Whoa: James Gandolfini Has Died

He was only 51

Actor James Gandolfini died suddenly after a suspected heart attack while on holiday in Rome to attend the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily. He was 51. Gandolfini will be forever known for his portrayal of mob boss Tony Soprano on the seminal HBO series The Sopranos, which eventually won him 3 Emmy Awards and a $1,000,000-an-episode paycheck.

RIP, my fellow New Jerseyan.

Pets for Patriots

…is having a t-shirt fundraiser.

They don’t just find strays homes with former service members. They actually work to find foster homes for active duty pet owners who get called up and can’t find someone to board their animals with for however long they’re deployed. So , rather than have to give your beloved family member up, they try their damndest to find a place for them until you get back, God bless them.

Quote Of The Day

Reflecting on the success of the marriage, Ron, now a 91-year-old grandfather, humorously said, “We promised to love, honour and obey, and I did all the obeying.”

A very very sweet story.

Photo Of The Day

Fire fighting…in a DC-10

Keep the folks in Colorado in your prayers.

What We Have Here…

Here’s Today’s “New Math” Lesson In Spanish

Ochocinco es igual a treinta

Former NFL wide receiver Chad Johnson has been sentenced to 30 days in a Fort Lauderdale jail for violating his probation in a domestic abuse case against his ex-wife and reality TV personality Evelyn Lozada. A plea deal had been reached on Monday but fell apart after Johnson playfully slapped his attorney on the behind.

Broward Judge Kathleen McHugh said Johnson wasn’t taking the case seriously enough even after Johnson apologized for the playful slap on his attorney. Judge McHugh also extended Johnson’s probation by three months.

The 35-year-old Johnson, formerly known as Chad Ochocinco, pleaded no-contest to allegedly head-butting Lozada during an argument in August. Lozada, who appears on the reality TV show Basketball Wives, filed for divorce just a month after marriage. Johnson was then released by the Miami Dolphins following his arrest.

With All This News Coming Out About Our Government

I just felt the need to read this again.

Be seated.

Men, all this stuff you hear about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of bullshit. Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. Battle is the most significant competitions in which a man can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base.

You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would be killed in a major battle. Every man is scared in his first action. If he says he’s not, he’s a goddamn liar. But the real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared. Some men will get over their fright in a minute under fire, some take an hour, and for some it takes days. But the real man never lets his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood.

All through your army career you men have bitched about what you call ‘this chicken-shit drilling.’ That is all for a purpose—to ensure instant obedience to orders and to create constant alertness. This must be bred into every soldier. I don’t give a f*** for a man who is not always on his toes. But the drilling has made veterans of all you men. You are ready! A man has to be alert all the time if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sock full of shit. There are four hundred neatly marked graves in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on the job—but they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before his officer did.

An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, and fights as a team. This individual hero stuff is bullshit. The bilious bastards who write that stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don’t know any more about real battle than they do about f***ing. And we have the best team—we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity these poor bastards we’re going up against.

All the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters. Every single man in the army plays a vital role. So don’t ever let up. Don’t ever think that your job is unimportant. What if every truck driver decided that he didn’t like the whine of the shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? That cowardly bastard could say to himself, ‘Hell, they won’t miss me, just one man in thousands.’ What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be then? No, thank God, Americans don’t say that. Every man does his job. Every man is important. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns, the quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us because where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who boils the water to keep us from getting the GI shits, has a job to do.

Each man must think not only of himself, but think of his buddy fighting alongside him. We don’t want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the goddamn cowards and we’ll have a nation of brave men.

One of the bravest men I saw in the African campaign was on a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire while we were moving toward Tunis. I stopped and asked him what the hell he was doing up there. He answered, ‘Fixing the wire, sir.’ ‘Isn’t it a little unhealthy up there right now?’ I asked. ‘Yes sir, but this goddamn wire has got to be fixed.’ I asked, ‘Don’t those planes strafing the road bother you?’ And he answered, ‘No sir, but you sure as hell do.’ Now, there was a real soldier. A real man. A man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how great the odds, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty appeared at the time.

And you should have seen the trucks on the road to Gabès. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they crawled along those son-of-a-bitch roads, never stopping, never deviating from their course with shells bursting all around them. Many of the men drove over 40 consecutive hours. We got through on good old American guts. These were not combat men. But they were soldiers with a job to do. They were part of a team. Without them the fight would have been lost.

Sure, we all want to go home. We want to get this war over with. But you can’t win a war lying down. The quickest way to get it over with is to get the bastards who started it. We want to get the hell over there and clean the goddamn thing up, and then get at those purple-pissing Japs. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. So keep moving. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper-hanging son-of-a-bitch Hitler.

When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a Boche will get him eventually. The hell with that. My men don’t dig foxholes. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. We’ll win this war, but we’ll win it only by fighting and showing the Germans that we’ve got more guts than they have or ever will have. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun c***suckers by the bushel-f***ing-basket.

Some of you men are wondering whether or not you’ll chicken out under fire. Don’t worry about it. I can assure you that you’ll all do your duty. War is a bloody business, a killing business. The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them, spill their blood or they will spill yours. Shoot them in the guts. Rip open their belly. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt from your face and you realize that it’s not dirt, it’s the blood and gut of what was once your best friend, you’ll know what to do.

