Debate thoughts

I just got through watching the GOP debate on CNN and here are my thoughts. If you didn't see it you can quit reading and go back to watching Dancing With Idols or whatever it is. I happen to believe the Republican field is much stronger than it was 4 years ago and we should have no problem defeating BHO.

Newt Gingrich continues to impress. I say again that he could do this in his sleep while some like Ron Paul look like they are asleep. Newt is obviously a better debater and smarter all around than the others. He had a controversial idea tonight that I don't remember hearing before about illegal immigration. If the illegals meet certain qualifications they can stay here without becoming a citizen for a while but will no longer be illegal.

I think that's smart. First, there is no way we are ever going to deport 10-12 million people. That's a pipe dream. It hasn't happened yet and never will. This also curries a huge Hispanic vote that Repubs desperately need. Staunch conservatives may make noise about it being amnesty but it's time to make a bold step like this.

Ron Paul is out for several reasons but mainly, for me, it is because of his lack of support for Israel. The Bible makes it plain that Israel's friends are God's friends and its enemies are God's enemies. Go home Ron.

Santorum and Huntsman can go home too even though Santorum supports Israel and made some good points he is obviously out of his league here. Cain didn't do himself any good in this one and Perry looks like he is, as we say, all hat and no cattle. Perry wants to look tough but he can't make correct decisions. I don't care about the gaffes. He just doesn't have what it takes.

That leaves Bachman, Newt and Romney. I will take the heat for saying that this is no place for a woman. She's a strong woman and has some good ideas but she's going to get run over in the long run and she knows it. Go home Michelle. My prediction is that it will be Romney and Gingrich in the final with Newt becoming president. Run, Newt, run!

Why I'm not preaching on Genesis 13:12...

I am preaching through Genesis and have made it up to this point but I'm skipping this whole section altogether.

Veterans Day

The man that took this picture has more courage in his camera-clicking finger than everybody "Occupying" their tents in parks combined. Thank you to all my friends and family (known and unknown) who have served. Thank you.

Happy Belated Birthday USMC

Sorry I missed it yesterday.

MJ's kids

Am I the only one who realizes that there is no possible way Michael Jackson is the father of these kids? I know mama was white and Michael changed to white later but these kids look nothing like any of the Jacksons. Probably Conrad Murray's fault.

My Cain bimbo theory.

Anybody else sick of hearing about Herman Cain supposedly doing something improper to somebody sometime somewhere many years ago? Yes, me too. Now I have said recently that

Newt is always going to be the smartest man in the room but I have a theory that Cain is the shrewdest. Everybody wants to know if Obama put these women up to it or was it Perry or Romney or who? I think Cain is doing it to himself and here is why I think he's the shrewdest guy in the room.

When I was in woodshop in high school I built a footstool for my mom. It was for her birthday and so I wanted it to be perfectly smooth so I would sand it down real good and then wet it. Wetting it made all the rough spots stand out and then I would sand them down again and then repeat it. That's what Cain is doing. He hired a few bimbos to say something completely untrue knowing that the media would have a feeding frenzy trying to give him a "high-tech lynching" as he called it.

What's in it for him, you ask? Well, it's a gamble but since it is completely untrue it will run its course and be proven false but then he can sand down the left-wing media for jumping on him but letting Bill Clinton get away from proven and admitted sexual crimes much worse than the ones leveled against Cain. So, hiring the women (who admit they need money so it wouldn't cost much especially since they have no shame) is just "wetting the board" (Dew, add your joke here) and now we just wait for him to sand down the rough media.

Pretty clever, I think. Either that or he's a pervert scumbag. What do you think?

Don't let your babies grow up to be Cowboys.

Somebody should "Occupy" Bausch & Lomb.

I told the Bausch & Lomb manager that I was going to tell all my friends about their scam so here goes. My eye doc told me that if I bought 4 boxes of contacts instead of 2 that I would be eligible for the mail-in rebate. I hate mail-in rebates because it is usually too much work and takes too long to get the money back but I went ahead and did it.

Six weeks went by and I got a letter in the mail saying my rebate was denied because I didn't send in all the required bar codes but they wished me a good day. I immediately called them back and politely told them that I had indeed sent in the correct number of barcodes. The nice lady looked up my account and said that it was not really because I hadn't sent in the barcodes but that it was because I was a new customer.

