One Thankful Pilgrim

It's time to kick back.
I got the turkey on the Weber at the right time and now the pressure is off.
Well, mostly off....
Linda will be bugging me for the next three hours demanding to know exactly when the turkey will reach smokey deliciousness and, since no two charcoal fires are the same, I will give her the usual "I don't have any idea". She, like all women, thinks it's important for everything to come together at the same time for Thanksgiving dinner. And, like ALL other guys, I couldn't care less. Left to our own devices, virtually all of us males would eat everything over the sink and wipe our hands on the drapes....but I digress. What time is the first football game???


For years our family ate seafood at Thanksgiving because we found turkey to be no big treat. We all loved fish and it worked out just fine. That all changed when a friend introduced us to the wonder of hickory smoked turkey. WOW! We've been busy with the Weber kettle ever since.


While the turkey sizzles I'll take a few moments to reflect on what a lucky guy like me is thankful for this year:

First of all, great friends. You can never have enough of them.



TIVO has to be right up there. I haven't viewed an entire ShamWow commercial since Mitch got his ass kicked by some chick in Miami. When Billy Mays caught the "big bus" I had to remind myself who he was. (Hadn't seen one of his idiotic pitches in years.)

I'm thankful that Linda doesn't make me watch the Macy's parade on TV. Not only do I hate crap like that it's also extremely frightening to realize that the only participant in the parade that I recognize anymore is Kermit the Frog. Who the hell are those nitwits singing on the floats??

I'm really thankful that America has a great bunch of patriotic kids in uniform keeping us all safe. We need them now more than ever.

I'm very grateful that my family is healthy and prosperous. Both daughters married well and have successful careers of their own.
Also, thanks to my brother and his wife and the nuns at St. Joseph's Home, my mom is well taken care of in her 89th year.


This afternoon grandson Dan, now six weeks old, arrives for his first Thanksgiving and he is smiling for friendly faces these days. I hope he has saved one for me.


"Yesterday unborn; tomorrow dead......why fret if life be sweet."
Groucho Marx

It's only rock n' roll

But we like it!

We had to see the movie. Didn't we?

Linda and I toddled off to the nearest cineplex to catch Pirate Radio the other day. It was an okay movie....nothing great. Not much in the way of a story, but fun.

It's the tale of the constipated BBC refusing to play or acknowledge popular music during the mid 1960's and how a bunch of ragtag radio reprobates (Are there any other kind?) broadcast the hits of the day from an old rust bucket ship operating in international waters. Radio Caroline was one of the first ships, (there were at least two), to rouse the ire of the British government by blasting the Beatles, Beach Boys, Stones and other hot bands of the day to a proletariat salivating for them. The UK was proving even way back then that private enterprise is always superior to the usual government "spend too much and don't get the job done" situation.

The acting was fine; the equipment in sync with the era and the disc jockeys looked exactly like the kind of hoodlums I was proud to have joined here in the United States of America in the 1960's. God, it was a great time to be on the radio!

And that's what struck me.......

The business that was commercial radio in the middle of the last century was absolutely the most fun anyone could have with their clothes on. It became the tribal drum of the boomer generation and it infused everything.

Pirate Radio, the movie, brilliantly captures the pervasiveness of radio in the 60's, for that is precisely how it was. Transistor radios were everywhere! People had them on at work, took them to the beach, blasted them at home and went to sleep with them at night. Of course, we all listened in our cars too. The music united us and to be on the radio purveying the hits was like getting to be a perpetual party host and guest at the same time. (Perhaps that's why the bar always seemed to be open.)

As the movie ended it occurred to me how much has changed in the past forty plus years and how radio and the music no longer unites us.

It was a wonderful time, but it was a L O N G time ago. And, like a distant station at sunrise, it has faded..... probably forever.

Paging General Patton!

In the 1950's there was a Texaco jingle that went, "You can trust your car to the man who wears the star".
Today your chances of finding anything but a chance to pump your own gas at a Texaco station are pretty much nonexistent.

In the Army it was said only a fool would trust a general because once a man had put on a star he became a politician and was no longer a soldier. George Patton was probably the last general officer the Army produced who truly didn't give a rat's ass about politics. He merely wanted to lead his troops to victory and keep America safe from the tyrants of the world.

As a newly commissioned Army lieutenant I found myself in a Signal Corp school at Fort Gordon, Georgia studying the operation of field radios used by the infantry. The courses were highly technical and boring but necessary if you wanted to stay alive in combat. At the time, all of us in the class had orders for duty in South Vietnam. The study module was to last eight weeks and we were subjected to written and operational tests at the end of each segment of instruction. During one written test my pal, John Hall, and I noticed that the Captain teaching the class had accidentally handed out an extra test to our row. Seeking to amuse ourselves we decided to answer all the questions with profane and sexually explicit funny responses. (You know...."A" material.) When we finished we handed in the extra test and signed it--we had to sign all our tests--with the name of the General who was the commandant of the Army signal school. We thought it was a scream.

