(Excuse the reflection)
Monthly Archives: April 2010
The Birds and the Bees
I was invited to SuperPizzaBoy’s school last week to sit with my son while they received “the talk” from somebody from the county health department.
Who would miss such a thing? Well about half my son’s fellow classmate’s father’s, is who. I don’t get it? I hope you don’t either! Sometimes you just have to show up, no matter how busy or important you are. The school let us know a long time in advance. I bet you either Bush or Obama would have saved the time, if they had sons. (OK, how come Obama, Bush, nor Clinton had sons? Plot, plot, plot, I am on to something here!?)
Anyway kind readers, those with delicate sensibilities leave right now, because I’m about to get real. I mean real real.
I mean it!!
I really do!!!
OK
I kept notes. You know, I thought I might learn something and I did. It is the fault of pituitary gland. Yep, the pituitary gland. I am ashamed to say, that I didn’t know that!
Here is the pituitary gland,
Yep, that’s it. It weighs 1/2 of one gram. Or about 1/900th of a pound. Man, does it cause a lot of problems! Its hormones trigger all the various changes in the body that turn boys into men and girls into women. It is right behind the bridge of your nose on the underside of your brain.
I kept notes on the rest of the talk. This is what was discussed. It was only an hour and that included a 17 minute video. The speaker was entertaining, informative, and blunt.
The Dad’s that showed up, we all had big ole grins on our faces. The kids, will the boys were a little embarrassed by the whole thing. The girls, with their mom’s were in another room, hearing their side of the story.
The speaker jumped in and we covered everything from testicles to wet dreams from hyperactive oil and sweat glands to American Idol, Zits to boners, broader shoulders to vocal cords, scrotums to morning wood, ovaries and eggs to federal income taxes, seminial vesicles to thinking about what kind of man you want to be, and prostates to deodorant.
Wow, I was worn out. The kids where shell shocked.
I give the talk a four on a scale of one to four.
Of course, this kind of thing is going to have to be revisited quite a bit. By the Dad’s. Not all jobs can be outsourced!
“This puberty is going to be a little harder than what I thought” is what one kid said.
Yea, no kidding. You have no idea. Its kind of like when prospective Dad’s at work who about to have their first kid say, “its not that big a deal.” Yeah, right dude, Your life is not going to change much. A couple weeks, you will be back to the same routine. No big deal.” “Hah, you fool,” you want to yell.
I feel sorry for the Dads who were too busy or important to come, and for their sons.
Where Were You on April 19, 1995?
I was at work in the Oxy Building in downtown Tulsa when I heard the news about the bombing. I went downstairs to the cafeteria and watched the video. I remember it was all very confusing and nobody knew what happened or why. People didn’t know if it was natural gas explosion or just what. There was a lot of speculation that it was middle eastern terrorists striking in the heartland.
We had a couple of customers come in from Oklahoma City for a meeting. They worked several miles north of downtown Oklahoma City. They said that they could feel the boom in their office but they didn’t know what it was.
What a shock when we learned that it was fellow citizens that murdered so many people. The chief of coward’s advice to survivors of the murdered victims before he was executed years later was “get over it.”
A few days later I talked to another customer who worked just a few blocks from the Murrah Building. He talked how it blew out the windows of the downtown YMCA and injured children who were in the day care. He helped get the children out of the Y.
Sweetie and I went down a few weeks later to the site. What got me was the damage to the surrounding buildings.
It drove home to me the mayhem, violence, and chaos that can result from the power of morons.
I feel the same dread now, that I felt then. The political atmosphere is very similar. I know several people who think very strongly that the country is not on the right track and not a one of them I know would harm anybody and I will defend forever their right to express their opinions. But with freedom comes responsibility and when I see facebook comments such as, “where is Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him” I get very concerned. There is always a fringe group of morons out there who will act on things and they can cause great destruction.
So my prayer is not that people will suddenly make themselves happy with the present political situation. I pray that they will express themselves responsibly and keep faith in our democratic values and institutions and remember the weak minded out there such as the Murrah building murderers who had trouble distinguishing right from wrong. Words do have power.
It has been a long time since I’ve been to the Bombing Memorial. It was done exactly right.
I’m participating in a meme this week sponsored by the “Real Housewives of Oklahoma.” The theme of the meme this week is “Where Were You on April 19, 1995.” Go check out the Housewives. They are definitely real.
Fox News – Lying Then, or Lying Now, or Lying Then and Now
From erv
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News attacking Senator Coburn for dis’ing Fox News.
Of course O’Reilly attempted some spin control right away, notice the very carefully worded denial and the carefully edited sound bites.
As Huffington Post describes it:
“Ohhh, I get it! Very clever, Bill. I guess you win. Except for just a few things:
1) In the original exchange on Tuesday night with Senator Coburn (the full, unedited version of which you can watch here), O’Reilly didn’t say “We researched to find out if anybody on Fox News had ever said you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance… during the time that the final Obamacare bill was being debated. Nobody’s ever said it… during the time that the final Obamacare bill was being debated.” No, what O’Reilly said was: “We researched to find out if anybody on Fox News had ever said you’re going to jail if you don’t buy health insurance. Nobody’s ever said it.”
