So I made a pot of Sgt Mom’s Brown Rice/Lentil Soup today. Used Green Lentils. I add a pound of HOT Italian Sausage to it. It’s simmering now and the house smells soooooooo good.
Won’t eat much today because I know it will be better tomorrow. But there’s nothing wrong with it freshly made either.
Fox News is reporting that President Bush Commutes Sentences for Two Former Border Patrol Agents.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
So the impending Obama ordination/coronation/apotheosis is nearly upon us and of course the media is all girlish a-twitter, breathlessly declaiming yet again how extraordinary, how very historical, how bright-new-day-adawning it all is… meeeh. I switched over to a strict diet of the classical station two weeks ago, it was all getting to remind me of girly fan-mags like Tiger Beat going all gushy over Herman’s Hermits and the Monkees, and I have a low nausea threshold, anyway.
Still, there he is, and there he will be, in all his Urkel-geek glory – attended by a fawning press establishment, and the multitudes who see in him whatever they wish most to see – and no doubt trailed by all sorts of unsavory connections from the old Chicago hood. Commander in Chief, President of the Good Old US of A, and the current Resident of the White House – I shouldn’t wonder if he and the rest of his family might not be thinking second thoughts about the whole thing, at this point. It’s probably pretty different, actually being the one at the tippy-top of the chain of command, rather than just being able to skate past, by voting “present” .
Wish ya luck, Baracky… I really do. Wish ya luck and a real thick skin. You wanna hark back to Abraham Lincoln? Take a look at the pictures of him, before he took the Presidential oath the first time around, and then the pictures of him as he was starting his second term. Looks a couple of decades older, doesn’t he? But that’s what four years will do to you, in the highest office in the land. It isn’t all standing up and making mellifluous speeches to the adoring crowds … but I daresay you’ll be finding that out very shortly, of you haven’t already.
I shouldn’t sound all that discouraged, really I shouldn’t. We’ve had worse chief executives over the 19th and 20th century, although some of them were such pale nonentities considered over the long haul that even the actions they took while in office are relegated to the footnotes. I am sure people felt passionately about Millard Fillmore, at the time of his election, although at present I have no idea of why. The long haul tends to even out the bumps and the dips in the road. What was Warren G.Harding, after all, but a temporary rut, a long-ago embarrassment with a hatchet-faced wife, a mistress in the downstairs broom-closet and a scandal at Teapot Dome. At the very best (and we will be extraordinarily lucky if this is the case) Barak Obama might turn out to be presidential material like Truman – a hard-headed, competent and personally uncorrupted man who emerged relatively unscathed from a perfect sink of a political machine every bit equal to that which made Chicago famous. At worst, he’s Jimmy Carter with melanin.
Hey, I’m an optimist – I can dream.
And you know what the nicest part might be? Maybe we can finally hear the very last of “Amerikka is teh most racist nation evveh!” I’m personally looking forward to cutting off at the knees the next race-hustler who tries to lay that one on me. Really, I am. Almost as much as I am looking forward to hearing Garrison Keillor lampoon Barak Obama on Prairie Home Companion – or the Saturday Night Live crew do a similar parody.
Just to get them inspired, here’s a link to an entry on Protein Wisdom which has the most perfect photoshop eveh of the post-coronation appearance. Enjoy.
A send-up from Israel’s answer to “Saturday Night Live”, on BBC coverage of the current situation in Gaza
Link: 
Found by degrees through Rantburg and Hot Air. Enjoy – it’s subtitled, which puts almost everyone in on the joke. Look, haven’t I been saying we ought to make fun of these guys … and this one makes fun of the Palestinians as well.
All righty then – the Daily Brief site is safely transferred over to a new host – all but some posts from the first part of the month, and for putting weird little marks in all of my own posts where the quote-marks and m-dashes go. I assume this is because of my penchant for composing in MS Word and then copying and pasting… my bad. I’ll fix such of my posts as I can.
