My last year in high school it snowed three inches one day. That’s more snow than our little metro area usually saw in three years. For a city without a single snowplow, that pretty much meant the city shut down entirely that morning.

As it happened at that time Dadman and I both lived on the other side of the river from our high school, in the “big city.” It’s a pretty remarkable coincidence that led to us living thirty miles from our high school, but within a mile of each other, but it basically had to do with his family moving off the Air Force base into a snazzy new condominium, while my dad had just divorced his second wife and moved to the apartments that were the closest to his new lady friend’s house. Let’s just say the apartments were somewhat less “snazzy” than Dadman’s condo. But that did mean that we ended up living across the highway from each other, so with three inches of snow on the ground, we decided to meet up and make some snowmen and have some snowball fights. At the age of 17 that sounded like a good way to skip school since we knew we were going to get nailed anyway since our school didn’t close because the snow was just a light dusting there.

So we spent a good part of the morning trudging around in the huge open field that separated our domiciles. Dadman has a pretty wicked throwing arm. My own baseball and snowball throwing skills are fairly solid, and I can to this day generally get a snowball within a few inches of my target up to 30 feet away with no problem, but Dadman should have been a pitcher. Let’s just say that even though we both got pelted pretty well, I ended up with a hefty amount of respect for Dadman’s four-seamer.

After a while the semi trucks blasted through the highway enough that cars were able to venture forth into the frozen white wasteland.

As it happened at that time, I had not yet met the Cosmic Wife and so was wasting my time with another young woman that I only thought I was desperately in love with. It was a convincing delusion though, and so I did all that I could to spend as much time with her as possible. This is the same girl I met at the Dr. Blood’s house of horrors, and as it happened, she went to a different high school in the big city, and so her school was closed for the day as well. So as soon as the roads were just below suicidal to drive on, Dadman and I loaded up to go to her house.

Her house was in the midst of a high-priced neighborhood along one of the main drags through the city. It was situated on a hill just adjacent to that main drag, coincidentally aligning her back yard with a traffic light. A large wooden fence surrounded her back yard so from the road, waiting at the red light, you would have to crane your neck to see up to the wooden fence, and could not see the back yard at all.

This of course was far to tempting to pass up. Her back yard was literally coated with ammunition for pelting cars on the highway, and soon after arriving at her house, she, Dadman and I were lobbing snow bombs into the street, peering through cracks in the fence to see what bedlam our attacks caused. And we were pretty accurate too. No doubt the snowballs were falling fully 30 feet onto the stopped traffic after accounting for hill and over-the-fence trajectory. We were having a ball.

Then suddenly our laughter was interrupted by shouting and cursing. Uh oh. We looked at each other and then through the crack where three young men were standing on the sidewalk berating us for pelting their car with our rain of snow bombs.

What would you do? Duh… What kind of idiot would jump out of their car in the middle of a snow bomb barrage? Plus we were secure in our mountain redoubt, confident that the combination of snow-covered hill and six foot fence would keep us safe from any retribution. So the onslaught continued.

They got back in their car and turned right at the next street. We promptly forgot about them as we sought new prey.

But they hadn’t forgotten about us.

Suddenly snowballs started falling in our midst. We quickly reverse engineered their trajectory to discover they were coming over the back of the fence, where we again heard the same voices shouting and cursing. So we tossed snowballs back at them, but it was clear that they were not having fun.

Soon we saw the tops of heads poking over the top of the fence. They were scaling the outer defenses!

Remember what I said about Dadman’s four seamers? Well he let one fly on a frozen rope and nailed the lead guy right in the kisser just as his head cleared the fence. Randy Johnson could not have delivered a more perfect strike.

But that only egged the attacker on. Soon he and his two friends had hopped over the fence, where the leader unfurled a set of nunchucks and began to swing them around. This had turned serious.

Now this is where my commitment to truth and honesty is sorely tested. For I was no hero that day. My only thought was to get my GF into the house away from the lunatic, so I turned back towards her and prepared to beat a hasty retreat.

