Notes From The Road

My new titanium spork has a bottle opener attached. I don't know when I would use it as such but it made a good tent stake puller

• Roswell cop cars are ugly.
• There weren't as many Mexican radio stations out that way as I thought there would be.
• A lot of the towns had a concert venue and/or performing arts center of some type. We just missed Clint Black and Don Edwards was coming some time after we left.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  

  Inside Artesia's visitors center. I couldn't get an answer why a safe needed a press attached to it.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Academically I knew NM was a big state for agriculture but I had to see it to believe it- cotton and grain fields that went on for mile after mile and stretched to the horizon in every direction.
• There weren't as many people there as I thought there would be from Texas.
• We didn't see any javelinas except in a zoo. There were plenty of animals though. I saw one rattlesnake and more lizards than I have seen in my entire life.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The little zoo in Roswell is free and well worth it. Prairie dogs burrow right along the walking paths.
• We didn't make it to Lincoln National Park or the attractions in Lincoln County- there was just too much to see and do. We flat ran out of time.

Psst, Want Some Ludes?

Yes that says what you think it says and yes it is a real, full 1970s vintage sample bottle of Quaze. When my sister found it in my mom's belongings she gave it to me as I worked in pharmacy. We made some good natured jokes about mom's high strung nature and left it at that. I could have told you I took them home as I wanted to show a pharmacist I worked with (his mom was placed on Valium back in the day for the sin of telling her doc she was a little nervous one day) but had no independent recall of where they were specifically and could not have found them without turning the house upside down if my life depended on it.

Here is were it gets weird.

On vacation I reached into my bag (a CVC bag I used in Iraq) for something and felt a container I did not pack and pulled this little gem out. The thing is- there isn't a chance I put it there- ever. It had to drift into the outside pocket of that bag by accident while in a box of other crap from the detritus of one of my former lives. 

The trouble is: what if an overzealous cop or an airport screener saw it ? 

Bingo! Book him Danno!, they would say as they wet their little britches in excitement. Cah-rap! I would say as I saw my various endorsements and licenses and freedoms fly out the window.

And then- I would become another statistic in the war on drugs.

Wednesday's Digressions

Too be filed under could only happen to me: as I was sitting down on the side of the bed I slipped causing my leg to go up making the ball of my foot impact on one of the sprocket gears to my bicycle.

• Cow and Chicken still makes me laugh.
• Remember Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa? It had it's moments. They totally stole my idea where cowboys in the old west were actually cows.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  

  People don't believe me when I tell them my eldest is a pyrate.

  
  
• A Dennis Miller special is on. I don't know if I still love him or not- it has been years since I saw anything of his. He is killing in Orange County-the house is packed and receiving him well.
• In the olden days of Netflix I started a thing at work where you dropped your Netflix DVDs in a basket in the break room, If you wanted to watch one you took it. Whether you watched it or not you put it in the mail first thing the next day. When I went back to work for the same organization 10 years later people remembered that dumb, simple funny thing.
  
  

  

  Apparently just to be stupid and awful some stupid awful excuse for a human broke the mechanism off this sundial in Botanic Garden

• Yesterday (10/02/2014) I had a chop house cheeseburger with jalapenos and a cinnamon roll for breakfast.
• It nauseates me to read that sentence.
• The amount of salad and bread wasted at Olive Garden annually would be a literally staggering number. This is so true it is a defect in their business model. 
• I don't see any expiration date...

Various And Sundry Thoughts With Irrelevant Pics

Roswell alien. They come at night and rummage through our garbage to learn our secrets.

• In my teens I was invited to hang around to be considered for little brother status in a motorcycle gang club. I went to their family homes and outdoor meetings and rode on the back of a chopper a time or two.
• That factoid and a quarter will get you well, basically nothing but it still makes me think- all these years later. The first thing I think of is: what were those older people of every stripe thinking when they hung out with me? I mean really- from cops to teachers to yes a full on 1%R who could have been killed if he hadn't the right to wear the patches he wore- what were  they doing hanging out with a 14 year old kid and yes, doing the things we often did? Well, each in their own way were trying to help me find my way.
• I wish I could thank some of them and let them know I turned out more or less OK but one of them shares a name with a famous person so a web search is pretty useless and I cannot find anything on the other two I think of often. No, Facebook is the Debil and I try to stay away from deviltry.

