Brad's Worlds

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

If you visit the South, please keep the following in mind... If you're going to live, or visit in the South, you need to know the rules. In an effort to help outsiders understand the rules of the Southerner's mind, the following list will be handed to each person as they enter a Southern State.

1. That farm boy you see at the gas station did more work before breakfast than you do all week at the gym.

2. It's called a "gravel road," No matter how slow you drive, you're going to get dust on your Navigator. Drive it or get the heck out of the way.

3. The red dirt -- it's called clay. Red clay. If you like the color don't wash your car for a couple weeks -- it'll be permanent.

4. We all started hunting and fishing when we were seven years old. Yeah, we saw Bambi. We got over it.

5. Go ahead and bring your $600 Orvis Fly Rod. Don't cry to us if a flathead breaks it off at the handle. We have a name for those little 13-inch trout you fish for -- bait.

6. Pull your pants up. You look like an idiot.

7. If that cell phone rings while a bunch of mallards are making
their final approach, we will shoot it. You might want to ensure it's
not up to your ear at the time.

8. No, there's no "Vegetarian Special" on the menu. Order steak.
Order it rare. Or, you can order the Chef's Salad and pick off the two
pounds of ham and turkey.

9. Tea - yeah, we have tea. It comes in a glass over ice and is
sweet. You want it hot -- sit it in the sun. You want it unsweetened --
add a lot of water.

10. You bring Coke into my house, it better be brown, wet, and served
over ice.

11. So you have a sixty thousand-dollar car. We're real impressed.
We have a quarter of a million-dollar combine that we only use two weeks
a year.

12. Let's get this straight. We have one stoplight in town. We stop
when it's red. We may even stop when it's yellow.

13. We eat dinner together with our families. We pray before we eat
(yeah, even breakfast). We go to church on Wednesdays and Sundays and
we go to high school football games on Friday nights. We still address
our seniors with "yes, sir" and "yes, ma'am," and we sometimes still
take Sunday drives around town to see friends and neighbors.

14. We don't do "hurry up" well.

15. Greens - yeah, we have greens, but you don't putt on them. You
boil them with salty fatback, bacon or a ham hock.

16. Yeah, we eat catfish, bass, bream and carp. You really want
sushi and caviar? It's available at the bait shop.

17. They are pigs. That's what they smell like. Get over it. Don't
like it? Interstate 85 goes two ways - Interstate 40 goes the other
two. Pick one.

18. Grits are corn. You put butter, salt, and maybe even some pepper
on them. If you want to put milk and sugar on them, then you want cream
of wheat - go to Kansas. That would be I-40 west.

19. The "Opener" refers to the first day of deer season or dove
season. Both are holidays. You can get pancakes, cane syrup, and
sausage before daylight at the church on either day.

20. So every person in every pickup waves? Yeah, it's called being
friendly. Understand the concept?

21. Yeah, we have golf courses. Don't hit in the water hazards. It
spooks the fish and bothers the gators -and if you hit it in the rough,
we have these things called diamondbacks, and they're not baseball
players.

22. That Highway Patrol Officer that just pulled you over for driving
like an idiot -- his name is "Sir," no matter how young he is.

23. We have lots of pine trees. They have sap. It drips from them.
You park your Navigator under them, and they'll leave a logo on your
hood.

24. You burn an American flag in our state, you get beat up. No
questions. The liberal contingent of our state legislature -- all four
of them -- enacted a measure to stop this. There is now a $2.50 fine
for beating up the flag burner.

25. No, we don't care how you do things up North. If it is so great
up there why not visit a Northern state or stay there. And no, down
here, we don't have an accent, you do.

Monday, June 27, 2005

What are the Odds???

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

Sometimes in your life things happen that are too strange to explain. Blah, blah, blah, here's my story. I'm buying a car and had some questions that only the Department of Motor Vehicles could help me with. I haven't been into a DMV since I got my license renewed over 3 years ago. Who is sitting in the far corner of the dmv? My ex-wife. She lives 65 miles away from this dmv but lives in a town that has a dmv. She's with a guy, no problem. We're movin' on. We speak. No problem. But what are the odds of that happening? I could understand if it were in Wal-Mart or Pizza Hut or someplace we both frequent. But not at a place where you only have to go to any of their many many statewide locations for about and hour every 1460 days.