But not Dadman. As the wanna-be Kwai Chang Cain whirled his nunchucks, Dadman delivered another strike, and then he began berating the nunchuk wielding fiend.

“What areya gonna do punk!” He yelled as I was now caught in desperate conflict, half fleeing already. But how could I leave Dadman alone to this fate since he clearly was not joining the retreat? Another sizzling white sphere was delivered, which the nunchucko barely dodged. “Hey!”

“Come on!” Dadman yelled, quickly scooping up another round. The two cohorts, without nunchucks, were clearly unsure of their next move. Then another snowball was thrown, this one by my GF! Oh the shame of it!

So I also reloaded and the three of us, boy, boy and girl, deadly white ammo in our hands, faced off against the nunchucko and his two cohorts. So we pelted the two cohorts, one of whom decided he had had enough of this. The the other cohort broke. Now Dadman, sensing the advantage, advanced on the nunchucko. “Come on big man!” he taunted. Another heater pelted the nunchucko in the side as he tried to dodge. My GF and I were pelting him too.

With a final curse he turned and ran.

It was Dadman’s finest moment.

But I got the kiss.

Sigh… I am going to have to start telegraphing my jokes better. I probably have something I think is clever, some double meaning with a twist, or some obscure literary reference in probably 1/4 of my posts or comments. But it is a rare, rare thing when someone actually seems to get it…

I’m just too obscure. I’ve just got to get out more… Or figure out how to be more overt, while still maintaining an illusion of subtlety…

The Obama administration has closed all input on a new Executive Order that is being crafted to address the right of US Citizens to fish in public waters, including much of the ocean coastline and the Great Lakes. (Hat tip to Old Goat for the link.)

The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.

Emphasis mine, by the way.

So, basically the Obama administration is crafting this new policy with input only from “environmental groups” and they appear to be following an anti-use script that is modeled on anti-hunting legislation passed in Canada.

As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled “Transition Green” shortly after Obama was elected in 2008. What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper.

Although the thrust of the ESPN story is about fishing jobs that would be lost if Obama shuts down recreational fishing, my own opinion is that the impact of such a decision will be far more profound than just the job losses.

I suspect that Obama and his inner circle have no idea what political napalm they are dealing with here. I doubt there are three people in the White House who actually enjoy heading out to the local reservoir with a fish pole and a bucket of bait. My guess is that Obama’s inner circle views the average outdoor hunting/fishing enthusiast as a toothless hillbilly with a bloodthirsty streak. He probably truly has no idea that fishing is one of America’s most popular pasttimes, and that most fishermen are not poor backwoods banjo players, but include most of middle class America.

If Obama shuts down access to popular fishing locations, forcing people to crowd into a few “approved” water holes, the political backlash will be thundering. What surprises me is that he’s going after fishing first instead of hunting. But again, I doubt Obama has any idea of the sheer number of Americans who enjoy heading out to the local lakes and rivers each weekend to relax and bring home a few fish for dinner.

To set this up I have to reveal a few things, but they are most likely things that long time readers of this blog have already figured out.

Basically the fellow who goes by the moniker “Dadman” on this blog is my best friend all the way back to high school, where we met over 30 years ago. I give Dadman a lot of credit for how my own life turned out (but none of the blame, of course). When Dadman and I met I was a seriously messed up kid going through the mess of my parents’ divorce and my dad remarrying the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

The previous few years before meeting Dadman were pretty rough years, and like many young boys struggling through family difficulties, I had begun to adopt a “streetwise” and “troublemaker” persona. I smoked cigarettes, drank beer, stayed out late and was not completely innocent of some of the accusations of neighborhood vandalism thrown my way. But I was not happy adopting the “punk” persona, and when my dad remarried and I moved to a new house in a new school district, I made a conscious and determined effort to develop a new and more positive group of friends.

