I travel for my job. A lot. I’ve had jobs that entail a fair amount of travel for about 10 years now, and my recent stay in Overland Park, KS, is quickly moving to the top of my list of Worst Ever Hotel Experiences.

I was browsing the hotel chain’s website tonight, making sure that all my points are registered there, and saw that I needed to submit a “missing points” request for last week’s stay (once that stay is registered, I’ll be “gold” status with this chain). One of the questions on the “missing points” form is the room rate (so they can figure out the correct number of points to give you).

As I was doublechecking my rate, I realized that while my confirmed reservation showed one rate, the rate I paid was $10 higher. I vaguely remember mentioning when I checked in that the rate they were having me initial seemed higher than the one I was expecting, but it was almost midnight, I was exhausted, and so I bought their response of “that rate’s not available” or some such.

Well, I’m not tired now. I’m angry. In ten years of business travel, I’ve never been charged a higher rate than the one on my confirmed reservation.

I will be back in Overland Park next week, and I will be making an appointment to see the GM of the hotel where I stayed last time. I’ll be taking with me a copy of the letter I left with the front desk when I checked out (since I’m confident they never gave it to him), and after speaking with him, I’ll be sending a copy of the letter to the corporate office of this particular chain.

I’ve gotta say… I’m easily irritated at things, but my irritations are quickly dispersed, and not long-lasting. It takes a lot to make me truly angry, and these folks have done it. I’ll also be sending a letter to my company’s travel department, expressing my extreme dissatisfaction with this particular hotel in this particular town.

My question for our more knowledgeable readers is this: Is it common for a hotel to charge a guest a different rate at check-in than what is on the confirmed reservation? A reservation, I might add, that’s being held by a credit card to ensure that the room and rate will be available upon check-in? Is it legal to do this? Did I lose any right to complain when I initialed the room rate upon check-in? I just want to have all my ducks in a row when I visit the GM next week.

Thanks for your input.

I’d love to see what Julia could do with this one.

DIRECTIONS
1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 — first sentence
3. Book #2 — last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 — second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 — next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 — final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph.

My result:

In a sheepfarmer’s low stone house, high in the hills above Three Firs, two swords hang now above the mantelpiece.
“I want from you an alert, a query, transmitted to all your agents around the world, barring none.”
“Who decides what to do?” So did the alcohol: the sinners who drank it became more insolent; the prohibitionists who reviled it grew enraged at its proximity. He might as well have been singing.

The instructions seem a little vague, though… “Make the five sentences into a paragraph.” Does that mean simply copy the five in straight sequence, with no additions, as I’ve done above, or does it mean to be a little creative?

In a sheepfarmer’s low stone house, high in the hills above Three Firs, two swords hang now above the mantelpiece. “That’s irrelevant,” he snarled. “I want from you an alert, a query, transmitted to all your agents around the world, barring none.” He might as well have been singing, for all the attention his words received. The tension in the room increased. So did the alcohol: the sinners who drank it became more insolent; the prohibitionists who reviled it grew enraged at its proximity. But who decides what to do?

I’m thinking this would be a good writing exercise, or another tool for combating Writers’ Block.

Oh, and my five books were:

The Deed of Paksenarrion by Elizabeth Moon
A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax by Dorothy Gilman
Sporting Chance by Elizabeth Moon
Rising Tide:The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America by John M. Barry
The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey

These are just the five that were closest to my sofa, not requiring me to get up and search for books to use.

h/t: Joshilyn Jackson (who, it seems, has written a book titled after my favorite Georgia town name. Must. Get. Book.)

If the personal stuff is anything to go by, then 2006 was the year of living dangerously. It’s the year when both my daughter and I cheerfully said “the hell” to what we had been doing for a while, and resolved to pursue what we really wanted. Blondie plunged into college (funded by the GI Bill, and a small VA disability payment), and I exited full-time employment in the pink-collar ghetto with a cheerful face and almost indecent haste. No, really, I think I was given a healthy shove just as I was nerving myself up to jump. Life is too short to spend it looking at the clock and wishing for the work day to end so you can get to the stuff you really want to be doing.

But I look ahead to 2007 with a vague yet unshakeable feeling of dread. I have the feeling that things are happening faster and faster; and that they are well beyond anyone’s ability to control. There have been… is the word “portents” too heavy? Baleful, maybe; like one of those Technicolor Texas sunrises; all purple clouds edged with gold and the sun rising blood-red in smear of pink sky. One thinks of that kind of sunrise as a herald, a red sky as a warning of storms.

