Friday, April 25, 2014

Weekend Update - Do What You Gotta Do

I finally had to do it.  I had basically run out of options.  I was down to three good upper teeth along with a couple chipped and broken ones, and the rest was a loose and irritating partial that had to be practically glued in with more Polident than I'd prefer.  And there was that gap thing.  Within a month I had lost half a tooth (lightly popped popcorn kernel) and a complete tooth broken off at the gum line (who knows, it was ready.)  I have always been plagued with weak teeth.  Hereditary, I suppose.  I brushed, flossed, picked, polished, with the best of them.  I went to the dentist every six months for forty years for cleaning and cavity repairs.  But my teeth just got worse and worse.  Some people I know hardly think about their teeth, and haven't had a cavity in their life.  I hate these people.  At any rate, the final straw was the above mentioned gap thing.  I couldn't smile without looking like some third-world refugee.  I developed weird hand movements to cover my mouth when I laughed, and being a singer in a band was rather awkward, particularly during the high notes.  So, something had to be done.  I had put it off long enough.  I chose something called DentureMasters after talking to several of my similarly afflicted friends, and met Dr. Ridley who advised me that the way to go was a denture implant device.  It's like a denture, only without the palate plate, and it's held in place by four implanted posts.  Quite neat, actually, and very real looking.  So out came the remnants of my uppers, and in went the implants.  Fun afternoon, I'll tell ya. Yes, it was rather expensive, and I'll be paying for it for the next two years.  But damn, I'm pretty again.  Grin!  But I digress ...


  • And speaking of aging, and bodies going bad, and the coming Apocalypse, how's your back?  My friend Jerry has the back from hell.  I've seen him suddenly collapse to the floor screaming in pain for no apparent reason and lay there for up to an hour, because something not-so-funny happened in his back.  I drove a public transit bus for 42 years, and believe me, the only reason I was able to last that long was because my back, for godknows what reason, was strong.  Only now that I've retired, my back has decided to convince me to stay sitting in the recliner (Honey, would you bring me a beer?) rather than getting up for small errands.  And it's not funny, no matter what anyone says.  Even Mark Morford:  "Stand Up or Die Trying."
  • Hillary Clinton certainly has been grabbing the headlines lately.  First of all, just to grab headlines and
    lift herself to the level of George Bush, she somehow orchestrated a shoe-throwing incident at some speech she was making.  And then, by some monumental magic, she got her daughter pregnant with her first grandchild.  This truly is an amazing woman.  The ever-so-sharp Republican spin machine has been spewing spittle over the conspiracy theories concerning all of this.  And this is only the beginning.  Secure your seat belts, and brace for impact.  This is going to be a fun campaign.  Go Hillary.
  • President Obama referred to Paul Ryan's recently released budget proposal as a "stinkburger."  Horrors.  A very old and technically irrelevant dinosaur named George Will almost had a stroke when he heard that.  While most intelligent people wonder why anyone reads George Will anymore, we do find it rather amusing that he assumes someone does.  From Salon:  "George Will's Humiliating Temper Tantrum"
  • After the horrible incidents on 9/11/01, the United States government did a lot of good things, and they did a lot of very bad things.  Can I get an Amen?  The bad things can be laid pretty much directly at the feet of the CIA, who's sleuthing missed all the clues and thusly began an operation of "ohshitguilt" by arresting, containing and torturing every possible suspect they could find.  We've been waiting for heads to roll, and apparently it's beginning.  The CIA has been ordered by a military judge to turn over classified information regarding its secret prisons used last decade to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists.  Uh oh.  
  • It doesn't get much better than this.  Some old tea-party-type shitkicker in Nevada named Cliven Bundy has drawn in the right-wing pundit folks by refusing to pay the federal government grazing fees, or some such nonsense, and ohgawd they loved this man.  Other shitkickers from all over the country


