As you probably know, not only is today Friday the 13th, but there’s also a full moon (well, technically speaking, there was a full moon last night at 12:11, but it should be pretty darn full again tonight). There won’t be another full moon on a Friday the 13th for 35 years (August 13, 2049 in fact), which most likely means this is the last one I’ll ever see (assuming it stops raining long enough to see anything). But if I’m still around, by golly, I’ll be sure and mention it. It’ll be eight days after my brother’s 102nd birthday, so we’ll probably just roll it all into one big party.

Texas Guv Rick Perry went to San Francisco of all places yesterday, and proclaimed that being gay is kinda like being an alcoholic (and therefore “fixable”).

I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.”

So now I guess we know what’s on Rick’s mind after a few shots of bourbon. He oughtta hook up with Santorum for a good old Rick-roll in the hay.

Speaking of “the gays,” what’s up with all these insulting restaurant receipts? Is this real actual shit, or is it bullshit?

A transgender woman who says she received an offensive receipt after a night out at a hookah bar in Washington, D.C., has filed a complaint against the restaurant.

In August 2013, Amira Gray visited Bistro 18 with eight friends, including four women and two gay men, according to legal documents posted on Lambda Legal, an LBGT legal nonprofit organization. In the complaint, Gray says she and her friends were ignored by the waitstaff the entire night (except for when an employee brought over a hookah machine) and had to go to the bar to place their orders.

When they received their bill at the end of the night, the slur “Gay Bitches” was written on the receipt, the document notes.

I mean, isn’t it kind of stupid to put on the receipt you’re giving to the patrons? Especially since it says “Please Come Back!” at the bottom.

I mean, when people are visiting your establishment and paying $40 for a couple of hookahs, you shouldn’t be pissing them off (has the wait staff never heard of the Internets?). Not to mention they charge $12 for a bottle of Deer Park water – a buck more than a shot of Jameson, which I personally find offensive because there’s no way a bottle of crappy Maryland tap water is worth more than a shot of Irish Whiskey.

And paying $22 for a “Golden” Margarita is just plain nuts (though not as nuts as paying $20 to smoke flavored tobacco out of a water pipe – sorry, I just don’t get that particular fad).

Anyhow, no matter what your feelings (and, hey, maybe they were a really annoying group of people, who knows?), it’s pretty darn stupid to insult your customers on a printed receipt and then hand them said receipt.

One thing I learned in my years in the service industry is to make sure you wait until the customers are out of earshot before you insult them – and never, ever, put it in writing. Especially these days, when everybody carries a camera with a phone attached to it.

Speaking of which, I finally bought a new wallet last week. I’ve had the old one for more years than I can remember – so long, in fact, that it came with the plastic insert thingie (long since worn out, replaced, and worn out again) designed to hold photos of your kids or your dogs or whatever.

Anyhow, it occurs to me that wallets no longer come with these things (at least none of the ones I looked at did), and I realized it’s because we all keep our precious photos (movies, even) on our phones these days. I remember meeting up my sister and brother and their respective spouses and/or children a couple years back, and everybody was passing their phones around – flashing out pocket-sized teevee screens around the way we used to pass photographs back and forth.

The world has certainly changed since I was a kid. I wonder what things will be like on the next Friday the 13th with a full moon? I hope I get to see it.

I know we’re all saddened by the demise of the soon-to-be dearly departed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Sure, we’ll all miss his smug demeanor, his Prada shoes, his firmly cemented hair, and his eternal snarl. But the worst part of all this is that it propels him into Republican Party martyrdom – free of his congressional responsibilities (like perpetually voting to abolish Obamacare and whatever the hell else these parasites spend their time doing), brother Eric will now have plenty of time to make the rounds on Fux “News” shows (perhaps he’ll even get a show of his own), get paid a bundle for speaking engagements, and in general attempt to bolster his national political ambitions (not to mention his campaign war chest). I mean, it’s not like the Republicans have anybody else to run in 2016.

Or do they? I mean, Chris Christie, the other fat guy – Huckleberry or something is it? – Rand Paul, that Eddie Munster-looking dude, Ted “Joe McCarthy only dumber-looking” Cruz, Jeb the Once and Future Bush…? Am I missing anybody?