Dadman was one of the first guys I managed to strike up some sort of friendship. Dadman was funny, he was talented (unicycle rider, juggler, artist), he was interesting and he had a beautiful and loving family. I used to enjoy visiting his house just so I could get an idea of what a true nuclear family was like. Dadman and I also hung around with some other straightlaced classmates, allowing me and Dadman to cater to whatever lame “bad boy” impulses we had without delving anywhere near the depths I had so recently been descending into. Dadman was also a naturally likable fellow and as such I was (in some cases reluctantly) adopted into a larger circle of friends than I would ever otherwise have mingled with.

To use an analogy, I was Dadman’s sidekick. Dadman was the instigator in almost all of our shenanigans. With the angst and stress I had at home every day at that time, I was simply not equipped for the process of instigating shenanigans, and I was more than willing to let Dadman do all the hard work of actually initiating things, so long as I got to go along.

One of the things Dadman instigated was participating in a yearly event at the Louisiana State Fair known as “Dr. Blood’s.” Dr. Blood was run by a theater personality in Shreveport named Drew. I have forgotten his last name, but I’m sure Dadman will remember. (UPDATE: his name was Drew Hunter I believe.) Drew was a member of the Shreveport Little Theater and every year he managed to scrape up the money to rent a portion of the State Fair ground buildings to create a Halloween Experience. In general it was a “House of Horrors” sort of thing, and Dadman had been a part of the previous year’s production and so invited me to join him as a member of the Dr. Blood’s cast. That sounded like fun, so I was happy to join. As a result I met the second girl in my life that I got romantically entangled with, and whom I dated for two years afterwards.

That girl drew me deeper into the local theater and music scene (she played cello on the Shreveport Orchestra), and as such she invited Dadman and me to a weekend retreat taking place at a boy scout camp located south of Shreveport called “Camp Forbing”. (Or at least that’s what my memory says.) The event was some sort of weekend camp, but I don’t even recall the purpose of it, only that the boys and girls were separated, and most of the people there were people Dadman and I had met through Dr. Bloods, the Little Theater or the Shreveport Orchestra.

Of course they separated the boys and girls into separate buildings and gave us dire warnings about sneaking out in the night. Warnings Dadman and I promptly decided to ignore. So after a day of camp activities (which may or may not have involved bows and arrows, but DID involve folk dancing and singing), my then GF and I parted ways while Dadman and I plotted how to wreak some havoc on the night’s calm.

So we managed to sneak out after dark, when all the youngsters were supposed to be safely in bed for the night, and began roaming the wooded darkness making “Legend of Boggy Creek” noises. But that got boring and didn’t seem to elicit the response we were looking for. I don’t remember whose idea it was, but since most of the ideas at that time were from Dadman, I’ll lay the blame on him. It was thus that we began roaming the woods loudly reciting verses from Shakespeare. We would sneak up to the girls rooms and act out scenes from Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet and when the adults scampered out to find the culprits, we would dash off and hide, then we would move on to the next hut and repeat the process.

For some reason we found this hilarious. After maybe 30 minutes of Shakespeare in the Dark, we finally returned to our rooms. I don’t even remember if we got caught, but I do remember that my then GF thought it was such a cool thing.

I probably didn’t tell her it was all Dadman’s idea.

… because they think they’ve managed to lie to enough members of the House to get them to vote for the existing Senate bill by promising to “fix” the bill in reconciliation, when in fact all they really plan on doing is getting the Senate bill passed and having Obama sign it into law. The promises for reconciliation are just as reliable as any other Obama/Pelosi/Reid promise. Once they have what they want, they’ll just call reconciliation impossible and say “Hey, look at that! We’ve successfully passed Health Care Reform! Yay Us!!”

So my oldest brother and I used to be big fishing buddies. He passed away about ten years ago in an automobile accident, but I spent more time fishing with him than probably anyone else. Especially back when we lived in northwest Louisiana and were surrounded by a dozen or so major lakes filled with bass, crappie, bluegill, hybrid stripers and, of course, alligators.

Alligators are very common in northern Louisiana. They inhabit pretty much any reasonably sized body of water. They can get quite large too. Alligators of up to 12 feet long are pretty common in the major lakes of the area. They eat a lot of pet dogs. For the most part though, they don’t attack boats.

