Yesterday I go the surprise of my life as I opened the door to Ryan’s Pub. It was Friday, and during lent I abstain from eating meat. Lovely had just returned from a doctor’s appointment where he performed a biopsy. She was not a happy camper. Our plan was to go to Ryan’s for a fish dinner, but that fell apart when I had to go alone.
Just inside the door of Ryan’s is a section of bar, and sitting there were four of my very best friends. They were just as surprised as I was and greeted me with open arms. Naturally, I had to have an adult pop while I waited for my fish order to go. I felt like a teen ager gabbing away with my buds. The biggest difference was the topic of conversation. As teen agers we would have discussed the girls and their mammary protrusions, but as octogenarians we discussed aches and pains.
My new intarsia project is taking shape, I promised myself to have it finished by May. I have completed the cutting and moved on to fitting. With over a hundred pieces there is a whole lot of fitting going on. At this point the picture is not very pretty, there are too many wide spaces between parts and it isn”t a picture yet. I feel good about the wood colors I selected this time the object should look pretty natural.
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Step One -ModelStep 4- assemble and fit parts.Step 3 Cut partsStep 2 make a pattern
“To get back to my youth I would do anything in the world, except exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”
Oscar Wilde
“The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.”
Will Rogers
“We must recognize that, as we grow older, we become like old cars –more and more repairs and replacements are necessary.”
C.S. Lewis
“Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do about it.”
Golda Meir
“I’m so old that my blood type is discontinued.”
Bill Dane
“The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
Mark Twain or Joe Biden
“Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes, age just shows up all by itself.”
Tom Wilson
“Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your retirement home.”
Phyllis Diller
“I don’t plan to grow old gracefully. I plan to have face-lifts until my ears meet.”
Rita Rudner
“I’m at that age where my back goes out more than I do.”
Phyllis Diller
“Nice to be here? At my age, it’s nice to be anywhere.”
George Burns
“Don’t let aging get you down. It’s too hard to get backup”
John Wagner
“First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.”
Leo Rosenberg
“Aging seems to be the only available way to live a long life.”
Kitty O’Neill Collins
“Old people shouldn’t eat health foods. They need all the preservatives they can get.”
Robert Orben
“It’s important to have a twinkle in your wrinkle.”
Unknown
“At my age, flowers scare me.”
George Burns
“I have successfully completed the thirty-year transition from wanting to stay up late to just wanting to go to bed.”
Unknown
“At age 20, we worry about what others think of us… at age 40, we don’t care what they think of us… at age 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.”
Ann Landers
“When I was young, I was called a rugged individualist.
When I was in my fifties, I was considered eccentric.
Here I am doing and saying the same things I did then, and I’m labeled senile.”
George Burns
“I complain that the years fly past, but then I look in a mirror and see that very few of them actually got past.”
Robert Brault
“The important thing to remember is that I’m probably going to forget.”
Unknown
“As you get older three things happen. The first is your memory goes, and I can’t remember the other two.”
Sir Norman Wisdom
“It’s paradoxical that the idea of living a long life appeals to everyone, but the idea of getting old doesn’t appeal to anyone.”
Andy Rooney
“Birthdays are good for you. Statistics show that the people who have the most live the longest.”
Larry Lorenzon
“The older I get, the better I used to be.”
Lee Trevino
“You know you’re getting old when you can pinch an inch on your forehead.”
John Mendoza
“I was thinking about how people seem to read the bible a lot more as they get older, and then it dawned on me—they’re cramming for their final exam.”
George Carlin
“I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap.”
Bob Hope
“I’m 59 and people call me middle-aged. How many 118-year-old men do you know?”
Barry Cryer
“I don’t do alcohol anymore—I get the same effect just standing up fast.”
Anonymous
“By the time you’re 80 years old you’ve learned everything. Then, you only have to remember it.”
George Burns
“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.”
