Wow

If you don't visit wannasmile on a regular basis, you should. Here's one reason why.

One of her regular series, "Zen Moment of the Day"

Vladimir Lenin, Pitchman

On Twitter, there are plenty of spam accounts constantly throwing out links to products and websites. I've recently been followed by a couple that mix "real" tweets with ads. The best of these is Vladimir Lenin's, @thresagu, which mixes Lenin quotes with ... well, you'll see. These two were back-to-back:

The revolutionist despises escapism; he is always ready for any psychological confrontation with capitalist ideals.
— Vladimir Lenin (@Thresagu) July 30, 2014

Tips to Keep Your Skin Clear - http://t.co/L309pnd9PI pic.twitter.com/IhkoAXbUU2
— Vladimir Lenin (@Thresagu) July 30, 2014

I guess it makes sense. After a long day killing all kinds of counter-revolutionaries, who wouldn't need a soothing facial massage?

The Tea Party Is Now Completely Out Of Control

Just look at these crazed, bigoted Teabaggers in their white KKK sheets with all kinds of weapons strapped to them. Sickening! Oh, wait. Those are Hamas guys. Never mind, we're cool with them because they're all ethnic and diverse and stuff.

Source.

The Gator Didn't Stand A Chance

Wow.

The Perfect Business Plan

Yesterday, my wife and I were looking at burial plots. Not for ourselves, but for a relative who had recently died. One of those we visited was deep in the hood. You didn't really feel safe driving to and from it. I came up with the perfect slogan for the place.

"Here at Restful Acres, we believe in preparing for the day when you're shot to death visiting Restful Acres."

Odds And Ends

Random tidbits and observations today.

You can't change other people, you can only change the way you interact with them.

A "Bovver boy" is a hooligan, sometimes a skinhead.

Google's excellent speech-to-text algorithm knows that when you say, "new paragraph," you want a new paragraph in your text.

Cute tweet seen recently: "The first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club."

At Catholic Charities yesterday, one of our customers was a handicapped, probably mentally ill transvestite. He was treated with love and compassion and we were genuinely happy to serve him. Plenty of the progressives on Twitter would have been shocked to see it, figuring we'd pitch him down a flight of stairs and scream at him that he was going to hell.

Link Of The Day

Charles Krauthammer has hit the nail on the head today with this column. Here's one of the payoff bits:

Obama’s passivity stems from an idea. When Obama says Putin has placed himself on the wrong side of history in Ukraine, he actually believes it. He disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating. History sees to their defeat...

Remember when, at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, Obama tried to construct for Putin “an off-ramp” from Crimea? Absurd as this idea was, I think Obama was sincere. He actually imagined that he’d be saving Putin from himself, that Crimea could only redound against Russia in the long run.

Italics in the original. If you're wondering why the US hasn't intervened in any meaningful way to stop Russia, ISIS, Syria or anyone else, it's because Obama thinks they've already lost. Like the Marxists, he seems to think that history is relentlessly moving in one direction, in this case towards freedom, civil rights and prosperity. All we have to do is sit back and watch them fail.

What's worse for them, these anti-freedom forces are getting a lot of grit in their eyes from blowing up buildings.

Gun Violence Is A Symptom

More shootings in Chicago. More every week. Last weekend, an 11-year-old was killed by stray bullets*. Some are calling for stricter gun control. Just how you'd get stricter gun control is something of a conundrum as Chicago already has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation. The only thing I can think of is house-to-house gun confiscation searches done on a regular basis.

And after that, what? Do you think people are shooting each other, but aside from that, they're at home playing backgammon quietly in their homes after a long day of working hard to improve themselves?

I'm not sure what the ratio is, but I'm sure that child abuse rates, for example, are orders of magnitude higher than gun violence rates. Dittos for other crimes. That is, for every person killed by a gun, maybe 23 people are robbed, 37 people are beaten, 81 kids are sexually abused and so forth. If you stop the gun violence, you haven't changed any of those.