    have loaded up their various assault weapons in the back of the old pickup truck and headed west to help old Cliven keep the Feds off his (not actually) property.  FOX news absolutely loved this guy.  Right up to the point old Clive not only said he doesn't recognize the United States government, he also had a few choice words about "the Negro community."  Uh oh, again.  And the FOX news
    reaction.
  • Bad Hat's Person of the Week Award goes to Dr. Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency medicine who runs the Violence Prevention research Program at the University of California, Davis.  Apparently since Congress pressured the Center for Disease Control to stop funding research on gun violence, because, well, it's our goddamned American right to own an assault weapon, Dr. Wintemute has given more than $1.1 million of his own money to keep the research going.  While the slaughter continues, we salute the good Doctor, and give the big Bad Hat middle finger to the United States Congress who obviously can't get its head out of its ass long enough to smell the gunpowder.  Keep your heads down.

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Close Encounters

I was channel surfing through the usual nonsense on the TeeVee the other night when I stopped at the Science Channel.  They had something called "Close Encounters" playing, and I could tell from the listings that there were several half-hour episodes waiting in line.  The first one was about Japanese airline pilots "encountering" strange lights somewhere over the pacific, and the other episodes had similar story lines, true, all true, as seen by competent eyewitnesses, all.   I put the whole thing on pause, got up and refreshed my brandy, got back into my seat and punched the button which would record all the upcoming episodes and turned the lights down low, because ohmygawd I love this stuff.  I've loved "UFO" stories every since I was a teenager.  I would scour the library for books on "close encounters," and was particularly fond of books by people who claimed to have been taken aboard one of these exotic crafts from another world.  My favorite was one by George Adamski, who not only claimed he had been invited for a ride-along, he had taken pictures.  And even though the pictures he included in his book looked like pictures of a lamp shade taken with a Brownie camera (see the creatures in the window?) I tended to wish it was all true.  And then there was Roswell, and all the sightings ever since, all over the world.  Pretty compelling stuff, actually, when you read it all at once.

Which brings me to a point, sort of.  We as human beings tend to want to believe all kinds of stuff we find mysterious and exciting, because, well, they're mysterious and exciting.  Some people believe in ghosts, for example, which the skeptical scientific mind rejects simply because, in the long run, their existence is ridiculous.  The imagination is a powerful thing, indeed.  As I get older I become more skeptical of unscientific theories.  Except for UFO's.  I know they exist.


I helped make several of them.


My long time friend Jerry Paulsen is my co-conspirator in all this, and I'm not in the least bit hesitant to place most of the blame on him.  Although while I'm sure Paulsen hasn't an evil bone in his body, I do know I thank Whomever-may-be-in-control for allowing us both to survive his shenanigans, and the "BaDass Balloon" was only a mild example of what I'm talking about.  First of all, I'm ashamed (not really) to admit there were drugs and alcohol involved in most everything Jerry and I did those three or four years we roommated together.  We called it "BaDass," a French word we invented  from the English word "Idiots," and the word itself was convenient enough to which we could blame our antics upon.  It was all Cheech and Chong and Firesign Theater, combined with our own exquisite bullshit.  There's enough silliness connected with "BaDass," that a book could be written, and should be written, and if we live long enough, might be.  Stay tuned, one day I may tell you the whole story.  But I digress.  The "BaDass Balloon" was an invention of Jerry's, I think, although I suspect he learned it from some other degenerate and was just passing it along.


It consisted of two thin strips of balsa wood, about fifteen inches long each.  We would take these thin strips and form a cross, or an "X" with them, and poke a small straight pin through the middle to hold them lightly together.  Now the hard part.  Someone had to get a laundry bag, a laundry bag you get back from a laundry. One of those really thin bags that the laundry people put over your shirts when you got them back.  And you'd have to get a box of a dozen small birthday candles.  And a couple of Bic lighters.  And some really good ganja from Dave's apartment next door; Dave, whose nickname was "Stoner."  And a sixer of Bud, if you're thirsty.  Ohgawd, it's all coming back to me now.