For fear's sake, I'll stop there. But, in music history:

1962, Hank Ballard and The Midnighters who wrote and first recorded "The Twist" are scheduled to perform the song for American Bandstand but have to cancel the date ... Chubby Checker is hired as a replacement to perform his version of "The Twist," which will climb higher on the pop chart than Ballard's original, twice ... it will hit number one, and then do it again a year later...

1963, 13-year-old Stevie Wonder's "Fingertips Pt. 2" becomes his first of 61 records to chart...

1969, Mick Taylor makes his stage debut with The Rolling Stones at a concert in Rome ... he replaces Brian Jones and will stay with the band until 1975 when he retires and is replaced by Ron Wood...

1970, the cops in Niagara Falls discover Chubby Checker packing pot and some other illegal substances...

1977, Elvis makes his last public appearance at The Market Square in Indianapolis ... "Can't Help Falling In Love" is the last song he sings ...

1993, two of the world's most beautiful people, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, become husband and wife ... the union will last for two years...

1998, Paul McCartney personally selects and arranges the flowers--45,000 of them--at Manhattan Riverside Church where friends and family gather to say farewell to his wife Linda...

1998, Johnny Cash returns to the stage for the first time since being diagnosed with Shy-Drager Syndrome months earlier ... he walks onstage surprising Kris Kristofferson who is singing "Sunday Morning Coming Down" at a Cash and Waylon Jennings tribute concert at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville ... the song was the one a young and unknown Kristofferson had hand-delivered to Cash after landing a helicopter on his lawn in a creative attempt to get his music into the hands of someone who could help him gain recognition as a songwriter...

1999, Eric Clapton auctions off 100 of his guitars to raise funds for his Crossroads Center, a drug and alchohol addiction treatment center in Antigua ... among the guitars sold is his famous "Brownie" which fetches a cool $497,500, topping the $320,000 paid for Jimi Hendrix's guitar...

2000, Michael Jackson is slapped with a lawsuit by German promotor Marcel Avram ... the suit alleges that Jackson refused to perform two scheduled events ... it is a small problem for Jackson compared with future trials he will face...

Deaths today in history:
The Who bassist John Entwistle (2002), Stefanie Ann Sargent of 7 Year Bitch (1992), Hillel Slovak of The Red Hot Chile Peppers (1988), Steve Took of T-Rex (1980), opera diva Carlotta Patti (1889)


Tuesday, June 21, 2005

EZLIVN

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

Man I love the Grass Roots. I think they said it best in the song "Live For Today". Check out the lyrics here. Speaking of music:

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Week In Review


Lollapalooza Lost ... The Crüe Sued ... Zeppelin's Final Tour

This is the week that was in matters musical...

1948, Columbia Records begins mass production of the 33-1/3 RPM LP...

1955, Sun Records releases Johnny Cash's first single, "Cry Cry Cry" ... it is the first in a line of well over 100 hit singles by Cash to appear on the Country, Rock, and Pop charts...

1963, Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" hits number one on the U.S. pop charts ... it is the first and last Japanese song to do so ... the song, about a man trying to hold back his heartbroken tears, was originally recorded for the Japanese market as "Ue o Muite Aruko" (Looking Up As I Walk) ... the UK group Kenny Ball and the Jazzmen recorded a version of it and retitled it "Sukiyaki" after a type of Japanese cuisine ... American DJ Richard Osbourne of the Pasco, Washington, radio station KORD started playing Sakamoto's original version, with the Anglo-cized "Sukiyaki" title ... the song remains at number one for three weeks and sells over a million copies in the States ... on August 12, 1985, at the age of 43 Sakamoto will be killed along with 519 other passengers in the worst airline accident in Japan's history...

