Free Republic

Four word summation in four literal words from time immemorial: Kill, or be killed.

Don't talk about it, do it. Six words.

There are 24 hours in a day, use them. Eight words.

We are going to have to kill our way out of this mess. Thirteen words.

We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor. Fourteen words.

It is a common misconception what the several colors, shapes and configurations of traffic lights and posted instruction and prohibition signs on poles and painted on the roadway surfaces mean for motor vehicle drivers, bicyclists, and users of various other means of transportation and pedestrians.

I have walked, rode and driven about 2 million miles on and in many types of vehicles from tricycles to big riggs in 47 of the fifty states, Canada and Mexico on paved and unpaved roads. During these miles I have had several minor incidents and by learning from experience to always focus on safety because we are always one to three seconds from killing or being killed while on or near a roadway. I have avoided dozens of serious once in a lifetime incidents by disciplined driving habits and good luck. I surmise that the worst incidents happen when we are least prepared for them, or to say that another way, when we are distracted or have low situational awareness.

I will focus my comment on just one aspect of the limit lines and traffic lights.

First a few commonsense rules of the road. Automobile operators of all types have a responsibility to yield the right of way to all pedestrians, bicyclists and users of all manner of powered and unpowered wheeled and stand on or sit on vehicles on or near the roadway.

A green light does not mean go, like on a raceway drag strip.

It means you now have the right of way to proceed through the intersection if it is safe to do so. This means do not enter the intersection or cross the limit line painted on the road surface if any cross-traffic vehicle or pedestrian is completing a maneuver through the intersection whether legal or illegal. Do not enter the intersection if an emergency vehicle is approaching the intersection. This includes yellow and red-light runners, distracted walkers, drivers and animals, etc.

A yellow light means stop before the intersection if it safe to do so. Watch the traffic behind you for tailgaters that are by definition unsafe drivers and are generally distracted in some way.

A red light means you do not have the right of way to proceed through the intersection unless there are extenuating circumstances.

As noted in above posts, in general, stop before the limit line so you can see the line from your stopped position. Also stop before the vehicle in front of you so you can see that vehicles rear tires on the pavement.

Your lines of sight may not extend for you to see all approaching hazards. Anticipate that pedestrians, riders of bicycles and other wheeled vehicles and vehicle drivers sometimes disobey the law and go the wrong way and will be difficult to see because you are not generally anticipating such behavior. Children and animals don’t know safe from unsafe and are always in danger of making potentially hazardous moves.

Whenever we operate or ride in a motor vehicle, we have an approximate one in seven thousand chance of a fatal accident during that trip, whether we go only around the block or go around the world. Your milage may vary.

On One Foot

“Tel Aviv must stand on one foot and wait for our earth-shattering response,”

The great Talmudic sage Hillel was born in Babylonia in the first century BCE. As a young man he came to the Holy Land to study Torah at the feet of the sages of Jerusalem. He was initially a very poor, but brilliant student, and became a famous Torah scholar and eventually the Nasi (president) of the Sanhedrin. He is often mentioned together with his colleague, Shammai, with whom he often disagreed on the interpretations of Torah law: Shammai often follows the stricter interpretation, whereas Hillel tended toward a more lenient understanding of the law. In the great majority of cases, his opinion prevailed. Hillel encouraged his disciples to follow the example of Aaron the High Priest to "love peace and pursue peace, love all G d's creations and bring them close to the Torah." Hillel was a very humble and patient man, and there are many stories that illustrate this.

One famous account in the Talmud (Shabbat 31a) tells about a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism. This happened not infrequently, and this individual stated that he would accept Judaism only if a rabbi would teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one foot. First, he went to Shammai, who, insulted by this ridiculous request, threw him out of the house. The man did not give up and went to Hillel. This gentle sage accepted the challenge, and said:

"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this—go and study it!"

By Shoshannah Brombacher

Ethical monotheism.

The 3rd Statement.

The only unforgivable transgression is to use G d’s name for personal gain and by doing so besmirch G d’s name to G d’s children.