At any rate, the best one we ever did was at Mike's party in Springfield, at his house about a mile east from the enormous Weyerhaeuser Plant in east Springfield.  It was a good party, in the mid '70's, the drugs were above average, the tequila was flowing, and the "BaDass Balloon" had become legendary enough to have been requested by those in the know.  It had just gotten dark on a misty fall night, when we began our preparations.  We assembled the "X," with larger-than-usual balsa strips, and placed over 20 large birthday candles on it, and Jerry had obtained a larger, double-size laundry coat bag.   We placed the then assembled balsa strips gently into the open end of the laundry bag and affixed it with several more small straight pins.  I held the top of the bag, having to stand on my tip-toes to do so, and Jerry and a couple helpers started lighting the candles.


I could feel its power as it began to fill up with heat from the candles.  I was worried that the heat would actually begin to burn the laundry bag, and I yelled, "it wants to go NOW," and we all moved as a unit to the open air.  The slight misting of rain had stopped, but the air was cold, with a slight wind moving to the west.  We got to the open space, and I let go of the top of the bag.  Now just Jerry held the "X" at the bottom.  He gently lifted his hand and let go, and the "UFO" took flight.  It went up quickly.  Faster than any of the other "UFO'S" we'd ever launched.  It rose into the night sky against a backdrop of stars and black clouds, and slowly drifted westwardly, over the eerie steam clouds of the Weyerhaueser plant, and kept ascending.  Up, up, and mysteriously burning in the cold night air.  The glow from the candles reflected off the large laundry bag, and made the whole thing look very unearthly.  A true UFO.  It traveled west, toward the Willamette River and Eugene, with a purpose only it knew, and rose silently as it went.  It's glow was mesmerizing, something that once you saw, you could never look away.  For a moment, I thought of George Adamski and his friendly aliens, beckoning him aboard their wonderful spacecraft, and I was a kid again.  Here's to you, George, and all the aliens we know who are "out there," waving.


The entire party was out on the lawn that night, in the misting rain of Springfield, Oregon.  We all stared upward at the departing space craft, and no one spoke, except for a occasional "wow."  We watched as the glow in the sky suddenly flared, as the candles eventually burned down and set the balsa wood on fire, and then the magical flash of the laundry bag gently exploding with dripping ecstasy into the night.  Jerry and I turned to each other and hugged.  


It was, after all, BaDass.  And it would always be so.


Sunday, April 6, 2014

Weekend Update - Can We Get a Little Break Here?

(Okay, I'm ready for Spring.  Did you hear me, Oh-Great-Whomever-Is-In-Charge of this?  This silly little mind game you've been playing with us is no longer funny, not even remotely.  You give us a little sunshine, bring the temperature up to about 70, convince us it's okay to wash the car, then rips it all out from under us the very next day with a deluge of rain and wind.  We haven't even got all the damage done during the big ice storm we had a month ago cleaned up.  Come on. There's flowers to plant, seeds to be cast, decks to power wash; you know, the usual springtime stuff.  I'm giving you one more chance, Oh-Great-Whomever, and if you do this to me again there'll be hell to pay.  Do you hear me?  Hell, I say.  But I digress ...)
"...and when I get REALLY excited ..."