One of our favorite lakes back then was an impoundment located on the Air Force Base called “Harmon Lake”. It was a tiny lake compared to the major impoundments, but would still be a decent sized lake by Colorado standards. It was small enough that you could scull a johnboat around it in a few hours.

What, you don’t know what “scull a johnboat” means? Hmm…. Pity the educationally deprived…

A “johnboat” is a flat-bottomed boat with sides about a foot or so high and with two or (more usually) three benches across the inside of the boat. They are mostly made of aluminum and are just sturdy and substantial enough to hold a small outboard motor, but most folks just use paddles. A typical johnboat might be about 12 feet long and four feet wide. They are great for slow and leisurely fishing on smaller or shallower lakes which don’t have lots of wind or high waves. They are especially good for bayous or streams and have mostly replaced the indigineous “pirogue” which was once the most common watercraft in Louisiana.

“Sculling” is a specific style of paddling a small boat. The technique is best used in a boat with a flat bow and a bench or seat you can sit on at the very front of the boat. Instead of paddling from the side of the boat with a large paddle, you use a small paddle with a wide blade. With the paddle in the water directly in front of the boat, you move the paddle from side to side in a figure eight motion, modifying the angle of the blade as you move it in such a fashion that you create a steady thrust forward.

Sculling is ideal for slowly moving through calm and cluttered water, particularly when you have to navigate among cypress stumps, reed patches, algae blooms, etc. You can even scull backwards if you need to.

The drawback of sculling is that you have to extend your hand and arm forward in front of the boat just a few inches from the actual water surface itself.

So, anyway, we were fishing at Harmon Lake in a small johnboat taking turns sculling so the other could concentrate on casting. That doesn’t mean only one of us was fishing at a time, it just means that one of us had to scull while fishing, which makes it a bit more challenging to cast, retrieve and direct the boat all at the same time. As we pushed off into the lake to begin fishing, there was an old lady fishing on the shore next to the boat ramp. She was catching a lot of bluegill. That was pretty common so we didn’t pay any attention to it, except to wave at her as we circled the lake and passed her location.

After spending most of the day fishing like this (fishing for bass) we had passed the old lady several times, and of course had dodged a number of alligators as we moved around the lake. There was a small island just off the shore from the launching ramp and so as the sun was going down, we were making our final circle on the lake and were coming back to unload and head home.

It’s hard to convey in mere words the beauty and serenity of spending a summer day on a Louisiana lake fishing for bass in a johnboat that you are sculling. It can become a deeply spiritual experience. Everything slows down and your world becomes attuned to the natural rhythms of the world around you. In this case B-52s and KC-10s and A-10s would scream overhead since the lake was within a mile of the Air Force Base runway. But those interruptions were instantly forgotten as your ears strained to hear the tell-tale sound of a jumping fish. Dragonflies would land on your fishing rod and clouds of tiny insects would whirl around the cattails like miniature gray dust devils. Every now and then your reverie would be interrupted by the solid “thump thump” of a bass hitting your lure, or you would hear the tell-tale scream of your partner’s reel drag as he set the hook on a strike of his own.

The lake would usually have a cool breeze blowing which would keep the heat from being oppressive, but you got used to the heat regardless. And if it got too hot, that’s why you had the ice cooler in the middle of the johnboat anyway, so you’d pop open a can of ice-cold soda.

As the sun went down and the air cooled, the fish would typically get more active and so we would sometimes each have a fish on at the same time, while the boat continued its inexorable movement in whatever direction it was sculling when the fish hit.

So as it happened on our last swing around the lake, we decided to take one final swing around the island insted of heading directly to the johnboat docking area. It was a small island, maybe 50′ by 50′, so it wasn’t any big deal to scull around it. I was sculling at the time and as we reached the far end of the island and I did a quick and powerful scull to send the boat back towards the shore, bang! both of us got a solid hit and were soon simultaneously fighting a rowdy largemouth bass each. As we reeled the spunky fish in, the boat continued in towards shore.