I guess there’s that group of Bozos who are even too crazy and stupid for Republicans – Scott Walker – Wisconsin Ranger, Rick “Dumber than Bush” Perry, the ever-frothy Rick Santorum, and token minorities Bobby Jindal and Marco Polo Rubio.

I dunno, none of these people are exactly inspirational. I don’t think they’re bringing Mittens back for another crack at it. What about Bob Dole – he’s not dead yet, is he? Clinton v. Dole – it has a nice ring to it.

How about a chick? That Nikki Haley Barbour from South Carolina ticks a lot of boxes – female, minority, teabagger, not bad looking, Southerner. Team her up with some Republican shithead from a big state – say, Darrel Issa from California – and I think they’d have a pretty formidable Hillary-bustin’ team.

But apart from that “dream team,” Eric Cantor is just as crappy a candidate as the rest of them. Sadly, I don’t think it matters who they run, ‘cuz no matter how shitty their candidate is, I have a feeling he or she is gonna wind up winning. Just ‘cuz.

The Republicans have been holding back a whole lot of Clinton venom for about 15 years now – and that shit only gets stronger as it ages. Add to that the whole Koch-fueled, unlimited money thing, and things are gonna get vicious.

It won’t be like the first Obama campaign when they weren’t real sure about how to attack a black guy. I mean, they wanted to call him a you-know-what, but it took them a while to figure out how to go about it (say, by photoshopping him as a jungle witch doctor or saying he was secret Kenyan Muslim Manchurian Candidate).

They’ll be all-in on Hillary from the git-go. Hell, they’re all in on her already, and she aint even officially running yet.

I just thank my lucky stars that I’m not in a battleground state (and that I have a DVR so I don’t have to watch commercials), because the ads are gonna be nasty and relentless – probably starting at the end of this year.

But I guess for now I’ll quit worrying about that, and worry about getting ready for work. My second late day of the week, and one I’m not looking forward to, especially since I didn’t get much sleep last night.

It appears that we are transitioning nicely from Black Fly Season to Allergy Season (on our way to Deer Fly Season, which normally peaks in July). I got to the point where I had to go sit inside last night because my nose was running, my eyes were itching, and my head was pounding. It did give me a chance to flip around the channels and settle on “History of the Eagles” on Showtime. I guess it took place in two parts, and I caught the end of Part I and then Part II. Great music, of course. Don Henley and Glen Frey came off as, how shall I put it nicely, rather impressed with themselves.

There’s one part when Frey said he told the Eagles’ manager that, regarding a reunion,

“I’m not going to do it unless Don and I make more money than the other guys.”

I thought, “how very Republican of you Glen.” I suppose he and Don were the big names (well, Joe Walsh, too, but he was kind of busy drinking himself to death and he just happy to have an excuse to get sober), and maybe Glen was hurting for money at the time or something and couldn’t spare a couple percentage points for his band mates. But to me it just seemed like typical Wall Street/Republican “score keeping.” And there seemed to be an awful lot of “our music is great, we’re great” talk.

Of course, they’re music is pretty darn good, but, hey, how about a little false humility, at least?

Well at least Henley has that whole Walden Woods thing going on.

Anyhow, I guess I’d better get back to work. Just another 6 hours to kill.

I hadn’t noticed until this morning that Karen DeCrow died on Friday. I don’t know if she was “famous” or not (though she probably should have been – especially to those of you of the female persuasion), but she was a fixture around here for what seems like forever, though I was kind of surprised that she was born in Chicago and didn’t get here until 1967 or so. She’ll certainly be missed.

And more sad news of course with Tracy Morgan in critical condition after a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer slammed into his limo bus, killing one guy and injuring a bunch more. Hopefully everybody who isn’t dead will get better.

Yesterday was a bad foot day for me – the first one in a while, and it came from nowhere. Bad “feet” day, more accurately. I got out of bed and, damn, both my feet were killing me. It was all I could do to hobble over the the dump and the gas station to buy diesel, and then come back and cut the grass. Even driving the tractor was painful (and that doesn’t require much more than sitting there – though there is the whole using the pedal-control thing. I’m not sure what you call the pedal on a diesel with a hydrostatic transmission, but I don’t think “gas pedal” would be correct).

