Hotter than Hell: Not a snowball in sight

My entire day was spent out-of-doors.

I left the modest adobe a tad shy of 7 in the morning, and I’m now back here out of the long reach of the soaring temperatures that can up and crush your manhood when coupled with prolonged bouts of direct sunlight.

I had a co coworker pitching in today, somebody who is used to working exclusively indoors. And when I tell you he was visibly wilting, be mindful of the reality of the situation, which was that I thought he was going to faint dead away on a few occasions.

The thing is, while just about everybody bitches out loud about out the borderline record-setting heat waves and worse, only a few of us are accustomed to facing the worst that they have to offer while being gainfully employed far from the reach of the air conditioners.

And to thrive in such an overheated environment requires experience, a workout regimen far removed from the ‘norm, seriously-honed hydration practices, a few well-timed smoke breaks and the ability to ignore the obvious discomfort and step it up into another gear no matter what Mother Nature has to say about matters. You know, dogged stick-to-itiveness that throws the bird at the increasing fragility of your mortality.

Anyway, there came a point late this afternoon when I was on my knees on concrete for far too long, I was secretly cursing the sunlight that was making things a bit insufferable, I was trying to direct my sometimes overwrought coworker who looked as if he had had more than enough, when this familiar voice from my past upped and provided me with the comic relief that gave me that little, that extra kick in the pants.

"Yeah mom? Well what do you care? That's all you care about, somebody sitting down in the snow and letting it melt through your four pair of corduroys. You don't care that Junior Barnes hit me on the side of the face with a slush ball and let all the gunk go down in my underwear because if you did care you'd go out and get him!"


I'm going to get Junior Barnes. I'm going to get you Junior Barnes, boy I'm going to get you. And I started to make a snowball for Junior Barnes. I made a snowball that was so round and so perfect. And it's got a little name inscribed (on it) says "Junior Barnes."


 And I went out looking for Junior Barnes."Junior Barnes? You gunky… Oh… Junior Barnes." I couldn't find him. And it was 7.30. I had to get home before the monsters come out. And I took that snowball home. And I put it in the freezer.


And I waited. July. July 12th. My birthday. It was 104 degrees in the shade. Not a snowball in sight.


Junior Barnes was sitting on the steps in front of my house. I was standing there with him. I had gone to great lengths to prove to Junior Barnes that I was his greatest friend. Let him drink out of my orange soda bottle without even wiping it off.

And old Junior Barnes just sitting there telling his little jokes, "ha ha ha ha ha." And I was laughing right with him, "Junior Barnes, you are so-o-o-o-o- funny ha ha ha ha ha!" And I said, "Junior Barnes, I'm going in the house, and get an orange soda for us. You just wait right here. ha ha ha ha ha." You gunky.

And I walked in the house, and opened that freezer door, and my mother had thrown the snowball away.

 So I went back outside and I spit on him.
Bill Cosby, kiddies. I know the Democrats hate him these days for daring to speak out on social morays and racial politics.

But if you were a kid growing up when I was a kid, thanks entirely to him, you had to have been afraid, even petrified of crossing the Eighth Street Bridge after dark.

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MUST READ!

No commentary from me...

Remember, Obama tried to courtmartial SEALs for a bloody nose!

Later

Markie Drudge

I’m going all Drudge-like on you today.

CNN Money: GM CEO calls for $1 gas tax hike

FOX News: 1 in 3 Employers Will Drop Health Benefits After ObamaCare Kicks In, Survey Finds

LA Times: Obama’s chief economic advisor resigning

ABC News: Obama Says We Don't Know Yet Whether Disappointing Jobs Report is 'a Longer Trend'

CNN Money: Bernanke: Job market 'far from normal'

National Review: Can Obama Overcome Obamanomics?

Human Events: Obama On Jobs: "We Don’t Know Yet What Happened"

An excerpt: This latest head-scratching quote from Obama highlights the difference between his disastrous approach and what the House Republicans are calling for. I find it increasingly difficult to understand how any rational citizen can support the Obama approach. How does it make sense to keep giving more money and power to the man who says every single ramification of his policies is “unexpected?”