After reeling in the fish, having already reached our limit, we released the fish to fight another day, and I went to resume my sculling with a sense of satisfaction of a good day fishing. That’s when I realized the boat had drifted within about six feet of a large alligator, with a couple more alligators flanking the big one. He was probably about 10 feet long, but at that moment he looked more like 16 feet. And the boat was still moving right towards him, with my hand reaching with the paddle down into the water not more than a quick tail pump away.

So I did a quick couple of figure eights to stop the boat and send it drifting gently back a bit, and I waited for the alligator to move. But it wasn’t going anywhere, and in fact was staring right at me. This was unusual behavior for a ‘gator. Usually they would drift slowly away if your boat got too close, but this one and his pals were absolutely rock solid in the water and their eyes were fixed directly on me.

“Hey, that lady dumped all her bluegill in the water there.” my brother said. And it was true, the gators were there because the lady who had been fishing all day had decided not to take the fish home and so several dozen bluegill had been dumped into the water and the gators were hungry. But I didn’t want to go all the way back around the island so I decided to wait them out.

It’s sort of interesting to stare down three alligators from a johnboat that the biggest one could probably flip over if he really wanted to. Especially since it was getting dark.

After about five minutes my brother said “Just go back around the island!” so I grudgingly gave up on out waiting the gators… Stupid gators.

So, tonight I sat down and watched my monthly TV allotment (about 1 hour) and spent it on a show called “Meteorite Men.” Yes, it’s another bizarre “reality show,” this one is about a couple of dudes who roam around with metal detectors and ceramic magnets on the end of poles looking for meteorites.

Apparently meteorites are much more valuable than I realized. They keep talking about meteorites the size of pebbles being worth thousands of dollars. Iron meteorites apparently are the most valuable, in spite of being the easiest to find.

The show followed the two men as they spent several days (I think four) in the desert following a “secret map” that some ancient prospector had left behind after claiming to have found several chunks of iron in the Arizona desert. So they visited four “hotspot” locations on the map trying to find meteorites. Specifically they were hoping to find fragments left behind by this famous meteorite, the famous “Tucson Ring” meteorite.

Apparently the Tucson Ring meteorite has some unique composition and it is not known where it actually fell, so fragments from the ring would provide a way to locate it’s landing spot, and since the composition is unique, fragments of the Tucson Ring would be more valuable than ordinary iron meteorites, which are already about twice as valuable as gold by weight.

So of course this makes me want to go out and look for meteorites in my own backyard. Heck, I could be sitting on a fortune and not even know it. I’ve got some ceramic super-magnets and I’ve got a stick. Should be a piece of cake.

Just as soon as the snow melts.

Man I hate doing my taxes. A long, long time ago I promised myself that the day I had to pay someone to do my taxes, that day I would file a class-action lawsuit against the IRS. So far I’ve been able to manage my own taxes every year without yet being thrown in to the tax gulag.

All done. I’m confused though, I received a 1098-T from the college the Cosmic Daughter attends and I don’t recall getting one of those before (this is her third year in college). It was a major boon to my tax amount though, applied as a credit which really helped out. Is that new? Or have I just not taken a credit in previous years that I should have?

A man of 22 died in agony of dehydration after three days in a leading teaching hospital. Kane Gorny was so desperate for a drink that he rang police to beg for their help. They arrived on the ward only to be told by doctors that everything was under control. The next day his mother Rita Cronin found him delirious and he died within hours.

She said nurses had failed to give him vital drugs which controlled fluid levels in his body. ‘He was totally dependent on the nurses to help him and they totally betrayed him.’

via Neglected by ‘lazy’ nurses, Kane Gorny, 22, dying of thirst rang the police to beg for water | Mail Online.

The irony here is that the game they were playing was one where they were raising a virtual daughter while their real life daughter starved. In South Korea internet cafes are popular so they were basically living in the cafe and running back to feed their real life daughter once a day. A pretty bizarre story really.

(March 5) — A South Korean couple addicted to the Internet left their 3-month-old daughter to starve to death while they raised a virtual daughter online during 12-hour bouts at a cyber cafe, police said.

