Mix One Part Hatred with Two Parts Goofiness, Then Stir Slowly

Don't you just hate it when you ask your dog a question and he just stands there and doesn't answer, no tail wag, no smile, not anything?


Sometimes I live a very dangerous eXistence. I just had to trim my bad fingernail on my right thumb with a steak knife, using my left hand - and I am right handed. Oooh, I know what you're thinking.


Someone wrote: You know the economy is tough when you see two "Hell's Angels" doubled up on a Honda.

My Response: That madE mE rEally laugh hard. I EvEn havE EnlargEd E's from laughing too hard. That doesn't really mean anything, I just write goofy things after 1 AM. It was 1 AM about 34 years ago almost eXactly, and ever since, bam! -goofy-


United States President Barack Obama has asked the Islamic Republic of Iran for the downed RQ-170 Sentinel aircraft that crashed near Kashmar on December 4. (CNN)

I'm sure he will use a legal defense, "we were just hiking and didn't realize we were in Iran". Then the plane will spend a year and a half in an Iranian hangar, a cold dark smelly hangar, before the Sultan of Oman hands over a million dollars for it.


Remember that thing earlier in that paragraph about the fingernail, left hand and steak knife where I said I knew what you were thinking? Well, it turns out that I didn't.


Alcohol-free blog post - no alcohol was consumed during the production of this particular blog post. (Now I'm not sure if that was a good or bad idea.)

Update: What am I singing/humming this morning? George Harrison doing "Here Comes The Sun", perhaps I am just eXcited about some Texans coming home from far away later today! Here comes the son and daughter-in-law and puppy, yea!

My Idea for an Iranian TV Show: "Is Your Cleric Smarter Than A German Shepherd?"

Early this morning I read two and only two news stories. The first one involved a dog who helped save his family's house from fire and the other was an article about an Iranian cleric giving earthquake advice.

The first article tells how a German Shepherd dog, named Buddy, came to the aid of an Alaskan man who accidentally started a fire and then the dog got involved leading the authorities to the site after a GPS unit had failed. The event was recorded on the web cam of the patrol car.

Link to Dog Story

The second article was about an Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati who gave earthquake advice during a recent Friday sermon. He  told people that giving alms and praying for forgiveness would prevent earthquakes. ("Offering plate tectonics" ?) This comes a week after another Iranian cleric had mentioned that earthquakes were caused by promiscuous women. 

That made me want to know their position on Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, and Alien Crop Circles, as well as do they believe that Elvis Presley still walks among us.

From yahoo news which quoted the Iranian news: "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes," Sedighi was quoted as saying by Iranian media. Sedighi, like Jannati, serves as one of Tehran's acting Friday prayer leaders.

I think that the Iranian people need to learn to do a better job of not allowing ignorant people to become or remain their leaders, either in the positions of government or religion. Besides, it sounds like these two idiot clerics stole their "Sin Equals Earthquakes" idea from the American Pat Robertson who blamed Haitian earthquake troubles on sins committed a long time ago by people who aren't even alive. (I am hoping that the average Iranian citizen is smarter than all this nonsense, please please please, say its so. Prove it by getting these people out of office and into an insane asylum, rest home for the aged or 4th grade science class, as students, where they belong.)

Link to Cleric Story

Clerics, I will keep this next part really simple for you and write these sentences with as few words as possible and use short words as well. Okay? Here we go ....

Earth big. Earth moves. In different places. With different amounts of energy. At random times. Unpredictable. But measurable.

See? ... that wasn't so hard.

Whether or not you believe in the field of plate tectonics, you can set up experiments and measure the distance that the pieces of the earth move, actually and accurately see that a pair of plates move and keeps moving in the same direction.

Iran just happens to sit in a very active earthquake zone.

A few years ago the Iranian city of 97 thousand people with the onomatopoetic name of Bam was devastated by an earth quake that killed approximately one fourth of its people and injured a larger fraction. Had the people sinned? Hmmmm, well, if you call building your houses out of dried mud in an earthquake zone a sin, then you have your own answer.

Iranians would be served by better building codes, not dress codes, and my TV show idea. At least people all over the world have learned to depend on dogs to rescue people trapped in earthquakes. I have never heard of a rescue team of clerics.

"Is Stan Back from Uzbekistan?" - The Saga of an Exotic Pet Broker in the Middle East

This is the rough draft of a poem I started early this morning.

Give the Uzi back to Stan so he can safely go backpack through the peaks of Pakistan, searching for strange and many a wonderful pet, things our customers are unlikely to forget. But knowing him from previous trips, and how his brain has been known for its “skips” like that trip one time, he wound where? We found him crashed in a pub of Tashkent in The Republic of Uzbekistan, singing on and on cheery bar songs about Norm and Cliff and confused them with hiking trips he had taken in his youth near the French Normandy cliffs.

And if he loses his visa, and has to pay, that might not teach him a lesson or it possibly may.

And if he gets lost in Turkmenistan, then send again in our Armenian men from the home office of Turkey to find Stan our man, and remind him again to stick to his agenda: ‘Find Exotics For Us Plan', please Stan.

But don’t be surprised if he gets lost again, and if Stan’s ‘mental compass’ fails in a forest, and there's no one there to hear our man, when he fails, when he falls or even if he calls, will there be a hero for our Stan man?

And if Stan again gets another dog in Afghanistan, smuggled in from the East of Iran from a clandestine not-so-sure he’s was such a reputable man, who tells our Stan, “Oh, you’re a big canine fan, and Poochie is the finest Afgan best-friend-of-man”, and he hounds Stan until he not only buys just one pooch Afgan (that's really a French poodle with big aft gams) that strangely resembles a wooly on-steroids baby lamb, (baa-ark!), but the seller misunderstood the Stan order as “Okay, nine is fine” and then suddenly everyone hears our German friend Stan the Shepard arrive on the unloading dock with a flock of dog-sheep-dogs, just please, just please don’t have any one back at the exotic pet store roar, “oh, man, oh, man, he’s flocked up again!” as that will just confuse and anger many a man, and especially the Sultan, the top guy on that eastern tip of Arabia, known as Oman.

POETRY LINK: the next poem in my blog ...