WTF?

In my in-box, just now:

I shot that vid three and a half years ago and what's at issue would be music... by Van Morrison, of course... coming from my window as I talk about what a beautiful Spring day we were having.  This really blows my mind.  I understand copyright issues (even though nearly all of the music videos on the Tube o' You violate the spirit, if not the letter of the law) but music wafting out of someone's WINDOW?  Gimmee a break!

So, I resolved the issue by clicking on a "remove music" link on my copyright notice page.  The edit is still in progress as we speak so I have no ideer how this will come out, not that anyone would ever WATCH the gotdamned video ever again.  We only had a grand total of 61 views during the whole three and a half years the video's been public.  What bullshit.

Shorter:  Get off my lawn!

Update, much letter that same day:  So, the first 1:01 of the video was muted to remove the end of that Van Morrison song that was coming out o' my window.  We are now in compliance with Mr. Morrison's lawyers.  Here's the result...



Isn't it rather strange that Dylan coming out o' my window is OK, but Van ISN'T?

Wherein I Bring Teh Funny, Again

This one's courtesy o' My Buddy Ed In Florida...

The Black Bra (as told by a woman)

I had lunch with 2 of my unmarried friends. One is engaged, one is a mistress, and I have been married for 20+ years.

We were chatting about our relationships and decided to amaze our men by greeting them at the door wearing a black bra, stiletto heels and a mask over our eyes. We agreed to meet in a few days to exchange notes.

Here's how it all went.

Engaged friend:
The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, 'You are the woman of my dreams...I love you.' Then we made passionate love all night long.

The mistress:
Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing a raincoat, under it only the black bra, heels and mask over my eyes. When I opened the raincoat he didn't say a word, but he started to tremble and we had wild sex all night.

Then I had to share my story:
When my husband came home I was wearing the black bra, black stockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes. When he came in the door and saw me he said:

(You are going to love this...)

"What's for dinner, Zorro?"

I'd prolly STILL be in the hospital if I had done/said that last bit in those circumstances when I was married.

Already?

Baby, it's cold outside...

We might have gotten down into the high 30s last night and we'll get there for sure this evening.  I managed to take Happy Hour on the verandah yesterday as the cold front was moving in, given as how the temps were in the mid-60s and bearable, as long as I had on a sweatshirt and my slippers.  I don't think that's gonna be the case today.

So we'll break out a jacket when we make our run out to Cannon Airplane Patch later today to re-supply our meds.  My vacation screwed up my schedule in that space as I usually do that sorta stuff the first of the month, but all that's slipped to the middle of the month now.  I'll also make a somewhat-deferred big-ass commissary run while I'm out there.  DoD closed all commissaries (except for those overseas) when the gub'mint shutdown began but opened 'em back up last week.  Which makes one wonder: where the Hell's the money coming from?  When is a shutdown NOT a shutdown?  WTF?

In other news... we continue to read old love letters and I've even read a few of hers to me, contrary to what I said last week.  That said, we're ONLY reading her letters in the strong light of day while stone cold sober.  I don't EVEN want to risk making one of those late night drunken phone calls wherein I shout into the phone "WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU AND WHAT DID YOU DO WITH PAULA!?!?!"  We've all done that, or we've received at least one such call (I've been on both sides, albeit not recently).  NOT good.

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack

So, there I was, out on the verandah, drinkin' beer and listenin' to the James McMurtry station on iTunes radio and it was good, indeed.  So we hied our ol' ass indoors and went lookin' for a suitable JM song to post this afternoon.  Well, one thing led to another during our search and we came upon this tune...

I wanna go home with the armadillo
Good country music from Amarillo and Abilene
The friendliest people and the prettiest women you've ever seen.

No, that ain't Mr. McMurtry.  But it IS Gary P. Nunn, another old-time favorite of mine and if you watch Austin City Limits on PBS (as I do, every week) you'll recognize the tune.  I was fortunate to catch Gary at a free show at the Houston Festival 2000 in... you guessed it... Houston in April o' 2000.

And yes, he DID play "London Homesick Blues" and EVERYONE in the audience (including YrHmblScrb) sang along.  That, Gentle Reader, was one of those moments you just want to capture somehow and bring it out when things ain't so good.  Good times.

A Public Service Announcement (AND a Re-Run!)