All of which leads me to this…ONE…MORE…TIME…

“Note that not only can Republicans do better than that, but they will have to do better in order to win in 2012.”

In actuality, anyone, even some systematically vilified chick from Alaska can do better than to have the lowest percentage of Americans gainfully employed since the Great Depression.

If Barry doesn’t walk away, he is going to be shown the door in a very, very grotesque manner in November of 2012. Well, provided that one more “unexpected“ shock delivered to the economic system doesn‘t put an end to our experiment in democracy long before that.

Barry is one and done.

And deservedly so.

Bye

Word Police alert

This one cracked me the funk up.

I snagged this from a local blog...

Let me do my Conservative Republican imitation for you..."Barry.  Like that Hope and Change yet?  Osama Obama. Obamalama.  This picture." ...and I could go on.  It's as if political criticism from a party of supposed "thinkers" has degraded into nothing more than a bunch of Limbaugh sound bytes.  Note that not only can Republicans do better than that, but they will have to do better in order to win in 2012.

Uh, I"m confused. I thought his birth name was Barry Soweto? So, what, we've got another new rule coming from the other side? No more Barry? How about Tom, Harry, or clueless dick?

Here's the updated rules...

*You cannot use the middle name.

*You cannot use the real surname.

*And now, you cannot use his real first name.

Anything else?

Frankly, that's not a problem for me. All along, I've been modifying his name to correctly match his inept performance as part time president and full time White House golf pro/am coordinator...Baroke Oblahblah. You know what I'm going on about, the country is broken, and in response, he keeps yammering on with the condescending, self-immolating blah, blah, blah and blahs.

In a nutshell, he was a very, very, very bad hire. But I didn't hire him. Did you?

Truth be told, here's the self-important, partisan gibberish that set me off...

Note that not only can Republicans do better than that, but they will have to do better in order to win in 2012.


Preaching to the leftist choir is cool and all. Jeez, thats the oft-repeated act of 99% of the bloggers in this corrupt area. But be served, just because like minds agree doesn't make it so. And haughtily talking down to those of with unlike minds only goes so far as to impress yourself and the like-minded choir.

2012?

The only thing the Republicans have to do to win is to sit idly by and allow the charlatan who's name cannot be uttered in public without prior approval to continue to flail all about while his sagging internal polling hints that he might want to plan for his next job...his second ever job.

Luckily, the Republicans are trying to intervene right now, shortly before the man with no Fedrule budget, no resume, no experience, no basis in the economic realities of a free market system and two or three sets of wafting names sends us all to hell.

As far as I'm concerned, I'll call the charlatan any fu>king thing I want. And don't come crying to me when a loaf of bread sets you back a five-spot next year.

You know, grossly devalued dollar. Record deficits. Accelerating inflation begets hyper-inflation. All of that good stuff the Republicans can't hope to match.

Fu>k Barry! And fu>k anyone who dares to play the role of Word Police.

Buh-bye

Best blogs of 2011

Some necessary reading?

From Time.com: The Best Blogs of 2011

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Kiss the 3rd quarter goodbye

In our much sought after perfect world, we hire yet another platoon of new police officers, we add a newly-formed street sweeper division and we add three new engine companies to our fire department.

Unfortunately, at the national level, we are completely devoid of capable leadership.

CNN Money: State, local layoffs to hit record levels

The excerpt: NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Don't look to state and local governments to prop up the job market.

To the contrary, this cash-strapped sector is set to go on a record-breaking layoff binge when the new fiscal year starts on July 1.


State and local governments are forecast to shed up to 110,000 jobs in the third quarter, the first time the blood-letting has risen into the triple digits, according to IHS Global Insight.
"We're on a downward path," said Greg Daco, principal U.S. economist at IHS. "It's not looking good."

Hope & Change, anyone?

By the way, does anyone know how the pretend president did on the back nine today?

Much like his disastrous budgetary performance to date, I'm thinking he went over the allotted strokes.