3. You shall not take (carry) the name of the L rd your G d in vain; for the L rd will not hold him guiltless that takes His name in vain.

All other matters of the other 9 Statements may be forgiven.

Roma (Gypsies) originated in the Punjab region of northern India as a nomadic people and entered Europe between the eighth and tenth centuries C.E.

They were called "Gypsies" because Europeans mistakenly believed they came from Egypt.

This minority is made up of distinct groups called "tribes" or "nations."

I've interacted with the Roma several dozen times in my place of business, their place of business and in public and the result is always disappointing.

That creature should be put out of it’s misery.

Compassionate euthanasia.

Matthew 7:16

Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. 15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. 16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. 19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

Everything I need to know about the members of the cult of Muhammad is reviled by the way they treat their women, their childen, and all of life and civilization around them.

This is the full text of Enoch Powell's so-called 'Rivers of Blood' speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968.

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.

One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: "If only," they love to think, "if only people wouldn't talk about it, it probably wouldn't happen."

this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" Granted it be not wholly preventable, can it be limited, bearing in mind that numbers are of the essence: the significance and consequences of an alien element introduced into a country or population are profoundly different according to whether that element is 1 per cent or 10 per cent.

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen.

Let no one suppose that the flow of dependants will automatically tail off. On the contrary, even at the present admission rate of only 5,000 a year by voucher, there is sufficient for a further 25,000 dependants per annum ad infinitum, without taking into account the huge reservoir of existing relations in this country - and I am making no allowance at all for fraudulent entry. In these circumstances nothing will suffice but that the total inflow for settlement should be reduced at once to negligible proportions, and that the necessary legislative and administrative measures be taken without delay.

I stress the words "for settlement." This has nothing to do with the entry of Commonwealth citizens, any more than of aliens, into this country, for the purposes of study or of improving their qualifications, like (for instance) the Commonwealth doctors who, to the advantage of their own countries, have enabled our hospital service to be expanded faster than would otherwise have been possible. They are not, and never have been, immigrants.

I turn to re-emigration. If all immigration ended tomorrow, the rate of growth of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population would be substantially reduced, but the prospective size of this element in the population would still leave the basic character of the national danger unaffected. This can only be tackled while a considerable proportion of the total still comprises persons who entered this country during the last ten years or so.

Hence the urgency of implementing now the second element of the Conservative Party's policy: the encouragement of re-emigration.

Nobody can make an estimate of the numbers which, with generous assistance, would choose either to return to their countries of origin or to go to other countries anxious to receive the manpower and the skills they represent.

Nobody knows, because no such policy has yet been attempted. I can only say that, even at present, immigrants in my own constituency from time to time come to me, asking if I can find them assistance to return home. If such a policy were adopted and pursued with the determination which the gravity of the alternative justifies, the resultant outflow could appreciably alter the prospects.

The third element of the Conservative Party's policy is that all who are in this country as citizens should be equal before the law and that there shall be no discrimination or difference made between them by public authority. As Mr Heath has put it we will have no "first-class citizens" and "second-class citizens." This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendent should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to imposition as to his reasons and motive for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.

There could be no grosser misconception of the realities than is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader-writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong.

The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.

This is why to enact legislation of the kind before parliament at this moment is to risk throwing a match on to gunpowder. The kindest thing that can be said about those who propose and support it is that they know not what they do.

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

Whatever drawbacks attended the immigrants arose not from the law or from public policy or from administration, but from those personal circumstances and accidents which cause, and always will cause, the fortunes and experience of one man to be different from another's.

But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.

In the hundreds upon hundreds of letters I received when I last spoke on this subject two or three months ago, there was one striking feature which was largely new and which I find ominous. All Members of Parliament are used to the typical anonymous correspondent; but what surprised and alarmed me was the high proportion of ordinary, decent, sensible people, writing a rational and often well-educated letter, who believed that they had to omit their address because it was dangerous to have committed themselves to paper to a Member of Parliament agreeing with the views I had expressed, and that they would risk penalties or reprisals if they were known to have done so. The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.

