Another from the crowded stage at Audubon Park in Memphis.
Wail on, Skydog!
Bonus:
A little less crowded:
Here's someone else I miss: the late, great Buck Owens, here reprising a classic of his with Dwight Yoakam. There just aren't enough songs that reference the fine art of rolling a drunk.
Porter Wagoner has passed away and left Country music one step closer to total domination by faux-Country acts singing about sippy cups.
Take a minute to listen to some real Country, Porter style. This Bill Anderson-penned number is my favorite song of Porter's and one of his best, I think.
(By the way, if Bill had penned that sippy cup song, the guy in it would still have stood on his front porch and looked through the window at his family, only this time the children would be all dirty and hungry and the wife would be banging a vacuum cleaner salesman.)
I think this is the first time I've seen one of our traditional Southern snacks listed as being healthy. It so...odd, like if the Milky Way stood on its head and showed the universe its underwear:
For lovers of boiled peanuts, there's some good news from the health front. A new study by a group of Huntsville researchers found that boiled peanuts bring out up to four times more chemicals that help protect against disease than raw, dry or oil-roasted nuts.
Lloyd Walker, chair of Alabama A&M University's Department of Food and Animal Sciences who co-authored the study, said these phytochemicals have antioxidant qualities that protect cells against the risk of degenerative diseases, including cancers, diabetes and heart disease.
The taste of a hot, salty, mushy green peanut is so good. I especially like getting a juicy one so I can drink the hot peanuty water. I might even surreptitiously roll the empty shells around in my mouth a little to suck out the juice. Boiled peanuts are so delectable, as a matter of fact, that eating them makes up for the six hours or so you spent enduring the smell of hot boiling ass to cook them, which is as close an approximation as I can give to the bold smell they release as hot steam. As a child I once spent the better part of a summer day in a motel efficiency with giant kettle of green peanuts odoriferously on the boil. Now that I think of it, since it was me, an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin all in a tiny un-airconditioned room in Florida, maybe it wasn't the peanuts I was smelling. In any case, at the end of it all, I was rewarded with a glass of tea and a section of newspaper filled with a delicious treat to eat underneath a tree.
My co-worker has some stories to tell about her college roommate at Stetson who kept a hotplate on her dorm room desk whose sole use was to keep her in fresh hot boiled peanuts. My co-worker did not laugh when she told them, either.
You'll find a little history on our snack here.
Director Oliver Stone continues to surprise with his wide-ranging selection of subject matter to translate into film. His latest sortie into cinematic storytelling will be a drama about, of all things, the Vietnam War:
Woody Harrelson is reteaming with his "Natural Born Killers" director Oliver Stone for the Vietnam War drama "Pinkville."
...
Stone, who served in Vietnam, already revisited the conflict with the films "Platoon," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Heaven and Earth."
As long as a scrap of hide and at least one hoof remain, I guess.
People don't like to talk it about much, but some babies drive away the very people they would most like to keep in their life, sabotaging what would be healthy relationships but for the Dead Sea of their id:
A baby was abandoned twice in one night — first by her mother, who left the child with a man who gave her a ride, and then by the man and his wife, who left the baby at a hospital, police said.
...
Police said Michael Williams was driving home from work in LaPorte early Sunday when he was stopped by a woman he knows holding her baby. She asked the man to give her a ride to Gary, and when they arrived the woman exited the car and asked Williams to take her baby.Williams told police he suspected the woman was on drugs and agreed to keep the child. After he arrived home, however, he and his wife wrapped the baby in a blanket, attached a note, drove to a Portage hospital and left the baby on an emergency room counter.
Desperately needy and clingy, always wanting to be taken care of -- we've all seen this dysfunction dance before.
I cannot understand North American cannibals lack of organization in the kitchen. Jeff Dahmer was found to be storing an uncovered head on the refrigerator shelf where it would absorb the odor and flavor of God knows whatever else was in that fridge -- perhaps even onions. The police discovered many things during a careful search of his apartment, but Tupperware was not among them.
Now they've arrested a Mexican cannibal and he shows the same cavalier attitude in regards to food storage as Dahmer. Is it a guy thing?:
When [José Luis] Calva allowed policemen to search his dingy fourth-floor flat in the wee hours of the following Monday, the scene that greeted them was straight out of a horror screenwriter's most lurid fantasies. Police say that inside one bedroom closet was Alejandra [Galeana]'s dismembered cadaver—sans the right forearm and the right leg below the knee. The missing limbs turned up inside the refrigerator in the kitchen, where investigators also discovered a Corn Flakes box containing a bone covered in muscle tissue that had apparently been fried.
