Nom de plume: Rivrdog

RIP

It says here that the inventor of Ramen noodles, who was also the head of the Nissin Co which sold them worldwide, has died after a full life at 96.

Most of us, your blogger included, owe a huge debt of gratitude to the man who developed this 10-cent meal. If there is a college student out there who DIDN'T eat Top Ramen as a major source of their food, after spending their food allowance on Beer (or ganja), they are some kind of weird.

For the information of those who have not lived on this type of food, there are many different variations on Momofuku Ando's theme, and some are quite nice. In my later flying days, I would take my own food on longer C-141 and B-52 missions, because the USAF instituted a ridiculous policy which said that the price of a flight meal (box lunch) had to equal the cost of the current meal in the chow hall. As an officer, I had to pay the actual cost of a meal in the chow hall, which meant $8.00 baloney sandwiches, so I took noodle cups instead. All the aircraft had hot cups, which you would fill from the drinking water jug and heat up (to only about 190 degrees though, at the 8 or 9 thousand foot cabin altitude). A noodle cup could be prepared in minutes, in between the various navigation duties I was assigned to, and wolfed down in a short interval also.

Rest in Peace, Ando-sama, you've earned your rest, having fed a good portion of the civilized world for over a generation.

(Claps twice, bows towards the west, in the direction of the gentleman's funeral banner, but as a 40-year consumer of ramen noodles, I figure his spirit already recognizes me.)

Dunderhead report From Oregon, Part Deux

We have a national disease that is endemic in this nation. Might be in others, too, but it's especially bad in the US of A.

It's called "I'm a complete dipshit and I think I'm bulletproof Syndrome"

Last couple of weeks, we got inundated with the reports and the angst over the family from Kalifornia who thought driving a Saab and having a GPS set made them superheroes who could overcome all the laws of physics and human endurance in the wilderness mountains of Southern Oregon. They paid for their disregard of reality, and I commented on it here.

Now, the mountains of Oregon are once again on the national news highlight reels. Three adrenaline-junkie mountain climbers ignored first the weather forecast, blizzards on Mount Hood and high avalanche danger, then their own training, leaving most of their heavy gear behind, and took what amounted to summer gear on a winter climb and traverse from one trailhead at 6,500 feet to the top of the almost-12,000 foot mountain, then a traverse around the summit and descent to another trailhead at 6,000 feet.

THIS IS A TOUGH FEAT IN SUMMER, AND ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE IN THE WINTER. It amounts to an expedition at this time of year, but the men were only equipped for a day climb and hike, not an expedition, according to this report.

Now, every expert climber on the West Coast who can take the time off is flying out here to risk his/her life in the likely-futile attempt to save these boneheads. Sheriff Wampler of Hood River County has worn out two of the premier mountain rescue teams in the country, the Crag Rats and Portland Mountain Rescue. It's all he can do.

The brother of one of the fools appeared on TV and said that his brother was a good climber.

I beg to differ with him. He's no better than a boot recruit climber with no training, since he chose to disregard all of his.

Do you remember all the scorn that was heaped on Veep Cheney's head when he accidentally shot a hunting companion? Do you remember what Veep Cheney said? "I've got no excuse, and I'm sorry."

These boneheads have no excuse, either. They may be fine fellows, but they sucuumbed to that Syndrome, and thought they were bulletproof.

If they are still alive, which is doubtful, they know now that they are NOT bulletproof, but in the meantime, they have put dozens of their brother and sister climbers at risk, as those stalwarts answer the Sheriff's plea for yet more climbers to make yet more rescue ascents.

I've summitted a Cascade peak, Middle Sister, back in the 60's. That was in the summer, and I was carrying almost 50 pounds of camera gear in addition to my climbing gear, as I was a cinematographer on a college film project when I did the climb. I was in superb shape then, and yet it used ALL of my bodily stamina to hike 8 miles, climb the 11,000 foot peak and hike out 14 miles, all in one day. These boneheads were all older than that, and yet their climb and trek was much more arduous.

You want to try my kind of a rush? Take your rifle and put 5 rounds 100 yards downrange with old eyes looking through iron sights and group them so that your palm covers them all.

That will give you a rush.