  • Let's start with news we barely care about.  Apparently actress Gwyneth Paltrow and  Coldplay singer Chris Martin have split up.  This news shouldn't be news to anyone but the most ardent of fan club members, except for something the couple included in their press release about the break.  They used the term "conscious uncoupling."  You know, like in "Things didn't work out between us, so we consciously uncoupled."  Oh brother. I'm sorry, but crap like that is what keep my eye sockets lubricated with copious amounts of eye-rolling. When I think of divorce I think of death-wishes and name calling, dishes being thrown and clothes tossed out onto the lawn.  You know, normal stuff.  But "conscious uncoupling?"  Please.  However not everyone feels like I do on this subject.  Mark Morford weighs in with "How Not to Murder Your Ex."
  • Nothing gets our blood boiling more than a good alcohol fueled discussion of the Junior Bush years, and the conversations get the loudest when it gets to the subject of the Iraq debacle, and especially Dick "We Call Him Dick" Cheney.  Discussing The Dark Lord calmly is almost an impossibility, because we know, we KNOW, Dick Cheney has never admitted he did anything wrong during his years in the administration, and as a matter of fact he thinks most of things he did were heroic.  But lest we forget, there's one other person who took part in all that, who, when you think about it, was even worse.  We called him "Rummy."  Donald Rumsfeld served as Secretary of Defense under Cheney, and practically everything he ever uttered about his actions turned out to be wrong. (Lies.)  Documentarian Erroll Morris has released a documentary about Rumsfeld entitled "The Unknown Known," after one of Rummy's most famous misspeaks, and it's a doozy.  The fact that Rumsfeld sat for this documentary shows how demented this man is.  Check out Alternet's "Rumsfeld Documentary Reveals What an Unaccountable Slippery Bastard He Is."
  • And since we mentioned Dick Cheney, we can't help but pass this along.  Yet another pro-gun Republican politician has taken careful aim and accidentally shot a fellow hunter in the face.  Must be something going around with these fellows.  Oklahoma Representative Steve Vaughan afterwards said he was sorry, but apparently that's just one of the hazards one has to contend with when one goes hunting with a conservative.
  • I was watching The Today Show the other day when I got up to get another cup of coffee.  When I got back to my seat what I saw on the TV screen almost made me loose my Wheaties.  There was Dubya Bush, being interviewed by his daughter Jenna (who now works for NBC,) and they were standing in a room full of paintings, purportedly painted by Dubya himself.  The paintings, grade school level at best, were of world leaders, and even old Dubya himself.  He began heh-heh'ing his way through the "interview," and made an alarming statement.  "Painting has really opened my mind," he said, and then stood there frozen with his Alfred E. Newman grin waiting for his daughter to give him a little hug, or something.  Opened his mind?  Holy shit.
  • If you have not watched an episode of "Cosmos" on TV's Sunday nights, you have been missing the most fantastic stuff anywhere on the tube.  Bad Hat highly recommends it, and be sure to gather the kids around the set with you.  That is unless you're a devout radical Christian who believes the Earth is 6000 years old, and mankind used to ride around on the backs of dinosaurs.  Then I'm thinking you probably wouldn't like this show so much.  You see, it has a lot of "reality" and "science" and yucky stuff like that in it.
  • From the Miami Herald:  " CIA officers subjected some terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11 attacks to interrogation methods that were not approved by either the Justice Department or their own headquarters, and illegally detained 26 of its 119 captives in CIA custody, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded in its still-secret report, McClatchy has learned."   Uh oh.

    Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/03/4037714/mcclatchy-senate-panel-finds-cia.html#storylink=cpy

Thursday, April 3, 2014

Thanks, Lyndon

So I sat there for the longest time trying to figure out what was wrong with my foot.  Since I was in an aisle seat, and the plane had landed, I was fast becoming a roadblock of sorts to the fellow inhabitants of my row, but I was, at least for the moment, more concerned with my foot than I was with their inconvenience.  It was numb.  No, more than numb, it wasn't there.  I couldn't feel it anymore.   My knee was there, but since I couldn't actually see beyond my knee I wasn't sure if my foot was there anymore.  We had been on this stinking airplane for approximately 21 hours straight since we left Travis Air Force Base in California, and somewhere around the International Date Line we not only had traveled back, or forward, in time, I had also lost a foot somewhere.  "Hey asshole, how 'bout gettin' out of the way."  That came from my seat mate to my immediate right, a rather large swarthy dipshit from Merced, California who had not only fallen asleep with his head on my shoulder several times, he had drooled while doing it.  I mumbled something about my foot being asleep so he kindly kicked it.  My foot, I mean.  It woke up.