After a break, the Captain went nuts and wanted to know who had done this horrible thing with his test. He asked that the culprit identify himself and waited for one of us to stand up. Hall and I stayed put. The Captain then accused one of the other lieutenants by name. "Lieutenant Allison come forward immediately!"
The rest of the class then pointed out to this hopeless stooge that Lieutenant Allison was absent that day because of some dental emergency. The Captain was beside himself. (It never occurred to this nimrod that he might have passed out an extra test.) He then excused himself for about thirty minutes while we all sat there wondering what would happen. Hall and I were wondering if the food would be better at Leavenworth instead of Vietnam.
When the Captain returned he placed the test we had turned in for the General on the overhead projector. He then proceeded to read the very creative answers John and I had provided for the "big guy". The Captain was laughing out loud and made a big show of how funny the whole incident was. You see, the Captain had taken our "test" to the General and it was now apparent that the General had----GASP----LAUGHED!
The General had thought it was FUNNY; so now the Captain thought it was funny.
The General laughs and we all laugh. That's how a Captain makes Major and Major makes Lieutenant Colonel and a Colonel..........makes...
You get the idea.

The horrible tragedy of this past week at Fort Hood is the direct result of nobody having the swinging Oswalds to speak the truth about a nutjob Major who, because he was Muslim, was allowed to continue to serve in our military in the interest of diversity and political correctness. Thirteen good Americans have paid the price for this and it is a disgrace all because someone with a star didn't have the guts to acknowledge terrorism in the ranks. This is a philosophy that originates at the very top of our chain of command and values catering to the base even if it means sacrificing truth and the security of America on the alter of political expediency.

The people who no longer recognize a "war on terror" and worry about the "awful" Patriot Act and waterboarding murderous zealot dirtbags, not to mention closing Guantanamo, need to re-think their game plan.


General George Casey is no George Patton and ignoring the fifth column of terrorists in our ranks gets us nowhere. This is not a problem for the criminal justice system. This is WAR! The consequence of continuing to ignore the obvious is unacceptable.
We need to find some leaders who see the big picture.....Leaders who know when the enemy is peeing on our shoes and telling us that it's raining.
The clock is ticking on this untenable situation.
Those who hate us think we're weak.
Lead, or get out of the way.
NOW!

"The guy is an idiot....Let's make him V.P.

Maybe you've seen the ads for the latest e-reader device being promoted by the venerable Barnes & Noble bookseller. It's called...the Nook-e.

Like the Kindle from the folks at Amazon it is an electronic nightmare designed to make reading a book more like watching TV.

This is obviously an idea hatched by some imbecilic vice president with plenty of time on his or her hands. Why in the name of Ernest Hemingway and all that's holy would anyone want to read a book that requires batteries and can't be underlined or dog-eared????

And, while we're at it, why would you name such an invention the "NOOKIE"?! (Unless, of course, your plan is to market this moronic device exclusively to teenage boys.)

For years vice presidents of all sorts of corporations have been producing crap like this because, well, that's what they do. Vice presidents are nitwits who couldn't quite make president (see Biden, Joe) and have been around long enough to have either incriminating photos of the REALLY big bosses or have married into the family.

It's the American way. "This guy is a useless dope let's make him a V.P. just to get him out of the way."

In the 1960's Western Airlines launched a V.P. inspired ad campaign called "Western pays a buck a flub". The advertising featured a big time TV ad where a heavenly chorus jingled that the airline would pay each and every passenger a dollar every time the company made a mistake. If the flight attendant, then called a stewardess, failed to say "please" or "thank you" you could hit them up for a dollar. It seemed such a good idea.

Western pulled the commercials after a couple of weeks to prevent the company from going under. It's a really bad idea to pay for mistakes when your company is a world class airborne misfortune.

Another vice president of yet another really horrible airline, rumored to be United, is said to have run a promotion called "Take Me Along" in the late 1950's. The idea, no doubt hatched after many cocktails, was to encourage the wives of executives to accompany their husband on his next business trip. After the first wave of commercials ran business was up substantially and the V.P.'s were all patting themselves on the back when one of them decided that it would be a fine idea to follow up the campaign with a letter to the spouses who had "been taken along".

Shortly after the first few hundred responses asking "What trip?" the program was abruptly abandoned.

In the broadcasting business the program director who has destroyed the ratings at the most number of stations in a corporation usually gets the nod to be the Programming Vice President. These guys specialize in producing a ton of fatuous memos regarding how to introduce the traffic or what inflection to use when saying station call letters.

The famous drop of live turkeys from a helicopter as a Thanksgiving promotion was most certainly the work of a vice president. .

John Nance Garner is remembered for saying "The vice presidency isn't worth a bucket of spit." (For the record: I don't think he said "spit".)

Here is my theory: A vice president is someone who wears his hat to the bathroom so that he'll know which end to wipe.