This is just the right combination of modern vanity and old timey reality in the hills of Tennessee. Watch the whole thing for the runner-napping. Yeeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I suspect Chet Atkins got his inspiration from Merle. Any of you readers from Kentucky and Tennessee will love this real music. I especially think of the folks I spoke to in a little Bible church up a coal mining river valley in southern Kentucky in the town of Putney. For you people who never have been in Kentucky, that "u" in Putney has a pronunciation all its own. The deacon told me if I could not learn to say Putney right I would not get the offering. I learned, and I bet I will go back and visit those folks again some day. He also told me I had come down there from Detroit, but I would go home to Deee-troit. So, here is the Nine Pound Hammer, a tool most essential to survival in Kentucky.
I have never seen double wides perched on the side of mountains like in Kentucky. They had one edge against the mountain and the rest of the double wide hanging on thin air. I asked how they got them into those spots and was told with a Caterpillar tractor. Once they get them there they are never moved again.
I watched the video, and I was made to remember that I taught English and Christian Education in Grand Rapids School of the Bible and Music long ago in 1972. I also remember that I used to visit the Eerdman's book clearance store in Grand Rapids and find some real bargains, though they had some defects causing them to be marked down 80%. And, one day in 1989 I was going to that very store following an old Buick in my red beater Valiant, and he turned left just ahead of me, and I followed him. The siren wailed, the red and blue lights started flashing, and I was served a nice ticket by a Grand Rapids cop for doing a left turn against a no-left-turn sign. The guy in the Buick needs to buy me pie and coffee at the Amway Plaza for taking the ticket instead of him. The thing that will not leave my memory is when the cop handed me the ticket and said, "Sorry buddy." They don't make cops like that anymore. So, here is a piece of promotional work like nothing I have ever seen before. The music theme is a bit blasphemous, but you really need to watch this and marvel that so many Michiganders could do so much so well in the lip dub department.
So, why should these Buddhists have all the fun. Can a Bible believer bring the world a merry heart moment? Proverbs 17:22 A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones. Ecclesiastes 9:7 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Proverbs 15:15 All the days of the afflicted are evil: but he that is of a merry heart hath a continual feast.
The map shows Nippur in about 1500 BC when it was in decline. The reason Google will not show you this map is because they have an agreement with the Sumerian Government to conceal the fact that Nippur is rapidly becoming a ghost town. You will notice the two lane boulevard with no residences or stores on it. It is suggested that the city of Detroit may also be paying Google to hide the fate of Nippur so that this troubling situation will not be seen as a trend. After all, if a large famous city turns into a ghost town every 3500 years, who knows where this trend could lead?
Once again, you learned the truth here. The facts we uncover are very hard to find, and you need to keep checking to see what we find next. We are now looking into the fate of flatulanium gassium, the burping worm from the Neoprene Era. We hope to post our results after our correspondent, Sherman, recovers from his journey back in time in the company of Mr. Peabody and his Wayback Machine.
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman, that she should bring her own grocery bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.” The young clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were truly recycled. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Grocery stores bagged our groceries in brown paper bags, that we reused for numerous things, most memorable besides household garbage bags, was the use of brown paper bags as book covers for our schoolbooks. This was to ensure that public property, (the books provided for our use by the school) was not defaced by our scribblings. Then we were able to personalize our books on the brown paper bags. But too bad we didn’t do the green thing back then.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day. Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the throwaway kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy-gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right; we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right; we didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 23,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest burger joint. But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a lesson in conservation from a smart alack young person.
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Your Editor, Steve Van Nattan, was even less green.
I grew up on the Canadian River bottom of Oklahoma, in the Mojave Desert of California, and in Africa.
Thus.....
We did not buy our pork sausage in a staerofoam tray with shrink wrap on it. We went to our neighbors in Oklahoma when they were killing a hog, helped dress the meat, and they always sent us home with some sausage. Everyone helped each other shell corn and bale hay, so we did not know all the great modern farm equipment we were missing out on. We did not buy our beef in the same staerofoam packaging which becomes eternal trash in a landfill. We went to the plains of Africa, killed an Impala or Zebra, dressed it, ate some, canned some, and smoked some. But we also did not know anything about the Green way of doing things back then.