1966, The Beatles album Yesterday... And Today is released by Capitol in the original and soon-to-be controversial butcher sleeve ... the cover shows the Beatles garbed in white butcher's smocks and smiling cherubically amidst bloody cuts of meat and dismembered baby dolls ... assembled from B-sides and UK album leftovers, it is the last album created for the American market without the group's direct consent ... the cover is intended to represent how the LP and albums like it are a melange of chopped-up pieces of music ... the negative backlash rolls in just days later and Capitol scrambles to replace the cover with a tamer one ... the company pastes a new band photo over the original sleeve on thousands of already-manufactured copies ... as a consequence it is the only U.S. Beatles album to ever show a loss on Capitol's books ... it makes lots of money for record collectors over the years, however, as the the original quickly becomes a valuable collectors' item ... lots of fans will ruin their Yesterday... And Today album sleeves by attempting to pull off the replacement cover to view the original...

1969, Jimi Hendrix earns what is in its day the largest paycheck ever paid to a performer for a single show; $125,000 for a single set at the Newport Jazz Festival ... the three-day music fest gathers 150,000 people in Northridge, California to hear and see Hendrix, Steppenwolf, Jethro Tull, Joe Cocker, CCR, Ike and Tina Turner, and more...

1970, "Cinnamon Girl" by Neil Young goes gold...

1973, The Rocky Horror Picture Show opens for the first time in London ... two years later Tim Curry will reprise his role for the movie version...

1980, The Blues Brothers, starring Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi, premieres in New York City ... oodles of musicians appear in cameos including James Brown, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Steve Cropper, Donald "Duck" Dunn, Murphy "Murph" Dunne, Aretha Franklin, Willie "Too Big" Hall, John Lee Hooker, Chaka Khan, Tom Malone, "Blue" Lou Marini, Matt "Guitar" Murphy, Pinetop Perkins, and Joe Walsh ... in addition to its many significant and hilarious musical numbers the film also boasts the biggest car-crash sequence ever filmed for a motion picture...

1980, Led Zeppelin begins a three-week tour with a concert in Dortmund, Germany ... held at the Westfalenhalle, it is their first concert on the European continent since 1973 ... due to John Bonham's death in September, it will be the group's last European tour ... they open the show with "Train Kept A Rollin," a song they haven't played since 1969 and which Page also performed with the original Yardbirds ... the Tiny Bradshaw composition was popularized by Johnny Burnette and will later be covered by rockers ranging from Alex Chilton to Motorhead to--most famously--Aerosmith...

1982, James Honeyman-Scott of the Pretenders dies of a cocaine and heroin overdose in his sleep in London at the age of 25 ... ironically the guitarist was among the band members who voted out bass player Pete Farndon for drug abuse a mere two days earlier ... after Honeyman-Scott's death frontwoman Chrissie Hynde pens the tune "Back on the Chain Gang" as a tribute to him ... the song will go on to be one of the band's biggest hits ... guitarist Robbie McIntosh, whom Honeyman-Scott was trying to talk into joining the band just before his untimely death, is enlisted to replace him ... a year later Pete Farndon will also die from drug-related causes...

1987, Mötley Crüe is sued by a woman claiming that she lost her hearing because a Crüe concert she attended was too loud ... the Florida real estate agent was sitting in the front row when she suffered the hearing damage ... the band's insurance company eventually pays her $30,000 ... no one knows what type of volume level she was expecting at a concert by a band called Mötley Crüe...

1990, Little Richard receives his star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame...

1993, the U.S. Postal Service releases a set of stamps that feature iconic images of Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Clyde McPhatter, Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, Ritchie Valens, and Dinah Washington...

1994, Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff is found slumped over her bathtub, dead of a heroin overdose ... next to her body is a cosmetic bag with more than just lipstick inside ... tragically, this occurs just after Kristen had packed her bags to move back to Minneapolis in order to escape Seattle and its too-easy-to-cop drug scene ... Pfaff dies just two months after Kurt Cobain ended his life ... it's been a swell couple of months for Courtney Love...

