"It's been awhile... since you shaved."

Getting older, there are important people in your life that you begin to see less and less. The first sign that you and an old friend have been bit by the "How've You Been" bug, is that you can't keep up with their changing facial hair. Clean shaven one year, beard the next. Muttonchops another year, mustache the next. If this has happened to you, keep in touch with your people. Don't let the circle go broken. Life is too short to let go of good friends! (Awwwww, insert your favorite friends-forever song here.)



P.S. - This guy is an asshole. If anyone wants to write and tell him so. Please send message with all Asian scat pictures to:
John Zalokar
35W142 Duchesne Dr.
Dundee, IL 60118

"He was very lucky"

"He was very lucky..." said the Doctor. Lucky to be alive, yes. But I wouldn't call it all good luck. That is pretty unlucky that of all the seas in the world, you happen to catch the giant marlin that jumps toward the boat, spearing the relatively microscopic two-foot section called your chest.
That has to be higher odds than the lottery. Maybe not. They say I will get struck by lightning before winning Lotto.

Fisherman speared by blue marlin off Bermuda
Monday, July 24, 2006

HAMILTON, Bermuda (AP) -- A fisherman was recovering from surgery after he was speared in the chest and knocked into the Atlantic Ocean by a blue marlin during a fishing competition off Bermuda's coast.

Ian Card, 32, was in stable condition at King Edward VII Hospital in the British Island territory from a wound that his doctor said could have been fatal.

"He was very lucky," said Dr. Christian Wilmsmeier. "It was a very serious injury."

Card and his father, Alan, both operators of a charter fishing boat and experienced marlin fishermen, had just hooked the fish Saturday when it suddenly leapt out of the water, impaled Ian Card just below his collar bone and knocked him into the ocean.

"The fish all of a sudden changed direction and jumped. The fish made a leap and Ian just happened to be in the way," Alan Card said.

The younger fisherman managed to struggle free while his father cut the line and helped his son get back into their boat, the Challenger.

They managed to make it back to shore in about 40 minutes for emergency medical treatment.

The fishermen estimated the marlin at about 800 pounds (363 kilograms) and about 14 feet (4.3 meters) in length.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The grass is always less brown.

I was watching the local news today and the weather man came on. He said "this storm system will deteriorate, and that is good news!"
I love the rain (so does my half-dead lawn), so to me, this is bad news. Thank you to the weather man and his almighty weather opinion. I would prefer the storm system to rock my world, baby. I prefer hardcore, mature MILF storms to barely legal, inexperienced storms.

Then I realized that during a drought, the same weather man would say "let's hope this storm system materializes, we REALLY need the rain!"

Rain is good when we need it, but not good when we don't need it!? I suppose that is simple enough logic. At least when floods are taking away homes. However, if there are times when we DO need it, why would there ever be a time when we don't need it? We always need rain. If God satisfied our request for not needing rain, we would then need rain again. That's when the weather man says, "Hey God, we really need that rain again buddy! But keep it light. And only on weekdays. Because if it rains too much, it will ruin our weekend shopping!"

See food free write

I keep meaning to do this, folks. But it is now finally freewrite time. I am writing straight off the top of my skull and the fingers aren't stopping. I am at work, so I may get interrupted. It might not be a true freewrite, but it is free enough. So the other day I went to a seafood restaurant and they had liscense plates covering the walls. To the left of a Florida plate was a Tennessee plate. The county was Cocke. Cocke county. Maybe the guy it is named after should have recommended his first name be used in naming the county. Robert County. William County. Todd County. Lucious County. Harry County. It would have been better than Cocke county. Then I ate my seafood and left. But I was actually already leaving the restaurant when I saw the plate. Then again on the way out, I saw a sign that said "Save a tourist, eat a gator" What was my first response to that? "Save a gator , eat a tourist"? No, it was something else but I can't really remember. "Endanger tourists, breed gators"? Maybe that was it. Either way, what a bullshit line. It can go three ways, the gator is in our backyard, we are in the gator's backyard, or we are to co-inhabit the same space. I like the last one. If a gator eats your baby, you should have kept your baby away from the gator's mouth. That's a smilin' gator.

part b:
I just sat in my car during lunch and ate some trail mix. decided to come back in and do another free write. I listen to the classical music on NPR a lot on my....DAMN, interrupted at work....anyways, I really like the choral stuff. I sit there and stare off into the sky and that choral music makes you feel part of everything. Then you look back at the building you work in, and realize it is all b.s. Why do we waste so much of our lives on something we don't believe in? Are you helping people at your job? Are you giving back to this community we call humanity/earth/planet earth/love? If not, it would be good to question your shit. Don't slave your life away for the almighty dollar. Go listen to some classical music on NPR. This has been another free write from Wes. [I guess you could call them rants, but a rant can be edited..eh? These free writes are ...free writing.]

Put Away The Flags

Put Away The Flags

By Howard Zinn

From "The Progressive" and Progressive Media Project

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.

National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early.

When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."

When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."

It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.

We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.

As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."

We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.

Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.

How many times have we heard President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?

One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail last year that God speaks through him.

We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling "A People's History of the United States" (Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org