Thank You God

I thought I was gonna die..........I really did.........but I didn't...........and when I wake up enough, I'll tell a story about it..........

Smokies......

I'm heading out on Friday for a ride in the mountains.

Preliminary plans include a Friday ride from Hattiesburg to Cleveland, TN (420 miles)
Saturday morning ride through the Smokies through Deal's Gap and ride the Tail of the Dragon, head to Cherokee and finally onward to Asheville (260 miles)
Sunday morning leave Asheville and take the lower route back through the Smokies through Gatinburg and go all the way to Nashville (300 miles)
Monday morning get on the Natchez Trace and ride it all the way from Nashville to Jackson and then hit Hwy 49 and come my tired ass home (480 miles)

It's only 1460 miles, but those miles through the mountains are hard miles, not interstate miles. You go 30 mph up and down those switchback roads and keep your attention focused on what is right in front of you. Zaps all your phychic energy!

Then the Natchez Trace thing where the speed limit is 50. I've got 360 miles of that until we jump off north of Jackson. That'll be an easy 9 hours on the trace so we'll see how that works out with us old guys!

Looks like we have 5 going for sure - but we'll see who shows up at the Waffle House Launch Pad at 7am on Friday!

Pray for peace and justice and Keith!!

Daydream Believer

When I was a little kid, whenever I'd watch historical stuff on television or at the movies, I couldn't help but inject a little modern life into it.

Of course, at my age, modern life meant pretty much World War 2 stuff.

Take for instance, what would have happened at the battle of the Alamo in Texas in 1836 if our boys had a few M1 - 50 caliber machine guns. Say one each on the north and south walls and 2 each on the east and west walls. How do you think the Mexicans would have faired with their 7000 troops against our 182 men?

What if there had been a tank or two at the grand battles in The Lord of the Rings?

So next time you're feeling helplessly trapped in a historical drama - feel free to borrow my ploy and just imagine what if.......

Peace!

All I Want for Christmas......

Movies......

I took two "hot" 11-year olds to the movies on Friday night.

I know, it's quite a thing for us older guys to land such young chicks, but when you've got, you've got it!

Anyway, we went to see the new Disney movie "The Sorcerer's Apprentice".

It got hammered by the critics and didn't do very well at the box office this weekend.

So this post is not about artsy-fartsy movie review shit but all about personal musings for me.

I liked it.

I liked it alot!

It was funny, had some great one-liners, the cast was good, it has the very hot chick from the Matrix (you know, the French lady that played the wife of the Marovingian which the big puffy lips - yummo!)and was very good and light fare for a Friday night.

I had read the reviews before hand and really, don't pay that much attention to them but they were just brutal. They were univerally brutal about the acting, the story, the action, blah, blah, blah.

And here I am, Mr. Middle America, who absolutely enjoyed it!

Plus, the popcorn was hot, the icee was cold and even though I was forced to eat at McDonalds before hand by the "hot" 11-year olds, I had a very lovely evening (especially because my dates refused to sit with me!).

So I just don't understand why these serious movie critics who gush lovingly at "the hurt locker" (which I thought sucked ass) can poke so hard at a movie that obviously is just a fun Disney movie.

It says something about something I reckon!

So go to the movies this week. Take someone you love. Sit together if you want to. Hold hands even!

But above all, don't be so damn serious about everything and just enjoy yourself.

Take your mind off of all the shit that goes on in the world these days and just have a good time!

Jeez.

Peace.

World War 2 Posters - Blast From the Past!

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY BABY!

It was 3 years ago today that the unthinkable happened…………

She said YES!

Although it was quite an ordeal to get those words out of her mouth, I endeavored to persevere and was rewarded by a squeaky “yea, sure, OK if you can make it happen on July 12 I’ll do it”.

So let’s go back, let’s go back, let’s go way on way back when………… to July 12, 2007, the day the woman of my dreams said YES to this love-struck boy!

For those of you that may not recall the “story”, here is a brief recap.

I finally got her to agree to go marry me so I set it all up for a Las Vegas adventure, and then it began.

The adventure and everything else!