1995, Pearl Jam begins the infamous Ticketmaster Monopoly tour ... the band will, with mixed results, use a mail-order ticket service instead of the industry-standard Ticketmaster distribution ... PJ is frustrated by the company's attempts to raise ticket prices for their concerts above the mandated $20 price tag ... the band accuses the ticket giant of monopolizing the concert ticket industry and the U.S. Justice Department investigates ... guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament will testify before a House subcommittee to no avail...

1996, the Furthur Festival kicks off in Atlanta ... the surviving members of The Grateful Dead perform together for the first time since the death of Jerry Garcia...

1999, Pantera ride a float in the Dallas Stars Stanley Cup victory parade in downtown Dallas ... the honor is bestowed upon the band because Pantera, in addition to being huge Stars fans, wrote the team's theme song which is played multiple times at every home game...

2004, faced with anemic ticket sales, the promoters of the Lollapalooza Festival pull the plug on the tour...organizers say they would lose millions if the tour went ahead as scheduled ... according to promoters the festival's problem lies with the death of the alternative music genre as a viable consumer market ... the situation elicits this quote from one: "The audience for true alternative rock just isn't that big anymore. Lollapalooza was big in the early '90s, when the scene was exploding, when you had bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and it was something new and truly 'alternative.' Now you turn on the TV and everyone is pierced. I saw Shrek 2 the other day, and there's a scene in it where one of the characters crowd-surfs." ... the planned headliners for the abortive festival were Morrissey, the Flaming Lips, the String Cheese Incident, and the Pixies ... also included on the bill were bands Le Tigre, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Modest Mouse, and Wilco.

Monday, June 20, 2005

What a weekend.

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

I had a long weekend. I took off Friday and went to a car show in Arkansas with my dad. I'd been saving up for months to buy a cool car. I had a pretty good idea about what I wanted. I'd been looking on ebay at different models. We got to the show early but it was raining. I thought that this would be bad. As we got closer to the show, I saw cars parked on the side of the road up to a mile from the car show. Luckily, my dad and I got a great parking spot. As I began to look at all of the vintage vehicles, I noticed that I was drooling. Cars ranged in prices from $500 to $69,000.
We trudged through the mud for a long time. I found every car and truck under the sun but none of the models I was looking for. After hours upon hours of walking looking at several hundred cars in the rain, my dad and I decided to get something to eat. Hamburger, fried, and a coke.....$10.50???? So after the ass-raping for food, dad decided that his legs had had enough and said he was gonna sit in the truck for a little while. What's this??? The rain is stopping. Oh yeah. Keep in mind that cars come in and leave constantly all weekend so everytime you walk through, you see something different.
On my third round, I see the front end of what I think is the car I've been looking for. I already had a price that I was willing to pay. I look at the car and talk to the owner. It's well within what I was expecting to pay. I talk to him a little while and he gives me an even better price. I have to get dad. He's gotta see this. As soon as he sees it, his mouth drops open. He inspects the car and he's further impressed. When I tell him the price, he said it looked better than anything I'd been considering. He said I should go for it. I'm, by no means, an impulse shopper. I said I had to think about it. I check ebay to see if the price is high or low. Turns out, it's lower than ebay. Oh yeah. I sleep on it and can't find a reason not to buy.
The next day, my family went on a canoe trip down the Buffalo river. I get on my cell phone and from the middle of nowhere in a canoe, I buy a car. That's a first. After I relax from buying a car from a canoe, I see people cliff jumping. I watch for a while, to see how dangerous it is. After deciding that risk is my middle name, I decide to go for it. Oh how fun. After paddling for 7 hours, our fun canoe trip was over. My arms hurt. I'm such a wuss. But, I'm a wuss with a cool car.







Monday, June 13, 2005

Where Were You?

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

1957, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" hits the C&W charts for Jerry Lee Lewis ... the recording will ease on over to the pop charts within a week...

1958, Jerry Lee Lewis' producer, Sam Phillips, forces Lewis to sign an apologetic letter he then posts as a full-page ad in Billboard ... the letter is a vain attempt to bolster Lewis' plummeting reputation in the fallout from his divorce and subsequent marriage to 14-year-old second-cousin Myra ... though marriage to a second cousin of that age isn't such a big deal in the '50s southern U.S., the sanctimonious British press has turned it into a nightmare from which the Killer's career will never completely recover...