You long-time Gentle Readers know that I go on (and on!) about El Pinto salsa and chile sauce, which is New Mexico's best... and that, by definition, makes it the WORLD'S best salsa.  I was amazed and gratified to learn that everyone in these United States can enjoy New Mexico's finest chile because you can now buy it on Amazon.  Witness:

You may wonder why I bought El Pinto on Amazon and you'd be right to wonder.  The main reason is because a uniformed official from United Parcel Service will deliver the chile right to my door, saving me the trouble and expense of driving all the way to The Big(ger) City^TM to purchase same (no store in P-Ville carries the green chile sauce).  So there's that.

Oh, yeah.  I said I had a re-run for ya...

Monday, August 29, 2011

Does My Diet Make Me Look Fat?

I got to thinkin' that Michelle O would NOT be pleased at the way I eat.  Sometimes.  We all do this sorta thang occasionally and I know nary a soul who hasn't eaten a whole bag o' Oreos (or the equivalent amount o' junk food o' choice) and called it dinner at one point or another.  But consider my entire caloric intake from yesterday, in rough chronological order:

• Eight cups o' strong espresso-grind coffee, lightened with moderate amounts o' half-and-half and sweetened with raw cane sugar. Oh, and one level teaspoon o' Ovaltine, per cup.
• A complete bag o' home made tortilla chips from Juanito's restaurant, accompanied by a quarter jar o' El Pinto Green Chile Sauce (consumed in concert with the following)
• Three beers (Sammy Adams Octoberfest x2, Newcastle Nut Brown Ale)
• Four Nabsico Pinwheel cookies
• Two large glasses o' whole milk (we do NOT do 2% or any other sort o' perverted and unnatural food acts here at El Casa Móvil De Pennington... in the truest sense, meaning we also reject anything/everything labeled "organic" or "light")
• Four fingers o' Cragganmore (well, mebbe just slightly more)
• One tin o' Crown Prince Kipper Snacks
• A half pint o' Häagen-Dazs butter pecan ice cream
• One Centrum Silver vitamin pill 

I don't worry about the calories... I get plenty o' those in one form or another... but there are times when I just don't want to cook, even to the point of nuking sumthin' out o' the freezer. So, we just graze when terminal laziness hits.  Am I wrong in this?  Or is Michelle O just an overbearing, dominating, more-than-slightly-addled, busybody?  Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Yup.  El Pinto... it's what's for dinner, sometimes.  And now YOU can do it, too.

Local Boy Base Makes Good...

... from the Usual USAF Source:

Air Frame: MC-130 special-mission aircraft from the 1st Special Operations Wing at Hurlburt Field, Fla., sit on the ramp at Cannon AFB, N.M., Oct. 3, 2013. These airplanes temporarily relocated to Cannon to avoid the wrath of Tropical Storm Karen. (Air Force photo by SSgt. Matthew Plew)

We may not have verdant forests, rolling hills, or vivid Fall color here on The High Plains o' New Mexico but we DO have brilliant skies.

Tales From the Front, Cold War Edition... the Other Side

Just one small item that would drive the current tree-hugging, hybrid-driving, left-wing, liberal academic, Über-Feminist, Paula absolutely nuts if it ever got out:

Well... it's out, innit?  "My Master?"  It is to laugh...

On another, yet related, subject... I'm somewhat reluctant to publish any of The Second Mrs. Pennington's letters to me while I was deployed or when we were otherwise separated, mainly because of the explicit language contained therein.  We DO try to keep this blog at a PG level, or at least at the high-end of that rating.  If I posted any of her stuff I'd really have to use the censor's pen liberally to maintain our PG rating.  But, who knows?  I might publish some of that stuff at some point in future.  I really did love her explicit nature... it was one of the best things about The Girl.  Srsly... a spade was always a spade, and NEVER a "pointed earth-moving implement."  Ya gotta love that.

Wherein I Bring Teh Funny

In two flavors...

I NEED a few o' those cards on the right.  And then there's this:

It made me laugh but it really ain't funny.  At ALL.

Tales From the Front, Cold War Edition, Episode II

We're on our way home from Wallace AS, en-route back to Yokota AB, and had to hole up at Clark AB for a few days awaiting a flight back to Yokota.  I take the opportunity in this letter to rant about why 19-year-old two stripers shouldn't have been allowed to go TDY to certain places on the Pacific Rim unless accompanied by their mother.  So let's get to it...

