Mondays Missives

• Regardless of the endeavour, when starting out with something new you'd be hard pressed to find material more helpful than the For Dummies series. There are 1500 titles in 24 different languages in the series, look for them in 1/2 price bookstores.




• I'd nearly be willing to bet Don Imus has Parkinson's.




• I bought some carved animals year ago that have leather stretched over the carved part to represent hide- very pretty, interesting pieces of art originating in India. The funny/strange thing about them is when new they had a faint odor of urine. This dissipated over time to nothing but, a slight baseball glove smell. I'd forgotten about this until a guy I worked with mentioned travelling extensively in Mexico in the 70s. He related making his way to the coast and going deep sea fishing, he reported one of the biggest surprises of the trip was seeing Mexican tanners treat shark skin for custom boots by urinating on them.



• Man, I love sweet tea. Not too long ago I was in a sort of fancy restaurant and asked for sweet tea the guy who took my order literally rolled his eyes at me and in his most practiced, condescending tone said,"Sir, we do not serve sweet tea here."



• Alright dude, come down to earth here a little bit- we are in Fort Worth Texas not Martha's Vineyard.


• Just finished re-reading Stolen Valor by Burkett. If you are curious about the Vietnam war, it's impact on popular culture and how and why Vietnam Vets are portrayed the way they are- read this book. He tackles issues ranging from Agent Orange, PTSD to war fakers (and there are a lot of these) If you read it you'll be surprised at who has lied publicly or falsified their war service and I'm talking iconic images from actors to politicians to the idiots we've all seen on the covers of magazines slumped against the Vietnam Memorial bawling their eyes out.