Old Soldiers Should Fade Away

When he retired, General MacArthur said, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” That’s not true; some soldiers should fade away, but don’t. Ulysses Grant was an example; during the Civil War he was only general who could successfully command every front for the North, but after winning the war, he got [...]

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You May Be a Taliban If . . .

Afghanistan hasn’t been in the news much lately, so today my brother sent me this fun list.
You May Be a Taliban If . . .
1. You refine heroin for a living, but you have a moral objection to beer.
2. You own a $3,000 machine gun and $5,000 rocket launcher, but you can’t afford shoes.
3. You [...]

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What American Accent Do You Have?

Here’s a fun little quiz I took yesterday. You answer twelve questions on what words sound like to you, and it tells you what kind of accent you speak English with. I figured my accent would be labeled “California” or “Hollywood,” because I never noticed much of a difference between my words and [...]

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I’m Being Used as Ammo in a Flame War

Six minutes after I posted the previous message about the Uncyclopedia, I got a comment from somebody who loved it. Now that’s quick; I was correcting a typo in the first message when that arrived!
From time to time I check the stats of this blog to see where my traffic’s coming from, and have [...]

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Wikipedia’s Evil Twin

Or should I say, “Bizarro Wikipedia?” Over the past five years I’ve seen Wikipedia grow to become one of the most popular sites on the Internet, right up there with YouTube and Google. During my last year as a teacher in Florida, I recommended Wikipedia as a reference source to my class, but [...]

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I Got My Car Back, and Other Stories

Got the call at 11 AM today that the Buick was ready, so I called my pastor to get a ride to the shop.  I feel much better now; Leive once said that in America, where homes and businesses are spread so far apart, living without a car is like being handicapped, because it’s so [...]

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Forty Reasons to Say No to the Clintons–Again

While organizing a folder full of really old files (mostly from the 1990s) on my hard drive, I found this editorial, which had been written by Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe in October 1996, shortly before Bill Clinton was elected to a second term in the White House. Change the title to “40 [...]

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Shut In for Another Day

I just got a call from the body shop I went to yesterday. The car’s new bumper is on, but the paint won’t be dry until about noon tomorrow. Therefore Leive and I won’t be going anywhere today. However, I will need to do some grocery shopping as soon as I get [...]

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Can I Skip This Year’s Recession?

I mentioned near the end of December that I had a little fender-bender in a bank parking lot. Well, this morning I took the car to a repair shop in the Athens area, to get a new front bumper; that seems to be the place to go for honest work. The man there [...]

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White Dawn

It started snowing about the time I woke up this morning, and by the time I went to work, we had an inch on the ground, with a full-fledged snowstorm blowing more down.  The reflection of light off the snow was so bright, even while the sky was still dark, that I could turn off [...]

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