Ending gun violence will put a stop to finding bodies lying in pools of blood in the streets. I suppose that after that, we can all go back to watching Big Bang Theory with clean consciences. The people being beaten, robbed and assaulted can take care of themselves.

 * - Since this happens nearly every weekend, this post will be forever fresh. Yay.

Love Paramedics, Hate Guardrails

New blogging friend Trigger posted this bit on Conspicuous Forgiveness that's worth a read. It made me think of a sermon I heard recently letting us all know how important forgiveness was. The priest is a thorough lefty, so his sermons lean heavily to the forgiveness side and almost never touch on sin itself. Now that's all well and good and forgiveness is a big part of our faith, but it's only needed after you've screwed up.

In essence, forgiveness is the paramedics coming to patch you up after you've rolled your car and find yourself upside down in a ditch. Rules about sin are guardrails designed to keep you on the road and stop you from rolling your car in the first place.

Folks like that priest don't like it when we're judgmental of each other. They don't like to preach about rules and regulations or seem small minded. However, they also don't like to preach about the sins that led to little Taniqua Wilson being abused by her baby mama's live in boyfriend or the ones that led to Joe Smith's meth addiction. We hear a lot about forgiving Taniqua's mom and Joe, but some of us think it might be better to be asked to forgive just a little less often.



Still think you don't need guardrails?

Pink And Yellow

These are the flowers of some succulent out in our front yard. My wife and mom know what it is, but I don't. In any case, I was out there, fiddling around with my Nikon Artillery Piece and took this shot. I love it. I left it quite large, so I think it's worth a click.

Enjoy.

The Anti-Bullying Campaign Is Over

... and if your side is getting bullied, for the next two years it's going to be pretty awful.

For the first time in 1,600 years, Mass is not being said in Mosul: an ancient culture has been wiped out in a matter of weeks. It's a war crime that, strangely, no one seems to want to talk about. 

Mosul is the second-largest city in Iraq and the place where many Christians believe Jonah was buried. Since the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) rode into town, their faith has been forced underground. Bells have been silenced, the hijab enforced with bullets. Tens of thousands fled after being offered an unattractive choice: convert, pay a religious tax, or be put to the sword. 

There's no one out there with the will or the power to stop the bullying, whether it's from the Muslims, the Russians or the Chinese. If you're hoping America will step in anywhere, you're going to have to wait. Peggy Noonan penned an outstanding piece discussing President Obama's detachment from his job and how he's uninterested in any of these crises.

"The world seems to disappoint him," says the New Yorker's liberal and sympathetic editor, David Remnick.

What kind of illusions do you have to have about the world to be disappointed when it, and its players, act aggressively or foolishly? Presidents aren't supposed to have those illusions, and they're not supposed to check out psychologically when their illusions are shattered.

We've got at least two more years where Christians, among many others, will be murdered without a murmur of protest.

I don't know, he doesn't seem all that disappointed to me.

Beauty At The Living Coast

My folks took us to the Living Coast Discovery Center yesterday. A good time was had by all, but this had to be the highlight of the trip:

I have no idea who this boy was, but watching him with the tortoise was lovely.

It's Open Season On Christians

... because no nation will defend us. Burn down a mosque and tell Moslems to convert or die and you'll have several hundred crazies with guns and bombs slaughtering your citizens the very next day.

Breaking. #ISIS Islamists rebels just burnt the Assyrian Catholic Church in Mosel #Iraq. Completely lost. pic.twitter.com/U5GjRFYarN
— RealSy (@BBassem7) July 18, 2014

Q: What Invention Enabled Long-Range Ocean Voyages?

A: Sauerkraut.

I'm currently enjoying The Great Age of Discovery, Volume 2: Captain Cook and the Scientific Explorations after having made my way through the superb Treasure Island. The Great Age of Discovery is fascinating and it begins with one of the most interesting facts I've heard in a long time.