I politely explained that I had gotten a rebate from them last year for the same deal. She explained that was more than 12 months ago (14 to be exact)so I was considered a new customer. Mind you, 4 boxes of contacts is one year's worth and it takes 2 months to get a rebate so that doesn't make sense. Still polite, but with more urgency I explained the situation to the nice lady's manager who had the compassion of one used to dealing with customers that she could just blow off.

I proceeded to then explain that I knew where she lived and that I had seen where she slept and that her family would weep over what had been done to her but to no avail. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if she really did wish that I would have a nice day at all. Oh well. She will pay for it now. I'm boycotting B&L forever and that's gonna hurt them. Just ask Taco Bell.

I don't miss that.

Every so often I miss my wife (no jokes about my aiming getting better here). I really do...sometimes. You know, sometimes I have something funny happen and wish I had somebody handy to tell or sometimes I just need to vent, although she was never much of a listener in times like that. Her day was always worse than mine. Whatever.

Lately, though, I have counted my blessings a couple of times. I was walking through the Walmarts the other day with a married couple walking behind me about the same speed. I never turned around to see them but I knew the expression on the guy's face. His wife was droning on and on and on about some lady at work doing something and how she shouldn't have done it and that this woman told another woman and that woman didn't think she should but when they told Betty in Accounting...Oh, shut up!!!

I thought my head was going to explode as I remembered all the stories just like that I had heard and thought about all the hours of my life wasted listening to what sounds like Charlie Brown's teacher after a while. Whah, whah, whah. Whah whah. I wanted to turn around and tell her that just because her husband was saying, "Yes, dear. Yes, dear" didn't mean he was listening but I wouldn't do that to such a poor soul as him.

The great blogger Chupacabra has a post here about 8 words women use and what they really mean. I can't help but think this world would be a better place if when a woman said, "Nothing" when asked what was wrong, the man should just say, "Oh good. I thought you were going to whine about something meaningless again" and then go play golf.

My nightmare

I'm not sure which part of this I hate more. I've said here before I can't stand for someone to talk over me while I'm still talking and I would not tolerate being touched by someone in this scenario. Bad on Romney. Bad on Perry. Newt is obviously the smartest man in the room and did not have to stoop to any of this.

Now, here's my personal problems with this picture. To start, did your parents not tell you it was extremely poor manners to interrupt someone when they are speaking? There is nothing more rude. What you are saying is that what I have to say is more important than what you have to say and so I'm not even going to show you the courtesy of listening. That is immature and rude and shows your lack of debate skills.

The second issue is just my phobia with having someone touch me. Now you have to understand, this phobia is only in certain settings. I am very touchy, huggy friendly at church or with my family. I like to just stand with my arm around my mom or sister or even nephews. It's not gender-specific for me. My problem is if I were in Perry's position, I would have to remove his hand because in the back of my mind I know that a left hand on the shoulder comes just before the right hand uppercut. I know, I know, it's just my phobia. Maybe I grew up with the wrong friends. Maybe I didn't get enough hugs from strangers or maybe I got too many. Who knows? Just don't interrupt me and none of you freaks reading this better touch me either. So...run, Newt, run!

Baby Jessica

It has come to my attention that we just passed the anniversary of an event that we have forgotten about but we all remember. On October 14, 1987, Jessica McClure fell down an 8-inch pipe and was stuck there for 2 days. Anyone old enough remembers the saga of workers trying to get down 22 feet to rescue her. The scene gained world-wide attention.

I did not know that there was a trust fund set up for Baby Jessica (I understand most folks still call her that) paid for by anonymous well-wishers from across the globe. People wanted to help and so, completely unsolicited, money came pouring in for months afterward. The trust fund was set to mature on her 25th birthday which was March 26, 2011 and on that day she received an estimated nearly one million dollars.

That says a lot about the goodness of people. It says that there is an innate will inside people to want to help. It also tells me that if you have a small baby...and a pipe..."C'mon baby, walk over this way. Walk toward your college fund!"