Plus when I have to cut the grass, I constantly have to get off and move dog debris out of the way – bones, chew toys, sticks, and rocks. Yeah, rocks.

Every time I cut the grass (and this has actually been going on since before I started cutting the grass this year), I have to move rocks out of the way from around the sump pond, and yesterday was no exception as I had to move a bunch of rocks out of the way. And as I look out the window this morning, I see more damn rocks out there.

These aren’t small rocks, either (well, some of them are). Here’s one up close, and while there isn’t anything to give you scale, it’s more or less round, as thick as it is wide, and about the size of my head (and I’ve always been kind of a fat head). And the sucker is pretty damn heavy (I can pick it up with one hand, but it aint easy).

I haven’t caught anybody moving these rocks around (or, more importantly, how the hell they’re doing it – no way can they be getting their mouths around these thing, even if they could carry them, so I assume they’re using some kind of nose-roll technique lost to us since the days when the Pyramids were built). If you look at the picture above, though, you’ll notice a shitload of tooth marks on the thing. And I know who likes to sit and chew on rocks, so I’m pretty sure I know who the culprit is.

Now I just need to catch her in the act.

This is a particularly depressing Sunday for me, as not only do I not have tomorrow off, I have to work until five, too. That’s gonna suck.

Oh well, the feet are a bit better this morning, so I guess I should waddle into the Village and see about buying a couple ducks for this afternoon’s race (a five buck duck could net me a couple grand – hey, you never know).

It’s a big weekend here in our little town (or, more precisely, down in the Village). Yep, Olde Home Days are here again – a tradition that’s been going on since, well, I have no idea since when. Our town was founded in 1794 but the village is a newcomer, not incorporated until 1853 when they presumably decided town taxes weren’t high enough so they should add village taxes as well. Anyhow, suffice it to say, it’s been goign on for quite a while. In fact, in the olden days, Olde Home Days were called Old Home Days, but I reckon at some point “old” didn’t seem old enough so they went the universally accepted convention of adding an ‘e’ on the end to make it seem even older.

Anyhow, the weekend will be filled with bands, food, amusement rides, fireworks, a car and motorcycle show, tons-o-crap for sale, a parade, all, of course, culminating in the big Duck Race. All of which means there will be an ungodly amount of traffic in the Village – with cars at times no doubt backed up four or five deep at the traffic light. This means I’ll need to avoid the area between now (last night, actually) and Monday morning, which wouldn’t be a problem if I didn’t need to get both diesel and beer (and drop a shitload of electronics-type shit off at the Town’s electronics shit dumping pile).

Now, you might think that it’s a bit too close to Memorial Day to be having yet another paradin’ type of event, but you have to understand that here in these parts, summer is all too short and every town needs to jump in there with what we (and I assume y’all do, too) call “Field Days” before Labor Day week (‘cuz you can’t compete with the State Fair, after all). So I guess our village said, “fuck it, let’s get ours out of the way first,” and even as it is, we conflict with the vaunted St. Sophia’s Greek Festival and the “Taste of Syracuse” (used to have a conflict with the Balloon Festival, too, until they realized they had a chance of better weather if they pushed it back to the end of June/beginning of July).

I reckon I can head to the next town over to get beer later on today, but I’ll be needing that diesel to cut the grass and I’m getting tired of the old electronics sitting in my garage, so I guess I’d better make a quick trip over there now before the crowds show up.

Have an A-One day.

Yes it’s “D” as in National Donut Day today. And that entitles you to a free donut at Dunkin’ Donuts (if you buy an overpriced beverage to go along with it). Apparently there’s some other celebration going on today as well.

Ah, yes, here it it: it was 70 years ago that the Allies stormed the beach at Normandy or, as I like to tell my wife, the when my people turned the tide of the war against her people – though, strictly speaking, “my” person was on the other side of the world in either China, Burma (which was most definitely not called Myanmar at the time), or India. Of course, the folks over in Europe got all the publicity. There are a few folks still around who fought in that war, but not very many (after all, if you were 18 70 years ago, you’re no spring chicken today).

I saw that the last Navajo “code talker” – Chester Nez – died a couple of days ago at 93. And of course my dad’s been gone for, shit, it’ll be 20 years in September. My how the years fly by when you’re spending most of them trying to get through one day at a time. One day you wake up and notice it’s just about over. How’s that for a happy thought? I blame my sunny outlook on things on my mother and Peggy Lee, since my mom loved that song “Is That All There Is?”