Later

Intemperate stuff

I’m still trying to determine how scaling back full time kindergarten to half-day kindergarten somehow qualifies as grossly under educating…wait for it in deeply reverent tones…THE CHILDREN.

Remember, in my day, there was no such thing as all-day kindergarten. And many of those who came before my generation never attended kindergarten at all. And believe it or not, very many of us can get through even the worst of days without assistance. Or as presidential hopeful Herman Cain put it, “the department of happy.”

I guess we were just, you know, how do the class warriors from the left put it, “ more fortunate.”

For the purposes of condensing things, perhaps we could dispense with nap time, snack time (radiated fruits, veggies and bottled water only!), backpack safety training, Green 101, the risk-averse recess and the part about how Heather has a pansexual threesome in lieu of parents. Surrogate parenting of the lamest variety.

Yeah, we could give the old routine that produced rocket scientists (Hi, Dad, wherever you are) and scholars and playwrights and doctors and presidents another try. A half a day of pencils, chalk, reading, writing and ‘rithmetic. Oh, and how about some Dodgeball.

Then again, if we scaled things back and made them more economically proportionate, Big Education wouldn‘t be a bottomless money pit anymore. We can’t do that.

I dunno.

And before you go expounding on the merits of education and all things educating, know that, thanks to the politicization of education, educating has become not unlike Larping. They role-play, most of it looks real but isn’t and if you’re not real careful, it can get prohibitively expensive. It’s like, (wink, wink) mostly window dressing. You know, pretend.

Sez me.

I keep hearing all of this useless chatter about tornadoes, as if all or most of NEPA has recently been pounded flat. Here’s the scoop.

Either the weather patterns are cyclical in nature but always subject to change, or the end of the world is afoot as climate change is accelerating. And if the latter is upon us, the question begs, what to do about it?

Now, the folks that profess to know about all things that have never, ever occurred before tell us that we need to change-out our toilets, swap light bulbs, buy plug-in cars that have far less of a capability than my bicycles, recycle all of our coal-guzzling appliances, walk to the store even though we bought the pint-sized hybrids, eat only the natural foods known to have generated the most E-coli outbreaks and when we’re not out hugging trees during our lunch hours, embrace mass transit.

Meanwhile, those much more environmentally aware, far more educated and way too preachy folks are gassing-up their Escalades.

Sheep, they call you.

Anyway, when the killer tornado finally lays waste to this place, and as you are being propelled skyward to a certain death with your life passing across your eyes, you’ll probably regret not living your life to the fullest at the constant behest of the folks that did.

Huh. Suddenly, Studebaker Hoch--the superhero of the current economic slump--comes to mind. And…INTO…THE…SKY!!!

He could be a dog

Or a frog

Or a lesbian queen!

Fly to New York!

He could be a narc

Or a lady marine!

Sorry, sorry. I freaking hate when that happens. Never mind.

Yes, kiddies, as it turns out, sheep can indeed fly.

And that’s enough with blatant imbecility being used to make complete sophistry of incrementally induced mass imbecility.

Have a nice Green day, but keep one eye on the sky.

BAAAAH!!!

Later

Buh-bye Barry

Last year, your pretend President Baroke Oblahblah, his clueless ‘Czar’ underlings fresh from academia and the typically leftist-adoring media could not stop using the phrase “Summer of Recovery.

Today, in response to the “unexpected” avalanche of depressing economic news generated by the plethora of sagging economic indicators, the White House called this “bumps on the road to recovery.”

During January of 2009, your president said “The economy is cyclical. It’ll bounce back.” And then he proceeded to waste a trillion stimulus dollars by doling them out along strict ideological, partisan and party lines.

The man is as utterly clueless as he is hapless.

Then he put the first nail in the coffin by wasting nine months on his national health care reform plan which dropped the mother of all uncertainty bombs on the flagging economy.

Then, sticking with the unsettling uncertainty bit, he waffled and waffled and waffled about whether or not he supported an extension of the Bush tax cuts. He eventually pushed to extend them, which meant the two-year extension would nothing for business owners who generally deal in 5 or 10-year financial models.