Storytime

I told you earlier I would tell you this story about "The Incident" on the golf course, so here goes. In high school I was on the golf team. Everybody on the golf team, including me, was horrible but we had a good time. It's no wonder we were horrible since the best advice I ever got from our coach was, "Hey, Keebler, hit it straighter and farther."

We often had two-day tournaments where if you made it into the finals the first day you got to come back the next day to play for trophies or ribbons or whatever. None of us ever made it to the finals so all we ever really had were 1-day tournaments. In these tournaments you played with 3 students from other teams so usually nobody in the foursome knew each other.

We were playing at Mountain Valley down by Joshua. It's a beautiful course with a country club full of rich people who don't believe they are rednecks, but I digress. The day was beautiful but windy and a bit brisk. On this first day of the tournament all four of us were playing poorly which made me feel better since I played poorly on my best day. We played a couple of holes with all of us all over the course, taking forever to find our golf balls in the woods, and dropping balls this side of the water hazard that ate the previous shot.

After two or three holes like this one of the other guys jokingly suggested we should all just drop one shot after each hole just so we could save face at the end. We all laughed and agreed, purely joking, of course. The next hole was especially brutal for all of us again and as we got to the end and started to say our scores we all just looked at each other. "I'm in." "So am I." "Why not?", I said. What's it gonna matter anyway?

So, we did that. After each hole from then on we just subtracted one from our score and played the remaining 13 or 14 holes that way. "What's it gonna matter anyway?", right? Well, I'll tell you what it's gonna matter. Evidently, everybody else played pretty poorly and my "adjusted" score was good enough to get me into the finals the next day.

I don't know what happened to the rest of my foursome. I never saw them again because the next day I was playing with three other students, all of whom deserved to be there. This day was a Saturday and it was a big deal at the Mountain Valley Golf Course. Parents were there. (Not mine, I didn't tell them. They probably still don't know this.) There was even some local media there with cameras rolling for the evening news. I wish I was kidding.

I hit last out of my group. The others hit right into the fairway where golf balls are supposed to go. As I got settled in to hit I could almost feel people breathing on me. The excitement was high. The "Silence" sticks were held up by the judges. I planted my feet, wiggled my hips a little and swung for all I was worth. And for about one second that ball was soaring beautifully straight and high. Then it sliced so far right it looked like it must have stuck into an airplane.

I didn't bother wasting my time looking for it. I just calmly teed up another one and let the big dog eat. And then teed up another one...and another one. I seriously teed up four balls and then on the last one I just popped it onto the fairway with a light tap just so I could get off the tee box and out of the way.

I'll save you the play-by-play but what happened after that was even uglier. I have never played so bad in my life. In fact, I've never heard of anyone playing that bad. Long story a little shorter, I lost every one of my golf balls, either in the woods or the water. I was never so glad to lose all my balls because now I could just go home. Except now I had to walk through the rest of the course back to where I started with everybody asking me what happened.

Finally I saw the parking lot and the school bus waiting on me there. Yes, Coach Straighter Farther drove just me to the course on a full size school bus and when he saw me walking toward him after only a few minutes of playing time he bust out in a well deserved laugh and continued it all the way home.

Now, some would say that the moral of "The Incident" would be, "Don't cheat." Me? I'm pretty sure my luck would have been better if I had a gold plated divot tool, but who knows?

If I gain any more weight you could make me into a cannon ball.

http://www.wtsp.com/news/topstories/article/213247/250/Company-will-load-loved-ones-ashes-into-ammunition

What I learned about golf...

.