1964, The Rolling Stones know they have arrived when they get the chance to hang out with two of their idols, Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, while recording at Chicago's Chess studios ... the band's name is derived from a tune by Muddy...

1965, it is announced that The Beatles will receive MBE awards from Queen Elizabeth in October ... in the controversy that ensues, some previous recipients return their medals ... John Lennon returns his medal in 1969 signifying his displeasure with Britain's support for U.S. involvement in Vietnam...

1966, The Beatles record "Rain," which employs a reversed-tape effect for the first time in one of their songs ... it's the same technique that later results in the "Paul-is-dead" rumors ... John Lennon claims to have discovered the coolness of backwards tape when he accidentally put a working tape on his tape machine backwards while under the influence of illegal green stuff...

1966, rumors of Roger Daltrey's death are greatly exaggerated as European radios spew misinformation after Pete Townshend is injured in a car accident...

1969, multi-instrumentalist-turned-junkie and founder of The Rolling Stones Brian Jones announces he's leaving the band because he doesn't agree with their musical direction ... the band has had their fill of him and probably forced him out since his drugging and mental instability have prevented the Stones from touring the U.S. ... they will later joke about pranks they played on him such as having him record overdubs with no tape running ... hot blues guitarist Mick Taylor has already been lined up for the position and steps in as soon as Jones steps out ... within three weeks Jones will be found dead on the bottom of his pool...

1969, the Houston Astrodome hosts Soul Bowl '69, with perennial crowd pleasers Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and the Staple Singers...

1970, Derek and the Dominos hit the stage for the first time in Britain ... Clapton's much-feted collaboration with other former Delaney & Bonnie & Friends members (with a guest appearance by Duane Allman on D&D's only studio album) will play itself out by December...

1971, police panic when people start climbing over the fence at a Jethro Tull concert in Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver ... they drop tear gas from helicopters resulting in a general riot with lots of injuries ... averting disaster, Jethro Tull comes onstage in the middle of the ruckus--after the opening act flees--and plays their entire show while choking from tear gas fumes ... Red Rocks says no more rock concerts will be held there ... but they will eventually relent...

1974, king of the big keyboard sound Rick Wakeman parts ways with Yes to pursue a solo career ... he will rejoin the band for 1977's Going for the One, setting the pattern for decades of on-again/off-again relations...

1974, the Who sells out a four-night gig at Madison Square Garden in three days, two months before the show ... in the innocent world of 1974, that's a big deal...

Rolling Stone magazine that Little Feat has broken up after 10 years of musical matrimony ... Little Feat frontman, leader, and former Zappa sideman Lowell George won't live to see July...

1989, Jerry Lee Lewis, still going strong, gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame...

1991, Bruce Springsteen weds singer-songwriter Patti Scialfa who has been singing backup vocals with the Boss's E-Street Band for the past four years...

1992, a judge in L.A. dismisses a $25 million palimony suit brought by model Kelly Emberg against Rod Stewart ... she charges that they had lived together in a marital-like state between 1985 and 1990 and had a child together ... despite their current contretemps, sources close to Emberg report that she still thinks Rod is sexy

1992, feeling under the gun, Texas law enforcement officials call for a ban on Ice-T and Body Count's Cop Killer ... the album's sales double in the aftermath... Stupid cops.

1993, the movie What's Love Got to Do With It? opens to solid box office ... the biopic is based on Tina Turner's tell-all biography I Tina that details her stormy relationship with ex-husband Ike ... an anticipated counter-biography, I Ike, never materializes...

1994, Atlanta Falcon's wide receiver Andre Rison's Atlanta mansion burns to the ground ... it's determined that in a fit of pique his girlfriend Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes committed the arson...

1995, 90 minutes before he's to perform at a Texas police convention, country star Ty Herndon is busted by an undercover cop for drug possession ... he pleads guilty...