The husband and wife had been on the run since their baby, born prematurely, died five months ago of severe dehydration and malnutrition, police said. They were arrested this week near their home south of the capital Seoul and charged today with child abuse and neglect.

via South Korean Couple Nurtured Virtual Child as Their Baby Starved, Police Say – AOL News.

I suspect you’ll see more of these sorts of stories as people find more fulfillment in the virtual world than they do in real life.

So I’ve got bare patches of ground in my yard where there is no snow. I still have places where the snow is a foot or more thick, but that won’t last long. The temperature has soared above freezing here two of the last five days. I’ve got icicles on my roof. I’m driving to work in the daytime…

I’m ready for this winter to be over…

Just posting to make sure I get something posted today. I got nothing. Glad it’s Friday. Probably going to snow again. Not getting enough sleep.

I think we’ve predicted this several times here on CC

President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City. via Obama advisers set to recommend military tribunals for alleged 9/11 plotters – washingtonpost.com.

What just kills me about Leftist ideologues like Eric Holder is that after experts from two ideologically opposed administrations end up evaluating the facts and make the same recommendation; these brain-dead morons don’t even start to think “huh… maybe there’s something to this military tribunal approach after all.” Nope, they whine about how Obama is just like Bush.

I think at some point when your ideology so overwhelms you ability to rationally view facts and data, you should probably be put down like a horse with a broken leg.

What happened? I was getting all these email updates about the Olympics. Now I’m not getting anymore.

Is the Olympics server down?

So, remember when the iPad came out and I said that I’d be excited when they got to the third generation of those things? Well, droids on steroids are on the way. I’ll call those “second generation.” I figure third generation will appear next winter, probably in time for next year’s Apple announcements. By then droid could lap them, their OS is that much superior imho…

Apple’s iPad is certain to grab headlines when it hits stores next month. But a number of touch-screen tablets powered by Google’s Android operating system will also debut this year. Competing with Apple’s latest consumer gadget won’t be easy, but analysts say the software behind these devices could give them a few key advantages.

Like the iPhone OS, which will power the iPad, Android was originally developed for cell phones. This means it will be fast and low-power. “Android is very responsive; it’s instantly available,” says Jeff Orr, a senior analyst for mobile devices at ABI Research.

It can also make use of apps already developed for Android phones. “The real benefit [of using Android] is that it taps into this ecosystem of developers that have latched onto Android,” says Carl Howe, analyst and director of the Anywhere Consumer Research division of the Yankee Group. Most importantly, some of these Android devices come with features that the iPad currently lacks–the ability to run Flash, for example, as well as a webcam and software multitasking.

So I’ll be planning on buying one of those things about this time next year…

I blame Rock and Roll…

George Will has a column today on the decline of manliness. (Yeah, I know you’re thinking “George Will? Manliness?”) Here’s a quote:

Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a “disparate impact”: The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.

He then goes on to expound in great detail how “men” of today are mostly extended adolescents. He has lots of facts and data to back it up too. For example, in today’s America women are the majority of doctors, lawyers and other traditionally “male” professions. Women make up the majority of college students and 58% of college graduates today are female. Females aged 18-25 are roughly 1/2 as likely to be living with their parents as males aged 18-25.

He blames this on a culture which has essentially betrayed men, while at the same time glorifying women. Men are portrayed as bumbling incompetents in most modern entertainment, especially sit-coms and movie comedies. He uses the example of Cary Grant and Hugh Grant as a means of describing how his generation watched movies where men were debonaire, cultured and mature, where our generation watches movies where men are bumbling arrested adolescents.

I’d say he has a point.

The biggest comedy of 2009 was “The Hangover” a movie about four “men” in their 30s who were off to Vegas to have a wild bachelor party for their buddy. Each of the men was portrayed as selfish, immature and irresponsible.

Will also contrasted television shows like “Friends” or “Seinfeld” with shows from his generation to demonstrate how our culture has created an extended immaturity. Adult men never grow up in these shows. They behave and talk at early middle age exactly as they did in high school. With the exception of Jerry in Seinfeld, none of the “men” in these shows can hold a job, provide for their family, remain in a monogamous relationship, or address their life problems in any sort of serious way. He only compared this to the ubiquitous Westerns of his generation, where men were heroic, stoic and focused on providing for, protecting and raising their families. I would even compare modern shows to early sit-coms like “The Odd Couple” or “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” to demonstrate how different a 30-something was portrayed in the 50s and even 60s compared to today.