I had the opportunity to go to Colonial Country Club yesterday and be a part of a charity fund-raiser for The Gladney Center for Adoption. No, I didn't golf. I was just there to keep score for the foursome I was assigned. Evidently, somebody had to do it. I mean, any time I have ever been golfing that little task was done by those who were doing the golfing but not on this day. On this day things were different. I've not been much of a golfer since "The Incident" (more of that in an upcoming Storytime) and so I have been out of the loop about some important facts about golf, some of which I will share now. The first thing I learned was that I can't afford free drinks. On nearly every hole there were huge wooden containers filled with ice and all kinds of things to drink. There were cokes, water, Gatorade, and beer all free for the taking. I helped myself of the Coke and water as did the four caddies. The golfers each had maybe one beer during the course of the day but mainly water as well for them. I got to thinking about that. While I'm not much of a golfer I know that very few people just give away much of anything so I quietly asked one of the caddies about how much he thought these guys paid for the priviledge of playing at the Colonial for the Gladney Cup. I'm thinking it is probably something outrageous, like four or five hundred dollars. He said he wondered the same thing and had looked it up online the day before and it cost $10,000 for the foursome! Oh, ok, "free drinks", right. The next thing I learned was that gear don't make the golfer. Three of the foursome were pretty good golfers, each hitting about 4 or 5 over par. The fourth guy, whom you could barely see behind all of his equipment, shot 27 over. That's still better than I'll ever shoot but what got me was the amount of stuff, high-dollar stuff, he had. His poor caddie had to lug that oversize leather bag filled with every kind of club known to man with every pocket filled with gadgets and helps. I wanted to tell him that his laser, range-finding, GPS-enabled, hole-seeker thingee he was constantly using and slowing everybody up with was not going to help when you shank it into the woods every shot. And your golf ball retriever needs a snorkel on it there, big boy. Good thing he had that Personalized Full Grain Leather Bag Tag. It matched his Personalized Gold Plated Divot Tool and Cigar Holder. And I hate to think about how much that driver cost. No, not that one. The other one. (Yea, he had two.) Evidently, if you attach a mule's head to a custom club shaft it helps you hit the nearest tree every time. But the main thing I learned about golf yesterday was very important. In fact, according to the consistentcy of usage, the aftershot encouragement cannot be underestimated. You see, after each and every shot all members of the foursome are to encourage the ball and / or the golfer with two syllables. The ball is usually the first to get the encouragement. Common encouragements (remember, always two syllables) are "get up", "lay down", "get legs" or a simple "baby!". Next, the golfer will get his encouragement. It is always positive no matter what zip code the ball now has. Appropriate terms include "sweet strike", "nice out", "big dog", "boom town" or "Arnold" (Palmer or Schwarzenegger, I assume). I hope this lesson has been helpful. Please tune in later for Storytime when I continue my insistence that a good story needs to be told even if it makes me look bad

Put the WEE! back in Halloween.

The older I get, the more I realize the less I understand. When I was a kid our church had a haunted house (in the church) at Halloween. We loved it. I know now that we can't do that any more. Too many people get offended by all that and so, in order to provide an option on Halloween, our church will have bounce houses, food and games at our "Fallfest". On October 31. With candy. People will dress up. Some will say, "Trick or Treat!". We don't celebrate Halloween any more though? In case you are one of the few we have successfully fooled with this let me explain. Ok, wait. This is the part I don't really understand. I asked somebody the other day why they believed we shouldn't celebrate Halloween. I told them I know all about its origins as All Hallows Eve and that this was the big day for Satan-worshippers and all that stuff. But if this is Satan's biggest day, I'm not impressed. I never hear anything about Satanists ever doing anything on Halloween. Can't we go back to calling what we do "Halloween"? Their response to my question was that we don't celebrate Halloween because it's not Biblical. Well, duh! Neither is Christmas nor Easter. Those were pagan traditions as well but when anybody tries to call their Christmas tree or Christmas party a Holiday Tree or Winter Celebration we are ready to clobber somebody in the name of the Lord. All I'm saying is that we're not really fooling anybody with this. Even the kids. It's supposed to be about the kids so do they have to keep wearing their Halloween costumes they bought at the Halloween store to get Halloween candy at the "Trunkfest"? Somebody help me understand.

Let's play, "Which one Doesn't Belong" again!

Which one of these people doesn't belong at the meeting of United Nations yesterday? Hmm...could it be the guy at the top left who you wouldn't see at all if he wasn't smiling? Or could it be Ronald Reagan top row third from right? Maybe it's Pablo and Achmed on the lower left who thought this was "business casual" day? Obama, who is doing his best Glamour Shots, tilt-the-head look, seems to think the guy on his right shouldn't be there but I'm pretty sure everybody else in the world seems to think our president is the only one who doesn't belong.

