoochee River and began work on it. About a year after they moved in I was traveling in the area and stopped by for a visit. Now my buddy and have a long tradition of evening chats over bourbon and cigars and so it was on the second night of my visit. On his veranda watching the night fall and the street lights come on one by one up and down the tree-lined street. As always, the discussion centered around Formula 1 and his vintage Alfa Romeo. After a brief pause, he asked, "Did you sleep OK last night?" Now my buddy, apart from living in a house still under repair, is a "collector" and his homes eventually turn into in-city land fills with books and papers and magazines and brick-a-brak filling every room, (I seem to collect friends who are collectors.) the guest room being no exception, with just enough free space for a twin bed and dresser top. Thinking this the object of his concern for my comfort I, of course, replied, "Yeah. I slept fine." "You didn't hear any noise?" he inquired. Wondering if he and the Mrs. had gotten it on and was afraid I had heard them, I replied "No." (Although I do remember thinking that was strange coming from someone whom I once sat next to and carried on a conversation with while he was poking some fat girl from the rear on the beach.) He said, "You didn't hear anything on the stairs?" After thinking about it I said, "Yeah, now that you mention it, I guess I do remember someone going down to the bathroom. Why?" He said, "Because no one went down to the bathroom." After digesting that for a moment, I said, "Are you telling me there's a ghost in the house?" He nodded, "Yep, there sure is." "There used to be several of them," he continued. "They were making so much noise that (his wife) was scared half to death. I had to hire an exorcist to get rid of them. All except this one, but he seems harmless enough." I said, "Alright, you've got my attention. Let's hear the story." He said he did some research and found that following the Civil War the house became a home for wounded war veterans, several of whom died there. Later it became a boarding house but no one would stay for any length of time because of the noise. Several times it was bought and eventually sold because the owners couldn't handle it. It sat vacant for some years before they bought it... at a bargain price. He said when he thinks back on it, he remembers when he first stopped to look at it he was peering into one of the windows when he had the distinct feeling of someone standing next to him. Not just that, but he could smell him as well. He looked around and, of course, no one was there. I saw my friend just a few months ago and asked about the ghost. Was he still there? "Yep," he replied. "He likes to play little tricks. For awhile we would come out in the morning to take the dogs for a walk and find knots tied in their leashes. We kept them on the back porch so we thought some neighborhood kids were fooling around. Then we brought them inside and it still happened. But then it stopped. The dogs used to whine and act uneasy but they've gotten used to him. But you can tell when he's in the room because they can sense him and lift their heads and look around." I asked him, "Doesn't it bother you to know something's watching you?" He said, "It used to but now we never think about it. If he doesn't like it he can leave." It makes me wonder if Nana is watching me every time I slip into the bathroom to wang dang doodle.

Milton Friedman on the Drug War

Here's something I stole from Skeptical Eye, a great blog by the way.

The Last Word On The Matter