“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.”

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members.

Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction.

But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate.

Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly. The words I am about to use, verbatim as they appeared in the local press on 17 February, are not mine, but those of a Labour Member of Parliament who is a minister in the present government:

'The Sikh communities' campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.'

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.

For these dangerous and divisive elements the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the very pabulum they need to flourish. Here is the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood."

That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century.

Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Here is a good 1 hour PBS program from the 80's or 90's called "A Hotdog Program".

It is available on youtube from WQED in Pittsburgh.

A Hotdog Program

My favorite dog, a Chinese dry sausage, Lop Chong, is from the now retired owner named Calvin, or Cal for short.

He owned The Royal Frankfurter on Fourth Street in San Rafael, CA from the early 70's through about 2010.

Locally very famous, and about 1 hour from San Francisco's China Town and the treasures therein.

Also a note about the Varsity in Atlanta, via the barker behind the counter calling the shots as he greeted his customers, " Have your order in your mind, and your money in your hand!" About 20 registers, and long lines always.

The correct author of this Townhall article is Richard Weikart. So sayeth Saul Goodman.

Bloomfield is a picturesque village in central Connecticut, 3,500 miles from the Mexican border.

Not quite. Bloomfield to McAllen in Hidalgo county Texas at the Mexico border is about 2,100 miles. Bloomfield to Tijuana is about 2,900 miles. Bloomfield to McAllen is about 3,400 kilometers.

Yes meteorology is thought to be perhaps the most difficult of the physical earth sciences.

One theory to research is the “Butterfly Effect”.

From Wikipedia: “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.

The term is closely associated with the work of mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz. He noted that butterfly effect is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as a distant butterfly flapping its wings several weeks earlier.[citation needed] Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed runs of his weather model with initial condition data that were rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner. He noted that the weather model would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.

The idea that small causes may have large effects in weather was earlier recognized by French mathematician and engineer Henri Poincaré. American mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener also contributed to this theory. Edward Lorenz’s work placed the concept of instability of the Earth’s atmosphere onto a quantitative base and linked the concept of instability to the properties of large classes of dynamic systems which are undergoing nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos.

The butterfly effect concept has since been used outside the context of weather science as a broad term for any situation where a small change is supposed to be the cause of larger consequences.”

I don’t know about that but I took a meteorology class in college and learned that ocean and atmospheric currents play a crucial role in earth’s Macro and Micro climate balance.

Harvesting that energy flow may have significant effects that are difficult to predict or quantify.

The Earth’s ecosystem distributes energy using various atmospheric levels of wind currents and ocean depth levels of sea currents.

Siphon off a high enough percent of that energy distribution and climate change will become a very real unintended consequence.

Hi ProtectOurFreedom

Well here we are smack dab in a state that has a pretty good mix of the best climate, geography and weather one could hope for. I was born in Chico, grew up in Sacramento on the American river and have spent most of my free time in rivers diving, kayaking, fishing and rafting. In the Pacific ocean diving, surfing, sailing and fishing. In the Coast Range, Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountains fishing, backpacking, cross country skiing and snow camping, rock climbing and generally avoiding responsibility while lounging in beautiful redwood, oak and pine forests.

My first real Social Security number required job was summer farm worker picking plumbs that were to become prunes at age 12 or so. My big travels as a kid were from northern California to San Diego every year to visit family friends. The only time I crossed a state line as a kid was at Lake Tahoe on winter ski trips.

One of my friend’s father was a “Renaissance” man who owned a salmon fishing boat in Alaska that burned completely when they were on it, a bush pilot with no license that crashed his plane and survived that then drove big trucks to earn a living.

My friend and I went with him one summer when he drove a logging truck out of Ukiah into the old growth Redwoods in the Coast Range on land owned by the Masonite Corporation. We would ride from the logging landing back to the mill in Ukiah with different drivers and listen to their stories about various wrecks and close calls driving logging trucks. In the winter when it was too wet or snowy we went on trips from the mill to various lumber yards around California.