The execution of Saddam Hussein is just the most recent of these events; did it not seem to happen very suddenly? The various trials looked to be one of those continuing circuses that would drag on for decades. Saddam would grow fat and old, and his lawyers would quibble, delay and appeal for stays, and he would eventually die of something prosaic like a heart attack, long after anyone ceased to care, except for the last few toothless protest ‘tards waving signs in front of the last few McDonalds’ in Europe. Instead… short walk and a swift drop, thank you very much.

Iran with nukes, and a charismatic leader with apocalyptic visions… and a hard-on for Jew-killing. Not a reassuring combination, all things considered. Consider also that this doesn’t seem to bother the usual UN and Euro protest ‘tards who have a conniption every time an American administration sneezes. The possibility of a mushroom cloud blossoming over Tel Aviv, or Marsailles, or Rome doesn’t seem to keep much more than a handful of us awake at night… Eh, it won’t be a US nuke, so what? They’re the only ones that really matter, apparently.

Even more dispiriting than the possibility of Iran using nuclear materiel for un-peaceful purposes, (which admittedly is only a possibility) is the challenge which has already been conceded, yielded up and surrendered by our mainstream press and so-called intellectual elites. Contemplate how easily and how consistently the flow of AP and Reuters news releases, video and still photography from Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority were slanted by partisan interests. Now there is a dagger in the heart of any pretense at impartiality. Rathergate and See-BS 60 Minutes might have been a one-off, and I’ve been able to avoid watching TV news magazines for years, but AP and Reuters releases are at the heart of local newspapers everywhere, especially those who can’t afford to send a reporter much beyond city limits.

The affair of the Danish Mohammad Cartoons depresses me even more, every time I think on it. For me it is a toss-up which of these qualities is more essential, more central to western society: intellectual openness to discussion and freewheeling criticism of any particular orthodoxy, the separation of civil and religious authority, and the presence of a robust and independent press. The cravenness of most of our legacy media in not publishing or broadcasting the Dread Cartoons o’ Doom still takes my breath away.

They have preened themselves for years on how brave they are, courageous in smiting the dread McCarthy Beast, ending the Horrid Vietnam Quagmire and bringing down the Loathsome Nixon… but a dozen relatively tame cartoons. Oh, dear… we must be sensitive to the delicate religious sensibilities of Moslems. Never mind about all that bold and fearless smiting with the pen, and upholding the right of the people to know, we mustn’t hurt the feelings of people who might blow up the Press Club*. The alacrity with which basic principals were given up by the legacy press in the face of quite real threats does not inspire me with confidence that other institutions will be any more stalwart.

Interesting times, interesting times… as that Chinese curse has it. It would make a great book, though… assuming that we survive it all. A then-obscure poem quoted in a New Years Day broadcast, sixty-eight years ago has a an odd resonance for me this year:

“I said to a man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown,’ and he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way.”

(M.L. Harkins, 1875-1957, quoted by King George VI, 1 January 1940)

(BTW, The new book is shaping up nicely, with practically operatic levels of drama, murder, vengeance, betrayal and stolen children. The proposal for the novel about the Stephens Party is going to be presented by a writer friend of mine to his publisher, so keep fingers crossed on that one!)

* Meaning the MSM, legacy media, lamestream media… which as a national institution seems to be imploding of its’ own weight

Today’s Opinion Journal online has an editorial by Daniel Henninger about Jim Hake’s Spirit of America.

I love his subtitle: “Cut and Run is Not in Their Vocabulary.”

It is ironic that despite the years of our daily engagement in these places, the “information age” has brought us so little knowledge about the people of Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologically, much of America has already cut and run from these two countries.

Some Americans, though, simply won’t.

In April 2004, this column told the story of Spirit of America, organized by Jim Hake, to provide citizen-supported aid to the troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then in May 2005 this space was given over to an account of American businesswomen working to help women in post-Taliban Afghanistan.

Here in the U.S., the political new year will fill up fast enough with politicians and pundits offering ways to unwind and spindle the commitments America made to Iraq and Afghanistan. So this seemed a good moment to revisit the folks running Spirit of America and the Business Council for Peace. They’re not going to leave.