The book starts with a hideous, detailed description of scurvy, written by a mariner from the 18th Century. The author then goes on to describe various unsuccessful hypotheses and treatments developed by the British and the Continentals to deal with the problem. After a long period of study and experimentation, they discovered that the Scandinavians never contracted scurvy and that they always brought barrels of sauerkraut with them on their voyages.

Lieutenant Cook (later Captain Cook) made his first voyage to the Pacific with plenty of the stuff on board and lost no one to scurvy. Until that point, a ship's master could expect half of his crew to die from the malady on a voyage of that length and the remainder to be weakened or crippled.

So there you have it. Just as it did in the World Cup, pickled cabbage wins again.

Sauerkraut. Is there anything it can't do?

Addendum: Natural News calls sauerkraut the original probiotic superfood. Endorsed by rugged, manly seamen and hairy-legged, granola-munching, feminist crazies, you can't go wrong with a big bowl of sauerkraut!

Cheezburger of the Day

What I Saw While Drinking At An Irish Pub

On Saturday, I went to confession. After being shriven by the padre, I needed to sit with my German cookbook somewhere and pick out a recipe for the night's dinner, preparing as we were for Deutschland's World Cup game against Argentina.

Figuring I'd celebrate my newly scrubbed conscience with a pint, I wandered over to a local Irish pub and got a tall glass of Harp to quaff while I perused the recipes.

Howay the saved!

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon and while I sipped suds and flipped pages, a pair of young ladies came in and sat at the bar nearby. They had young children with them and it was clear they were regulars. They chatted happily with the barmaid about some adventure or another involving guys, booze and whatnot.

The ladies were sprinkled with tattoos, the kids were familiar with the bar and the topic of conversation was not one you'd associate with bankers, lawyers, captains of industry or their wives. Husbands weren't mentioned so it was a good bet the kids dads weren't in the picture. Be that as it may, they seemed like nice enough girls, if a bit wayward. Such girls have always existed and while we have more than our share these days, they're God's creatures just as much as, say, Cardinal Dolan of New York.

What did strike me was that thanks to our fiscal profligacy, much of it in the name of "compassion," each of them, ladies and children alike, owed $55,200+. The easy girls with children and no husbands from our past were never loaded up with that much debt. People make bad choices all the time, some worse than others. What gave the government the right to pile such a burden on all of them on top of the costs of their own mistakes?

I wished I'd had a congressman or Administration official in the bar with me. I'd have asked them, "What made you think you had the right to push all of that debt on top of them? Didn't you think they had enough problems without having to pay for you to look like a big shot?"

Caymanian Crab

The little fellow pictured below was smaller than your fist. He was also climbing up the wall of our house. I pivoted the image because it looked so odd the way it was naturally after I cropped it down to him.

I'm always surprised by crabs coming ashore. Here in San Diego, our crabs are rigorously aquatic. Crawling across lawns and up walls is simply unthinkable to them. Driving around Grand Cayman, we occasionally saw these fellows crossing the street and swerved to avoid them. The crab got a comment from someone in the car every time, too.

I left the image fairly large so it might be worth a click. The little arthropod has some interesting designs on the side of his head. Or is that body?

Where does the head stop and the body begin?

Looking For Comments On Some Self-Help Drivel

I threw this page together with a handful of suggestions for our kids. It's the three things I've found most helpful in my own meanderings - journaling, reading and stories of people who have overcome and accomplished more than could be expected. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Or if you don't want to click on the link, here's a repeat photo of our Maximum Leader keeping a watchful eye on the Catican Compound staff.

Willpower Is Overrated

... when you can just run away.

The best thing I read this weekend was advice to flee temptation. If you're trying to quit doing something and you find yourself in the perfect environment to do that thing, run away!



Exercising willpower takes a lot more energy than simply running away!

Inspirational Carpenter Story

I'm slogging through YouTube, building a list of inspirational videos for a friend who's going through some hard times right now. I came across this one and had to share it with you. It's pretty short and I think it's worth your while.

Enjoy!