This one's about the America of my youth.

     I got the inspiration for this article from my friend who writes the blog, "Random Acts of Patriotism."  This is a list of things you used to be able to do in Old America, back when we were free-range children.

     You could drink a beer at 18.
     You could ride a bike without any safety equipment at all (and we all survived).
     You could ride in the back of a pickup truck--and even sit on the sides of the bed as it moved.
     You could also do this on the hood of a car in parades or your driveway or wherever.
     You could eat your Halloween candy without checking it.
     You could also go trick-or-treating without any adult supervision at all and without fear.
     You could get thrown out of the house all day by your folks and have no problem with it.
     You could smoke cigarettes in school (mine had two areas--one outside and another inside for when it rained).
     You could see a gun rack--with guns in it--in lots of trucks every day in your school parking lot.
     You could go to school and not get shot--even though we had loaded guns right there in the parking lot.
     You could live within your means--because nobody knew how not to like nowadays.
     You could actually get music on the radio in the mornings--instead of idiots that talk endlessly.
     You could find cartoons on TV every Saturday morning--and they were worth watching, too.
     You could drink the water--they only sold it in bottles in Europe and third world countries.
     You could live like a king for a day as a kid on just a dollar.
     You could drink sodas that came in large glass bottles.
     You could hunt down a bunch of those glass bottles and return them to any store for money if you needed some easy cash--like when you'd been thrown out of the house all day.

     There's a lot more, but I have to get off my butt and be responsible for awhile.  If anyone else has anything they would like to add, please feel free to reply to this post or message me through email or Facebook and who knows, I might do another one of these.

     Have a nice trip down Nostalgia Lane.

Ladies, take heed.

     So a prank with a mannequin or two from some store in Sweden seems to have caused a ruckus online, just because they depict a more realistic body image for women.  (You can check it out at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/03/16/what-a-swedish-mannequin-hoax-reveals-about-body-image/ to see what the fuss is all about.)  Why is it a surprise that men don't actually want a woman who looks like a twelve year old boy in sack dress?  We like curves!  Hips and tits!  Oh, and when the hell did 'plus sized' come to mean a woman with a normal figure?  And what jackass made it out to be a negative thing?  Because I did not authorize that.

     Personally, I think I'm hella lucky.  I am currently living in sin with a white girl that has a black girl's booty.  It doesn't get any better than that.  Also, I have a theory about this whole thing: any guy who looks at an anorexic hermaphrodite on the cover of Cosmo or Elle or whatever rag is currently telling you to upchuck your lunch for the sake of a size 0 dress is probably a bone stabber anyway, so forget 'em.  But it isn't the pedophiles writing that crap--and it isn't men, either.  It's you women who are doing this to yourselves.  And because of that, I have been charged by all of the males of our species to make a public service announcement about this practice.  Here it is:
   
     STOP IT ALREADY DAMNIT!

     If you need that in a different format, I can do it with math:

     Kirstie Alley > Calista Flockhart

     Y'all got the picture?  Please eat a steak, some potatoes, and whatever dessert you want.  Hell, have two-with ice cream.  I wont tell.  And you can still work out if you want, and get into whatever physical shape you feel is the best for your health.  No one will try to stop you.  Just stop trying to look like prepubescent boys, it's freaking creepy and all the folks with Y chromosomes are more than a little concerned for your health.  Except for the douche bags, but they don't count anyway because they are probably pedophiles (as explained above).  Lastly, if you happen to be one of those unfortunate women who are undersized naturally, I have some good news.  I have asked around and some women who have been especially blessed in the curve department are willing to share a little of their genetic good fortune in order to allow for a groundbreaking new surgery I have developed--a reverse of the liposuction procedure, if you will.  Ladies, I give you lipoinduction!  Now let's make size 12 or 14 the new zero, okay?

     There goes my phone.  I bet it's the Nobel Institute, finally getting around to recognizing my genius.

     Laters.

    
    

This one is about the FDIC

     I checked my online banking account today and discovered that I had been charged for something they called "excessive activity fees."  The bank (Wells Fargo) explained it to me as an FDIC regulation.  According to this regulation if you have a savings account you can be charged $15.00 for every online transaction you make after six.  I happened to make eight, so I was charged $30.00 to my savings account.  Sort of a bounced check fee, only I had the money--they just took that money from me because I had the temerity to try using what was mine in the first place.

     I can't exactly explain why I am so offended at this.  After all, the government and our banks do things every day that are stupid and criminal.  I reckon this time, I have just had enough.  I feel they fucked with me one too many times and it is now my duty to fuck back.  I am trying to get that Change.org site to make a petition for me, but can't use it because I signed someone else's petition and when you do that they create an account for you but don't tell you what the password is--so I don't know how to log into the account and their website instructions on how to change your password are entirely fictitious.

     If anyone else has any ideas, let me know.  Apparently the 'creative revenge' center of my brain is on vacation or broken right now. 