Not even Freud himself could follow the labyrinthine paths of minds as twisted as this. You'd think that if anyone had an appreciation of keeping food fresher longer it would be these fellows.
Duane and... a Brylcreemed Dickey(?) just can't hide from the bass.
Wail on, Skydog!
I wonder why this house was declared uninhabitable:
A 12-year-old crashed his cousin's Jeep Cherokee into the side of an east Miramar home Sunday, leaving three family members homeless.Police arrested the cousin of the driver for allowing the boy to drive the SUV.
Miramar police arrested Yves Amedee, 25, who lives in the same neighborhood as the family whose home was damaged. He was charged with allowing an unauthorized person to operate a vehicle and obstructing an investigation by being disruptive.
The one-story home struck by the vehicle was deemed uninhabitable. Protective tape encircled the house to prevent onlookers from getting too close.
We also had a family member drive a car through our house. I won't give this person's name, but it rhymes with "Vlad." Pulling into the carport late one night, "Vlad" suddenly drew a blank on the division of labor of the pedals at his feet. Was there blood in his alcohol stream? I believe there was. He went through the house, but we didn't disinhabit it. My brother-in-law had a new wall up the next day.
For quite a while after that my mother employed a high-tech device to warn drivers that a wall was approaching: the wheeled washtub used to catch air conditioner juice from a wall unit was combined with lengths of clothesline tied to two-by-fours on either side and placed at the front of the carport whenever "Vlad" went out for the evening.
Now that's what I call curb appeal.
"Playing the legal system like a banjo," Carol City resident Harrel Braddy managed to stall his murder trial for almost ten years. Not up to serial killer Charles Ng's exacting standards of judicial delay, but pretty close. Now he'll be waxing melodic from Death Row:
Harrel Franklin Braddy dumped a little girl in the Everglades nine years ago to get chewed up by alligators.On Monday, a Miami-Dade judge sentenced Braddy to die for it.
''The defendant . . . caused this 5-year-old to die, alone in the wilderness, and to be mutilated by monsters of the swamp,'' Circuit Judge Leonard E. Glick wrote in his sentencing order. ``Adults are supposed to protect children from monsters; they are not supposed to be the monsters themselves.''
Braddy, 58, was convicted in July for the November 1998 killing of Quatisha Maycock.
The child was found dead in the Everglades with alligator bite marks on her head and stomach and her left arm severed. The medical examiner testified that the girl was still alive when one or more alligators bit her.
Braddy told investigators he left Quatisha in the swamp because she witnessed him trying to kill her mother, who survived Braddy's choking attack.
He put his time in the county lock-up to good use, training as a paralegal. So far he's his best client.
You know how to tell when your dog thinks you're a bad driver?
When she looks like she thinks she's a chimp about to be blasted into orbit.
Hallelujah. It's just been announced that next week Michael Devlin will plead guilty to all 86 charges in all four jurisdictions relating to his crimes in the kidnappings of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby. He's been sweating those kids and their families out since January saying his wanted to tell "his side of the story."
Tomorrow will be the fifth anniversary of Shawn's abduction. Kidnapped when he was 11, he was missing for over four years. 13-year-old Ben Ownby's kidnapping lasted four days.
The remarriage of an Oklahoma man's ex-wife leaves a bad taste in his mouth:
An Oklahoma man is facing charges for attacking his ex-wife her new husband.During the struggle, 35-year-old Tom Ledgerwood allegedly bit off and swallowed body parts from both of his victims.
Kristy and Larry Nuckols got married on Monday. This should be the happiest time of their lives, but what happened two weekends ago in the small town of Sasakwa has scarred them forever.
Kristy says the two of them were chased down a dirt road and their car got stuck.
That's when she says her ex-husband, Tom Ledgerwood, and some friends confronted them.
Larry says, "I had some mace and I hit him right in the eye, and he dove in the car."
Larry says they started fighting and were rolling around inside the car when Tom began biting him.
Larry says, "He told me, 'You know what that was? That's your ear, and I'm going to get the other one.'"
Larry lost half of his left ear, the top of his right one, and thought he was going to also lose his life.
Larry says, "People come up behind me yelling kill him, kill him Tom, kicking me in the back of the head."
That's when Kristy says she jumped in to try to save Larry.
Kristy says, "I went to put my fingers in his mouth to pull him back. One chomp and I knew that sucker was coming off."
Larry says, "I knew we weren't going to get out of there alive, so I started conniving."
Kristy says they eventually got her ex-husband to calm down.
Kristy says, "That's when he said he swallowed my finger and his ears."
Ledgerwood was arrested and is charged with five felony counts and could spend close to 50 years behind bars.