Back in Oklahoma we had plenty of butter, but it did not come in an electrified cooler case at the supermarket in a carton that made more trash. My Mom would skim off the cream from the cow Dad milked (by hand- we had no milking machine), and Mom gave me the Mason jar of cream, and I sat on the front steps and shook that jar til my arms ached. But, it was soooooo good-- fresh butter on Mom's hot lard soda biscuits! But of course the Green Thing club you belong to has never shaken a Mason jar for any purpose, right? There are a few people who still use Mason jars I believe-- I am told they still get their corn from a Mason jar in the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee.
When my Dad wanted to go down to Bolden's General Store in Briartown, Oklahoma, he walked the mile and a half. Driving the car would have used expensive gasoline, and he could not check his rabbit traps on the way. When we had a baptism we went down to the Canadian River, had the baptism in the river, and had dinner on the ground. We did not have pleasantly heated water by running a water heater. Furthermore; the cold river water greatly enhanced the shouting and praise of the baptismal candidates as they came out of the water. But, then, we were not as civilized as the nice big glorious classy churches of today-- we met in a school house before the ACLU figured out that we were violating the US Constitution.
When I was a kid growing up in Africa I did not have a scooter of motorcycle to ride. I walked, or I rode a bicycle like all the other Africans. I thought that was cool-- racing along a narrow path with a rice paddy on one side and a row of sisal plant spikes on the other was not dangerous unless you fell. I never did. But, or course, all you Green folks now know that my parents were guilty of endangering a child by letting me live so recklessly. I got my driver's license when I was 18, and only then because my Dad made me.
In Africa we turned on the light plant at sundown and turned it off at about 10 PM. Our lights were simply not in use the rest of the day. Primitive, I realize, compared with you green folks who have electricity in use 24/7 for one thing or another. When we lived in Africa we had no way to cool the house on a hot day, so we opened all the windows and let the wind blow through. Only now, after I have joined the green revolution, do I have central air and heat running all year. In that regard, I like you green folks' method of conservation.
I must confess that we had no running water inside in Oklahoma-- I did the running. We had a well out back where we pulled up a bucket of the most cool clear clear water on earth and drank deep. Mom never washed any drinking glasses back then in an electric dish water-- there was a bucket of cool well water by the back door and a dipper hanging on a nail. The only rule was not to let out
any backwash when you drank from the dipper. We were almost never sick. Hmmmmm When we wanted to cool a watermelon in the summer heat, we put it in a bucket and let it down into the well water to cool off. We backward idiots thought that cool watermelon as a real luxury.
Back in Oklahoma when we wanted to have ice cream at the church socials, the deacons brought a zinc washtub, two milk buckets with lids, a lot of ice from an ice house, salt, and the ladies brought the milk and cream mixture. The buckets were filled, and the big men took turns grabbing the bails of the two buckets in two hands and rotating them back and forth in the ice until they were moaning and teasing each other about "getting too old for this." The lid was lifted every few minutes and the mixture turned over. The ice cream was beyond description-- sorry about that. I realize though that you Green People have the benefit of about twenty other ingredients in your ice cream that aid and abet cancer, and there is so much sea weed extract in the stuff that it can stand up tall like pudding when it reaches room temperature. I do believe that it tastes like the back end of a mule though. But, it IS convenient to grab it out of a monster freezer at the super market all packaged and pretty.
We backward flatlanders failed to add chlorine and fluoride to our water to poison our livers and hasten the day of judgment. In Africa we collected rain water in tanks that often had dead lizards in them. The water tasted fine unless you stupidly climbed up and looked down into the tank. That would result in retroactive dysentery caused by the mind more than anything else.