(snip)

With the SonoSite ultrasound company, SoA delivered handheld ultrasound machines to the primary hospital in Al Qaim, Iraq, near the Syrian border. “Before this,” said Mr. Hake, “they were using seashells to listen to the sounds of a pregnant mother and baby; the Marines couldn’t believe it.”

Jim Hake says Spirit of America’s contributions have fallen off since 2004 owing to general fatigue with Iraq, “but under the circumstances people continue to be quite generous.” An end-of-the-year funding request raised more than $150,000. “The emails we send to donors are not a good-news operation,” says Mr. Hake. “We don’t want to put a happy face on it. But the information is more encouraging than what they typically hear. The destroyed projects are hardly good news, but there are lots of guys and gals in the military there who are not just marking time, who want to see this work.”

If you’re looking for groups to support with your hard-earned dollars, after you’ve sent your share to Valour-IT, think about Spirit of America and the Business Council for Peace.

I don’t pay much attention to DC architecture, and was pretty much unaware that something called Statuary Hall existed in the Capitol Building. But I’m watching President Ford’s funeral, and as they were talking about taking his coffin to the Rotunda, they kept talking about Statuary Hall (apparently, his kids used to play there, when they were younger).

Barbara Walters said that among the 100 statues in Statuary Hall (2 from each state), only one was of a female. The male commentator said “Frances Willard,” and she was surprised he knew who it was. He said he went to Willard Elementary school, in Illinois.

So my curiosity was piqued, and I jumped online to learn about Frances Willard, to see who she was and what she had done. Then I got curious about Statuary Hall, and wondered who my home state had enshrined there.

As I was browsing the list, I found the name “Mother Joseph.” Now, I’ve been dense in my time, but it just seems to me that someone named “Mother” is most likely female. So I clicked on the name to learn more about that subject, and she was, indeed female. So that’s two women in Statuary Hall, not just one.

I continued perusing the list, noting with interest that Mississippi enshrined Jefferson Davis there, and Louisiana erected a statue of Huey Long, and then saw the name “Esther Hobart Morris” from Wyoming. Hmmm…. Three women in Statuary Hall.

Oh, my… only a few names further down the list is Montana’s Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives (1916). Four women, now.

And only five or so names further down I find Florence R. Sabin, of Colorado, the first woman to graduate from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She’s number five on the list of women in Statuary Hall.

Directly below her is Sakakawea, a name I’m used to seeing spelled Sacajawea. Number six.

Sakakawea is immediately followed by Maria L. Sanford of Minnesota. Number seven.

Continuing down the list, I eventually find Frances Willard, of Illinois. Number eight.

And two names below her, Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute woman from Nevada, whose autobiography Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, was the first book written by a Native American woman. She’s the ninth woman in the list of statues.

Maybe I mis-heard Barbara Walters, or whomever the commentator was, but I’m confident that I heard her correctly, because she made a big deal of her male counterpart knowing the name of the only woman in Statuary Hall. So I thought maybe it was that only Frances is actually *in* Statuary Hall, and the others are scattered throughout the building, and I re-sorted the list, by location.

Some statues are in the crypt, some in the Hall of Columns, others in the Connecting corridors, but there are three statues of women in the actual National Statuary Hall, if one counts the vestibule as part of the hall. So that’s not it.

When I clicked on Frances Willard’s name, I found where my confusion arose. Frances was the FIRST woman to be placed in Statuary Hall, not the only one. I’ll grant you, “only” sounds better than “first,” but it’s just not accurate. And while two of the statues were placed fairly recently (Sakakawea in 2003, and Sarah Winnemucca in 2005), the others have been in place for decades.

Barbara Walters’ mis-statement bothers me. It probably doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but to whomever was listening to her tonight, the message she imparted was that fifty states placed a total of 100 statues in a national gallery, and only one of those statues was of a female. How symbolic of the male-dominated society some believe America to be. But the truth is, almost ten percent of the statues are of women. And two of the nine are of Native Americans.

This did not require a huge amount of research on my part. But how many of the folks watching the funeral will bother to do the research? After all, if Barbara Walters said it, it must be true. *sigh*

There was crap on TV last night. Not a thing worth watching. Beautiful Wife gave up in complete disgust and went to kill trolls on the Big PC. Boyo came up from his playroom to watch cartoons on the Big TV. I plugged in my headphones and spent about two hours just surfing around YouTube.

