death

If you’re done harassing has-been baseball players and their trainers, perhaps you’d like to explain (and use little words, please) just what the fuck is going on with Wall Street and why we feel it necessary that the US Taxpayers should bail the rich asshats out?

Thanks.

Have you ever gone to an airport to pick up somebody you didn’t know?

Or, perhaps, somebody you had met once, but hadn’t seen in a while?

I did this, nearly twenty years ago. It was a couple days before my wedding and I was nominated / volunteered to pick up my fiancee’s brother. My future brother in law.

He called and said he was coming to the wedding, which was a little odd because hardly anybody had seen him in twenty years. I met his son and his ex-wife, in fact, before I met him. Lucky for me, he looked kinda like his dad, so I was able to spot him easily at the airport. That and the fact that the place was just about closed for the day (he must have been on one of the last flights, if I recall he phoned the house when he arrived and this was LONG before cell phones) - he was practically the only person waiting.

Anyway, why do I bring this up, do you ask?

Because that was a long time ago (nearly twenty years, you might recall, back in paragraph three I said this), nobody has heard much from him since, and last night another of my wife’s brothers called and said he had passed away. If I have the story right, he was on dialysis and picked up a respiratory infection in the hospital that did him in. Somebody going through his things found his son’s name and location and a trooper showed up at the door yesterday bearing the bad news.

So, um, yeah.

This is the second sibling in three months, both to a respiratory infection caught while in the hospital. Damn. That’s not good.

My wife told our kids this morning (obviously, they have no clue who he is) and one of my boys was in tears at the thought of her leaving town for a while to go to the service. My oldest, though, was thinking “Oh, yeah, dad’s in charge. Ice cream for dinner!”

Happy new year.

A classic tale of critters done wrong, right here in Texas.

The American city of Texarkana suffered a slight setback to its popular annual festival this weekend, when dead pigeons started plummeting from the sky.

The ex-pigeon deluge came as Texarkana, a city confusingly placed halfway across the Texas/Arkansas border, was celebrating the Quadrangle festival. Visitors couldn’t help noticing that there appeared to be a large number of dead and dying pigeons on the ground, reports the Texarkana Gazette.

Then witnesses started reporting that the pigeons were dropping from the heavens.

One word of advice: DUCK!

With all the focus this week legalizing discrimination against fellow Americans, it’s easy to forget the hell we have unleashed on other folks.  In fact, you might say that is exactly why we are even discussing gay marriage at this point - it certainly hasn’t been important enough to talk about for the last two years, but hey, isn’t that an election coming up?  Gotta divide the country again, quick!

Emily Dickinson wrote, “hope is a thing with feathers”. If what she wrote is true, then hope has flown far- very far- from Iraq…

From Baghdad: There’s an ethnic cleansing in progress and it’s impossible to deny. People are being killed according to their ID card. Extremists on both sides are making life impossible. Some of them work for ‘Zarqawi’, and the others work for the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. We hear about Shia being killed in the ‘Sunni triangle’ and corpses of Sunnis named ‘Omar’ (a Sunni name) arriving by the dozen at the Baghdad morgue. I never thought I’d actually miss the car bombs. At least a car bomb is indiscriminate. It doesn’t seek you out because you’re Sunni or Shia.

More here.

Found at Boing, Boing:
Death by Caffeine

You could drink 127.09 cups of Drip Coffee before croaking

(boing!)

Also check out this page,

It would take 17,130.75 Hershey’s Kisses to put you down.