And, to make matters worse, we failed to see the Green advantage of your inside toilets which become vile with germs every two hours and need large doses of Lysol from throw away cans. And, we walked "out back" to the out hose in Oklahoma and Africa where the smell was pretty gamy, I admit. But no one parked on the stool and read three chapters of "Trails Home" while a lineup waited outside and pounded the door. We also used old magazines and the Sears and Roebuck catalog pages instead of buying ooshy cooshy soft paper that fell apart and left your finders........... never mind. Once a year my Dad dug a new hole and pushed the outhouse over to the new hole. He planted a fruit tree in the old hole which grew like it was on steroids. But we did not know of the glorious Green thing we were missing out on, like landfills and stinking waste treatment plants south of town.
Finally when life was over for some friend, they did not buy an exquisite plastic and brass coffin and a marble headstone. They did not buy a pricey piece of ground in a pricey park called a cemetery and spend half a year's salary to plant their friend there and preserve their body with deadly chemicals as if they would stay fresh for eternity. No, we primitives in Oklahoma and Africa dug a hole for our friend out back of his family place, rolled him in a white cloth, placed him in a pine box the neighbors made, committed him to God with tears and hope, and we laid him to rest in peace as he had died. We believed that God would raise him at the resurrection one day even better than he ever was in real life. But then, we had not learned the blessings of Green thinking that says we must waste our substance on funerals because we paid our friend no attention when he was alive, and our conscience commands us to try to make up for it after he is dead and gone. So thoughtful. Oh, one more thing, when the old folks became lame and troubled, they were not sent away to a nursing home 500 miles from home where no one visited them much. They were made comfortable at home, or with grown kids, and they were allowed to die in peace without some doctor insisting they be fed fifteen dozen drugs every four hours and be given therapy by a visiting nurse who massaged their toes and fingers with and electrified gadget that cost the tax payers two million dollars. They may have lived a couple of days less than Green people today, but they died at home in their big chair in the corner, and 90% of the time, "They died in their sleep" instead of in ICU with a gang of doctors and nurses shocking them back to life twelve times before giving up. And, the grandkids to this day talk about how sweet it was to be sitting there by grandpa when, "He went to be with the Lord." You civilized Green people today obediently stay where you are told to stay, in the waiting room, and no one knows what grandpa's last words were, except that from the waiting room they heard, "ARGH" as the doctor did the last fibrillation that finally killed grandpa.
We were indeed pretty primitive folks back then.
For the record, I DID NOT MAKE UP ANY OF THIS OR BORROW IT. I was there helping or watching in every memory above.
There was Nancy Reagan, there was Rosalynn Carter, there was Barbara and Laura Bush, will you permit me, there was even Hillary-- some we liked and some we did not like, but the ALL looked like ladies.
Three days before the Republican presidential primary in Ohio, Mitt Romney was campaigning in Dayton when a woman stood up to ask a question that pointed to one of the most important missing debates of Campaign 2012, and to a widening division in the GOP over a critical foreign policy issue.
Vicki Chura said her daughter was on her second tour in Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division. She said her daughter was increasingly frustrated by the lack of clarity of the U.S. mission there and desperately wanted to come home. What would Romney do as president to expedite the withdrawal of U.S. forces?
The economy is and probably will continue to be the dominant issue in the campaign, but the shooting rampage Sunday by a U.S. soldier that killed 16 Afghan civilians could push the Afghan war into the political debate.
The killings may or may not be a shock to the political system. At a minimum, they are likely to raise uncomfortable questions, particularly for President Obama, the architect of the current policy, but also for the Republican candidates. Even for those out of power, Afghanistan provides no easy answers.
Romney’s response to Chura’s question underscored why. He began by criticizing the president. He said that Obama has not clearly defined the U.S. mission to the American people, and that a president should report regularly on the goals and progress of any such mission.
Romney described the U.S. objective as one of building an Afghan security force capable of protecting the country’s sovereignty — which is not that different from Obama’s stance. Hoping to show empathy with his questioner, he said he wants U.S. troops to come home “as soon as humanly possible.” But he offered a big, broad caveat: They can withdraw, he said, “as soon as that mission is complete.”