I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position.’ We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We’re going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.

There will be some complaints that we’re pushing our people too hard. I don’t give a damn about such complaints. I believe that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that. My men don’t surrender. I don’t want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he is hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight. That’s not just bullshit either. I want men like the lieutenant in Libya who, with a Luger against his chest, swept aside the gun with his hand, jerked his helmet off with the other and busted the hell out of the Boche with the helmet. Then he picked up the gun and he killed another German. All this time the man had a bullet through his lung. That’s a man for you!

Don’t forget, you don’t know I’m here at all. No word of that fact is to be mentioned in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell they did with me. I’m not supposed to be commanding this army. I’m not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamned Germans. Some day, I want them to rise up on their piss-soaked hind legs and howl ‘Ach! It’s the goddamned Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again!’

Then there’s one thing you men will be able to say when this war is over and you get back home. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting by your fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks, ‘What did you do in the great World War Two?’ You won’t have to cough and say, ‘Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana.’ No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say ‘Son, your granddaddy rode with the great Third Army and a son-of-a-goddamned-bitch named George Patton!

All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. I’ll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in battle any time, anywhere. That’s all.

Is it even possible to read that and not hear it in George C. Scott’s voice in your head?

Esther Williams Has Died

Send in the nuns!

D-Day

Honor their sacrifice by upholding their ideals.

I Feel Awful For His Family

And the people in his group who had to witness this but, seriously, all I can say is WTF was he thinking?

Authorities at Yosemite National Park were searching for a 19-year-old man who was swept over the edge of Nevada Fall on Saturday afternoon.

Aleh Kalman of Sacramento was witnessed swimming above the 594-foot waterfall, about 150 feet from the precipice, when a strong current swept him to the edge of the fall shortly before 3 p.m. Saturday, officials said. The man, who was hiking the Mist Trail with a church group, was trying to swim to shore from a rock in the middle of the river, officials said.

It what universe was this possibly a good idea?

Ah, Blessed Fecundity

The return of the sun has gotten things growing apace

major dad Likes To Refer To Me As “Pencil Neck”

…I’m hoping he doesn’t upgrade me to “Pencil Head”

BERLIN (AP) — German doctors say a man spent 15 years with a pencil in his head following a childhood accident.

Aachen University Hospital says the 24-year-old man from Afghanistan sought help in 2011 after suffering for years from headaches, constant colds and worsening vision in one eye. A scan showed that a 10-centimeter (4-inch) pencil was lodged from his sinus to his pharynx and had injured his right eye socket.

The unnamed man said he didn’t know how the pencil got there but recalled that he once fell badly as a child.

No Fort “George Washington”, “Patton”, “Pershing”, “Bradley”, OR “Douglas MacArthur”?

But we have ALL these bases named after CONFEDERATES?!?! I never put it together.

Sorry, but I’m totally with this guy. I don’t care how long it’s been that way. Time to CHANGE THAT SH*T.HOLY MOTHER OF GOD, FORGET I EVER MENTIONED IT

Misplaced Honor

N the complex and not entirely complete process of reconciliation after the Civil War, honoring the dead with markers, tributes and ceremonies has played a crucial role. Some of these gestures, like Memorial Day, have been very successful. The practice of decorating the graves arose in many towns, north and south, some even before the war had ended. This humble idea quickly spread throughout the country, and the recognition of common loss helped reconcile North and South.

ut other gestures had a more a political edge. Equivalence of experience was stretched to impute an equivalence of legitimacy. The idea that “now, we are all Americans” served to whitewash the actions of the rebels. The most egregious example of this was the naming of United States Army bases after Confederate generals.

Today there are at least 10 of them. Yes — the United States Army maintains bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed United States Army soldiers; indeed, who may have killed such soldiers themselves.

Only a couple of the officers are famous. Fort Lee, in Virginia, is of course named for Robert E. Lee, a man widely respected for his integrity and his military skills. Yet, as the documentarian Ken Burns has noted, he was responsible for the deaths of more Army soldiers than Hitler and Tojo. John Bell Hood, for whom Fort Hood, Tex., is named, led a hard-fighting brigade known for ferocious straight-on assaults. During these attacks, Hood lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, but he delivered victories, at least for a while. Later, when the gallant but tactically inflexible Hood launched such assaults at Nashville and Franklin, Tenn., his armies were smashed.

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry Benning, a State Supreme Court associate justice who became one of Lee’s more effective subordinates. Before the war, this ardent secessionist inflamed fears of abolition, which he predicted would inevitably lead to black governors, juries, legislatures and more. “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Benning wrote. “We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.”

Another installation in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named for John B. Gordon, one of Lee’s most dependable commanders in the latter part of the war. Before Fort Sumter, Gordon, a lawyer, defended slavery as “the hand-maid of civil liberty.” After the war, he became a United States senator, fought Reconstruction, and is generally thought to have headed the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He “may not have condoned the violence employed by Klan members,” says his biographer, Ralph Lowell Eckert, “but he did not question or oppose it when he felt it was justified.”