Several hours before, we had plummeted through the dark of night headed toward Tokyo International Airport, and we were apparently low on fuel because the pilots in their infinite wisdom decided it would be cheaper to fly directly through a monstrous thunder storm than to go around.  I have never been afraid of flying ever since that night, because that night the Flying Gods had their chance to do away with me, and chose not to.  It was September of 1966, and I would live another day, at least.  I would tell you the details of the wings flapping up and down like an actual bird, and the engine pods swinging back and forth, but I'd have to double-up on my medication again.  We'll just let it go for now.

But now we had just landed at Tan Son Nhut airport, in the heart of Saigon, South Viet Nam, a freaking war zone. I stumbled forward down the aisle with the drooling dipshit bumping my backside like he was in a hurry to get out and kill something, but they hadn't opened the door yet.  Something was wrong with it, apparently, and two of the stewardess's (stewardi?) were teaming up trying to get the handle to swing down. I figured the storm we went through in Tokyo had twisted the plane so much that we were trapped, and they'd have to cut us out like sardines in a can.  Now, the air in that plane was not good.  It smelled like Hank Kucera's South Eugene High School gymnasium right after football workouts.  We needed air, and we needed it fast.  Drooling Dipshit pushed past me and yelled "get outta the way!" and grabbed the handle and almost ripped it off the door frame.  The door opened.  We suddenly regretted that action.

If you ask anyone who's ever been to Viet Nam what it was like to be there, the first thing they'll try to describe is the smell.  But I'm going to begin with the heat.  The door flew open and it all hit us right in our faces.  When I had left home in good ol' Eugene, Oregon it was cold and rainy, so I decided to wear my Air Force blues, a full uniform consisting of wool and other natural warming fibers.  When the door opened, a wave of kerosene scented heat made our eyes squint like we were staring directly into the sun.  Then we were walking down the ramp, walking and coughing, walking and squinting.  It must have been near 90 degrees.  It took me a few minutes to realize it was also actually raining.  Raining!  In the twenty or so minutes it took to get to the terminal, my rumpled Air Force blues got soaking wet, and heavy.  And hot.  I sat on a bench in the terminal to collect what was left of my thoughts and heard my first thump of an explosion.  Then another.  And another.  They were a ways away, but it was an otherwise alarming sound, and as I looked around, I could see the people in charge didn't seem concerned at all about them.  Steam began rising from my uniform.  It would be two more hours, including a harrowing 18 mile trip by military bus northward up a narrow, very busy road, until we reached Bien Hoa AB, my home for the next 12 months. And that was the first day.

I've include the above in this report because (1) it's part of what I've been doing lately - writing my memoirs, such as they might be; and (2) to tell you of the following.  I'm now receiving a monthly check of over $400 for being exposed to Agent Orange while I was in Viet Nam, and developing Diabetes Type-II afterwards.  Seems there's some sort of connection.  I had odd feelings about accepting this money, because, well, hell, lots of people have diabetes type-II who were never anywhere near Viet Nam.  But then I thought of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  He was the President of the United States when I was drafted, "Greetings," (okay, I avoided the draft by joining the Air Force), and he was the one who sent me to Viet Nam, somewhere I definitely did not want to go, under any circumstances.  Now, if Lyndon was alive now, I'm sure he'd feel guilty about all the shit he did to us, the young people he ripped away from their homes to go fight a war that was probably illegal, and definitely immoral.  But we did it, and he did it, and I look at this monthly check like it's a check directly from ol' Lyndon himself.

So thanks Lyndon.  I appreciate it.  It'll help pay the bar tab when the nightmares come, and I can see the steam rise off my uniform again.  And I'll raise a glass in toast to you, you who had no sons to send off to the fight, and I'll remember those of us who never came home, and maybe I'll sleep tonight.  But then again . . .

JP