Maurice Chevalier
“Getting older. I used to be able to run a 4-minute mile, bench press 380pounds, and tell the truth.”
Conan O’Brien
“I have reached an age when, if someone tells me to wear socks, I don’t have to.”
Albert Einstein
“Grand children don’t make a man feel old, it’s the knowledge that he’s married to a grandmother that does.”
J. Norman Collie
“You know you are getting old when everything hurts, and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work.”
Hy Gardner
“When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.”
Mark Twain
“You know you are getting old when everything either dries up or leaks.”
Joel Plaskett
“There’s one advantage to being 102, there’s no peer pressure.”
Dennis Wolfberg
“I’ve never known a person who lives to be 110 who is remarkable for anything else.”
Josh Billings
“At my age ‘getting lucky’ means walking into a room and remembering what I came in for.”
Unknown
“Old age is when you resent the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated because there are fewer articles to read.”
George Burns
“The idea is to die young as late as possible.”
Ashley Montagu
“You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.”
George Burns
“People ask me what I’d most appreciate getting for my eighty-seventh birthday. I tell them, a paternity suit.”
George Burns
“Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician.”
This article knocked my socks off. I suspected what the author writes about, i. e. that crime statistics are heavily skewed by major population centers. Daniel Greenfield states the facts to support my suspicions.
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1% OF DEMOCRAT COUNTIES MAKE UP 42% OF AMERICA’S MURDERS
Democrats desperately trying to spin high crime rates caused by their pro-crime policies began falsely claiming that crime was a Republican problem. The media began running articles with headlines like, “Red States Have Higher Murder Rates” and “Republicans Like to Talk Tough on Crime — But They’re the Ones with a Real Crime Problem”.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who once claimed that the internet would have no more of an impact than the fax machine, argued that high crime was really a Republican problem and decided to prove it by claiming that, “Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s.”
Krugman, who somehow has a Nobel Prize, failed to note that most of the murders were coming out of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt won most of the state while Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties however went to leftist Democrat Joy Hofmeister. The ‘blue’ parts of Oklahoma are also red with blood.
“The fact is the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma under your watch,” Hoffmeister had claimed in a viral gubernatorial debate attack. Oklahoma had 287 murders in 2020: 166 came out of Oklahoma County and Tulsa County, the two counties that supported Hoffmeister.
Oklahoma County and Tulsa are two of the 62 counties that were responsible for 56% of America’s murders in 2020. A groundbreaking study by John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, revealed that “1% of counties have 21% of the population and 42% of the murders” and “2% of counties contain 31% of the population and 56% of the murders.”
The 1% of bloody red counties include such Democrat strongholds as Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Dallas, D.C., Miami-Dade, Milwaukee, San Diego, St. Louis, Chicago’s Cook County, L Houston’s Harris County, Detroit’s Wayne County, Memphis’ Shelby County, Pheonix’s Maricopa County, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, and many others.
Biden won Cook County, the bloodiest county in the country, by 66%. He won Los Angeles County, the second bloodiest, by 71%, Harris County by 56%, Philadelphia by 81%, New York City by 76%, Wayne County by 68%, and Shelby County by 64%.
Shelby was not only one of the three counties in Tennessee to vote Democrat, it was also responsible for 311 of the state’s 682 murders. Similarly, Wayne County was responsible for 379 of Michigan’s 693 murders. Houston accounted for 405 of the 537 murders in Harris County and along with Dallas’ 251 murders, Austin’s 47, San Antonio’s 128, Fort Worth’s 99, accounted for around half of murders in Texas. Maricopa County made up 299 of the 423 murders in Arizona.
Marion County, where Indianapolis is located, accounted for nearly half of the murders in the state, even though it has less than 10% of the population. Milwaukee was responsible for 201 of Wisconsin’s 308 murders even though it also has less than 10% of the population.
There isn’t a red state murder problem, red states have a Democrat crime problem.