1998, a judge in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court hears opening arguments in a suit brought by the Ronettes against their former producer, Phil Spector, charging him with breaching their 34-year-old contract by failing to pay royalties ... in 2002 the reclusive studio guru is finally ordered to pay the girls $2.9 million plus interest...

2000, Sinead O'Connor outs herself in an article that appears in Curve magazine...

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

I Don't Like Spiders and Snakes........

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

Actually, I like spiders. But I'm terrified of snakes. Why am I talking about this? Friday, I'm waiting on my best bud Paul and his wife to come over. We have a night of intoxication to get to. I had been playing the bass and looking out my front window. When I play and look out the window, I prop my foot up on the window sill. The phone rang and I was in the middle of a conversation when, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!! I look down and just outside the window is a huge snake starring at me.

I'm so startled that I can't continue my phone conversation. Just at that moment, my friends pull up. They honk the horn, once, twice, three times a loady..... What the hell??? Anyway, I finally crack the door and try to yell for them to come help. It comes out like Mickey Mouse on crack. Finally, they come and see my problem. Paul isn't too fond of snakes but isn't a pussy like me. He tells me to find something to kill it with. I get him a ho. Now I've gotten Paul ho's in the past but.... that's a whole other story. I got paul a......rake. That's what it was. He tells me to get him a gun so when he gets the snake off of the window sill, he can take care of it. Oh shit. The snake went into my hedge. As Paul digs for it, I get my pistol.

Not that I don't trust paul with a gun, but I waited in the house along with his wife. Blam! Blam! Blam! "Damnit. I missed." As Paul wrestles with this hedge that the snake keeps slithering out of sight in, I call my uncle that lives next door. Paul gives up with the gun, with a little persuasion. So, my uncle arrives with a sling blade. "I like them french fried taters". What the hell???? Not that sling blade. This one is for clearing bushes. Some call it a brush hook. Anyway, whack. Prolbem solved.....almost.

What the hell do we do with this snake? I ask Paul to put the snake in the woods for me. He walks out of sight. I go back in the house and Pauls wife asks if Paul left some work boots in the back of my truck. I said I didn't think so but we could look. As I casually and calmly walk to my truck and look in the back......(I would've screamed again but somehow nothing would come out). I started backing up in a panicked state. Paul had put the snake in the bed of my truck. Evan cackles like a chicken. I tell Paul to get that damned snake out of my truck. He takes it away. If there ever was a day when a rubber snake would've come in handy, that would have been it.

Friday, June 03, 2005

Tomorrow is my Birthday!!!!

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

Tomorrow is my birthday. Am I excited? No. Not really. How old will I be? Let's just say that it will be my 1st anniversary of turning 29. You do the math. It's too depressing for me. What plans do I have, you may ask? I sense a lot of alcohol this weekend. Keep in mind. I rarely drink. I've drank less than a dozen times in my life. I may ruin that record this weekend. Well, maybe not. If I continue to drink all weekend, that's like, one time, right?

I Agree With Paul

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

I've been thinking about this whole so-called "Sin Tax" increase. Are teachers so underpaid? Read Pauls comment. Of just check it out for yourself. Here is a link to teachers salaries in Louisiana. Read Pauls comment. (yeah I said it again). I did the math too. Over $20 an hour. I hear all this bitchin about teachers not making anywhere near what cops make. That's entirely untrue. I was a cop for 3 years and never came close to making half that. The job I have now pays almost twice what I made as a cop and it's still nowhere close to that salary. So, take your stupid "sin tax" that's supposed to go to teachers salaries and flush it down the toilet and spend some time working on the roads, why don't you. We have the worst roads in the country. When Bill Clinton was president, he came to the General Motors plant in Shreveport, la. A lot of us were thinking, whew, now someone with real power will see our road problem and do something about it. You know what happened? They repaved ONLY the road from the airport to the G.M. plant so his ride would be more comfortable.
If one voice can make a difference, show me how.