I have already applied to cut back my hours at the Hellhole Telephone Bank to a more manageable 15 hours a week, since the work for Watercress Press is ramping up. Frankly, I have gotten better at the whole ‘taking reservations’ thing, but entering uncomplicated data into an insanely complicated and antiquated DOS-based program while simultaneously pitching a whole range of add-on services and amusements while trying my darndest to keep the whole transaction under 4 minutes flat… well, lets just say I have had jobs that I hated more. Not many of them, but I did hate them more. I don’t want to napalm my bridges entirely, by quitting outright an employer which – say what you will – does at least pay on a reliable basis. At 15 hours a week (three five-hour stints a week) I can keep my loathing of the place down to a bearable level. At this point, I have taken an oath in blood that I will never, ever set foot on any of the property premises owned by the chain for which I am taking reservations. Seriously, I have begun to dislike them that much.
It’s kind of a moot point this week, as I have caught the most horrendous cold-flu-allergic reaction to mold and dust – or whatever. Sinuses running like Niagara Falls, eyes likewise, sore throat, coughing like Camille, and I can’t talk above a painful croak. Which will pretty much put the kibosh on eight hours of phone work, and honestly, I think they might very well pay me just to go home and take my germs with me. I have an editing job to work on, and when the cold misery gets too much for me, I can turn off the computer and crawl into bed.
Have to be better by Sunday, though – another signing event for “Adelsverein” – this one at a Hastings in New Braunfels. Practically the only bookstore in New Braunfels, I think. If there is an independently owned one in town, I haven’t been able to find it through Googlemaps. I was well enough to send out another mailing, targeting various history museums, or as in some cases, re-targeting them for another round. Eventually, I may get a response from some of them. Already did get an email from the bookstore at the Alamo… yes, that Alamo, the ground-zero of touristic-type attractions in Texas, and I would purely love to have the Trilogy for sale in the bookstore there. Apparently, as part of the process, I do have to send them two review copies, so they may verify that no, my writing does not suck. And at least I was considering this kind of thing far enough in advance as I was writing, that I did set two scenes at the Alamo itself. Not during the immortal siege, of course – that has been done to a turn. No, the old church and the yard in front of it serve as the background for two scenes in Adelsverein set years later, when it was an Army warehouse and marshaling yard.
My grand plan is to have the Trilogy for sale as a local interest item in every town that the plot encompasses. Except for Indianola, of course – that town is no longer there, in a meaningful commercial sense. A trickle of regular royalty payments would suit me right down to the ground, but I do have to carry on with marketing the books here, and there – follow up with letters, with phone calls and postings on various websites and forums.
It’s been said over and over, that the writing of a book is the relatively easier part – getting out and marketing it, that’s the hard work.
Bummer, Ricardo Montalban is dead at 88. But I bet he rooked mahvelous my dahlings. Okay, that’s Fernando, but you had to think about it a moment.
I should stop…seriously I jest with all resepct an awe. What an icon.
What do you call a little doggy who is the result of a cross between a chihuahua and a Shi-tzu? (and what would you give to have not been present at that moment, the barking would have been deafening!?)
Blondie and I spotted one, in Fredericksburg last weekend – kinda cute, actually. But small, and probably yappy. The best we came up with was
(wait for it …. drumroll, please…)
A ‘Cheet-zu!’
Any other suggestions?
Dear Hamas,
You really gotta get better at the agitprop thing.
Obviously faking CPR and having your own web guy stand in as a cameraman and bereaved older brother … you people are embarrassing yourselves.
Respectfully Submitted,
The Media Savvy West
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.