The CPRC study showed that while 2% of counties populated by Democrats were responsible for 56% of the country’s murders, 52% of counties had no murders and 68% of counties had at most one murder.
These numbers clearly show that America is not a violent country, that we do not have a crime problem and that gun culture is not the issue: crime culture in Democrat cities is the issue.
Democrat crime cities and counties have created a massive social problem that otherwise would hardly exist. As the study notes, “If the 1% of the counties with the worst number of murders somehow were to become a separate country, the murder rate in the rest of the US would have been only 4.31 in 2020. Removing the worst 2% or 5% would have reduced the US rate to just 3.71 or 2.99 per 100,000, respectively.” We could have the murder rate of New Zealand.
If it wasn’t for the Democrat crime counties.
America is not a dangerous or crime-ridden country. Unfortunately Democrat cities are overrun with criminals and the politicians who cater to them. The Democrats became an urban party and, after jettisoning the white working class and the small business middle class became the party of criminals. From police defunding to the Black Lives Matter riots to mass jailbreaks and the legalization of drugs and shoplifting in major cities, they embraced pro-crime policies that unleashed a massive crime wave. And now they pretend not to know what’s causing the crime.
“Nationwide, violent crime rose substantially in 2020,” Krugman admitted. “Nobody knows for sure what caused the surge — just as nobody knows for sure what caused the epic decline in crime from 1990 to the mid-2010.”
Tough-on-crime policies cut crime in the 90s and the oughts: pro-crime policies boosted crime.
There’s no mystery here. Crime is caused by repeat offenders. In the 90s we began locking them up and then about 5 years ago, we began letting them go at the federal and state level.
In ‘I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America’, David Horowitz exposed the lies behind the Black Lives Matter pro-crime movement and warned of the pandemic of crime that was being unleashed. That hoax has unleashed unprecedented violence, but that crime wave largely remains confined to Democrat areas where criminals prey on members of the party.
More than an additional 5,000 people were killed in 2020. There is little doubt that the disproportionate majority of both the victims and the killers were Democrats. Democrat pro-crime policies are killing Americans, but mostly they’re killing fellow Democrats.
An added 5,000 murders alone means $85 billion in costs. That’s a fraction of the money, estimated at half a trillion dollars, that we spend every year coping with the criminal justice and social problems caused by Democrat crime.
America could be a safe and pleasant place to live. And the majority of its counties, which are mostly Republican, are. Unfortunately many of its Democrat counties are broken places, packed with broken families, criminal cultures and leftist politicians who pander to the criminals.
And the party and its media cover it up with lies about systemic racism.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
My son in law sadly reported to me that he kissed his eighteen year old Honda van good bye. The van was still in good running condition and he wanted to keep it as a working truck. Since he is in the business of fixing air conditioners and furnaces he has opportunity to make a few bucks on the side. The company he works for provides him with a work truck, but they don’t allow him to use it for jobs not company assigned. Thus a handy vehicle with his tools loaded would be a great assistance.
The Honda began to alert him to problems with dashboard icons that warned of impending doom from air pollution devices. The Honda doctor wanted nearly two thousand dollars to fix the problem, but the van is worth much less than that. He was not in the mindset to spend that much money to repair a truck that might last another year before the next large expense occurs. The truck has over 210,000 miles on it’s odometer which is credible for a car these days.
The son-in-law called a junk dealer who gave him $500 bucks for it. The man hoisted the van onto his flatbed hauler and told him that he will remove and recycle the catalytic converter and then the van goes into the crusher. In the good old days backyard mechanics would disable these non-essential devices and sensors and continue running the van. Today, we have laws they stipulate with holding a license plate if the vehicle does not pass the yearly emission control test, no plate, no car.