I was surprised. I knew there were TV clips and funny commercials there. In the back of my mind I sort of knew that people put their own videos in there, but I didn’t know the extent of the community. Many of the videos are simply of people talking or singing to their webcams. What sort of took me back was that there are some seriously talented people marketing themselves via YouTube.  I just thought it was like, “Our family vacation videos.” or “Teenage skateboarders trashing their nuts.”
I’m not going to run out and become a Hill88 Fanboy (Although, I think Second City needs to grab up this gal, get her on stage for a couple years and then ship her off to SNL for boot camp. It’s rare and wonderful to find someone who takes silly to that level.) or wait with baited breath for Esme`e’s latest rendition of Alicia Keys, but it’s nice to know that when there’s nothing on TV you can pick up the trusty laptop and kill an hour or two just checking out what’s there. Hell, I killed half an hour getting caught up on the Letterman interviews I’ve missed.

Don’t misunderstand…there’s as much crap on YouTube as there are video and web cams on the planet. I believe Paul refers to such things as, “teh suck.”  The further you drift away from the “most watched” and “favorites” etc. the more you get into things that Jerry Springer would disapprove of.  And though I’m as big a fan of boobies as the next guy…some of the younger gals kind of creep me out with the bumping and shaking etc..  It seems a bit desperate.

Exposed: The Extremist Agenda.

If you get a chance to see this, watch it. It’s both scary as hell and truly hopeful as it shows the worst in extremist propaganda, including what lil kids “sing” for “fun.” It’s hopeful because there are more and more Islamic leaders speaking out against the crazies.

My First Sergeant turned me on to Glenn Beck. I guess I’m a sick twisted freak. I think he’s great. But I’m also in recovery so I get that kind of humor.

We get it. Saddam’s gonna hang. Move along.

Jeez, the talking heads on Fox News are practically salivating.

I have no problem with him being executed, I’m kind of surprised, but I don’t have a problem with it.

I’m kind of creeped out by the whole Death Watch thing.

Wizbang goes to the Apollo.

OTB believes in the magic of the holidays.

“…From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean…”

In hot pursuit of my next “book”, I continue to plough through a great stack of readings, all about the German migration into Texas in the mid-19th century. Yes there is a great story there, of which practically no one outside Texas has ever heard, and given any sort of encouragement I will bore you rigid with all sorts of trivia. Like, for instance, the aristocratic patrons of the Society for the Protection of German Emigrants to Texas fell, hook, line, sinker and obscene amounts of cash to two of the biggest land swindles ever known. Three words “Fisher-Miller Grant”. That little fiasco was right on par with the sale of Manhattan Island, by a tribe that didn’t even own it. Ah, but it came out all right in the end… if the aristocratic members of the Society had possessed business acumen on par with their ambitions… well, let’s just say if that had been so, the second language of the state of Texas would not be Spanish. And it might not have joined the Union at all, but continued as an independent entity or quasi-German colony, which would have pleased a whole constellation of German princes and nobles, but really have annoyed the Confederate States, and deprived a great many Southern generals in the “late unpleasantness” circa 1861-65 of a great portion of their fire-eating, romping-stomping cavalry.

Texas joined the secession, to the heartbreak of Sam Houston, and enthusiastically entered into the whole spirit of the Confederacy… to be expected, since the Anglo (read American) settlers were mostly from southern states, and of that Scots-Irish breed of whom it has been oft-acknowledged that they were “born fighting”; Indians, British, the French or each other, whichever were most convenient at the moment. To read of the enthusiasm with which Texans volunteered to fight for the Confederacy is to wonder if it was just that they were spoiling for a fight, and the issues which impelled the secession were a minor bagatelle.

But this was not true of the considerable district around the German-settled areas around Fredericksburg and New Braunfels, all through the rolling lime-stone hills between San Antonio and Austin. This was the high country, the less-good land of hard-working farmers and small cattle ranches, solidly opposed to chattel slavery and who had opposed secession from the very beginning. They may have settled in Texas relatively recently, but they were a cohesive block, had put down deep roots, knew their rights and were prepared as stubborn and stiff-necked Americans to insist on them. If the Hill Country had been geographically contiguous with the Union at any point, doing a “West Virginia” and seceeding from the Secession would have met with solid approval.