I think that’s how I got diesel in my blood that led me to drive OTR for two years.

Hi TigerHawk,

"MY FIRST TRIP CROSS COUNTRY WHEN I WAS A KID FROM NY TO CA OVER A LEISURELY 3 MONTH SPAN OF SUMMER, WAS NOT HOW MUCH RICH LAND WAS UNDER CULTIVATION, BUT HOW MUCH WASN’T."

We live in a country surrounded on 3 sides by abundance in our oceans, are blesses by great climate, geography, prevailing weather, perfectly situated rivers and bays, deserts filled with minerals, mountains full of timber and soils as rich as any other nation excluding none.

I was born and raised in California's northern central valley. It is one if not the most abundant favorable weather, natural rich soil and mountain snow irrigation areas in the world.

Many nations have little or none of the resources we have in the U.S.A. The question is: We are blessed with so much and yet some other countries with much less natural resources manage to produce an amazing amount of goods and services.

Think Japan and Hong Kong. Japan makes products that the whole world wants, yet has few resources beyond its people. Hong Kong has no resources but for its people and is the world leader in offering services.

Some nations and cultures have near the resources of the continental U.S.A. but produce only strife and a failure to thrive. Some nations/continents have the extreme example of the climate, geography, flora and fauna weather, soil types and poor if any river systems that all together result in a perpetual survival mode of existence that eliminates the prospect of surplus that allows innovation of civilization development over time.

Adam Smith in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations delineates the foundation of why some cultures excel at abundance and a surplus of goods and services.

Prioritize cooperation and facilitation via thinking less of one's self and more of your neighbor, i.e. The Golden Rule.

Sorry to spell Mardi Gras wrong... proof reading needed.

Texas is an impressive state... If I was headed south east from California and I was running I-10 I would time my driving so I would sleep in Las Cruces and drive to Beaumont to sleep again. I don’t know of anywhere on earth that you can sleep in almost a Sonoran Desert and drive for a day and sleep next where sugarcane is grown.

I have been throughout the Panhandle to Brownsville, Laredo, Corpus Christi, the Metroplex, Wichita Falls, seen it snow in San Antonio several times and toMidland/Odessa to the CAF CONFEDERATE Air Force Museum where Fifi was hangared.

Don’t mess with Texas!

Hi Luvie,

Well here is a short list: Alamo and most of Texas;

In Mobile AL all through the Battleship USS Alabama BB-60 and the USS Drum SS-228;

Went to New Orleans several times including 1 week before Marti Gras and waded in the Mississippi;

Skin-dived in the Atlantic ocean in South Florida and skin-dived at Lithia Springs and snuck out of the spring pond into the Alafie River on advice of a local dive shop;

Full immersion in all five Great Lakes;

2 days in Colonial Williamsburg;

Went through the White house, saw both houses of Congress in session, went through the adjourned Supreme Court and all the sights of our Capital including but not limited to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, The Holocaust Museum and the toughest place to leave once there, Arlington National Cemetery...I wanted to stay there to keep our Nation’s Heroes company in gratitude for their sacrifices;

Top of the World Trade Center, when we had them. If I was in charge we would have rebuilt then to a 1/16th of an inch on the outside and modern on the inside after we decided what enemies were responsible with a 100 or 1,000 or 100,000 lives price per murdered people in that full attack...but I digress. A Knicks game at the Garden just to say I saw something at the Garden, Several Broadway plays courtesy of the Broadway Ticket Development Fund booth in Times Square;

Niagara Falls a few times; The Meteor Crater; Fossil Butte National Park and snuck onto a Wyoming excavated coal seam site when the overburden crane was out of service for maintenance...I got caught and lectured by the crane crew after I went to the seam itself, then the overburden drill rig and finally to the huge walking foot dragline crane. I go places that say KEEP OUT;