Now here is my dilemma. My own Toyota is seventeen years old, has 182,000 miles on it, has a rustless body, the interior looks like it did when new, it has no dents, the paint still shines, and I still like it’s style and looks. Then why would I trade it for a car that is newer and doesn’t appeal to me? Because Uncle Sam has this thing about keeping air pure. I remember when driving in California years ago that the air seemed to be foggy, and the residents dismissed my complaint with “oh that’s only smog.” We see similar pictures of smoggy days in China, and hear stories about the government forbid driving cars on days when the Olympics were being held. Yet, the same government that withholds personal freedom and liberty of it’s citizens does not have regulations that require smog control devices on their cars. We, on the other hand, have some personal liberty and freedom, but are hampered by laws and regulations that really contradict everything our constitution stipulates. Since we claim to be a Nation of Laws and we try to mean that by enforcement our liberty and freedom are often limited. Why we even have two sets of justice, although that is not stipulated it is very clear that some people play by a different set of rules and regulations.
If I were a rich man, I would have new car every year, and a paid driver to haul my ass to the library, and the pharmacy once a month. I am not rich, but I am not poor, so I must provide my own transportation, and that means driving myself around in a car. When my dash board lights up I’ll have to move to a State that doesn’t require emission control testing.
When I was a teen my home town of Chicago had a public transportation system that allowed me to get around town for a nickel a ride. It was cheap, and easily accessible. No one had to walk more than eight city blocks to catch a streetcar, and the cars came by every fifteen minutes. Today, when I could use a system like that, the tracks are buried under asphalt and the streetcars are replaced by buses that come every hour. It is worse in the suburbs where transit systems are a dirty word, and the infinitely wise city planners don’t even provide sidewalks to link one neighborhood with another. The younger planners argue that we don’t need public transport any more because self-driving cars will replace the need for a personal transportation device, and the next day we read about someone getting killed in a self driving car accident.
About twenty years ago, I thought it would be cool to come back a hundred years from now t see how the world had changed. Currently, I am only fifteen years away from being able to remember what it was like a hundred years ago, and it ain’t pretty. I don’t imagine the world will look like it did in Star Wars or Star Trek. The flying car will still be grounded, people will still have to work, and they will still have to commute to a job on out dated and scarce transportation. I think a hundred years from now people will still be blogging about how much better it was in the “good old days.”
This is the second time I read “Travels With Charley” by John Steinbeck, and I enjoyed it more this time than I did the first. One of my goals for 2023 is to re-read books that have made a lasting impression on me. This is the second book I have re-read, and both of them are by John Steinbeck. He is one of my favorite authors, another favorite author is James Michener.
Travels with Charley is an amusing story of a trip taken by the author to see America. He took his giant poodle Charley as a companion in a special new pick up equipped with a self designed camper. The route begins in Long Island New York, and encircles the United States. Steinbeck’s observations of the country are simple and factual. His conversations with Charley are often amusing. One vignette in particular is about the time he is warned by a National Park Ranger to keep Charley on a leash at all times while in the park because the bears may not get along with him. Steinbeck explains to the ranger that his dog is well mannered, and does not become aggressive with other dogs, cats or wild life. Steinbeck proceeds into the park and comes across some bears. Charley goes ballistic and vicious, snarling, barking and wanting to get a piece of bear. It was a complete surprise to the owner who felt obligated to return to the ranger to apologize.
I can’t remember when it was in relation to my first reading, but I took an almost identical journey around the country with my family. I felt the places he writes about because I was there. America is a huge country when traveled by car, it is even larger when traversed by bicycle. Doing it by bicycle was on my bucket list but I never made it happen. My oldest son, however, did very early in his life.
My current wish is to travel across country once more in my limited lifetime to visit the redwood forests of California. They are by far the most magnificent living things on our planet. Steinbeck explains how he anxiously awaited to see Charley, who was a committed tree marker, react to a tree as big as a two car garage. When the time came for the dog to mark the redwood he balked, he wasn’t impressed. So his master took out a pocket knife and cut a sapling Sycamore about four feet high and stabbed it into the ground next to a redwood. Charley marked it with pride.