  

  FG's Jack Skellington shirt

• A loosely connected thought to the first bullet point: back in the day bikers almost always rode choppers- not all but a guess I would not bet my life on would be +/- 60%. Today they're much more likely to ride a standard glide of some type.
• Mrs. Paschall has died. She was a nice lady and always treated us well when we went into the 5 and dime on the square in Decatur. One of our teachers Mr. Tindol bought the store after she and Frank left it. Mr. Tindol accused us of being there to steal stuff shortly after we walked in.  It didn't last long.
• Another legend Ms Cocanougher died recently. She was very sweet and decent. If you didn't know her name- you know her face if you're a contemporary to me in the Big D. 
• An old family friend is also gone. We called her Mud. 

  

  Random guy in restaurant wearing a shirt that struck me as humorously creepier than he intended

• I also noted too many people around my own age while reading the WCM obits. Some I knew, some I knew of and a couple I figured by their relationship status to the decedent I simply had to know but must have oddly forgotten. 

  

  Breakfast of champions

• 3: the number of degrees of separation I have from one of the Ebola nurses (if you need another reason to stay away from me).
• A natural fact:  sooner rather than later China will be at war.
  

  

  Line at the Weatherford America Wal Marts to buy  .22 LR bullets. They were waiting there for an hour plus for the shells to be put out. The sporting goods counter even  put out coffee and doughnuts. When I was a kid everybody had a .22 because it was cheap to shoot and everybody sold  22 cal rounds. You could get them at hardware stores and it wasn't unheard of for a convenience store to sell them. If you went into the right store and your face was known you could get them as a 10-12 year old kid. Now, they are expensive when you can find them at all and everybody lines up like it is free gubmint cheese day. I don't even know you anymore America. 

Monday's Missives

• My encounter at the burrito place this morning (08/08/2014) : Hi, how may I help you? A steak and egg burrito please. OK, a bacon and egg burrito. Would you like a drink with that? No, a steak and egg burrito. OK, a bacon and egg burrito. I'll have your total at the window. Resigning myself to a bacon and egg burrito I pulled forward. You had the bacon and egg burrito- right? Well, actually it was steak and egg but a bacon and egg will be OK. Oh steak and egg?! I'm sorry. I'll get that for you. A few  minutes later she returned and handing me my food said, Its bacon and egg. Thats OK I said. Have a great day! she said.
• On opening the bag I found a steak and egg burrito.
• There is an ice cream shop on Rosedale called Melt. Invariably when I drive by people are taking pictures of themselves in front of the building.
• Melt is trending on social media!
• #melt
• It is a funny thing when there are efforts to recover a neighborhood and draw in a better crowd of people, especially when it is in that weird in between place and it isn't quite there yet. I have literally driven by that place and seen hipsters taking selfies in front of the place and within 10 feet of them there was a semiconcious homeless person sitting there with a brown bag wrapped 40 ouncer between his legs.
• I'm waiting for that to happen but instead of a wino with a 40  it will be a dead crackhead.
• Deftones B Sides and Rarities- what I listend to all this morning. Great band for studio recording- terrible live.
• Although I don't want to sound like a nitpicker- it has always bothered me that flying squirrels are called flying squirrels as they glide and do not fly.

" There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare. There must be a battle, a brave boisterous battle, with pennants waving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands." Mary Elizabeth Braddon

I think he knew your grandma

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• Guess who saw Fury yesterday (10/25/2014)?
• Best war movie I have seen in years and it is one of the best ever. 
• The story line was plausible. The weapons and uniforms were great. There was nothing I could fault with the production values in general. Oddly, I just realized- nothing stuck with me about the music- maybe that is the way it was supposed to be.
• It reminded me: conventional wisdom has it even before they started dying of old age by the hundreds every day; you just didn't meet that many old timer M4 Sherman tank crewmen among World War II vets- too many died during the war.

  

  A Sherm with one of my old unit's crest on it's side.



M4s at Kasserine edit: My guess is the tanks were at the Desert Training Center in Cali- not the Faid Pass in Tunisia. (thanks Captain S.)