Went on Public Transportation and walked a lot through some very notorious places in most big cities. I drove for CR England and the only driver that ventured with me was a mid 20’s driver from Laos or Cambodia that was a Buddhist Monk trainee before he came to the U.S.A.. We went to a taping of the Conan O’Brian show at NBC 30 Rockefeller Plaza and another taped show for free with tickets distributed waiting in line at the TDF. All other drivers thought that criminals attack was certain in New York Boroughs. I explained that on Manhattan, there are residents wearing $20,000 dollars of clothing and jewelry walking the streets on 5th avenue and no criminal would bother them because they obviously have no valuables.

That was not the case in New Orleans where during Marti Gras I parked at the I-10 Marti Gras Truck Stop on Tuesday morning one week before Fat Tuesday and walked the 1-1/2 miles down Elysian Fields Ave to the French Quarter where the Quarter had all streets blocked so no vehicles allowed for the full-on party for Marti Gras. I stopped and talked with residents on their door stoops as I leisurely made my way to the Quarter. After watching several Crews parade, including the Crew of Pegasus it was time to go back to my truck. The only sober people there seemed to be me and the N.O.P.D., who held court in all the roped off intersections. That’s where I mentioned that I had walked to the Quarter down Elysian Fields Ave that morning and was ready to walk back at about 10:00 or so.

The police there told me New Orleans was then the murder capital of the U.S. and that I would surely get mugged and probably killed as the old rule of mugging no longer applied. They would have to come scrape me up out of the gutter…

The old rule was an experienced mugger that would size up a potential victim for jewelry and expected wallet cash and only bother to risk mugging if the reward was significant, and he knew how rob without making a mess of it.

The New Rules, I was told, were a gang of several pre to mid-teens who were looking to rob anyone they may find, even for $5, and maybe just for the experience, and they were inexperienced, and if I did not do as ordered and spooked them they would just shoot me for the trophy of “making their bones” and run, leaving me for dead and the police to clean up later. I was advised to take a taxi back to the truck stop or I would surely wind up on the coroner’s table. Good advice for me, the guy who got along with everybody and had never had a bad experience with anyone or anything in all my wilderness, suburban, urban, or inner-city adventures.

This list is a fraction of the 2 year adventure I had as a working tourist. I have seen some of the best and worst our great Country has to offer, and never a dull moment throughout.

Friends and family ask “Where was the best place you went?”. Easy question: The best place I ever went was everywhere I ever was”.

It is always the people you meet that make make life experiences great. The objective of my driving for 2 years was to get the “Lay-of-the-land” of our country, and at about 150,00 miles a year, I got a fair but not complete view of the 46 states I drove through.

I had plenty of time to get out of the truck and set foot in most of those states after I mastered my 5 most important guidelines for driving a big truck, like the five fingers on one hand, as I say.

#1: Learn how to drive you truck so you don’t kill anyone.

#2: Learn how to drive your log book so you get every possible mile out of it.

#3: Learn how to drive your customer by calling them after loaded or empty and letting them know if you can deliver or load earlier that scheduled. An empty trailer needs to get loaded and a loaded trailer needs to get empty so you can sell it to a customer. The variety of responses are; We need what you have, get here as fast as you can and we will load/unload you immediately; We don’t need what you have but we will fit you in if we can after you arrive; The warehouse space is not paid for until your scheduled delivery date and time so no early delivery, or the product you are loading does not exist yet so no early loading. This creates “tourist time” close to your appointment location.

#4: Learn how to drive your company. Let your fleet manager know you are available earlier the scheduled. You are now a “runner” and you get challenging rescue loads to handle. If you think big do what I did and tell your boss “When a problem lands on your desk, give it to me and I will solve it for you”. Sometimes you get two loads at once.

#5: Learn how to drive yourself. Once you set high exceptions of your ability you will be tested by many company wide challenges.

The reward is that you ping pong around the US and Canada. You find that wherever you load/deliver is probably the first and probably the last time you will ever go there.