2) While most of the clips in our highlight reel were indeed from the fall of 2009, two of them — Rush Limbaugh speaking on “Fox & Friends”, and Bill Hemmer on “America’s Newsroom” — were from February and March of 2010, the time referred to by O’Reilly as “the final bill debate.” So even if we ignore point 1, O’Reilly’s still wrong.
3) Of course, the original claim put forward by Fox News all those times back in the fall of 2009 was itself a lie. Factcheck.org debunked it back in November.”
Give it up guys,
Patty Griffin
This is what I’ve been listening to this week
What about you? What are listening to?
Look Who is Blogging Now
The world’s greatest sister, Ellen, who lives in Colorado with the world’s greatest brother-in-law Irv has started her own blog Ellen’s Blog. Please go check it out. Her latest post is about her trip to Hawaii. As a bonus, BIL Irv shows off a geocache that he found. Hawaii and geocaches, it doesn’t get better than that unless they can throw in some Fat Tire Beer.
If we are nice to her she met share a few photos with us from her trip to Australia.
Ellen is a fellow Forest Service kid, except she is a lot smarter and better looking than I am. Now if I can just get brother Bob in Fresno blogging our lives will be a total open book.
Weekly Skywatch
From the Back Yard
From the Office
Check out Skywatch Friday for photographs of our sky from all over the world.
Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
I had really been looking forward to reading this book and I finally got my library copy. I kept it way past the due date so they are probably going to rip up my library card. But this is supposed to be “the” book about our last presidential election.
Wow, has there ever been an election like the last one. It was fun. First we had Queen Hillary prancing along with King Bill like it was going to be a coronation and then along comes this guy Obama who kicks her butt. I mean bad, from one end of this nation to the other. Along the way John “Hair” Edwards gets shown for what he really is, a creep. Obama swept to the Democratic nomination all cool, calm, and collected. Hillary fought tooth and nail to the very end. At the Democratic convention Hillary gives a great speech. Good enough to get Secretary of State! But hey O, what’s up with Joe Biden? Joe Biden O, is that the best you got?
And then on the Republican side. You had McCain, war hero, POW, and hard working Senator, and the seven mutts. Mitt Romney completely changing his positions to align with the electorate, same with Rudy. McCain starts strong and then runs out of money, goes rogue and low budget and comes storming back. McCain changed all his positions in order to bow, scrape, and kowtow to the religious right. It didn’t do any good, they weren’t buying it. But they aren’t going to vote for Obama, no matter what. But hey this is politics. It’s not about principles anymore, maybe never was. It’s about focus groups, positioning, wedge issues, marketing, and money. Big on the money.
Anyway, McCain is getting his butt kicked good by Obama. Obama is harvesting the money off the internet like nobody’s business and McCain is not doing very well. The old fighter pilot knows that he runs the same old campaign with a predictable running mate he is going to get shot down. So he picks Sarah Palin, who? We had never heard of her but have you ever heard a better convention speech than what she gave? It was awesome! She kicked some butt. McCain got a kick in the polls and the race was on.
The press started checking on Palin. They check thoroughly. What do they find? Well maybe she was not exactly opposed to the “bridge to nowhere,” maybe she didn’t exactly sell the State airplane on ebay. It turns out that a lot of what she claimed just plain was not true. And then what about her experience, mayor of a small town. Ethic investigations in the Statehouse (“Troopergate”). The McCain campaign kept playing catch up with her on various issues.
I’m actually sympathetic to Palin. The book claims that the McCain campaign only spent a couple days checking her out. They are not looking for somebody who is spotless, nobody is. They just want to find all the warts, freckles, and wrinkles so they can develop a strategy for dealing with them. I don’t think she understood just how closely the microscope is that she would be under. So, the McCain campaign kind of threw her under the bus and she had to fend for herself. I also don’t think she understood how grueling a campaign is with every minute scheduled and an army of press ready to jump on you if you make a mistake.
She also just plain wasn’t ready. She still gets mad at Katie Couric for asking such “unfair” questions like “What newspapers do you read?” She is a great communicator. I don’t think we have heard the last of her. Whether it is more gaffes like the whole “death panel” thing or if she uses her charisma in a positive manner is an open question at this point.
Palin was a bold gamble for McCain and it could have paid off. The country was ready for a change and they got one. We’ll see how that works out.
Anyway, the book explains all the ins and outs of the campaign. It is very sympathetic to Obama. Cool, bright, and capable, yet unexperienced. McCain the principled, fly by the seat of the pants fighter pilot who wouldn’t go down without a fight.
This is a great book. If you found the last election fascinating, I recommend it. Four stars out of four from me.
Where Do I Come From?