I wish I could tell you what the outcomes were in those two "love stories," Gentle Reader but, alas: I cannot.  It might be because I don't know (I don't know, really) or it might be because I don't remember (which is prolly the case).  I don't want to come off as sanctimonious or anything even remotely close to that attitude and by that I mean I'm ALL in favor of the troops amusing themselves in whatever manner they choose.  (Parenthetical aside: When it comes to amusing ourselves we've been there, done that, but left the tee shirt on the shelf.  So to speak.)  It's just that I saw way too many of those hasty marriages come to grief where the guy was involved, less so for the woman.  The women usually made out alright.  OTOH, I've also seen a fair share of marriages that began in this manner work out, and by that I mean those unions turned into life-long relationships that NO ONE could ever question.  That sort o' thing was definitely a crap-shoot and the odds of success weren't in the shooter's favor.  

That said, I'm not one to talk: two marriages, two divorces.  Mebbe I shoulda married a hooker.  It couldn't have turned out much worse, come to think on it, and I'm only half-kidding.

Tales From the Front, Cold War Edition, Episode I

I told you, Gentle Reader, that I was expecting and had received a passel o' correspondence from back in the day... which consists mostly o' love letters between my beloved and I, back when we were betrothed and in a long-distance relationship.  I've had an opportunity to scan those letters over the last day or two and the ONE letter I was hoping to find isn't in the stack o' letters I received from SN2.  I've asked Sam to go back to the well and see if there isn't another stack o' letters stashed somewhere, mainly coz nearly all of the letters I wrote during my four-month deployment in Thailand have gone missing.  We shall see what he comes up with, if anything.

That said, I've been spending some time going through my letters over the last two days.  The emphasis is on "my" because reading her letters might could be painful in ways that are hard to describe, but I'm sure you can read between the lines.  I found things in the old letters that might could be of general interest and it's in that spirit I offer the following...

Some explanation is in order, no?  The Second Mrs. Pennington had left Japan a month earlier (from the date of this letter) and was back at school at Notre Dame in Indiana.  I, OTOH, was still in Japan serving in an Engineering and Installations unit at Yokota AB, on the outskirts of Tokyo.  I wrote this letter from Wallace Air Station in the Philippines, where I was on a temporary duty assignment (TDY) to perform a pre-depot level maintenance inspection of the radar facility at Wallace.  So that's the background.  The one thing that mystifies me about this letter is the racy bit in quotes on the last page.  I have NO ideer where that came from, but that saying appears in other correspondence... from the both of us... to no small extent.  All I can think of is we must have heard or seen that expression in some movie we saw or some book the both of us read.  Be that as it may... the sentiment was NOT misplaced, on either side of the wire.

I DO miss the girl.

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack: Born To Be Wild...

... or until such time as we're nicked by the local constabulary, more about which below.  But first... Steppenwolf:



I've posted about TT Week in the Isle of Man and believe me, Gentle Reader, it don't get ANY wilder than that.  Evah.  Both Daytona and Sturgis are more like the Westminster Kennel Club Show than a biker's destination, mainly coz of the racing.  Now there are races at the former... Daytona, but they're on a closed circuit... and there ain't no races at all in Sturgis.  TT Week in the Isle o' Man features a full solid week of road racing on real roads... serious roads.  And then there's the matter of Mad Sunday, which is THE ultimate biker's wet dream.  Let me quote:

On "Mad Sunday" any member of the public can ride the mountain section of the course, which is open one way from Ramsey to Douglas. In 2012 there were just four accidents on the open day - while in previous years there had been dozens. In 2013, eleven spectators were hurt when a rider lost control at Bray Hill on the outskirts of Douglas.

What makes Mad Sunday so Mad?  No speed limits.  None.  Ride as fast as you wanna.. on a twisty two lane road that runs over the mountain.  I rode Mad Sunday in 1982 and THAT was my peak mo'sickle experience... nothing will ever top it.

But we digress. I received a box full of correspondence from SN2 yesterday, all of which originated in days o' yore.  I found this lil item among the stack o' stuff:

Yup.  A ticket, about 40 bucks worth, give or take a farthing or six.  There's a bit of a story behind that ticket, the Reader's Digest version about which goes like this...