As it was, the Hill Country Germans pretty much stood apart from the fray until a year into the war, in the spring of 1862, when the tide began to subtly shift against the Confederacy, to those who had the strategic sense to see the long picture. New Orleans was taken by the Union, whose forces began a slow progression up the Mississippi, slicing the Confederacy into two portions. Those who had been opposed to the whole secession thing were confirmed in their judgment, and those who had wavered began to wobble in the direction of loosing confidence… while the die-hard Confederates began to see the skull-grimace of death and defeat grinning at them from the corners.

Texas was put under martial law, and the supreme military commander was a foppish and overbearing little martinet named Hebert, who did much to make himself detestable to even supporters of the Confederacy. But what ignited resistance in the Hill Country, and farther north, around present-day Dallas, was the institution of conscription. Texas had poured 25,000 volunteers into the Confederate Army during the first year of the war. But volunteers were not enough, and in the spring of 1862 legislation passed which authorized the drafting of every Anglo (white) male between the age of 18 and 34… shortly thereafter, it was changed to 17 through 50. Resistance was instant and furious among Unionists. A party of 65 Unionist men from the Hill Country attempted to flee across the Rio Grande; they were ridden down by Confederate troops along the Nueces River, and half were killed outright or executed out of hand. In following weeks, another fifty men in Gillespie County, around Fredericksburg, were executed… many of them by Confederate vigilante gangs. It was said bitterly for decades afterwards, that more were killed in the Hill Country by such gangs during the Civil War than were ever killed by Indians, during the war or after it. A footnote in the history books, if even noted to begin with.

The experience of the Civil War had, I think, the effect of drawing the Texas German colonies into themselves, and emphasizing their distinct character, rather than diffusing amongst their neighbors as similar German enclaves did in the northern states. For they were long in forgetting what had been done to them, by their neighbors, and fellow Texans.

More about the German settlers, here and here, from the archives.

Does anyone else find it weird that it’s almost 2007?  I mean, I KNOW time has gone by but it just feels somehow wrong that we’re well more than half way to the teens.  Where did this decade go?

While I’m thinking about it, has anyone figured out what the hell we’re calling this decade?  The “Oughts?”  The “Zeros?”  The “Ohs?”

My favorite take on this comes from the locals: “We used to have snow like this all the time, this is so weird.”

And that’s from the military folks, not the hippies.

I’ll keep you posted.

This is all over the place in one form or another:

The latest U.S. deaths brought the number of members of the U.S. military killed since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 to at least 2,978 — five more than the number killed in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

Emphasis mine. 

Mohammed on a moped, are we really going to start seeing this on a daily basis now?  “X amount more than were killed on 9/11?”  This is how we’re measuring things?

You know what pisses me off?  I know Viet Nam made the reporting of enemy casualties oh so uncouth, and that when it was tried back in 2003 the DoD took huge hits from the media for it.  So how come it’s okay for the media to report daily, almost hourly, on OUR dead?  What makes that okay?  How come their dead are sacred and ours are fodder?

Rest in peace Godfather of Soul.

Singer James Brown, known as the “Godfather of Soul”, has died at the age of 73, his agent has said. He was admitted to hospital in Atlanta after being diagnosed with severe pneumonia but died at 0145 local time (0645 GMT), said Frank Copsidas.

The star was famous for hits including I Got You (I Feel Good), Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag and Living in America.

“He is such an influence, I learned so much from him,” Mr Copsidas told the BBC World Service.

He had his demons, but most of the great ones seem to need them.

Some few Christmases ago, when Blondie was still stationed at Camp Pendleton, and my personal economics allowed me to fly out to California to spend the holiday at Mom and Dads’ house, my daughter and youngest brother conceived a grand scheme to give them a large color TV for Christmas.

Blondie and Sander also wanted to surprise them, and a huge box under the Christmas tree, no matter how cunningly wrapped, just would not deliver the same element of surprise… no, my daughter and my little brother had worked out a cunning plan to remove the old television, which had been inherited from Granny Dodo’s estate, install the new one, and gift-wrap the remote in a little box which would be in Mom’s Christmas stocking. They could pull this off because the television normally resided on a shelf of its own in a wall of books and cupboards, with a pair of louvered shutters closed over the screen. It was one of Mom’s enduring standards about television; that it be out of sight when not actually being watched, if not out of the living room entirely.