He doesn’t say this, but he implies that we are at risk of losing an entire generation (or two) of men, and without men to raise children, the loss may perpetuate itself as boys are raised to believe that “men” should act like teenagers for the rest of their lives.

Will’s penultimate paragraph suggests that this extended adolescence is compounded by the baby boomer’s narcissistic fixation with their own past:

At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang “Satisfaction,” a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year’s game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to baby boomers’ limitless appetite for nostalgia. “My generation’s obsession with youth and its memories,” Cross writes, “stands out in the history of human vanity.”

Now, I have to admit that this sort of thing hits me pretty close to home. I don’t make any secret that I am, at age 50, still very much involved in gaming, an activity I think Will would sniff at as a perfect example of this extended adolescence. I can at least offset that by pointing out that I moved out of my house at age 17 and have lived on my own since then, I got married in my 20s and had kids, and my career has been pretty consistent with pre-baby boomer career paths (essentially the whole “climbing the corporate ladder” career thing), so I’ve done OK in the “provide for, protect and raise the family” thing. But I do spend a good bit of my “leisure” time pursuing my own selfish interests, such as fishing, stargazing, playing guitar, blogging, playing computer games, playing table-top games, etc.

Maybe I’m some sort of transitional form of “man” where I was raised to get a job, be serious and be “a man” but not quite enough to put aside “childish things.” I’ve got a foot in both worlds, I suppose. Something to think about.

You are looking at the oldest known human-built structure. This monolith and wall is part of a temple complex recently uncovered in Turkey that is 7,000 years older than the Pyramids, 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, and according to our current understanding of human cultural progression, older than agriculture by almost a thousand years, and older than domesticated animals by more than that.

Old.

They call it potbelly hill, after the soft, round contour of this final lookout in southeastern Turkey. To the north are forested mountains. East of the hill lies the biblical plain of Harran, and to the south is the Syrian border, visible 20 miles away, pointing toward the ancient lands of Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the region that gave rise to human civilization. And under our feet, according to archeologist Klaus Schmidt, are the stones that mark the spot—the exact spot—where humans began that ascent.

This is completely rewriting early human history. And doing so emphatically since these constructs are far more sophisticated and abundant than any archaeologist would have imagined before stumbling across this site. There are at least 50 separate temple sites, each with its own monolith and carefully constructed walls. Many of the monoliths are exquisitely carved in a naturalist style far removed from the cave paintings known to have been done at about the same time.

This is just at the tail end of the last ice age. Just when humans were finding a world that was not a brutal fight to survive against the cold. Neanderthals roamed Europe at this time. It is possible that these temples were built before the first human city was built. In fact the archaeologist who found them theorizes that it was the building of these temples that led to the construction of cities, the cultivation of wheat and the domestication of animals. He might be right. Currently all the evidence we have is that wheat was first cultivated within a few miles of this location, and the first domesticated pigs were also traced to a short distance away.

What strikes me is how solid and clean the construction appears to be, especially the monoliths themselves. They are presumed to be carven idols of gods, and their “T” shape is thought to be an attempt to mimic the shape of the human body. If both of those presumptions are true, and they are both plausible, then that would mean that the builders of these temples contemplated gods as being similar to man.

Again, to try to put this in perspective, if these dates and conclusions are right, these 50 some odd temples with these huge monoliths (up to 17 feet tall, built with quarried rock from a nearby hill and weighing several tons each) were built by a culture that had no written language, no mathematics, no agricultural base and no domesticated animals, meaning every block was moved through pure human muscle power alone. Without even copper tools, all the stones were carved with stone tools.

I find this to be fascinating. I also doubt that we have just happened to stumble onto the oldest structures ever built. I am sure there were other, older structures, but this is undeniably old.