Anyhow, to those of you who are still around, thanks for all that saving us from the Nazis and the Nips and stuff. Sorry my generation turned out to be sort of lazy and useless, but, hey, you’re the ones who raised us.

On my way home last night, I saw a big dump truck about a mile from my house (not an unusual site, since we have a couple of quarries nearby) with the window down, and there’s a dog wandering around in the road by the truck so I kinda stop to make sure the dog isn’t gonna run in front of me. And she sees me stop so she runs over and jumps on my door, then comes around to the passenger side. So I open the door and in she jumps, all kinds of upset and wiggly and happy to see me.

I couldn’t exactly toss her out into the street, and I saw she had a Town dog tag on (but not one with her name and number on it, unfortunately) so I brought her home and gave her some food and water and let her run around my yard while I called the Town clerk, who was fortunately still in the office.

I read her the tag number and she was able to give me name, address, and phone number of the owner (plus the doggie’s name – Jemma). I gave them a call and left a message that I had Jemma and she was safe, and after a while the guy called me back and said he’d just gotten back from the store and found her leash broken, and then he came over and got her.

So I was thinking I did my good deed for the day, but then I thought what if she was being held prisoner and had escaped – relieved, thinking that I had brought her to freedom, only to be crushed to find out I was returning her to her captor? I could have been turning a downed Allied fighter pilot over to the Nazis!

Except I think this guy was Greek.

Well hopefully Jemma will stay put (or at least out of the road) from now on.

Time to get this week over, I guess, and next week’s gonna suck. Not only do I not have Monday off, but I also have to work late two nights to cover for a bunch of people who are in week-long training. And as if that wasn’t enough, if today’s Friday the 6th, then next week can only be one thing – Friday the 13th!

So I got an e-mail yesterday from Bill Lipton (director of the NYS Working Families Party), detailing the “…major win. Not for the Working Families Party, not for Governor Andrew Cuomo, but for the working families of the state of New York.” Basically, Andy supposedly said some shit that he may or may not have said before and promised to be a good boy and act like a progressive. Yep, that’s a victory.

There was link in the e-mail to “let us know what you think about the endorsement” and so I did. I basically said “bye-bye.” The output of the form of course went to a donation page where I attempted to donate $0.00, but they wouldn’t let me. I considered donating 2¢ saying “here’s my two cents, assholes,” but that seemed like too much trouble.

SPeaking of too much trouble, now I have to go about changing my voter registration. You can’t just switch parties in NY, you have to fill out a whole new registration form and mail it in. Yeah, mail. Well, I guess you can deliver it to the BOE personally if you want. Fortunately, since I don’t live on Shelter Island, I can just put it in my mailbox and raise the little red flag for the mail person to come and collect it (but she doesn’t walk door to door, she drives a truck ‘cuz it can be a long way between houses out here).

So now it’s time to choose a party to affiliate with. Democrats are out. We’re lucky to get one Democrat running for anything out here, so primary voting isn’t an issue for local elections, and who really gives a crap if I have the honor of voting for Hillary in 2016? Hell, I voted for her last time, so she’s probably better off without me.

I suppose I could register as a Republican and try to vote for whoever appears to be the least threatening when it comes to the general election, but I really just can’t see myself walking in to the firehouse in September and when they ask which party having to say “Republican” out loud.

The Conservative Party is out, too. I actually do consider myself conservative – just not the way those people define it. I think you should be able to do whatever you want to do as long as you don’t bother anybody else while you’re doing it, I think we have a responsibility to conserve our natural resources and treat the planet (and each other) with respect, and think that marriage should be between one person and another person (though if you want to three or more, what the hell, that’s your business – good luck if you can afford it, I guess), I think you should keep your religion to yourself (or you have no right getting all bent out of shape when I tell you what I think), I think that corporations are most definitely not people and have none of the rights imbued to them, I think that money does not equate to speech (free speech means you get to go stand on the corner and say whatever you want, it does not mean that you get to yell so loud that nobody else can be heard and it certainly doesn’t mean you get to buy more access to the people that run the country than poor folks get), I think we’re all in this world together and we’d better start fucking acting like it, I think there is an implicit social contract between the people and the government that requires the government to work for the benefit of all the people (and that includes providing healthcare and education – funded by income tax, not property taxes, plus school buses should have to stop for me, not the other way around), I think that the people should have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures (I think that one’s even written down somewhere) and I think that if you join a militia or have to kill shit to feed your family, you can have a fucking gun (preferably a muzzle loader) as long as you stay the hell away from me with the damn thing, ‘cuz if you shoot me or my dog I’m gonna beat you over the head with it.