Larry says, "He's a mad dog. He needs to be put down."
Kristy says she and Tom were married for 17 years and their divorce became final last month.
If he'd insisted on his full pound of flesh this could have been tragic.
How a bill becomes a law if Teddy Kennedy's sponsoring it:
The image of a topless woman that popped up during a state legislator's computer presentation to a high school class had been downloaded by a child of the lawmaker, a state House staffer said Thursday.The image of a topless woman was projected after Rep. Matthew Barrett inserted a data memory stick into the computer for a Tuesday lecture on how a bill becomes a law. He was speaking to an American government class of about 20 students in the northern Ohio city of Norwalk.
Barrett has said he did not know at the time how the image had become intermingled with the graphics presentation he was there to show. He immediately shut down the computer and finished the presentation using paper handouts.
All in favor?
Some conservative knees are jerking at references to Jeri Kehn Thompson being Fred Thompson's "trophy wife." Since the term refers to a beautiful woman who marries a wealthy, much older man, usually as his second wife, I'd say the glass slipper fits. Saying she's "accomplished in her own right" doesn't ring true. We all know and admire the accomplished women in our lives. What would put her in their company? The only thing being offered is her approximately five years of having good, if rather amorphous jobs in Washington (political consultant, media consultant), and she got those after she hooked up with Fred. That's not exactly pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps or mastering something difficult. Her B.A. is in English and she holds no advanced degrees.
The Washington Post did an extensive write-up of her in August that looks at her background, if you'd like to know more.
I'm in tune with Fred Thompson's political ideals and am glad he's happy in his personal life, but I can't see his wife as First Lady material.
You can find profiles of some our potential First Ladies here. I'm not finding any on the list appealing, except, oddly-enough since I don't care for her husband, the truly accomplished Michelle Obama. Laura Bush is going to be a tough act to follow.
There are so many crime stories in the news, sometimes my eyes glaze over from reading them all. But sprinkled in among the dozens of tales of misdeeds I come across daily are ones like this that have at their center something more satisfying than the standard mayhem:
Scott Masters, 41, of Park Hills, was indicted this month on a charge of second-degree robbery. He is accused of stealing a 52-cent donut from Farmington Country Mart and assaulting one of the employees who tried to stop him.If convicted, he could be sentenced up to 15 years in prison.
According to the original police report, Farmington police officers were told Masters entered the store and was seen taking a donut. When he tried to walk out without paying, he was approached by employees and asked to stop.
Witnesses said he became aggressive and assaulted a female store worker as he continued to try to leave the store. Officers later found and arrested the man at a residence on A Street.
Many are saying that law enforcement shouldn't fritter away valuable limited resources by prosecuting this man, but I'd say the fat was in the fryer when Mr. Masters made a decision to use violence against the clerk who tried to stop him from taking a powder with the purloined pastry. It's not so much the theft of a 52-cent item that's the issue here, but the way he went about stealing it.
Still photography can be deceptive. Witness INDC Bill's fondness for posting photos of "historical moments" hoping we'll fail to note the actors are all ferrets in human clothing. Being embedded in Iraq has emboldened him and he's now attempting to rook readers by passing off this photo as a picture of Marines playing chess. What you don't see, of course, is the image of them seconds later, the one in which they've taken those same chess pieces, sniffed them, and then dunked them in milk.
Bill's done some excellent posting from Iraq though, (he even video-conferenced with the President) and is home now. Unfortunately while he was gone his home was targeted by a fine art thief. Lost: his entire collection of photos portraying jackalopes and trucks carrying enormously oversized agricultural specimens, to include that of a beloved turnip which hung over his bed.
Secure in her double-coat, the stalwart shepherd sits immune to the elements...
...until a single drop of rain strikes her head...
...and sends her fleeing to the truck.
A tantrum ends in tragedy as a New York woman rides a hissy into the hereafter:
A relative of the traveler who may have accidentally choked herself to death while handcuffed in a Phoenix airport holding cell says she was a "wonderful" woman and mother.Officials say Carol Anne Gotbaum was arrested Friday at Sky Harbor International Airport after she became irate when gate crews refused to allow her late boarding for a flight.
The New York woman's stepmother-in-law, Betsy Gotbaum, says she was "sweet and kind and loving" and she's pleading for privacy for her stepson and the children. She calls it a "horrible tragedy."
Officers handcuffed Carol Gotbaum and took her to the holding room, where authorities say she kept screaming. When she became quiet they found her unresponsive.
They say she may have tried to get out of her handcuffs which ended up around her neck.
I'm not one for tasing, but in this case some calming volts would have allowed her to live to rage another day.