Interestingly, the site shows signs that it was deliberately buried some 3,000 years after it was built. To me that is just as curious as the building itself. Why would a new culture completely bury the temples of an old culture? They didn’t destroy it, they buried it. Interesting indeed.

The bombay doors are open and the nuke has been armed.

President Barack Obama urged Congress Wednesday to vote “up or down” on sweeping health care legislation in the next few weeks, endorsing a plan that denies Senate Republicans the right to kill the bill by stalling with a filibuster.

“I don’t see how another year of negotiations would help. Moreover, the insurance companies aren’t starting over,” Obama said, rejecting Republican calls to begin anew on an effort to remake the health care system.

The president made his appeal as Democratic leaders in Congress surveyed their rank and file for the votes needed to pass legislation by majority vote—invoking rules that deny Senate Republicans the right to block it through endless stalling debate. Obama specifically endorsed that approach

GOP leaders were unmoved, despite Obama’s declaration that he had incorporated a few of their proposals into his revised legislation.

There is a very good chance that Obama has just thrown Washington into total dysfunctional gridlock.

Which I’m all in favor of… Any time Congress can’t get things done is a win for the American people.

If there has been any doubt that the Obama administration is deliberately antagonizing the United Kingdom, please give me some other explanation for this latest foreign policy debacle:

Argentina was celebrating a diplomatic coup yesterday in its attempt to force Britain to accept talks on the future of the Falkland Islands, after a two-hour meeting in Buenos Aires between Hillary Clinton and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Responding to a request from Mrs Kirchner for “friendly mediation” between Britain and Argentina, Mrs Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said she agreed that talks were a sensible way forward and offered “to encourage both countries to sit down”.

Her intervention defied Britain’s longstanding position that there should be no negotiations unless the islands’ 3,000 inhabitants asked for them. It was hailed in Buenos Aires as a major diplomatic victory, but condemned in the Falklands.

Is it even remotely possible that this is just more inbelievably ignorant, arrogant incompetence?

And besides that, who picks these photo op pictures? Doesn’t Hillary have someone on her staff that says “Hillary, come over here and take another picture. You look like a neighing horse in that one.”

As the Health Care battle enters its end game, we are seeing a lot of last minute changes and jockeying for position on both sides of the debate.

Obama has finally played a decent political card (his first) on this by releasing a new bill from the White House (as opposed to letting Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid write it) which incorporates a couple of good Republican ideas and which whittles down the scope of the bill enough that it will certainly get the attention of an Olympia Snowe in the Senate. I don’t know whether to be pleased that our President has actually shown that he has at least heard a whisper of the complaints of the American people, or dismayed at the prospect that Obama may actually be learning something about how things work in Washington.

Still, I haven’t seen the text of Obama’s new bill, but it does have the possibility of being a game changer simply because it would likely be treated as a new bill instead of some effort to use reconciliation. I don’t see how something that radically different from what is in the current House or Senate bills could fall under the “reconciliation” rules.

One of the provisions that appears to still be in Obama’s new bill though is the criminalization of people who choose not to purchase health care. I won’t support any bill that has the potential to foment armed insurrection in this country, so I’m still opposed to it.

And that brings me to the concept of the Tyranny of Good Intentions. Why would any President or political party in America propose and turn into law anything so blatantly opposed to this nation’s founding principles? The “logic” of the Left is that health care is a shared responsibility that everyone in the country owns a piece of. In other words, from the perspective of the Left your neighbor’s health care is absolutely your problem. This is because they consider it to be a basic human responsibility to share the load for the health care of others. This is so deeply ingrained in their world view that they literally cannot see how anyone could object to the concept without being a literally evil person.

And so, because they believe it is self-evident that everyone should pitch in to share the overall health care burden, they have no problem making criminals of those who disagree. This is the same logic that says that using incandescent light bulbs is a “crime against humanity” and therefore prosecutable. It’s the same logic that says that people need to be protected against their own eating habits. All of this is for your own good.

The fact that it is the very definition of tyranny is something they quite literally don’t care about. It’s good tyranny after all.