NSFW Ice Cream

In the category of Tasty Instructional Aids, the Rivrdog blog presents:

Sniper attack on divorce judge

...this one was inevitable. I would be surprised if it doesn't happen again. When you give a "family" law judge the power to completely ruin a man's life, forever, then the person with the ruined life could easily feel that society's rules don't apply to him after the judgment is rendered.

That's when this type of assault becomes possible.
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UPDATE: 061306 2045 PDT: Some additional details: the shot was made from 300 meters away, and wounding indicates a frangible round was used. More here

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Some details of the attack are coming in. Apparently a sniper taking a shot from outside the building, who has not been caught, so the case will have to be made by investigators.

I wouldn't want to be a guy who had been through that judge's divorce court in the last few years.

Especially a gun-owning divorced guy.

Justice will prevail, I'm sure, but I will be watching closely to see how much INJUSTICE gets dispensed enroute to the justice.

A case like this has the potential to be another 'Nawlins fiasco, with cops battering down doors and grabbing guns right left and center. The good news is that Nevada is a place where SOME common sense usually prevails, and the tourist-industry CEOs are not going to want the cops to scare off customers.

BTW, when the first news bulletin came across, I says to the frau, "Bet that's a divorce judge". Confirmed 5 minutes later.

I should have been a reporter, but then, cutting to the chase and getting the hunches right doesn't guarantee you a job these days, since truth in the news is not the highest priority on the news directors' agendas.

Advice line

When you have grown daughters, you get asked for advice occasionally, mostly on manly things.

One of the darlings calls me late in the evening and tells me she has a "chemical spill" at her place.

OK, not hard, retrieve hazmat incident checklist from depth of mind where it went with a lot of other professional checklists when I retired.

1. Who is affected. Just her. Cat not affected yet.
2. What symptoms? Burns the nose, hands smarting. Hmmmm.
3. You have any idea what spilled? Yes, Mace. OK,  I take three combat breaths AND TRY NOT TO LAUGH.
4. Is it still spilling? No. It's the bedside night-stand can, and it seems to be leaking, and I got some on me.
5. OK, don't put your hands anywhere near your face, this stuff won't kill you, but since you wear contact lenses, it could be a problem if you get any in your eyes.
6. Go turn on the shower and leave it running. Cold water. If your eyes start to close up, grope your way into the shower, with clothes on, and wash out your eyes WITHOUT TOUCHING THEM ANY MORE. Now, since you can still see, get two large kitchen garbage bags and ties. Now ease the nightstand drawer out of the nightstand, trying not to move the leaky can of OC, and without inverting it, bag it and tie the bag. Now put another bag on in the reverse direction and tie it. Now take it out to your patio and lay it down. OK
7. Now do a surgical scrub with warm water on the hands. Now blow the nose a lot, each time with a new tissue that you don't fold and re-use.
8. You're safe, go turn off the shower. You might go on the internet and look up a recipe for anti-pepper eyewash. I understand the Black Cross Medics for the urban guerillas have a good formula that they might have posted on IndyMedia. This is why the military won't let members wear contact lenses.
9. When you get time, bring the bagged drawer to me and I'll decon it and dispose of the contents and paint the inside of it with Kilz.
10. The usual professional fee applies.
11. Good night.

So then I get my reward. "Gee, Dad, you sound like you really know how to handle this problem." A straight line if I ever heard one, so I offer a war story:

Whacko enters County Courthouse, makes a fuss at his hearing and disappears within the building. Reports come in of disturbance in a fourth-floor men's room. I take the elevator. I get there first. As I get in to the bathroom, I draw the can of whoop-ass from my duty belt and I soon find my whacko, standing on the flushometer valve in the back of a stall, with his shirt looped around a pipe near the ceiling and also around his neck. He screams a gutteral scream at me and prepares to either leap on me or hang himself, I'm not sure which. I shuffle-step two back and fire the can of pepper at him. It's the foamy kind, and I hold the valve open until he has an orange head. He pulls the shirt off his neck and falls down off the flushometer valve (I still to this day have no clue how he was balancing on something that small) and half-leaps toward me. I grab him, use the stall to hold him up and cuff him.

The pepper hits him, somewhat delayed because he's whacko (known disadvantage about pepper). He starts to holler, so I go to a sink, fill the bowl, and duck his head under until the bubbles start to slow down, then let him up and repeat a couple of times with clean water. In the old days this could have been done right in the commode, but the new water-saver commodes don't have enough water in them.