To: Our Friends in Palestine – Specifically in Gaza (and all their good buds in Mainstream Media)
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Why I Don’t Give a Rat’s Ass
1. I really don’t – having written about it several times before and most memorably here.
2. Really, if there is an aggrieved party anywhere else in the world who had a more legitimate grievance, a larger fund of donations in the form of coin, sympathy and goodwill and yet still managed to alienate, annoy, and piss away any residual body of good-will and sympathy (save of those mush-brained lefty luvvies exemplified by idiots like Rachael Corrie and her fellow tools in various so-called solidarity orgs)… well, it’s just hard to come up with any other religious/national/ethnic group who has managed to equal the record of your illustrious selves. I’d like to hear about them. Seriously, I would. The world record for political Darwinism is in contention here
3. And yet you still manage to blame plight on the Eternal Juice, and their infernal allies in the media… which is really sweet, since most of those media whores (to include the BBC and our very own terror-symps, NPR – not for nothing is it bitterly said that it stands for National Palestinian Radio) – they all still take your calls, choke down your spittle-flecked rants, and manage heroically never to mention all the rockets sent towards Southern Israel over the last few years. 6,000 is the last figure that I read – no thanks to NPR for this interesting tidbit.
4. So, my dear little Gaza chickadees – It has all to do with consequences. Having sent all those indiscriminately-aimed rockets in the general direction of those feelthy Juice, dressed your little children up in suicide bomber costumes, and fed them all sorts of Jew-hatred from the very cradle, sent your older children out to throw stones, and your young men and women to blowup restaurants, public buses and hospital emergency rooms, generated a tidal-spew of misinformation, disinformation and outright lies, and given every evidence of welcoming a good fight… well, now you have one.
5. It might seem also that although your allies in mainstream media are doing their usual heroic work in passing on every scrap of the disinformation and lies noted in item 4, it doesn’t seem to be going down quite as well as previous. Too much of the audience maintain vivid recall of incidents like the Jenin massacre that wasn’t, the al-Dura fraud, Green Helmet guy, and divers others. It’s pretty much taken as a given that any local stringers reporting for the news services are shills for one or another Paleo-faction.
6. So there you go – scream, rant and rave all you like, play the victim card and whine for intervention and rescue 24-7 . I don’t care. You provoked a fight; if the IDF air and ground forces are now having a contest to see how high they can make the rubble jump – it’s no skin off mine.
7. Frankly, if it had been a group of Mexican narco-traffickers planted just over the border from San Diego or Yuma, launching large numbers of rockets in a northerly direction, I can pretty well guarantee that the US wouldn’t have put up with it for more than a couple of months.
Sincerely,
Sgt Mom
PS – I am now waiting for a Jenin-like ‘ultimate atrocity story’ to surface, thanks to your apparently-farcical dramatic abilities, but which turn out to be strangely convincing to the gullible international media.
We seem to have survived the short trip over to a new host… but lost all the entries for the last week. Sorry… maybe they’ll be along later, or perhaps they are drifting out among the currents of the internet, like some kind of pixilated Flying Dutchman…
I’ll repost mine, anon.
Wherin it becomes clear the UN brass does not know it’s ass from a hole in the ground.
Who killed the Palestinian driver of an aid truck and wounded two others as their convoy made its way into the Gaza Strip through the Erez crossing during Thursday’s “humanitarian cease-fire?”
According to the foreign media, who based their information on UN sources, IDF tank shells blasted the truck. According to the Magen David Adom medic who claimed to have taken the Palestinians to an Israeli hospital, the truck actually came under Hamas sniper fire.
What is certain is that there is one dead Palestinian, and two others being treated at Ashkelon’s Barzilai Medical Center for gunshot wounds.
UN officials in New York placed the blame squarely on Israel …
Whoa – this one is a poser.
Tanks rounds – I know this is a shocker – blow shit up. That’s what they are for.
Rifle bullets tear people up.
It is safe to assume that if you’ve got one dead guy and two wounded guys with bullet holes in them that what got them was not big frickin’ shell from a tank but a yahoo with a rifle.
‘Cuz a 120mm shell had hit them they wouldn’t a) have bullet holes in them and b) there wouldn’t have been enough of any of them left to carry to the hospital.
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.