We left Hattiesburg in plenty of time to get to the airport in New Orleans and board our plane (because you don’t need to take any chances with stuff this important!). And as we were waiting in a very long line to check our luggage, we started to hear grumblings from Continental. Those grumblings soon turned to disgust and anguish as the truth of the situation was made evident………oh yea, “the flight had been cancelled”.

Then the fun we call “rebooking” began.

We finally waited in that long line long enough and we got booked on a new flight out the next morning at 6am.

This of course meant that we would have to be back at the airport at 4am.

This meant that we would have to get up at 3am.

This meant that we wouldn’t get much sleep for our big day!

But the 6am flight was going to get us to Vegas in plenty of time to do what we needed to do so I was still very happy!

So now all we have to do is go find us a hotel room for the evening in New Orleans…….

And without boring you with the gory details, just know that it took us visits to 5 hotels before we found one that had a vacancy – and it was right in the middle of crack central.

So we were entertained all night long.

And I mean that as sarcastically as I can mean it!

So after a non-restful night at the crack motel, we got to the airport the next morning at 4am and got all checked in. YEA FOR US!

We boarded the flight which then preceded to sit on the runway for an extra hour waiting on pilots………then we finally flew to Denver………..where we sat for a few more hours waiting on someone from Bumfuck, Egypt to come fix a mechanical problem with the plane.

Somehow, after all that, we finally got to Vegas about 2 hours before our wedding.

Please believe me that this is the short version of what happened. I have left out many other things, or as my wife was calling them at that time “messages from God”!

Because you see, my beautiful wife conditionally agreed to marry me contingent on any “signs from God” that she shouldn’t marry me…………

Getting the picture yet?

When we finally got to the amazing airport in Vegas, the limo I had booked wasn’t there because we had been rescheduled so many times and we were so late…..

“Hello, God, are you there”?

I eventually got the limo thing worked out and at this point, even my sunny disposition was taking a beating. I asked, no BEGGED the limo driver to hurry to the marriage bureau so we could get our marriage license………..so he took a “short cut” – which somehow caused him to slam on brakes and shoot our champagne bottle across the limo, crash off the glass and then spray all over us and the limo…..

“Why God, why”?

There was a very humorous story at the marriage bureau where an 85 year-old Jewish diamond merchant from New York was getting a license to marry a 25 year-old black hooker named “chastity” but I’ll leave that story for a cocktail party!

We got our license and then when we finally get to the hotel we had less than an hour before our “appointed time” on the roof of the Stratosphere for our ceremony.

And wouldn’t you know it, because we were so late, our room had been given away!

I had to sweet talk (bribe) a manager to hook us up………..so let’s just say that by this time, my wife was pretty much in tears and emotionally rinsed.

We get to our room and change quickly into our wedding attire and hurry up to meet with our preacher.

We finally felt like we were back on track and everything was going to be fine. So we took the elevator up to the roof of the tallest building west of the Mississippi River where I find out that my beautiful woman is more scared of heights than I am.

She really looked kind of green around the gills………

So we go out to the observation deck to do our thing and the preacher asks someone walking by if they wouldn’t mind being a witness to the ceremony. And the guy looks at us and says “NO” and keeps walking.

Well, I thought that was the last straw. She was about to jump off the damn building.

But we finally got someone to say “YES” and we did the deed and the rest, as we like to say, is history!

It’s fun to look back on that and remember how crazy it was. But mostly, for me, it’s fun to look back and realize that on this date in 2007, every dream I ever had came true for me.

I can’t state it strongly enough how important this was for me.

Our lives are marked by events and you judge yourself by those events. We end up dividing our lives as “stuff that happened before and after that event”. It is in that way that we realize the truly important things in our lives.

This was my moment of clarity. My time where everything I had ever gone through in life finally made sense to me. I could literally and figuratively see for miles and miles – even through space and time.

So thank you my darling. Thank you for everything you have done for me, everything you do for me and everything that will come in my life.

I owe you all.

And I give it gladly and take that responsibility on my broad shoulders and will never consider any of it to be a burden.

It’s simply who I am.

I love you so very much.

Happy Anniversary Baby!