March him downstairs, stuff him in the patrol unit and carry his deranged butt directly to the Psych ward, where the admitting interview is the shortest I ever saw conducted. Rubber room arranged, write a half-page report for the doc and go back downtown.

Then the fun begins. It seems that I was the first cop in history to break up a suicide attempt by macing the attempter. Internal Affairs, who has to approve all uses of force, must have kicked that one around for weeks before I got the official "all clear" letter.

I still catch flak about that call.

Now all y'all have a good laugh, too.

And yes, FYI I DID tell the dau that a light 5-shot revolver makes a better nightstand weapon. Of course, I got the usual polite "no", but she is considering my NEXT BEST alternative, a can of Wasp and Hornet Spray. It is made to throw a powerful stream 25 feet, and the super bad-nasty methyl-ethyl badshit in it is carried in a nice eye-killing hydrocarbon carrier. It is of sufficient size to handle several assailants, who will be VERY traceable with chlorinated hydrocarbons in their liver biopsies and opaque corneas later on. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the mixture is flammable also, so if you just happen to have a candle burning, the rumpkin will probably catch fire while he is soaking up the poison. Hard on the abode, however.

Oh, yes, it's deniable: it's wasp and hornet season here in the great Pacific Northwest, and most savvy householders have a can of it around.

Sweet dreams, it's now six-SEVEN-ought six, so you survived dispite Nostradamus and DaVinci. 

Like father, like son

Did you expect anything different? He took a page from Daddy's Chappaquiddick book, exercised political privilege to avoid the sobriety tests that everyone else would have to go through, and didn't show up again until he sobered up.

Like father, like son.
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Update: 050406 2150 PDT: This article clearly discribes the interference that Kennedy had the brass run for him with the investigating officers. The Fraternal Order of Police has made a complaint, apparently. In a different dispatch, Kennedy now claims he took sleep medication on top of an anti-nausea medication (sounds like a frat-boy goofball to me), and was under the influence of it. I don't know whether the DeeCee Code has indictable misdemeanors in it, but the Junior Bloviator just fessed to DUI. The law, you see, doesn't care what you are under the influence of. BTW, narcotics of abuse are Junior's choice of intoxicants anyway.

Just in: (at 050706 1900 PDT) The Junior Bloviator has run away and hidden in a drug rehab center. This is his third visit. Can't his constituents see that he is damaged goods? Don't give me the usual liberal crapology about his addictions being a "medical problem", they're a personality disorder, so you good citizens of Rhode Island have a whacko legislator.

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Chip off the old block.

Citizens of Rhode Island, don't you deserve better than this chump?

A better question, for the political masters of Washington, DC, would be why does a system still exist that legislators have some sort of Kings-X when they commit crimes against the citizens of DeeCee?

I'm not going to even ask the Kennedy scion to resign. He, like his father, has no sense of social justice or morality, or neither of them would claim to serve constituients ever again. Neither of them has the moral compass necessary to see the wrong they both have now committed.

Both of these cretins are only in it for the power tripping they get.

They are nothing to us. They are filth, scum.

Remember their lowly status whenever they open their mouths to tell you how they know best to run your life.

Illegal immigration control, idea #2

A few days ago, I suggested one way to control the illegal immigration that is swamping our social services safety nets.

Here's another way: use better control over the issuance of social security numbers. Since all the Federal welfare offices require a SSAN before dispensing free goodies, and since Social Security, by law, can only be granted to citizens, then an executive order ought to be issued to tighten up the issuance of SSANs, making sure, by stringent identification requirements, that ALL applicants are citizens.

After issuing said executive order, Mr. Bush ought then to order an audit of ALL previously-issued SSANs to determine what percentage might have been obtained fraudulently. If there are more than a fraction of a percent in this category, the President should go to Congress and ask for the money to re-issue every single account, relying this time on proper biometric identification of applicants.

Most of the illegals are here because we just don't give a damn in this country about proper paperwork. We can't have it both ways: the law says citizens only in the program, but many illegals are sporting social security cards. Let's get answers to the 5 "W"s here: who , what, when, where and why (and how) and figure out how this mess got started.

Then put a stop to it, and if the Feds can identify individuals who obviously looked the other way on citizenship requirements, then we have a nice home in the Gray Bar Hotel for them.

