Lolita and the Waterjet

This blog and the first response to it brought up two good reasons why I couldn't write a blog. First I'm not smart enough to write the blog and second I'm definitely not smart enough to decipher the rambling responses to it so I could come up with an intelligent reply of my own.

I have written these posts as topics that I happened to be interested in at the time. I am not naive enough to think that they would be interesting to any one person all of the time, nor would they be interesting to a broad audience at any time. The proof of this fact is evident by the lack of responses from a greater readership. Recent responses have come from a handful of people and many of those responses have little to do with what I have written.

This has become soft reading for a select few and normally doesn't create enough interest to even justify its existence. I was laughing to myself the other day about how I should just send out an email to those who wanted to read this.

Bballfan's response to this article was interesting and I think influenced by my inability to portray what I was really feeling about the clemency act by president Carter. Had I been more clear in the writing of my post, there would not have been any thought given to "spin" of any type.

Bballfan stated "The sentence that followed appeared to tell what you believe his message was, he loved Fidel Castro, so you do claim to know what his message was.I do not understand the form, saying you do not know something and then saying that you do know, which is it, you do or do not, it can not be both." I also think that the article was misread, because I never said anything about the President loving Fidel Castro. My statement was simply, "Lolita was later honored by Fidel Castro and now lives in Puerto Rico."

These articles are really kind of silly and I'm beginning to think that they are a waste of time for all concerned.

That's quite an impressive list of outstanding citizens. Interesting to note the FALN members, after being released from prison, were welcomed back in Puerto Rico as heroes.

Is there a difference between Muslim terrorists and Puerto Rican terrorists? If "they were sentenced with terms ranging from 35 to 105 years in prison for the conviction of conspiracy and sedition", then why would the President say that 19 years was enough?

"This one just seems to be very Political in nature, I am sure you didn't mean it to be that way,..." This is a great comment from an old friend and I am glad that he made it. I'd like to briefly address this comment because I think it leads to something very important. (I try not to use "very" very often because Mark Twain didn't think that it was a "very" good thing to do.) :>)

This particular post (Lolita and the Waterjet) was just my observation of a series of events, that I found interesting to me at the time. Any time that you write like this, you may suffer the unfortunate consequence that no one found it interesting other than yourself.

I think that most blogs are written with the express purpose of leading the readers toward a certain direction and are, in fact, soliciting comments of a particular nature. I don't generally do that in my posts. On the contrary, I welcome comments of all kinds. For you (not from Greene Co), this was perceived as a political post that you felt warranted comments of a political nature. To me, that is just as acceptable as seeing this as a post on criminal activity, or maybe a human interest article on a series of activities connecting Ol Simmons, Lolita Lebron, Paul Kanjorski and a waterjet that purportedly belongs to the Navy.

Which way the comments lead us is entirely up to you, the blog responders. My purpose is to offer something interesting and the only way I have to gage that interest (without going out for a second opinion) is to find something of interest to me.

I have had many people ask me what I meant to inspire by the writings of these articles. The only answer that I can give is that I just want to inspire people to respond.

I received a lot of flack about cruelty to animals concerning my post on the Iditarod. Nothing bad about that, in my opinion, they were good responses based on the responders own heart felt opinions.

I love to see responses of any kind. What good is a blog, if no one responds? It's like throwing a party and no one showing up.

"Just trying to keep the conversation lively." William Hurt in The Big Chill.

You made me get a password. I read them all, just never feel the need to participate. Keep them coming. I'm sure there is a vast silent majority out here that enjoys them.

Another nice historical column, Simmons.

Leon Czolgosz came up on Millionaire the other night. It was the first time my wife's been impressed with me for weeks, even if it was multiple guess.

I've seen the 1954 attack somewhere with newsreel footage, and recall reading about the swap. The picture with the column clearly indicates that at one time people in that building worked with each other.

