George of the back yard

Behind the shop lay a pile of bricks. Pile, not stack. Had the bricks been stacked, my job would have been easier. Not easy, because closer to 70 than to 60 as I am, many things no longer happen easy. The people who built the house 15 years ago piled the bricks behind the shop. I don’t know why. I don’t know how they piled the bricks, since close-together trees border three sides of the shop and the only way to get that many bricks in a pile would be to carry them an armful at a time or in a wheelbarrow, and neither of those is likely. Maybe the bricks were piled there before the shop was built. I figured there were 200 bricks, some piled atop each other, others covered by mossy dirt. What I didn’t know … Well, I’ll get to that. Or those. Priscilla has made plans for beautifying the back yard. We got 240 feet of chain link fence three years ago, and now we need to put in walkways and a few other things. We figure the bricks will make nice borders for sand or gravel walkways so the two dogs (55 pounds and 85 pounds) won’t stir up dust when they go running after nothing. They will stir sand or gravel, but it you’ve had dogs pretty much kill most of the grass, you won’t mind a little sand or gravel. I decided to stack the bricks just outside the backyard fence. So, I drove my pickup into the woods and then backed up to the brick/dirt/moss pile and started stacking bricks on the tailgate. When I got 200 on the tailgate I figured out: There are at least 200 more. At least. Not counting what might be beneath the dirt and moss and leaves. If the dirt covers more bricks (and I think that is the case, judging from what I’ve gone through so far) I’m looking at moving maybe 400 more bricks. Maybe 500. That many will make a lot of walkway border. The tailgate had what I figured a good load, so I drove forward and then began backing up and away from the pile of bricks. Everything was going OK until -- I backed between two trees and one side of the pickup didn’t. Well, it did, but not without paint scraping and metal bending and now I have brown bark stripes on what was pristine white. Oh, and the hinged gas access dived into the leaves. Watch out for that … Too late.

What's it all about, algae?

Somehow I managed to list me as a friend or member or something. The thingys in control won't let me delete me, so I'm stuck there, looking stupid. Except there's nothing to see except a gray sort of human-type shape that says SgtBob if you click on it. Hey, I look just like Ed and Michael!

Headlines in today's Little Rock paper

‘Northside girls rebuilt, revived’ Is that ‘rebuilt’ like RoboCop? Did the rebuilding require CPR? In A Flag for San Francisco, the Giants’ 1961 season, sportswriter Charles Einstein said sports pages often had headlines that could start wars, if applied in political or diplomatic news, as in ‘Dutch beat US girls.’ There is the famous ‘Smith High wins ugly girl’s basketball game.’ And one from a newspaper where I worked: ‘North Lamar girls come out on top.’ North Lamar girls weren’t ugly like the Smith High girls. Another from today’s paper: ‘Previous bowl stabs hung up by Hogs.’ You get ‘stabs,’ ‘hung up’ and ‘Hogs’ in the same line, it sounds like PETA should get a call.

That dog still don’t hunt

Back in 2006 a Tennessee woman showed David Crockett’s not executed marriage license on Antiques Roadshow. Two courts have ruled she has to give it back to Jefferson County. “As for her argument that the county trashed the document, the trial court stated: ‘That dog just won't hunt ... it just don't make sense that you can have all of the other documents immediately preceding that and subsequent to that, they're all still official county records, they're still in the clerk's office of Jefferson County.’"

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/08/01/38616.htm

Linked from pbs.org/antiques

Some interesting comments at the pbs site. “Your appraiser said ‘Eskimo!’” “That submarine flag is racist!”

We're smarter than you, so do as we say

“Relying on a belief in social evolution, development and modernization as objective truths, contemporary rescuers … consider themselves free, self-governing individuals born in the most civilized lands and therefore entitled to rule people in more backward ones.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/01/25/the-soft-side-of-imperialism/#.TyBUEzbSZKM.twitter

(An earthquake in Haiti, anything in Haiti, and it’s guilty whites piling up, one behind another, willing to pledge money, because, let’s face it, we have to help those poor Haitians. They certainly are not capable of doing anything for themselves. The same givers do not rush to "save" Turks or Armenians when earthquakes wipe out villages and towns.)

UK is broke

“Just because the spending was sometimes on worthy causes does not in itself mean it was affordable.” – Foreign Minister Jeremy Browne, ‘UK has run out of money,’

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9107485/George-Osborne-UK-has-run-out-of-money.html

Wow! Didn’t see this coming, either!

“The Justice Department will not defend the Defense Department and Department of Veterans Affairs in a lawsuit filed last year intended to extend rights and benefits to married same-sex couples in the military.”
…
Attorney General Eric Holder said “he determined that DOMA provisions ‘as applied to same-sex couples who are legally married under state law, violate the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment [of the Constitution].’”

http://www.military.com/news/article...ESRC=army-a.nl

(All of a sudden Justice quotes state law?)

Starting pitchers

Today, modern-day training techniques, diets and conditioning. Most pitchers are at least six feet tall. Two hundred innings makes a starting pitcher “a horse.” Twenty-five starts around average. Ten complete games leads the league. Most starters do not last beyond 110 pitches.

Kid Nichols. 5-10 ½, 175 pounds. Fifteen years in the majors – 1890-1906. Started 561games, completed 531. Five straight years pitched more than 400 innings; seven years more than 300 innings. Twenty games in the outfield, six at first base. Batted .226, 58 doubles, 24 triples, 16 home runs, 278 runs batted in. Would not know what a pitch count was. 361 wins, 208 losses.