Thursday, June 02, 2005

Some Things Are Just Too Much Trouble

Free Hit Counters
Ugg Boot

1. People try to start shit when there isn't shit to start. I live in a very small town. There isn't much to do here but gossip. I've nearly eliminated all contact to people in the same town because they're so full of crap and try to keep crap stirred up. Take this for example. Here's what happened. Jim walked across the street, got a coke from the machine, and returned to the bench where he was sitting, drank it and smoked a cigarette. What Saline people thought they saw. Jim was sitting on that bench looking like he was up to something. He waited until a white car with tinted windows drove past. He ran towards the car, kicking it like a madman. Got so hot he almost had a heat stroke. Staggering, he made it to the coke machine where he bought a bag of marijuana. See, Tom sells marijuana and hides it in the coin return of the coke machine. Jim bought the coke, obviously with drug money, and reached into the coin return and got the bag of marijuana. Returned to the bench, carefully watching for the white car, and began to drink the coke and smoke a joint. ...........................I need a joint after reading all of that bullshit.

2. The lake commission. In this great town that I live is a lake. It's known as Mill Creek Reservoir. We all refer to it as Saline Lake. I, as well as 90% of the population within 20 miles of it, learned to swim there. It was so cool. In the summer there would be boats, campers, music, and all that jazz. The main swimming parts of the lake are referred to as 1. the spillway 2. the point 3. the claybanks and 4. the watergate. Enter the lake commission. To be on the lake commission, you have to own waterfront land, as I'm told. Their goal was to clean up the lake, or so they said. Now they have iron gates where you can't enter the watergate, or point unless you pay to get in. How do you pay to get in? well, you have to be there at the exact moment when whoever they appoint to hold the key happens to drive by(in the few short years of the lake commission, I still don't know who this is). At the claybanks, my favorite place to swim for 25 years, they've cut trees to block the road and put up posted signs. You don't even have the option to pay to swim there. The spillway is never blocked where you can't get in but they have signs saying what time you can and cannot be there. Keep in mind this is a public boat launch. If there are 5 vehicles with boat trailers, meaning 5 boats are in the water, and you pull up and start to launch your boat. You see someone that just happens to pass at the same time and they say you have to pay to launch your boat from the PUBLIC boat launch, what do you do? Did the others pay? If so, is there any proof? My problem with it all is, if they're gonna charge, they it needs to be a state run program. Or atleast have someone in a guard shack charging everyone and not just a select few. And if they say that particular part of the lake will be open from 8 am to 8 pm, make sure it's open. I do not support the lake commission and never will as long as it's run like this. I am glad of one thing. I am great deal younger than the members of the lake commission, meaning, I can look forward to their deaths when the lake will possibly return to a family lake without having to pay to use a public lake. How else can you fight it? What authority do they have?

3. Women. Need I say more? I think not.
4. Cigarette taxes known as a sin tax. How is smoking a sin? Here is a link to the online Holy Bible. Do a search and tell me how it's a sin. If it's such a sin, make it illegal to smoke. And, since when do politicians care about sin? We can't even have the ten commandments on federal property. Oh yeah, since you could put a tax on sin. I get it now. I heard on the radio this morning that some brilliant politician in Louisiana is proposing a $1 per pack cigarette tax. That politician is Governor Blanko. Of course they're gonna spend the $182 million a year income on teacher salaries. I don't believe that any further and than I can throw the governor. Let me make this clear. I do not smoke and never have. Then what's my problem with it? The government as well as everyone else in the world knows that cigarettes are addictive. It's easier to kick 99% of all known drugs than it is to kick cigarettes. Are they thinking this will make people quit the bad habit? NO!!!!!! These money hungry sonsabitches(yeah, I said sonsabitches) just want to make more money. And what better way to get more money than taxing something that probably 50% of the population are addicted to? There is none. What will this tax not do? It won't make one single person stop smoking. I will not hurt the upper class citizens. They can afford it. What it will do.... This tax will make the poor poorer. That's all we need, some stupid tax that will make a select few rich and will take the majority of the population further into poverty. I need to run for office. They could put that tax up for a vote of the common people. Of course they won't do that because it would fail horribly. That's the good thing about most politicians. They're there to decide our lives.

and like my cousins old shirt said "The more people I meet, the more I like my dog".