Guard Dog

No reading Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost by Paul Hendrickson. If you are a fan of Papa you would enjoy it. Also reading The Art of Fielding. Everyone is raving how good this book is, I don't see it. It's ok I guess but sort of...meh.

Dune....boring.....who-is-this-person! Give us his name! Actually Dune is one of my favorites of all time right up to like the fourth book, then it jumped the shark and became absurd.

It is now 0947 in the morning on a BEAUTIFUL cool autumn day. I just finished trimming the trees off my fence (my chainsaw and I declared a truce and decided to work together today). After a quick breakfast of iced tea and a strawberry & peanut butter sandwich I'm going to plant carrots and onions and hope we can hold off the frost long enough for them to come in. After that I'm taking my XM radio, the dogs, & a 12 pack of Rolling Rock down to Cold Creek and I'm going fishing. Whatever we catch goes in the pan tonight. @LadyCrimson & Hurlshot too, you are both very lucky, always appreciate that!

Stop reading the Old Mans War series after "The Last Colony", that fourth book definitely jumped the shark.

I'm in a pretty good mood tonight. On Sept 1 the Tampa Bay Rays were nine games behind the Red Sox for the AL Wildcard playoff berth. Since then the Rays have been winning and the Sox, not so much. Tonight the Rays beat the Yankees and the Sox lost to Baltimore to tie the race with two games to go. No team in the history of organized professional baseball in the US has ever overcome a nine game difference in the last month of the season. That is so cool!

A bit much to go from "no telling people how to dress" to "CHAOS!!!!" I was responding to Guard Dog's post and didnt feel like editing when your post got in before mine. Oh I would not suggest a total free for all but it certainly would not hurt to leave people who are not hurting anyone alone.

Wow. I know you have to take what good news you can get but what a terrible thing to have to go through. I'm praying for all three of you.

Just think what a wonderful world this we be if we all just left each other alone? If somone wants to follow the dictates of their religion and wear burqas, or whatever, who cares. Why is this even a point of contention? The biggest problem with the world today is that 50% of the people in it want to control the way the other 50% live their lives. You can't wear burqas, you can't pray in school, you can't own a gun, you can't eat this or drink that or smoke that other thing. You can't build the house you want on the land you bought an paid for, you can't plant this kind of tree because it's non-naitive, you can't buy beer or chicken sandwiches on Sunday. It's fu***ng insane. I mean seriously, banning burqas is right there with banning pit bulls, or gay marriage, or legal gun ownership, or any one of a thousand other sh**ty rules created for the sole purpose of making us all as miserable as the little petty tyrants who made the rules. If you don't like burqas, don't wear one. What the hell do you care if someone else who you don't even know chooses to?

And from me as well Enoch. We're all thinking of you & your wife.

Now reading Sharpe's Tiger and That Used to be Us by Thomas Friedman.

Watching the stock market with morbid facination today. I'm so glad I got out all together in 2008. Even commodities are suffering today (which sucks for me because that is what I mostly own now). As soon as Gold hits $2K (or drops below $1600) I'm selling it all. To hell with all this. From now on I'm only buying real estate. I've actually thought about subdividing my place and selling off half of it. Or all of it and move somewhere I don't have to face a court battle with Uncle Sam over 1/8 of it. Never mind me, I'm just in a rotten mood today. Nothing a steak dinner preceeded by a few highballs of good bourbon won't fix. Or even better a romantic tryst. But, unless something strange happens on the way home from work Raithe's puppy has a better shot at becoming the next PM of Great Britan than I do of getting any tonight.

I think you'll like these better:

Ah, there is a certain arrogance that comes with the title "brightest mind". Turn off our phone, surely he did not mean me?

The pleasure was all ours.

http://www.economist.com/node/21529062 I guess it's inevitable that lower education will begin to follow what some colleges/universities are doing here in the US and other places too I understand, a 100% online curricula with minimal or no face to face interaction with teachers. I really don't know if that is a good thing or not? I guess some people will do well that way, others may need the more traditional way.

Don't know if you guys have seen these but NASA has released some new hi-res lunar pics. The ones of the Apollo-17 landing site were pretty cool. Jeez, Cernan and Schmidt were a couple of pigs. If they left a campsite looking like that in a State Park they would get fined! http://news.yahoo.com/astronauts-tracks-tr...-171551736.html

I learned how to can my own vegtables today. And I learned how to make strawberry preserves. The internet.... it's really is good for more than free porn. Almost everything in the garden is ready to pick. I've got some very fat tomatos, about twenty bushels of black-eye-peas (too bad no Fergie) and about forty pounds of yellow squash (around 19 kg for you civilized folks) and a bunch of strawberries. I think I'm going to go bigger next spring. I have to admit, it's a little bit of hard work but I can see what they say it is relaxing.

Just bought Sharpe's Tiger which is the earliest in his career. I was torn between giving this one a go or trying the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'brien but I know Cornwell has the goods and I've heard mixed reviews about O'briens series (that is was highly improbable historically speaking). Still working on Whiskey Rebels though and enjoying it.

Nothing what so ever. But sorry Wals, had I not sidetracked this thread twice it would be on the bottom of page two now. It was going nowhere my friend. Al Qaeda is harmless, probably did not do 9-11 anyway, we should all just move on and forget the whole thing ever happened. Nothing to see here. At least thats what I hear and read in the news anyway.

I drank all my beer, used up all my shiners & night crawlers. I caught three fish (actually I think it might have been two, that third one looked very familiar) all too small to keep. I took a swim in the creek with the dogs, took them home and brushed & dried them. Now to fire up the grill, drink some fresh iced tea and catch the Rays game. Life is good.

Hurlie, you ever read any of Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series? If so are they any good?

I was not referring to you I think it was Gorgon, Pop, mkreu and others who wanted to bring back the days of feeding us to lions.

I have. I have also heard that dinosaur bones are the work of Satan and that if humans evolved from monkeys then we should have records of modern monkeys giving birth to humans. Do most Christians believe this? I would hope not. Hmmmm... That monkey thing would explain some of the humans I've met. I can't speak for all christians obviously but I would call myself one and no I'm quite sure dinosaurs were just animals and not one of them ever laid eyes on anything resembling a human. And while humans did not evolve from apes, apes and humans do come from a common ancestry. Heck just look at average height and weight of humans compared to 200 years ago. Now among men 6' is average, 200 years ago it was unusually tall. Evolution is still ongoing and not just in humans, in everything. If you believe God created all life, and I do and not just here but everywhere (once again, just because we are unaware of it does not mean it does not exist), why is it so hard for some to accept that evolution is the engine and process of creation? The Bible is a great refence book and it should be studied by anyone who wants to gain a pespective on life, judeo-christian philosophy and history. But it is not the end all be all source of knowledge and should not be treated as such. It should be taken with a little perspective because every word in it was written by men. Many of whom knew nothing of the world beyond their own field of vision and knew nothing of history except what they saw in their own lifetimes. Not the kind of folks I'd ask deep questions like "How did we get here?" There are only two thing I know for certain about God, 1) He does exist 2) I'm not him.

Uh, no? Oby's a Russian nationalist, while I think Putin's ****? Can't you differentiate between a non-American nationalist and a non-nationalist American? That's a quote of a line of the Soviet National Anthem. Specifically, one dealing with its unbreakable union. I can't read Russian. That did not work out so well for them did it? Ok fair enough, oby does sound like a real russian. You've convinced me your not oby. As for who you really are, everyone is an alt around here. I'll bet there are only around 10 real people who post here.

Now reading The Whiskey Rebels by David Liss. A little slow to start but I'm warming up to it.