If folks want some topic of interest posted, send me the link, even if you know/think it's contrary to my leaning. If it's worthy of discussion, up it goes.
My rights begin where your dinner ends (upchucked)
One of this site's finest posters sent the following link, which reports that a frustrated Franklin Street restauranteur removed a bench owned by the town of Chapel Hill from in front of his business, the Front Porch restaurant. It seems that the bench was a roost for panhandling buzzards, and by inference detrimental to attracting patrons, as the owner, Billy Scott, 61, reported that the panhandlers harassed customers and vomited and urinated in situ.
The powers that be cited Scott for destruction of public property. Scott's defense is worthy of stepteens that I have helped raise: he didn't destroy the bench; he merely removed from its moorings, so to speak. Also, he reports having complained to the police about the panhandlers several times.
City officials note that panhandling is legal in Chapel Hill. One official conceded that Scott's action was probably directed at panhandler who vomited in front of the Front Porch (the dinner I mention above probably having been in liquid form, no doubt, perhaps Night Train Express).
Chapel Hill being a university town, one can imagine all the noise folks could make over trumped-up violations of panhandlers' civil liberties by the capitalist businessman. However, the solution seems simple enough: fine Mr. Scott for damage to the bench and for the cost of relocating it to a site where its users aren't acting in restraint of trade, so to speak. I guess it's too much to ask Chapel Hill LEO's to monitor panhandlers and shoo them elsewhere when they are borderline nuisancesome.
http://www.dailytarheel.com/index.php/article/2011/08/panhandling_0830
You can choose your friends . . .
. . . but you can't choose your family. And how Presidents know that. Jimmy Carter had Billy; Clinton had his wife's slug siblings, the Rodham brothers; Al Gore had his partying children; President George H. W. Bush had his son George . . . oops, wait a minute, he was Prez, too.
And now, President Obama has his own kinsman whom he didn't choose, in the august person of his half-uncle, Onyango Obama. Uncle Obama was busted for DWI in Framingham, MA, after he rolled through a stop sign, nearly colliding with a police cruiser. Unk became argumentative, said the cop had it wrong, and had drunk the usual "only two beers." He blew a .14.
More embarrassing to President Obama, perhaps, is the fact that Unk is now be held in jail at the behest of ICE. Uncle Onyango is here illegally, is a citizen of Kenya. The President has been trying to ease matters for illegal immigrants of late, but Unk's 2 beers may cost a bit of political capital.
Ha, ha. We all have relatives that we have to "live down" and some of us might even be those relatives to some of our other relatives. My grandmother had a sister whose name was NEVER mentioned, who smoked a corncob pipe AND "took snuff" and knew words that I never heard anywhere else, even in the Navy. Did I mention that as she grew older, her husbands grew ever younger?
ReplyDeleteIke's brother Milton Eisenhower was just the opposite, serving as president of 3 universities, Kansas State, Penn State and Johns Hopkins. In fact, there is still an urban legend about which says that when the trustees of Columbia U. hired Ike as president they thought that they were getting Milton. Not true.
John McCain's brother, a journalist who went on the stump in McCain's 1st presidential run and was not all that helpful, stayed off the stump in 2008, and had a widely read article published online during that campaign that might have garnered his brother a few unexpected votes.
Nixon's brother was certainly no help to him. Nor was LBJ's brother, Sam Houston Johnson, for god's sake, whose penchant for drink and loose lips inspired Lyndon to place him under Secret Service protection to shut him up.
Clinton's problems did not stop with his brothers-in-law...don't forget his own brother Roger who aspired to be the second coming of Elvis.
Cheney/Bush: On his record, Dick Cheney would almost certainly have murdered his gay daughter if he could have figured out a way to do it without getting caught. And GHW Bush's problems did not end with his son W, Cheney's puppet. There was the problem of the criminal Neill Bush, who somehow managed to stay out of jail. Wonder about that?
Not to mention W's wife, who managed to kill a high school classmate while driving drunk, and who for years afterward knelt next to her wayward husband in one public or private bathroom after another, barfing up their cocktails of coke and booze.
And then there were the grandchildren. See Barbara Bush's comments on that matter.
But my all-time favorite has to be Billy Carter, because as the brother of the only real southern president in my lifetime, I know him better than the rest. Every southern family, mine and yours, has its Billies.
The ne'er-do-well who always can get money from Momma with his latest scheme. And his best scheme of all was Billy Beer. I am one who can say that I actually drank more than one of his beers.
Were they great beers? No. Were they awful beers? No. Were they better than Budweiser's Clydesdale p*ss? Yes. Were they better than original Schlitz before they secretly changed their formula in the 1970s? No.
They were just mediocre beers. But imagine being the President of the United States, getting up every morning knowing that Billy was about to hold a press conference with a few of his redneck friends in attendance. In spite of all that, Jimmy loved his brother. How can one do anything else.
Ah, Billy Beer, remember it well, the two cans out of six that I drank from the gift six-pack I had received. I gave the other four cans and a second six-pack to one of my brothers, who was in the same state as your neighbor's boyfriend.
ReplyDeleteI'd say "mediocre" is being kind. There was a report that some nightspot held a dance contest, with first prize being a six-pack of Billy. Second place was TWO six-packs of the swill. None of the prize winners bothered to collect.
I was a Schlitz drinker until the company's changed the brand's recipe, making it undrinkable. That was an amazing business mistake, perhaps not on the scale of GM's Vega, but remarkable nonetheless.
Interesting about Unk Obama: MA requires an SSN in order to issue a driver's license. However, at the time Unk settled illegally in MA, he apparently applied for public assistance, during which he was not asked re citizenship, thanks to an order by Prez wannable Dukakis.
ReplyDeleteMA welfare authorities issued substitute numbers to welfare applicants lacking SSN's. The numbers were formatted like SSN's, only using a prefix that the SSA doesn't use. The MA DMV either didn't know that or didn't care. Thus, Unk could present a number and obtain a driver's license.
Does anyone care to place bets on whether this party animal will be sent back to Kenya?
If memory serves me correctly, didn't Billy once appoint himself as an ambassador to Libya, then flew to Libya to meet with Gaddhafi? He was quite the character.
ReplyDeleteI also remember Billy Beer, but was too young to imbibe. In my Chapel Hill days, the cheap beer of choice amongst budget conscience students was something called Red, White & Blue. Whether or not it actually qualified as beer is up to interpretation, but it served its purpose of getting one drunk.
Hi dotnet!
ReplyDeleteI believe he did. I'm surprised the Muslim country let him in, as awash in beer as he was.
Red White & Blue: your reference to its dubious status as beer reminds me of a Steelers game I attended in 3 Rivers Stadium. There, beer vendors roamed, selling their products, usually Iron City and Iron City Light ("IC Light," pretty good). Their chants of "Beah heah!" were part of the ambience of 3 Rivers.
Late in one game, a vendor came down the aisle with a different chant, "Zima heah!"
The astonished folks in earshot responded in unison, "Zima?!" Crestfallen, the vendor moved on, no doubt hoping to find inebriated college freshmen to whom to vend his liquid.