And then, in response to an accident in a highly dangerous industry, he decided that we should no longer drill for oil off of our own shores.

He set lose the regulatory dogs in search of coal-fired electric production to cripple and then destroy. And Federal regulators even denied construction permits for construction of new clean-coal plants.

By seriously devaluing the dollar by design so as to assuage Wall Street, he has made a trip for groceries a punishing experience.

A need for Quantitative Easing 3 has already been hinted at. Oblahblah himself has called for a second stimulus package so as to buy more votes. The Fedrule deficit is what? 14 trillion? Or is it 16 trillion by now? Does anybody even know? But he wants the debt ceiling raised even higher. Meanwhile, both he and his fellow Democrat debt-ocrats are just itching to raise taxes.

Recovery?

This ‘affirmative action’ pretender to the throne wouldn’t know how to effect an economic recovery if the blueprints jumped up and bit him where his gonads were supposed to be.

Markie’s political advice?

Barry, you ought not seek another term. For the good of the country, think of a plausible excuse and just walk away. You should have stuck with the free condom giveaways at Cabrini-Green.

And as for my ‘Hope & Change’ Democrat friends, think of your vote for the guy who makes Jimmy Carter look like an economic guru this way: You fu>ked up! You trusted him--the man with no resume!

Please, no more pencil-neck geeks.

Later

Miles to go before he sleeps

I knew this was coming. With every fiber of my misspent being, I just knew this was coming...

The link: Susquehanna RiverFest Protest Planned

The excerpt: I cannot sit idly by and watch the Wyoming Valley RiverFest be sullied by the likes of Chesapeake Energy and Williams Energy.

Dude, I'm really not sure what you've got up your recycled sleeve, but if need be, count me in. Well, that is, provided that I won't have to walk all the way to the fairgrounds again just to hug a tree.


Gas Stock

Here's what I'm thinking. Hear me out.

The methane gas bubbling up through the waters of the Susquehanna is much more prevalent up north a ways than it is ever likely to be here in the Wyoming Valley.

So, early on the morning of RiverFest at the Apple Tree boat launch, we put in well before the throng of eager paddlers. We glide out about 30 feet, and spin the U.S.S. Dude around so that we're staring back at the long line of folks patiently making their way down the launch.

And after a hearty yelp or something equally startling, I flip open my Zippo, light what could be my very last Newport and then extend my hand sporting that still-lit Zippo outwards over the water as if I mean to drop it.

How much you wanna bet the gas company executives in attendance spin and run for cover? Kaboom!?!

Then again, I'd like to add my name to Standing Stone before I go and gleefully incinerate myself just to make a point.

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P.S.--That button I was wearing that day read, "Impeach Everybody." How's that for bipartisan? Oh, and State Rep. Ed Pashinski can attest to that.

Splash pad at Coal St. Park: Opening soon

I checked the site very early this morning, and Wilkes-Barre’s new splash pad at Coal Street Park is well under construction.

According to a high-ranking City official I spoke to last night, it is expected to be open to the public in very late June, or early July.

In addition, the new basketball courts look like they’ll be ready to go very shortly.

The addition of the splash pad was the right decision at the right time. The Olympic-sized pool that was removed was in need of a complete overhaul. If it was restored, we’d be on the hook for the staffing and maintenance during an economic calamity which has caused municipalities both large and small from coast to coast to leave the covers on their community pools this Summer.

You see, outdoor community pools do not generate income for the host municipality. Rather, they are costs of the variable variety. And large costs at that.

But with the $145,439 splash pad, the installation costs far less than overhauling a large pool. The staffing and maintenance will cost next to nothing. Our kids will have an exciting new water amenity the likes of which most of them have never seen before. And but feet away sits Wilkes-Barre’s newest, most state-of-the-art playground.

Sorry about the picture quality, but it was very early.

Since all five of my grandchildren will be in town starting on July 2, they had better get that sucker done.

What was it, again?

Downtown Tommy?

Later