Such was the plan, but for the maximum surprise to be achieved, several challenges had to be worked out: the installation would have to be done after we were all done watching television on Christmas Eve, and Mom and Dad would have to be out of the house. The old TV would need to be unhooked from the antenna and VCR, and the new one put into its place, and all the evidence removed. Blondie and Sander estimated they would need at least twenty minutes. The optimal time to perform this substitution would be while everyone was at midnight candle-light service, at a church in Escondido, about half an hours’ drive away. As soon as they were out of the way, Blondie and Sander would set it all up and follow the rest of us in his car; hopefully not missing too much of the service. After all, this was one of the two official times per year when Dad actually set foot in church.

On some pretext, Blondie and Sander would lag behind, while all the rest of us; Mom and Dad and I, Pippy and her husband and the children, and JP and I would head down the hill to church service in several cars. And Blondie had sworn me to secrecy; my part in the plot was to make sure that Mom and Dad left the house on time. The new television was outside in the back of Sanders’ car, having been hidden at a neighbors’ house… oh, yeah, everyone was in on this, except for Mom and Dad, and possibly the pastor and church council.

At about twenty to eleven, Mom began reminding us all to change into something suitable for the midnight service. Dad turned off the television and closed the shutter doors, an event we all noted with covert interest, before Blondie and I went to the guest room to change. Blondie was going to wear her dress uniform… this always went over well with Mom’s friends at church, who were heavily into competition on the grandchild front. And her excuse for lagging behind would be an inability to locate one of her dress pumps, which she had carefully hidden under the bed.

So, everyone was ready but Blondie, with one shoe in her hand and making a pretense of frazzlement as she looked for the other, Dad was looking at his watch, Pip and her husband had rounded up the children, and were herding them towards their vehicle out in the driveway. In accordance with the agreed-upon plan, I put on a bit of a frazzled look myself (really, I am a better actress than most people give me credit for) and announced that Blondie can’t find her shoe, and that we should leave now. Sander chimed in on cue: he would stay and help her look, and catch up with us in his car.
“Don’t you have another pair of shoes you can wear?” Mom asks.
“No, I only brought the one set of dress pumps,” Blondie answered. No one even suggested that she borrow a pair; for a start, she wears a size nine and a half.
“It must be in the guest room,” Dad said determinedly, “Five minutes, we’ll take everything apart and look for it.” He and Mom looked like they were about to drop everything and look for the damned shoe. It meant a lot to them to have Blondie show up in uniform.
“Give us another minute, we didn’t look under the bed.” Blondie and I retreated to the bedroom and close the door.
“You’re got to get them out of there!” Blondie hissed at me.
“Give me a minute… OK, got it.” Of course… how devious. Devious, but effective.” I put on my coat, and picked up my purse. Down the hall, Mom was fussing around with her own coat and scarf.
“Did Blondie find her shoe?” she asked, and I whispered, conspiratorially
“It’s not lost, it’s just an excuse for the two of them to stay behind and set up a surprise present for Dad. Forget about the shoe; just get Dad out of here.”
I found Dad pacing up and down in the solarium
“Did you find it?” he asked, and I lowered my voice again,
“It’s just a ruse, so Blondie and Sander can stay behind and bring in Mom’s surprise Christmas present… just get her out of here, so they can get to work.”
Dad looked amused; he has always liked this sort of intrigue and with a minimum of fuss, they both headed for the car, with me trailing after and congratulating myself on my efficiency and guile.

And so it went according to plan… all except for Sander and Blondie getting to church after service had started, not knowing that they had locked the door into the sanctuary because of the late hour, and having to pound on the doors until the ushers let them in. The next morning, Mom unwrapped her first gift, and looked at the new TV remote with great bewilderment. Under all our expectant eyes Sander opened the doors to the TV cabinet with a great flourish… and Mom and Dad were both very, very surprised.

Merry Christmas… May all your surprises be the nice ones!!

Caught this one in a WaPo Editorial that Blackfive linked to. Couldn’t resist re-posting it.

NORAD Tracks Santa 2006

One of our best Christmas Eve’s ever was the eve we spent manning the phones for NORAD. Boyo was only 6 and was interviewed by the local news while he and a bunch of other kids were in the corner of the Command Center watching Rudolph etc. while Beautiful Wife and I manned the phones. We must have had 40 phones in there and we just couldn’t keep up with the calls. A small kitchen was filled with all sorts of food from sliced cold cuts to every imaginable Christmas Goody. The “uniform” was Christmas Casual and it’s pretty darn weird to see a Four-Star walking around with antlers on his head and a glowing nose on his face. Almost made you think he was human.