Peace.

And God Said.........

I can't ever decide whether or not I believe in providence or not. I guess it depends on my mood.

But there are some signs that pretty much can convince me that it would be a good idea to go back to bed........

Peace?

Happy 6th of July!

Hope everyone's 4th of July was as wonderful as mine was!

And in wonderful, I generally mean very quiet and time spent with the one you love.

Because if we're judging success like that, then I had a very successful long weekend!

I love being at home with my wife and not having much to do because then I get to spend time with her.

And that just cranks my tractor!

We did scurry off to the coast on Sunday the 4th to have dinner with my cousins from Baton Rouge. We went to the "pan-oriental" restaurant Tien at the Imperial Palace and it was quite good. I was happy we went.

But it was a quick trip. We left around 5pm and got home by 11pm so no muss, no fuss for the Kennedy's!

Now onward to this week.

I find that Tuesday's after a long holiday weekend are more like Mondays than a regular Monday. But like most days, all you have to do is grin and bear it and it will be over before you know it!

I'm planning a motorcycle trip for this coming weekend to the Smokey Mountains so we'll see if that happens or not.

But until then I bid you.......

PEACE!

Soccer, the good, the bad, and the British....

Here is a little primer on Soccer:

No matter how much we Murkins (that's Americans to you that aren't from the south) continues to emerge as a competitive World Cup nation,there is little doubt that the international perception of American soccer will always be looked down on.

Why? Because Murkins don’t even call the sport by its proper name, of course.

We don’t call it “football.” They call it “soccer.”

Here in the good ole USA, "football" is that game that dominates the fall and the winter each Friday night, all day Saturday and most of the day after church on Sundays......and these days it seems to also be on Tuesday's and Thursday's as well .....and "football" features men so large they should come with their own zip code, so fast you have to use instant replay to see them move, so graceful that you could imagine them dancing in a ballet - but I digress.

Elsewhere, football is football. The round-ball sport, the beautiful game, with its biggest prize, the World Cup to be handed out on July 11.

Soccer? Pah, a silly American term created by a nation that has its own national obsession.

No country has been snootier toward the USA’s use of the term “soccer” than England.

Before the opener between the USA and England, the Sun newspaper even ran a spoof front page urging the English team to win the “soccerball world series.”

But let’s agree British humor is different than ours and take a halftime break here.

Coupled with their team’s humiliating exit from the World Cup it might be another rude awakening to the Brits that soccer isn’t an American term, it is actually an English one.

And it isn’t some modern fad that shows disrespect to the world’s most popular sport either. Nope, it dates back to the earliest days of the game’s professional history.

Indeed, until the last few decades, even Englishmen would routinely refer to their favorite pastime as soccer, just as often as they would say football.

Clive Toye was an Englishman who moved to the U.S. and became known as the father of modern American soccer. He is the one that brought the Brazilian legend Pele to play for the New York Cosmos.

Here are his thoughts on the matter:

“Soccer is a synonym for football,” said Toye, who helped launch the North American Soccer League in the late 1960s. “And it has been used as such for more years than I can count. When I was a kid in England and grabbed a ball to go out and play … I would just as easily have said: ‘Let’s have a game of soccer’ as I would use the word ‘football’ instead. And I didn’t start it.”

But if that's not good enough for you,you can check the etemology and find that to get to the beginning of the origin of “soccer” we must go all the way back to 1863 to a meeting of gentlemen at a London pub, who congregated with the purpose of standardizing the rules of “football,” which was in its infant years as an organized sport but was growing rapidly in popularity.

Those assembled became the founding members of the Football Association (which still oversees the game in England to this day). And they decided to call their new league "Association Football", to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

Still with me? Because now we must go back to the English humor.

A quirk of British culture/humor is the permanent need to familiarize names by shortening them. “My friend Brian Johnston was Johnners,” said Toye. “They took the third, fourth and fifth letters of Association and called it SOCcer.

So there you are.”

So forget that English condescension and carry on calling it soccer, safe in the knowledge that you’re more in tune with the roots of the sport than those mocking Brits.

God Save the Queen!

Pace