• Like a lot of other weird things we believe, the M4 wasn't that terrible of a tank- especially earlier in the war.  The use of  it was not due to a lack of care and concern for our troops and a case of war planners and politicians looking at our troops as fodder to feed the War Beast. There were some mathematics involved though. The Germans weren't making enough of the really big bad tanks that outclassed the M4 to turn the tide and if we had switched to a heavier tank, production of the already good and proven Sherman would have had to suffer.  Also and again, I guess this is mathematical and in war to come out on the losing ending of an algebraic equation is to die but look at the literally legendary Tiger tank. It came out early in the war and was was feared like few other vehicles by the allies. It was it's gun that made it fearsome- the 88mm. The tank itself was generally reliable but it's problems were kinda biggies. I don't want to belabor the point (or argue) but something like 1000 Tiger 1s were made and more like 40,000 Shermans were produced. More vehicles does mean more you can lose but it also means more you have to use for point on assaults and providing infantry units with support etc. 
• We could have hung a better gun and installed better optics on the M4 and no one today would really be arguing which was better between the Axis and Allies tanks. 
• Yep, I guess also it could have been diesl powered and possessed of 200 more horsepower and had thicker armor... but then if we knew everything then we know now and we had a time machine I would go back and strangled life out of little Adolf in his crib while Alois and Klara slept.
• I am not being rude or disrespectful since we're discussing a US tank crew in WWII but I'm also not incorrect when I tell you this man is the idol of every studious US armor crewman.

  

  Die before I kill you.

• I had always wanted a realistic movie to be made about US armored crewmen but especially once I saw The Beast about a Russian crew in Afghanistan. The concept is the same though- is The Beast (or Fury in this case) the tank as we suppose or is it the tank commander or something living within the individual crewmen's hearts or mankind itself...?
• Anyway, the tone was set in the movie within the first few seconds and didn't require any stupid back stories or flashbacks to the sweeties the guys left behind or whatever.

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  A great pic of a Sherman and Tiger locked in a death embrace

  
  
  
  
• The humor was great- dark and absolutely genuine to a group of soldiers
  
• There isnothing like being in a column of vehicles heading out for a combat patrol. You know this may be your last day on earth- you may be entering your last moment. You get a knot in your stomach and your mouth goes dry. You throw a splash of water in your mouth turning your Copenhagen snuff to mud and pull your fireproof gloves on your hands. You look back at your best friend to make sure you see him for last time in case one of you dies today. He gives you a stupid grin and flips you off. OK. All Cobra elements this is Cobra 32 lock and load your weapons and tell me when you're up. and then about 60 seconds later, All Cobra elements roll- time now the patrol leaders voice says over the radio. Amid the smell of dirt, snuff, sweat and diesel fuel exhaust we roll into the unknown.
• Why do we still make war, we should be much too evolved for it- right? It makes literally no sense. Why do we do it? That is probably why we still do it- it makes no sense and it is exciting.

  

  Dead Germans being dead in the mud in front of a Sherman not wondering about which tank was better in WWII.

  
  

                                                         

Good Night Sweet Prince

                                   

Alvin Stardust Dead Of Death On This Day of Our Lord Oct. 23, 2014- My Coo Ca Choo

                                             

This Day In History: Charles Pretty Boy Floyd Dead At The Hands Of G-Men In An Apple Orchard in Ohio 1934

His funeral in Oklahoma was attended by as many as 40,000 people- still the largest in OK history.

 

My Day Started With MGMT- Kids How Did Yours Start?

If you like it check out Electric Feel. Come for the cool music, stay for the weird video.

My New High Art Print

I call it, SPEW. Signed copies are available as you exit through the gift shop.

Booties Pooches, New Mexican Scenery and Various Drive By Shootings

A weird thing about humans: I spoke to this lady multiple times and if my life depended on it I couldn't tell you her name but her dogs were named Rayne and Burke.

FG: My key poked a hole in my pants. Do you want to take a picture for your dumb blog?

Drive-by pic of a church building in Roswell

Why are water towers near old airfields and military bases often red checked? 

Sunrise as viewed from the tent

Same but more glary.

Why so far away mountain?

There- that looks better.

Aaaaaah- too close mountain. Personal space! Get out of my face would you?!

Mud flats

are flat and muddy.

You think you found a real Army-Navy store but instead, you find disappointment and missed/disregarded opportunities for the owner to make a lot more money and have an interesting landmark that would draw people from near and far but yeah- go visit anyway when in Roswell.