So, here is the question: When is the mission complete. If Obama did not answer this, neither did Romney. Why?
Answer: The empire is far from complete? The USA is on a roll, the last roll of every empire in world history. When an empire is about to crash, they go off over the horizon to see if they can justify their existence by grabbing more real estate.
It never works. Alexander the Great ended up in Basra in the Middle East where he died of systosemiasis very likely. Greece promptly collapsed into chaos.
What is the moral of this sorry satire?
If you are about to be fired from your job, go steal all the door knobs from the building and resign.
I trust that these little fireside chats help you understand the issues of life. I try hard to make it all very clear.
Well, Saint Lawrence lost heart and fled. That is what I hear from Dublin, Ireland.
You see, some devout thief was having a guilty conscience over all his past life of crime. He found no solace in his collection of brass knuckles and jim jams for breaking and entering the common abode of generic victims about the city. So, the blighter popped in to pray at the local Catholic Church, and he came away blessed with the heart of saint.
Now, the local padre is a bit disconcerted though. You see, the wayward fellow who was so blessed that day really did have the heart of a saint. The heart first belonged to Lawrence O'Toole of Dublin when he was born in County Kildare in 1128 AD. He used the heart to good effect until November 1180 when he went on to his assigned cubbyhole in Purgatory. One would assume he has moved on to heaven, at least if he was as good at applying his heart as the Roman Church claims.
You can see the cage in which Saint Lawrence has hung for centuries without murmur or repine. What patience. Frankly, I suspect old Lawrence must have been relieved to be out and about after residing in that cage since 1180 AD. You can also see a couple of Saint Lawrence's petrified turnips from his garden long ago.
Saint Lawrence was a Murry, as was my grandmother, but I doubt if she knew Saint Lawrence. I don't believe they were that closely connected. I find it sad to inform you that Saint Lawrence O'Toole passed on suddenly some time ago. I am sure many of you did not hear the sad news.
He left no issue because, in his line of fathering the flock of Ireland, he was not permitted to marry a nice Irish girl. That's the way the family tree dies.
So, Taffy came to the thy house and stole, not a leg of beef, but O'Toole's heart. The most shocking thing that seems to rattle the parisheners in Dublin is the fact that they can no longer gaze at the desiccated heart of their patron when they kneel to pray to him. You see, Roman Catholics do not have enough faith to pray to God, or Mary, or their patron saint without a bit of the old bloke hanging about.
The thief was kind enough to leave Larry's turnips for the parisheners to pray to, but somehow the effect seems a bit withered compared to having old Larry up there interceding for them.
This is why there are enough bits of wood around in pretty gold boxes in Catholic Churches to make a cross the height of the Empire State Building in NYC. Was the cross of Christ that big? Not at all. You see, any priest who has a flock of believers to whom he ministers, and the flock has no relic to gaze upon as they pray, can cut a chunk from the local oak tree, send it to the Pope, and he can "omni domini, etcetera, et rigibus in sanctorum," and that wee bit of wood instantly becomes a retroactive part of the cross of Christ.
If you believe that, I have a very nice old bridge in Brooklyn, NYC that I would like to sell you for $24.99. You can sit in the middle of the bridge and pray to Saint Bridget.
Do you worry yourself because I jest over this very serious matter? Well, I shall then give you the very real truth that gives me a lack of empathy for these diddle head Irishmen:
1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
The pathetic thing is this-- these people in Dublin have been praying to a dead heart while Jesus Christ was said, in THEIR Bible, to be the ONLY object of prayer in the whole universe. So, BAH to the vicar of Dublin. His wringing of the hands is devilish mockery to the God, the Savior, who died for his sins.
The following is adapted from Bill Nye's Remarks. Bill was postmaster of Laramie, Wyoming in about 1885.
Thus:
Mr. Webster, no doubt, had the best command of language of any American author prior to our day. Those who have read his ponderous but rather disconnected romance known as "Websters Unabridged Dictionary, or How One Word Led on to Another." will agree with me that he was smart. Noah never lacked for a word by which to express himself. He was a brainy man and a good speller.