Chief Foxworth is 10-79

The ten code refers to signing off at the end of shift. The Chief, appointed by Socialist Mayor Vera Katz and now to be fired by Anarchist Mayor "Taliban Tommy" Potter, apparently followed the wrong Captain into battle.

Happens to a lot of cops. It isn't the stress, regardless of what you've been told, cops just learn how to intimidate better than most, and are forever curious to see if this means more quim (ahem, it usually does).

If you want ALL the dirt, including the sex harassment victim's VERY EXPLICIT affadavits, go here. The file is a bloated .pdf, so be patient. The gal's attorney is Vic Calzaretta, who has represented both sides in this sort of tort, but his prime practice is representing cops. I'm sure that Foxworth would have rather had him on his side, and not be fighting him.

The Chief's toast. Stick a fork in him, he's done.

The complaint also alleges that Foxworth, not yet then Chief, but of high rank, used an unmarked car to go to the gals' house and party, including boozing, then drove himself home.

I'm sure that Taliban Tommy would like to have applied the Clinton Defense of "so what, it's on his time", but it wasn't: phone logs and emails (very graphic) have been provided, and the boozing and driving a City car is enough to do it without the sex complaint, anyway.

No, the PeeCee Chief will have to leave, and soon. I don't see this case ever coming to court.

So, the speculation begins. Who/what will the anarchist Mayor, himself a former (do nothing drone of a) police chief dredge up for a replacement?

I'm betting: think "Multiple Minority". That would be someone of minority (Communist to anarchist) politics, a female, a person of color AND a GLBTC (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Curious). I'm sure such people already exist in the Police Bureau. They did in the Sheriff's Office. They were usually at least Captains, having sued their way into the rank.

I'd guess that Hizzoner will have at least a half-dozen to choose from, if he stays within the PPB and/or the MCSO, and doesn't go shopping in Seattle or San Francisco or Berkely, in which case there would be dozens of candidates.

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UPDATE: 040506 2020 PDT: It just occured to this writer that Chief Foxworth made a very basic error. In sex-role playing, anyway. He undoubtedly cast himself in the role of Master (or Dominant, or "top") and cast the gal in the role of Slave (or Submissive or "bottom"). It seems to me, having done the , erm, "research", that the FIRST thing role players are supposed to do is confirm their roles. Every time they play. Had he done that, he would not have been in the pickle he's in now, because he would have been told by the gal that she didn't want to play the sub role anymore. Any decent Top knows the way out of that one. It is a graceful retreat.
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A dying friend

UPDATE: 101205 0930 PDT: This post has generated a lot of emotion and soul-searching. That is a good thing, because the subject of dying should be taken from all angles, whether it is our own life we discuss, or some other's. Please follow the comments, and look at the commenters. Most of them are bloggers, and have posted on this topic. Please click on their name-links and go to their blogs and read their work as well.

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As we get older, we outlive people that we traveled life's roads with. That's a sad fact of life. A few days ago, Rob, aka "Acidman" of the fine blog Gut Rumbles, announced that he was dying. He may well be, as the physical symptoms he has related to us are those of a dying man.

He has also told us that he expects to just die, without any heroic medical efforts to keep him alive. He says that he is doing that for his children, to whom he intends to leave his life's fortune.

I shall miss his daily wit and personal brand of humor, his attention to history and his intolerance for fools. I can only dream of being half the blogger he is.

All that said, I just ran across a blogger who expresses her admiration for Rob, much as I have done here, but she also wishes to deny him his destiny, and advocates for "intervention", which is a code word for locking the man up and making unwanted moves to force him to be technically alive. Sort of like that poor Florida woman suffered. You know who I mean, but I won't grant the google-power to her torturers.

You see, Rob, and everyone else on this planet, has the right of controlling their own destiny. That right of control doesn't have an asterisk at the end of life, it is supreme to the end. All religions aside, for almost all of them try to force us to believe that we blaspheme our God if we take our own life, or fail to prolong it, IT IS OUR RIGHT TO DIE WHEN WE DAMN WELL WANT TO!!!

So, all of you who want to "intervene", I command you, back off. It is Rob's right to die the way he wants to, and when he wants to.

You trifle with his life at the peril of yours.

Training Day?

Even the lowly whore must have a training day.

Would be hard to call it "the world's oldest profession" if they didn't have training, I guess.

And no, I haven't been to the training here in Portland, OR that the story mentioned.