    I was going to make a post about the recent panic-buying of guns and ammunition, because it's really pissing me off--you can't find ammo anywhere and prices for both guns and ammunition have gone through the roof.  Then I decided that was a lost cause, at least for the foreseeable future.  What's pissing me off next after that is our lack of a real winter.

     This is the second year in a row we have had temps over 70 degrees (F) in January.  What the hell is up with that?  Where is my snow, damnit?

     I think we can avoid the fact of global climate change any more.  Don't panic, though--I have a cure!  We just nuke a few countries, like Iran and North Korea (before either nation gets ahold of a bomb that can reach us) and maybe a few others (just to keep the riffraff silent), and the resulting nuclear winter will even everything out.

     I have just saved the world.  Now wheres my Nobel peace prize, damnit?

This one is for the dreamers.

     I want to say Happy Birthday to Dr. King.  Martin Luther King was a man of great character and still serves as a good example and I believe that everyone could profit if they took some time to learn a little about him.  The Reverend fought for equality among men and envisioned a world where the petty little differences that set us apart--things like skin color--would no longer matter.  He died fighting for this ideal twenty-one days before my first birthday on 4APR1968.  I can vaguely remember him being on television from that time.  I have slightly better memories of Richard Nixon running for President.  Those (along with even better ones of the first moon landing by the crew of the Apollo 11 mission a little over a year later) are my oldest memories.

     If you all expect this to be the part where I get all predictable like most writer--positing maudlin "what-if's" about the great men in our history taken from us by the hate-filled and fearful, and then going on to drop names like JFK, John Lennon, and Jesus--before trying to make some vague philosophical point about how great a people we would be if we could only stop rolling around in our own shit--prepare for disappointment.  We are born shit-rollers--violent and petty and spiteful--and because of this the dreamers in our midst will always do so at their own peril.  It wouldn't (couldn't) work any other way.

     It's what makes being a dreamer worthwhile.

This post was made under duress.

     She Who Must Be Obeyed has commanded me to use my soapbox here to air one of her grievances.  The issue that is keeping her awake at night is that she can't she find eggnog after Christmas Day in any store in our town, or any of the little ones nearby.  I don't drink eggnog so I don't understand what the fuss is about.  I sweat a little while she tries not to shake the gun she's holding against my head as I write this.  If anyone knows why this is, or has a secret stash of eggnog saved up from before Jesus' womb Bastille Day, please be so kind as to share.

     It's not that I'm afraid of dying, you understand.  I just don't want to be permanently crippled or maimed because she couldn't get a clean kill with the DT's .

    

This ones about gun control.

     There has been a lot of talk in the media about gun control lately.  The sad fact of the matter is that every time a tragedy strikes, someone will try to use if for political gain.  I am usually reluctant to pull things from the headlines because I don't want to be a part of the typical media storms that significant events inspire.  However, I will do so after enough people try to give me their misinformed or fear-inspired views.

     A lot of people think that politicians talking about gun control means that they are trying to pass laws that will allow the government to send an armored SWAT  team into their homes to take away the firearms they already own.  This will not happen.  What the politicians are trying to do mainly is look like they are actively addressing an important social issue.  What they are really doing is being the corrupt, lazy, and inefficient bureaucrats that they are.  Hotheaded activists on both sides of the issue will make things more muddy by spouting off tirades designed to antagonize their opposition.  Ultimately, the best the politicians or activists will ever be able to manage is adding a few more ineffectual laws to an already ludicrously large pile of similar legislation. 

     The truth about gun violence is that every child murdered in a school, every family killed in a movie theater, every innocent person slaughtered in a public massacre by some homicidal jackass with a gun were all abiding by our laws.  They didn't have guns on them because they were somewhere guns weren't allowed, or they had chosen not to own a gun.  The criminal with the gun doing all the killing is the one breaking the law, and that jackass honestly couldn't give a damn how many gun laws they have broken when they are on a killing spree.  No matter how much you or anyone else might not like it, guns are out there in the world--and no amount of legislation or wishful thinking will ever make them cease to exist.

     This is the ultimate truth about all our gun laws: they cannot keep guns out of the hands of criminals who want to obtain them.  The best thing more gun laws can do is create a larger selection of targets for criminals.  Making magazines smaller just means the bad guys will carry more of them.  And being shot with a .45 pistol round or a 5.56 rifle round really will not make any difference to the person with a hole in their head.

     Here is another harsh fact about gun violence: your typical mass murderer, the one that walks into a school or mall or ambushes first responders, usually eats a bullet as soon as any resistance is offered.  Or they give up.  Either way, the killing spree comes to an abrupt halt.

     This is the last hard truth about guns and violence I am going to give to you all: if those schoolteachers or everyone in those malls or movie theaters had been armed, if even just one of them been armed in each attack, the outcomes of them would have been wildly different.  The body counts of these incidents would have been zero or in single digits.  Because the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.