And if they’d just go ahead and legalize pot already, I’m sure I could think up a few more things.

Anyhow, so I guess that leaves the Independence Party, the Green Party, the “Other” party, or the “No” party. So I guess I’ll have to go Green. They have almost zero local presence in the town councils and county legislature and all that. But at least I’ll never have to worry that they’ll endorse a weasel like Governor Snotball (and their actual candidate is a local guy – transplant from San Francisco – who’s a good lefty and a teamster who unload unloads trucks for UPS).

In a (sadly) typically cowardly act, the NY State Working Families Party decided to give Governor Snotball its ballot line in the November election, proving once and for all that it’s just shill and rubberstamp for the Democrats. So, no voting the WFP line for me anymore. And they aren’t getting any of my time or money. Not that they got much of that anyway, but still. I think I’ll have to change my registration back to “no preference” since there isn’t anybody worth voting for in the primaries anyway (least ways, not anybody who has a chance in hell of winning). I think I’ll just have to start writing myself in for everything – it does about as much good as anything else.

Yesterday was a big day here. My Internet has been kinda crappy lately, so I finally gave the good folks at Time Warner a call, and darned if they weren’t able to get somebody out here right away. A couple of very nice fellas, who ran some new cable from where it enters the house to where it connects to the cable modem (upon further review, I hadn’t noticed, but it appeared that some varmint of other had partially chewed through one piece of cable), and then swapped out my old DOCSIS 2.0 made in China modem with a newer (if not actually new) DOCSIS 3.0 made in Vietnam modem. It also has much prettier lights (green and blue and very bright – they look quite Christmassy).

So now I’ve gone from a single-channel modem to a multi-channel one, and am ready for when Comcast takes over and offers (so they told me) a 500 Mpbs Internet package (not that that will do me any good unless all the websites and content providers I patronize pay the Comcast ransom that our Preznit’s cable industry lobbyist FCC Chairman is pushing to continue to allow). No doubt they’ll also have a cap of 250 GB per month or so, so that 500 Mb per second (which is 62.5 MB) would last, oh, about an hour and eight minutes if I were to actually use it all (which doesn’t seem all that likely today, but they start offering streaming 4K video and who know what else, it may not seem to crazy).

Of course, Comcast has their own video service call Xfinity, and guess what? That doesn’t count against your data cap. So you can either use what they tell you to, use the crippled providers who refuse to pay for the “fast lane” (more like they refuse to pay the toll to use the highway, so they’re stuck on the old country roads with potholes and trees down that take the long way to get from one place to the other), or use the folks who are willing to pay the fee for access (who will of course pass that cost along to you – which which may or may not be OK until you go over your data cap).

But anyway, right now my Internet is good, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

I also put together and briefly played with my new power washer (which is Generac that I may or may not have purchased simply because it’s orange – though it does go well with the tractor). There’s an on/off switch for the motor, which is cool because it actually has two positions labeled “on” and “off” and there’s a slidey switch to turn the gas valve on, which doesn’t actually have words, but it’s got a picture of a gas pump with an arrow. So that’s OK, but then there’s a slidey switch for the choke right above the fuel switch and it has an arrow, too. But it doesn’t tell me if the the arrow points to on or off (or full choke, no choke) and the arrow points in the opposite direction of the goddamn fuel switch. So it’s a little confusing.

I should probably read the manual, but I hate to resort to that.

Anyhow, that sucker blasts out pretty good and would probably rip the mirrors off my car if I got close enough to it. So I think I’ll try washing the cats with it later on.

I thought it was a little chilly when I got up at 5:00 this morning, and when I went to the lo-cal teevee station website to check the weather, I saw why.

Damn, that’s gotta be some kind of record.