It was in the early evening, just after dinner, when I decided to go for a little putt on the back roads just outside Douglas.  So, there I was, motoring along at about 60 mph on a two lane country road when I had the livin' bejeezus scared outta me when a guy on a Suzuki RG500 GP bike went screaming past me at about 120 mph or more.  The guy caught me completely by surprise and I inadvertently changed lanes when he blew by me.  (Parenthetical side note: given there's actually no track at the IoM TT, most teams do their testing after hours on the back roads.  This was a case o' that.)  So, it wasn't but three or four minutes later when a friendly constable steps out of the ditch on the side o' the road and waves me over, me bein' caught in a speed trap.  I was incredulous and exclaimed "Didn't you see that guy on the Suzuki in front o' me?"  "Wot Suzuki?" said the constable, in reply.  It dawned on me right there and then that some animals are more equal than others during TT Week.

So... it was off to traffic court the next day to pay my fine (60 mph in a 45), which really pissed me off as I missed the first race while cooling my heels waiting to see the fines clerk.  There really AIN'T no justice in this world, sometimes.

Our mount for TT Week:

That was one seriously quick mo'sickle.

Saturday: Dancers?

No... Durango!  These new "Ron Burgandy" ads are pretty danged good.

A Brief Follow-Up

I mentioned one of the best parts about our recent trip Back East was re-connecting with old friends Chip and Kathy.  I posted this pic of the three of us...

That was now, these were then... c.1978:

What a great looking couple, eh?

Thanks, Sam.  You da MAN.

Happy Face!

From the Usual USAF Source:

Air Frame: Lt. Col. Joel Meyers, 389th Fighter Squadron commander, gets a welcome-home hug from his daughter upon his return to Mountain Home AFB, Idaho, from a deployment to Southwest Asia, Oct. 5, 2013. Meyers led an expeditionary contingent of Mountain Home aircrews, maintainers, and F-15Es on a rotational deployment of combat forces to that region. (Air Force photo by TSgt. Samuel Morse)

I love photos like this.  Welcome home, Colonel Meyers, and all the troops in the 389th FS!

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack: Do What You Wanna Do!

We're in the mood for some old-school funk today...



So, here we are: out on the verandah, enjoying a warm breezy day, beer and cigar close at hand and listenin' to the Isley Bros. tell me to do what I wanna do.  Well, OK, then... we shall do just that.

Did I say it was warm and breezy?

Why... yes, I DID.  It's mah-vel-ous outdoors, simply mah-vel-ous.

The Non-Essential Sunny

Heh.

Broadening Our Horizons LXX

Our brew today...

Just when I was on about the wonderfulness of the mePhone's camera... and then this.  I almost didn't post this pic.

That would be a Lugene Chocolate Milk Stout from the O'Dell Brewery, and Boy does it ever live up to its name.  This brew is a full, rich, chocolatey concoction that pleases the palate immensely... or my palate, at any rate.  One of the Bros really likes it too, giving the beer an 89 rating (Very Good).  From the tasting notes:

TASTE: Creamy, silky smooth, thick bodied, milky, subtle roastiness, chocolate throughout, modest hopping, big juicy kiss of alcohol, date sugar, mild spice, dark berries, faint orange peel, sweet creamy finish

This is a big brew, 12oz bottle took a while to conquer though I did not complain once. Seek this one out for something completely different.

When Jason sez "big brew" I'm quite certain he's referring to the beer's 8.5% ABV content.  We shall sip this one slowly.

And now it's time to fire up a cee-gar and adjourn to the verandah to take in yet another one of the last o' the nice days.

Whut?

I don't get it.

Jes kiddin'.

Almost Mohammed Redux

Moon:  I have you at my five o'clock... you need to close and come around hard left.
Evening Star:  Not in this millennium, Bud.  What ya see is what ya get.

Ah, well.  Close enough for gub'mint work, eh?

Tonight's pic was taken with the mePhone, last night's was taken with the Big Camera.  I'm kinda sorta amazed at how well the mePhone camera does things.

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack: Second Choice

I heard this tune on RP today and wanted to post it but... alas, the quality of the available video on the Tube O' You isn't so good.  It's not all THAT bad and would bear looking, if you have a mind to do so.  I think I'll be looking up more work from the Nashville Mandolin Ensemble in future.

So... second choice.

Sunshine, daydream, walking in the tall trees, going where the wind goes
Blooming like a red rose, breathing more freely,
Ride our singin', I'll walk you in the morning sunshine
Sunshine, daydream. Sunshine, daydream. Walking in the sunshine.

Sunshine daydream, indeed.  One can NEVER go wrong with the Dead.  Ever.