My absolute favorite calls went something like this:

“HQ NORAD Tracks Santa. This is Sgt Timmer, may I help you?”

“Hi Sergeant, this is a Mom in Milwaukee and I’ve got you on the speaker phone with my five children who are too excited to go to bed.”

Sounds of giggling kids, one little voice “Where’s Santa Claus?” then another, “Yeah, where is he?!”

An excited Sgt Timmer: “Milwaukee?! Ma’am, we’ve got Santa and his sleigh inbound to your position within the next half an hour! NORAD recommends that all good children in Milwaukee go to bed immediately in preparation for Santa’s arrival.”

Sounds of children shreaking, laughing, and bolting down a hall…doors slamming.

A giggling Mom, “Oh, God bless you Sergeant, Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas Ma’am, NORAD out.”

Pretty soon our house is going to fill with the smells of tomorrow’s feast. We’re not going anywhere this year and I didn’t invite anyone over this time. This year it’s just the three of us and I’m okay with that. Next year it will be a houseful of folks back home. Maybe not our house, but a house and you can be sure it WILL be full. Beautiful Wife’s got a HUGE family. Their weird, but we love them.

Merry Christmas and God bless us…everyone.

When Timmer upgraded the site to a newer version of Word Press, he also installed the Akismet spam-killing option, which keeps a running tally of spam comments intercepted and deleted. This is actually kind of amusing, because at current rates of accumulation, I believe we will have deleted 100,000 individual spam comments by New Years’ Day… none of which have actually posted.

I scroll through the pages of spam occasionally— like when there is only a hundred or so—just to make sure that there are no legitimate comments stranded there, and a depressing chore that is, too. Multiple identical, ungrammatical or just plain gibberish comments, with a link to a website embedded somewhere out the wilds of the internet.
Lots of kinky sexual practices, porn that to judge from the title line tends toward the disgusting side of the scale, boatloads of dubious drugs, a scattering of payday loan sites, insurance, and of late, a couple of sites that push ready-made term papers. A depressing collection of topics, and even more depressing is that it was probably less trouble for the originators to send it all out than it is for me to delete it all.

100,000 of these, all dumped on one site… none of which were actually posted. I presume there must be blogs somewhere out there with an unwary or careless administrator, where such comments do get posted and stay up, and presumably serve as free advertising, but probably not many. I suppose the spam-scum sending out this huge quantity of comments must get one or two links somewhere, and that must make it all worth while. But it’s kind of depressing… it’s the marketing equivalent of carpeting an entire town with spray-paint graffiti over every imaginable surface; walls, windows, other billboards, fences and retaining walls, all advertising some nasty sort of pawn-pornshop on the bad side of town. Even if all of it is swiftly and magically scrubbed away, a dozen times a day, I still resent the effort of having to do it. I loath everyone involved: the spammers who repeat this pointless exercise several hundred times daily, and doing it very badly, their disgusting clients with their rip-off business plan, and their schlubby loser clients. I hope they all get disgusting diseases, that their servers crash, and their pets all bite them. Bah, humbug, spam-scum… I wish a Merry Christmas for everyone else in the world but you.

So, taking bets on when we will get the magic 100,000; when will we cross the magic threshold?

…about sitting for a couple hours in the Kansas City airport yesterday was that I had the opportunity to help the server in the tavern play Santa’s Elf.

Some soldiers came in, so I called Chris over, handed her some cash, and told her the soldiers’ drinks were free, from a grateful citizen. And I asked her to tell them “Merry Christmas!” for me.

It was supposed to be anonymous, but one of them saw her getting the $$ from me, and came over to thank me. I told him it was my privilege to thank him, instead.

There have been so many times I’ve *wanted* to buy a soldier a drink. I’m glad I had the pennies to spare, yesterday.

It really made my day.

I’ve been hard on the moderate Muslim community for not speaking out louder. So it was good to see this over at the Headmistress’ place from the Washington Post:

Local Muslim leaders lit candles yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis, in a ceremony held just days after Iran had a conference denying the genocide.

American Muslims “believe we have to learn the lessons of history and commit ourselves: Never again,” said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, standing before the eternal flame flickering from a black marble base that holds dirt from Nazi concentration camps.

A heartfelt salute to the Muslims who broke ranks with the fuck-tards who try to re-write history for their own profit and power.  It’s things like this that give me some hope that we won’t be fighting forever.