It would ill become me at this late day to criticise Mr. Webster's great work--a work that is now in almost every library, school-room and counting house in the land. It is a great book. I do believe that had Mr. Webster lived he would have been equally fair in his criticism of my books.
I hate to compare my own works with those of Mr. Webster, because it may seem egotistical in me to point out the good points in my literary labors; but I have often heard it said, and so do not state it solely upon my own responsibility, that Mr. Webster's book does not retain the interest of the reader all the way through.
He has tried to introduce too many characters, and so we cannot follow them all the way through. It is a good book to pick up and while away an idle hour with, perhaps, but no one would cling to it at night till the fire went out, chained to the thrilling plot and the glowing career of its hero.
Therein consists the great difference between Mr. Webster and myself. A friend of mine at Leavenworth once wrote me that from the moment he got hold of my book, he never left his room till he finished it. He seemed chained to the spot, he said, and if you can't believe a convict, who is entirely out of politics, who in the name of George Washington can you believe?
Mr. Webster was most assuredly a brilliant writer, and I have discovered in his later editions 118,000 words, no two of which are alike. This shows great fluency and versatility, it is true, but we need something else. The reader waits in vain to be thrilled by the author's wonderful word painting. There is not a thrill in the whole tome. I had heard so much of Mr. Webster that when I read his book I confess I was disappointed. It is cold, methodical and dispassionate in the extreme.
As I said, however, it is a good book to pick up for the purpose of whiling away an idle moment, and no one should start out on a long journey without Mr. Webster's tale in his pocket. It has broken the monotony of many a tedious trip for me.
Mr. Webster's "Speller" was a work of less pretentions, perhaps, and yet it had an immense sale. Eight years ago this book had reached a sale of 40,000,000, and yet it had the same grave defect. It was disconnected, cold, prosy and dull. I read it for years, and at last became a close student of Mr. Webster's style, yet I never found but one thing in this book, for which there seems to have been such a perfect stampede, that was even ordinarily interesting, and that was a little gem. It was so thrilling in its details, and so diametrically different from Mr. Webster's style, that I have often wondered who he got to write it for him. It related to the discovery of a boy by an elderly gentleman, in the crotch of an ancestral apple tree, and the feeling of bitterness and animosity that sprung up at the time between the boy and the elderly gentleman.
Though I have been a close student of Mr. Webster for years, I am free to say, and I do not wish to do an injustice to a great man in doing so, that his ideas of literature and my own are entirely dissimilar. Possibly his book has had a little larger sale than mine, but that makes no difference. When I write a book it must engage the interest of the reader, and show some plot to it. It must not be jerky in its style and scattering in its statements.
I know it is a great temptation to write a book that will sell, but we should have a higher object than that.
I do not wish to do an injustice to a man who has done so much for the world, and one who could spell the longest word without hesitation, but I speak of these things just as I would expect people to criticise my work. If we aspire to monkey with the literati of our day we must expect to be criticised. That's the way I look at it.
P.S.--I might also state that Noah Webster was a member of the Legislature of Massachusetts at one time, and though I ought not to throw it up to him at this date, I think it is nothing more than right that the public should know the truth.
Woman Fatally Mauled Assigned Indoor Job
And, to make matters worse, we failed to see the Green advantage of your inside toilets which become vile with germs every two hours and need large doses of Lysol from throw away cans. And, we walked "out back" to the out hose in Oklahoma and Africa where the smell was pretty gamy, I admit. But no one parked on the stool and read three chapters of "Trails Home" while a lineup waited outside and pounded the door. We also used old magazines and the Sears and Roebuck catalog pages instead of buying ooshy cooshy soft paper that fell apart and left your finders........... never mind. Once a year my Dad dug a new hole and pushed the outhouse over to the new hole. He planted a fruit tree in the old hole which grew like it was on steroids. But we did not know of the glorious Green thing we were missing out on, like landfills and stinking waste treatment plants south of town.