This pictures tells you a lot about where I come from:
That’s me with the Smokey Bear. The Forest Ranger is my Dad. The place is somewhere in New Mexico. I have no memories of it. We also lived at the Coyote Ranger Station in New Mexico and then in the Ranger Station at Payson, Arizona. We lived in government owned houses. I remember the houses in Coyote and Payson had the exact same floor plan. The houses were located right on the property of the office and warehouse. So we grew up very familiar with Forest Service trucks.
and Forest Fires
(top two photos from flckr.com)
My older brother and I, who was about 5 at the time, used to strut around the yard and warehouse kind of keeping an eye on things and asking the workers what they were doing. I guess that we figured that since Dad was the Ranger, well, that made us second and third in charge. A National Guard officer showed up one day to talk to Dad who wasn’t there. While waiting he was joshing brother Bob and I a little about what he was planning on doing. We puffed up and told him that he better check with Dad before he started.
We didn’t get our own house until Dad got promoted into a Forest Supervisor’s office in Price, Utah. We stayed there for five years and then we moved to Eagar, Arizona.
Dad did various things for the Forest Service but everybody fights fires as their backup job. Sometimes during really dry summers he would be gone for weeks at a time helping fight huge fires in Montana, Idaho, and who knows where. One day he would show up exhausted. We got real close to Mom. We played games and drank pop and worried about and missed Dad.
I was a Forest Service kid, as were my brother and sister. My Mom was a Forest Service wife. It was kind of like being in the army I think. It was very close knit. The employees and their families socialized quite a bit. Wherever we moved we already knew somebody. My Dad who has been retired over 25 years still attends a reunion campout in Quemado Lake, New Mexico with his former coworkers and their wives. Mom has been gone for some years now but when she was still around she looked forward eagerly to the reunions.
So, we were always on the outside of wherever we lived. I mean the residents were very welcoming and we participated in whatever the school and the community had to offer but it wasn’t like I ever expected to stay anywhere. People will tell you that “the kids will be fine” about a move and that is true but I can tell you that it is gut wrenching to say goodbye to your friends and move hundreds of miles away and often never. I think that an entire Boomer generation went through the same thing and that’s why many people refused to move so much when they had kids. Its too hard on the kids I think. I’ve been there.
During my sophomore year in high school we moved from Springerville to Albuquerque. Talk about night and day. From very conservative, close knit, ranching and logging community in the White Mountains of Arizona to an ultra liberal city at the tail end of the 1960’s. Talk about culture shock, especially for the kids. It took about a year for us to find a social group to fit into. It all worked out for the best though. I got along with my parents very well and stayed at home while I went to college except when I worked as a summer roustabout in the oilfields of West Texas.
So, that’s where I came from!
I am participating in a new meme sponsored by the “Real Housewives of Oklahoma” aka “RHOK.” They are the the some of the smartest and talented bloggers in Oklahoma. One in particular, Miss Priss, was recently voted, “Hottest Mommyblogger” in Oklahoma. So go check them out.
The theme of the meme this week is “Where Do I Come From”
My World – Birthday Geocaching and a Contest for GPS Adventure Tickets in Maryland
Last week was my birthday. Here is a clue to how old I am:
(If you can decipher the clue you might win something. Go to the end of this post to see if you are interested.)
So how did I celebrate? I went geocaching. My young bride Sweetie agreed to come along. Here we are at the start, you can tell she is eager to get started.
We had a few hiccups involving uploading and downloading the coordinates where we had to go home to get everything fixed. I mean you can’t really enjoy the woods without the right technology, right?
So we finally got started and found our first cache.
We went on a three mile hike in the woods.
The red buds were blooming everywhere.
Sometimes you have to get down and dirty and reach up inside hollow trees and hope for the best.
and sometimes you have to make your way through the poison ivy and thorns
and sometimes you have to deal with obstructions in your path
Some caches are very clever. Do you see it?
Now do you see it?
We, or at least I, had a great time. Sweetie is such a great wife.
For other sights and sounds of our planet from all over check out That’s My World.
Now the Contest!!
If you are interested in geocaching, GPS technology, and wonderful science museums and can make your way to Baltimore, Maryland I have four tickets to the Maryland Science Center. They are having an special exhibit titled: GPS Adventures. You have to hurry though. The tickets are good through August 12 but GPS Adventures last day is April 18.
I really, really, really want somebody to have these tickets. So if you would like to go to the Maryland Science Center and can decipher the clue as to how old I am then email me with your answer at yogiabb(at)yahoo(dot)com.
It’s going to be very simple. When I get home from work Tuesday evening. We’ll take the entries, write them on a piece of paper, put them in a hat and SuperPizzaBoy will pull the winner out of the hat and I’ll be contacting you for your mailing address. You are going to have to trust me.
The only thing I ask is that if you get the tickets, please go and then make a blog post about it, and send me the link! I think that it would be a great My World post. I would love to go to that museum and exhibit, but its not happening for the Yogis.