THE GREAT FLOOD

It's 7:22 a.m. and Junior is asleep and Patrick is outside in the rain.

It's been raining and cold for a whole week now, and no let up in sight. Very miserable weather.
I was going to go to the White Expo that's being held by the National Association for the Advancaement of White People, but since it's raining, instead I'll just work on Junior's application for a grant from the United Caucasion College Fund.

More later.

Image is Patrick's new avatar.

Now the auto html is not working properly on blogger. Oh well. If I were paying for this, I'd be pissed.



I read in the Lone Ranger's blog this morning that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Oz was riding in a plane that got hit by lightening, Saturday.

I used to fly every week for about ten years in a different life. We businessmen had to sit in the back of the ship so we could smoke. Smoke and drink. And boy could we do that.

One Friday nite, returning home to Hartsfield, we flew thru the biggest lightening storm I've ever seen. It was spectacular--flashes down below ever few seconds, a real show. As we descended thru it, we got bumped hard. The pilot came on and said we were hit by lightening, but we were 100% A-OK. That made the tourists in front of us a little uneasy. In order to fuel their fears, I began talking about it in a way designed to scare the hell out of them, using my experience to lend credibility to my rant. --but you have to remember I was young and stoopid and drunk.

Anyway, When it came time to land, we zoomed straight in. No twenty minutes or more in a holding pattern, circling over the second businest, at that time, airport in America. So I knew they got emergency clearance. When we got off the ship, there at the jetway, was the co-pilot , as was their custom in those days, to greet us goodbye.

I'll never forget this poor fellow--He was drenched is sweat and pale as a ghost.

In hundreds and hundreds of thousands of airmiles, that's the only time I was flying in a plane that got struck by lightening.

But I was hit by a pass of sheet lightening while holding onto a metal lawn cart in a field while part of a landscape crew as a teenager. We were planting the lugustrums for new construction at the world's first condominium, in Clearwater. We had an old '54 Studebaker dump truck, that I had to drive to the Forida Steate Inspection Station. How it passed, I'll never know..... That was about forty years ago, on a planet far different from the one I'm inhabiting today.

Which reminds me of another harrowing airplane ride. We were flying on this little Brazillian job--a twelve space little two engine prop plane-- chartered to get us from BFE somewhere to a real airport.--I think it was in the Carolinas somewhere. Anyway, You could see into the cockpit, there was no door, and the Pilot was wearing a black Cowboy hat. This is the truth, I swear. Anyway, again we were flying over a thunderstorm, and so to get thru it to land, the pilot deccided to put this little piece of shit into a power dive--staraight down to the airport. That was really cool. The whole way down, somebody was yelling at the top of their lungs "Yaaaaahhooooooooooo!" Yaahoooooo!!". To this day I suspect it was the pilot!

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