Lions and Tigers and Bare-Faced Liars

Lions and tigers and bears were what Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tinman and the Cowardly Lion feared in The Wizard of Oz. But today we have much more to fear from Bare-Faced Liars like those in the media who persist in trying to make massacres carried out by Muslims be about everything except what they're really about.

But before I get started on that I wanted to mention that it's as cold as. . . Well, as Pop used to say, it's cold as a brass bra on a witch's. . . Sorry, I forgot for a moment that this is a family blog. Sis reminded me just the other day after I posted that thing about how pleased Aunt Mary would be to see the acceptance of the new word in the language.

Bobbitise was used as a verb by a writer for the Times of India. You'll have to look it up on your own because I don't have time to explain right now since I'm determined not to let this turn into one of these interminable posts that wanders all over the place.

I have to get back to the fact that it's wery, wery cold out there right now, as Bugs Bunny would say. I just walked back from leaving my car over at the Ford Dealer. I wanted to get it serviced before Ford goes bankrupt or they shut all the dealers down. Plus, I noticed on Friday that my inspection sticker was three months out of date.

Fortunately for me the local police are shockingly inefficient after almost eight years of poor leadership by the Bush administration, which is being held responsible for every other goofy thing that goes wrong in the country so why not this. I have a feeling that important laws like getting our cars inspected every year in the proper month and not mixing recyclables in the regular trash will be a lot better enforced after Barry drafts a million or so secret police stooges, I mean community service volunteers, to poke their noses up our. . . er. . . to keep a very close and helpful eye on all of us. And I just can't wait until he provides me with a community organizer to help keep me better organized and more attentive to the environment and stuff.

So anyway, being a law abiding citizen, I dropped my car off at the dealer this morning as soon as I could after realizing that I would eventually get caught; but then I had to walk home, a shocking thing, a very unnatural thing with gasoline down to $1.79 a gallon at the Wawa.

Is this a great country or what! The rest of the world is paying like $8.00 a gallon for gas and we're well on our way down to paying a buck. You almost hate turning the car off overnight and then having to run out there to start it so it can warm up while you're having your second cup of coffee in the morning. I really, really need one of those remote control starters. I'll bet Al Gore never has to waddle his fat. . . er. . . never has to waddle outside to start a frozen car so it can warm up in the morning.

Speaking of which, or rather not speaking of which, I just read a great paragraph in Florence King's latest column in National Review when I slipped outside for a cigarette The way Barry's going to be doing on the White House balcony once he gets inaugurated. What? The media never told you he's a weak willed tobacco addict. Never mind.

Anyway, I'm too lazy to look up the link to Florence King's column, so you'll have to google it if you want to read the whole thing. Her column is called "the bent pin," and this edition's entry is titled 'Iceberg, Right Ahead'.

She wrote, "Did you know it's entirely possible to drink a whole bottle of vodka a day with no hangover or other ill effects if you use milk as a mixer? I did it the last week of the campaign. I don't know what size the bottles were because I don't understand these new foreign measurements, but they were whole bottles and I polished them off. My doctor was alarmed. "Don't worry," I said, "it was skim milk,""

I had a fraternity brother back in college who swore by scotch and milk; but he never could get me to try it. Not that I was terribly scrupulous about the scotch, although I considered it an expensive affectation. That was during the period when I was perhaps not paying as much attention to my studies as I should have been. I had a free ride scholarship from the Navy that also included $100 per month in spending money, and I was making some extra money on the side, so money was the least of my problems; but something about paying for scotch just didn't fit my thinking.

That same buddy and I later quit drinking cold turkey for quite a while after watching the movie The Lost Weekend. The movie was very powerful; but our period of temperance may have had something to do with the fact that we shared a quart of on-sale cognac and a bottle of wine during the movie on the theory that cognac is made from wine so it should be compatible with wine. Oh, and we watched the movie after returning from The Knotty Pine after the bartender rudely refused to continue to serve us.

I think the wine was Barcelona Sweet Red; but it may have been Thunderbird, which had a great slogan. The Senior VP of Sales at my company recently greeted me with "What's the word, Sully?" as I approached him in a corridor. I immediately gave him back, "What's the word? Thunderbird. What's the price? Thirty twice." It turned out he had never heard the slogan, so I had to explain it to him later. He's a bit younger than me so I'm not sure he believed me 100% that T-Bird was sixty cents a quart at the time.

The wine turned out not to be compatible with cognac on top of beer. And it did not endear me to my roommate, Dave B, who returned to the room from the weekend at home to find me curled up on his bed in a nest made of the formerly clean clothes that had been neatly stacked there. He took a can of instant drink powder and turned me into a crusted mummy while I slept. Later, when I woke he was not at all sympathetic to my explanation that I had moved to his bed only because mine became unsuitable for sleeping in during the night.

All was not lost though, for the pattern of events did result in a never since repeated physiological experience. When I finally arose to stumble down the hall to the shower room I found that all I could see was a tiny image in the center of my field of view. The effect was like looking down a long pipe. Very strange and edifying in a certain sort of way.

Ever since then I've been a veritable paragon of moderation in all things, more or less. All of us learn in life. Well, most of us learn, mostly from experience, those of us who survive. There is, of course the fact that ultimately none of us survive. But best not go there.

I was talking about my lack of temperance in my younger days, and perhaps to this day in some things. I take solace in Saint Augustine, who sort of said, 'Lord give me temperance and self control; but not yet.' Good old Saint Augie. He was definitely a righteous dude who would have fit right in at our fraternity, at least before he got into the robes and started talking and writing all kinds of heavy downer stuff.

I've always wondered if he's an ancestor; but I've done so privately since senior year of high school. One of the nuns at Bishop Kenrick became quite cross with me when I speculated a bit along that line in a book report that strayed a somewhat from the theme of City of God. She very unjustly gave me a C for that paper even though that was an A paper if I've ever written one, very inventive. But she was a wise old bird though, that nun. She was just teaching me a valuable lesson with that C grade. Never, never, never speak truth to power. The Cambodians, I think it's the Cambodians, have a somewhat similar wisdom, in their folk saying, 'When elephants dance the mice should stay clear.'

But I was writing about Florence King. Ah, Florence, it's a great pity she's about a hundred or a hundred and ten years old and can't live forever. What a piece of work. One of these days I really need to get her first book, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady. I've read all of her other books and I've been looking forward to her columns for years.

But I appear to have digressed and gotten myself all twisted around like a coyote in a hall of mirrors with a roadrunner. I was at the Ford Dealer. And I was dressed in about five layers for the walk; but still, I about froze my. . . Sorry again. . . Uh, various and sundry parts of me were very chilled by the time I walked the couple of miles home.

What the heck is going on anyway. We were promised global warming to eliminate these cold winters. Yet this November and December are easily the coldest we've had for a long while. The pond has had a skin of ice on it for a couple of weeks which is unprecedented in the thirty years since we moved here.

Anyway, I plan to get back to that in another post; so back to the running amok Muslims and their perfidious apologists in the media.

Here are the plain facts. . .

Eh, I'm too lazy to lay out the facts and the Ford Dealer just called to say my car is ready; so I'll just give you a link to a column by Mark Steyn, who's a lot more disciplined and organized than me, and who makes a lot of sense on this subject.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzA2Y2E2MDU2YjQzOTQwZjUzNjcwZDA0OTE3YmFkYzg=