Well Simmons you old dog, you've done it again. What I thought was going to turn into a shirts against skins backyard blog off between two sets of brothers, has now woke me from my winter hibernation. And you thought nobody cared about what you wrote? Your blogs and the comments that ensue are about the only reason i check this site, don't underestimate your audience. Although I didn't really see anything in your post that was political, I think it just goes to show where politics rank on most peoples minds these days. We're all very concerned and rightly so, on both sides of the aisle.

For every Bill Clinton, there is a Ronald Reagan....

Some might remember something called the Iran-Contra affair. Where ol Ronald was involved in a very tricky weapons deal with Iran with Israel as the pivot man. He thought selling weapons to Iran might get him some leverage with Hezbollah who at the time were holding Americans hostage,again. The weapons deal was enough to get him elected, as the hostages were released the day that he took office. This deal violated many international treaties, and certainly didn't discourage hezbollah as evident by their actions to this day. Iran now points those same weapons in our direction, and hezbollah is still terrorizing the world, not a very good long term result. This whole situation probably would never have come to light,except for a botched delivery that was intercepted, was reported in a Lebanese magazine. When Reagan was confronted he denied knowledge, two weeks later when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he admitted that he had lied and that he was aware of these shipments. Sounds like he might be a candidate for the IU basketball coach job. I'm afraid to even touch where the funds for these arms sales were being sent. To a drug cartel fighting the leftist govt in Nicaragua, a cartel with proven links to Manuel Noriega. A cartel that the DEA admitted to having known about operations in the U.S....These werent some pinata vendors that we were funding with ill gotten arms proceeds, they were a drug peddling militia that needed weapons to secure passage of narcotics... I could go on for days.

And all of the people convicted of shredding documents, lying to investigators, etc. were all pardoned.

Executive powers have been abused by both parties, lets not kid anybody.

Thanks for waking me up Keith, and keep up the good work, we all need to be shaken up a bit in these gray February days. Glad to see you are back on your feet as well, though i kept waiting for your nyquil fueled manifesto to show up late one night, to no avail.

"Perhaps history will prove me wrong, but I suspect I am right suspecting corruption in most (if not all)modern presidential terms whose aspirations of granting pardons to guilty parties supercedes the law on which we depend."

I think if you look under all Presidential terms you can find some form of corruption-- heck even Washington's had 1 or 2 (if you look you shall find) ...

Lincoln's amnisty was questioned but he had so much power even after death he got his way and as someone with a Southern General as a family member-- thank you Mr. Lincoln.

HillTop, if you get the chance to stop by Rolla, swing on into the University and see their Stonehenge. Dr. David Summers, a world renown expert in the use of waterjet technology, designed and supervised the construction of a smaller version of Stonehenge. Also, his folks did the excavation under the Arch in St. Louis for the IMAX Theater, see http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/354689.html

I had the opportunity to travel with Dave a few times and once, we attended an International Waterjet Conference in Berkeley, CA. While there, we took a boat trip out around Alcatraz, oh well, that might just be another story.

As far as Pericles is concerned, he gave quite a stirring sales pitch on Athens, while at the same time, honoring the dead and comforting the families of the deceased. Remember this, because it is just as applicable today as back in the days of Pericles; If you send your sons to die in battle, it is imperative for someone to remind you why it was so important that they died. That's just my take on the Funeral Oration, but then again, it was all Greek to me.

Time to go brush the snow off the Mustang and slide it on down to the big fenced in place.

Sandburg attended West Point for 2 weeks.

Vaisforlovers: West Point isn't for everybody, E.A. Poe didn't like it either. I'm just glad Carl got out and wrote Rootabaga Stories. If you've never read any of them, you should make some time for them. Welcome to the Village of Liver-and-Onions. Remember this little girl, "Never kick a slipper at the moon if it is the time of the Dancing Slipper Moon..."

Tonight we are past the Dancing Slipper Moon and if you venture out around 10pm Eastern Time and the sky is clear...you may see the eclipse and a beautiful red moon.