Sunrise in Paradise

For my 666th post I thought about posting something about all the evil in the world but who needs that? How about a beautiful sunrise over the thriving metropolis of Paradise, Texas? A beautiful sunrise or sunset always reminds me of Romans 1:20. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

"Fall" is in the air.

Yea, yea, the cooler weather is great but that's not the kind of fall I'm talking about. I'm talking about the kind of fall that hurts your pride and body; the kind of fall you don't see coming and to be honest, don't know if it is really going to happen until you are on the ground.

I went to clean the windows of a house yesterday and got there the same time some tile installers got there too. We were all getting our stuff out of our vehicles and chatting and trying to be cool yet professional. Don't act like you don't do it too. I have my bucket in one hand and my broom in the other. The broom is for sweeping the window sill and clearing out cobwebs.

I set my bucket down on the sidewalk and moved the broom to my left hand at the same time my left foot rested against a small stump in the grass. I'm too busy telling some witty story to the other guys to realize that my momentum was still easing leftward. Not very quickly, but still easing that way. I'm just to the really clever point in the story when I realize I'm slowly starting to lean.

No problem, the broom is there to hold me up and I'm comfortable with that. Ok, maybe too comfortable because now I'm leaning on it pretty heavily and my grip starts to tighten around the wooden handle. Am I falling? Not really sure. Still talking like nothing is happening but now the bristles on the broom start to fold under and I lean that much further over.

Wait, wait, uh oh, yep. I'm pretty sure I'm falling but it seems to be taking a really long time. My hand starts to slide down the broom handle and I see my right leg completely off the ground and rising. Now it's hard to look cool at this point and I don't remember what I was saying which makes me look even stupider as I continue to ease downward and to the left.

A few more minutes of this and I realize that I am for sure falling but the good news is that I only have about a foot to go before my left pocket hits dirt. It's too late to reverse course but I still have plenty of time to make needed adjustments and so I let go of the broom and put my left hand out to help me bounce right back up but there is a freshly clipped bush there and I cut my finger on it.

The reaction is to bring that hand up which now lets me fall even further over to the left and so I tried to squirm to the right but now where did all these bushes come from? I'm a turtle on its back for a couple of seconds thrashing around in a man-eating bush with a bloody finger and a story untold. I don't know what's worse. And the whole process seems to have taken about an hour and a half.

I'm not sure how I got out of there. I may have blacked out from a total lack of coolness, I don't know, but by the time I managed to get out of there most of the guys had politely averted their eyes and had gone to work. Heck, you can't watch a guy fall all day. Anyway, for their sakes I hope to catch up to them again to finish my story. But I may wait til spring.

What I'm afraid of.

When I was in high school, one of my teachers asked each of us to tell the class what we were afraid of. Actually, since she was an English teacher she probably asked us to tell of what we were afraid, but, whatever. As we went around the room, there were the expected answers of snakes, spiders, drowning, the dark, etc. At 16 years old, I had to think about it for a while and since none of that stuff scared me (I was, after all, 10 feet tall and bullet proof) I finally answered truthfully that really the only thing that scared me was accidentally running over a person, especially a child, while I was driving.

Now that I'm older (and about 5 feet tall and barely waterproof) I have a few more fears than I did as a kid but truthfully, that fear still haunts me. I think about it often as I drive, especially through residential areas, going slow and watching closely. It has paid off many times as I have seen the ball go rolling into the street and I'm aware enough to expect some little crumb-cruncher to come running after it. I've never even come close to my worst fear. Until today.

I wasn't in a hurry but I was pulling through the gas pumps at the local QT just a hair too fast. I was maybe doing 5 mph when I probably should have been doing 3. Not exactly Indy 500 stuff here but just almost too fast to see the little 2 year old run around the pump and stop literally inches from my front bumper, close enough she put her hand on my grill and then ran off again, continuing across the lanes of pumps until a lady grabbed her and hollered at her mom who was pumping gas three lanes over unaware that her daughter nearly had a really bad day.

I just sat there for a minute or two and composed myself. I wanted to say something to the mom but she had already thrown the kid into the backseat and taken off by the time I got around to getting out.

She will never know.

And hopefully I won't either.

Friday Quote

‎"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." –John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, 1780