Not all the honorees were even good generals; many were mediocrities or worse. Braxton Bragg, for whom Fort Bragg in North Carolina is named, was irascible, ineffective, argumentative with subordinates and superiors alike, and probably would have been replaced before inflicting half the damage that he caused had he and President Jefferson Davis not been close friends. Fort Polk in Louisiana is named after Rev. Leonidas Polk, who abandoned his military career after West Point for the clergy. He became an Episcopal bishop, owned a large plantation and several hundred slaves, and joined the Confederate Army when the war began. His frequently disastrous service ended when he was split open by a cannonball. Fort Pickett in Virginia is named after the flamboyant George Pickett, whose division was famously decimated at Gettysburg. Pickett was accused of war crimes for ordering the execution of 22 Union prisoners; his defense was that they had all deserted from the Confederate Army, and he was not tried…

By the way, the is some absolutely fascinating combined American/Army history contained in these posts: “Posts” being used in both the Army base AND blog sense.

Don’t Look Know Now, But

…Google has a teeny, TINY American flag and yellow ribbon on their search page today.

Oh, yes, they do.

I’ll be a socialistic monkey’s uncle.

Memorial Piggie

Got up a tad earlier than I cared to this morning to get the 12lbs of pork butt on the smoker

The knockout roses are looking quite neony

and it was exceedingly pleasant sitting on the deck working my way through a pot of coffee

(gratuitous multi-grill pr0n)

Makes Me Cry

The Garden State

Rob has been showing some loverly pictures of the verdant fecundity that is his garden down South. A few years ago we both planted some fig trees at basically the same time.

Here’s his today

And here are its Jersey “siblings”

I am right on the edge of where these things can live per the USDA; the winters are turning them into Fig Banzais…

He also has some nice Roma tomatoes starting to fill out where as mine are just starting to grow

Ah well…there ain’t much ‘victory’ in this garden at this point!

Why Mothers Choke Their Teenage Sons: When She’s at Work and You’re IN the Storm Cellar

…don’t be sticking your cell phones through the door handle openings.

You’re supposed to be as far away from that little door as you can get, numbnuts.

I Told major dad He Could Back Off a Little On the Smoke

…next time.

How we went from backstroking in the rain to a brushfire just over in the fence in a month’s time is a chin-stroker.

Your Daily AK Update

Interesting article here on the plans to replace the AK-74.

The real question is can Vanessa Redgrave dance with it?

“And I Thought God Just Answered One of My Prayers”

“He answered two of them.”

WNEM TV 5

Like Emerging Into a Nuclear Winter

My God

I just can’t imagine the horror of it all

It looks like 50+ are dead.

And even though the number of tornadoes this year is well below average I’m glad we can count on one of our Esteemed Senators to not “politicize” this tragedy.

Pray and please give what you can to the Salvation Army and other such organizations to help these folks.

ths adds: The Salvation Army link for Oklahoma donations

Perhaps The Mets Should Sign Him

They’ve done far worse

Jolita Brettler, aged nine, who has been receiving coaching lessons from Harlem RBI for the past two years, was impressed with Harry’s batting skills.

She said: “All of us were like ‘is that a bird or is that a ball?’. I didn’t think anyone could swing that fast – he hit that thing out, all of us were like ‘wow’. “Who thinks that a Prince is going to play baseball? Princes are usually in castles or doing something important.”

He’s got the Common Touch in spades.

Unlike that total dorktastic father of his.

On This Day In History, 1781, Begins the “Battle of Pensacola”, Where Unheralded General Bernardo de Gálvez of Spain

…throws a monkey wrench in the works and darned if he didn’t wind up saving us.

On to Pensacola
His next target was Pensacola, the capital of West Florida. However, due to several hurricanes and storms, he had to wait until the next March to attack this target. Pensacola had a narrow entrance to its bay, and this entrance was guarded by a British fort. The first Spanish ship was fired upon and ran aground. The rest of the fleet retreated back to sea. Gálvez was head of the ground forces, but for this campaign Havana had sent Admiral José Calbo de Irazabel to be in charge of the navy. Gálvez kept urging the admiral to press the attack, but the admiral kept making excuses.

Gálvez knew that the British fleet was on its way, so he decided to take the matter into his own hands. He took his own four ships, hoisted his personal flag in the lead ship, stood on the prow with his sword raised, and ordered a 15-gun salute fired as he led his ships through the pass.

When the rest of the fleet saw this daring move, they urged the admiral to give the order to follow. Still, Irazabel hesitated. Finally he told the other captains, “Do whatever you want.” The other ships followed Gálvez. Irazabel returned to Cuba and was never heard from again.

After two months of fighting, the British finally surrendered in May 1781. The Battle of Pensacola was one of the longest battles of the American Revolution; yet, it rarely appears in our history books.

In July 1781 British troops began to arrive in Yorktown, the final engagement of the war. Think how much impact Gálvez and his troops had. Not only had he kept the British occupied on a second front throughout the war, but also imagine how much impact the loss of Pensacola had on the number of troops and ships the British could send to Yorktown. Imagine what course the American Revolution might have taken without the help of this able Spanish general.