Joe was a guy. Joe was a guy who meant what he said. If Joe said he was going to have a beer, he had a beer. If Joe said he was going to walk his dog, he walked his dog. If Joe said he was going to shoot you in the balls, well…
Many years ago, I met Joe at the gun range. I had just moved to the area and was looking for a place to practice my favorite hobby—shooting guns. About six months earlier, I had visited the range and run into a guy who, over twenty years later, I now count as one of my best friends. Jim convinced me this was the club to join, so I applied for membership, got signed up, and then promptly sat at home doing very little over the winter. In late April, I decided to go up to the club and see what was going on. There was a note in the club newsletter that there was a new pistol “combat league” forming up, so I went up there on the day and got to know the guys.
The head of this ragtag group was Roy, a retired police officer who had been doing various kinds of competitive handgun shooting for decades, who wanted to set up a low-pressure, easygoing league and pass along some of his knowledge while having some fun. One of the other members was a long-time acquaintance of Roy’s, Joe.
On the day of our first match, Roy took Jim aside and said to him quietly:
“Jimmy, I need you to carry hot during the match today.”
This was a breach of general match etiquette, not to mention safety protocol.
“Roy, what do you mean? This is a cold range during matches.”
“Jimmy, Joe’s shooting the match today, and I need you to watch him. If he gets angry and goes nuts, I’m gonna need you to put him down.”
Roy had known Joe for many years, and evidently understood that when he was in stressful situations, Joe had a tendency to…get angry and do strange things.
That day, all went well, and Joe didn’t pop his top, but afterward, Jim and I were chatting with Roy about what he had asked Jim to do.
“Jimmy, you don’t understand. Joe, sometimes he gets angry and once he gets going, there’s no stopping him. Let me tell you a story about him.” Roy opened the cooler, grabbed a beer for each of us, and we settled down at the picnic table and listened.
“You see, this one time, Joey, he was walking around downtown at night a few summers ago. Don’t ask me why, but you know he doesn’t have a lot of money, so he just walks around for something to do—better than watching TV, I guess.”
Roy took a pull from his beer and paused.
“Well, you know Joe always carries that snubbie with him when he walks. And that night, he was walking down in a rough area—not the smartest idea, but hey, a man’s free to take a walk, right?
So he’s walking around, and it’s still hot out, and just got dark, and there’s these kids on the front porch and they start teasing him—they know he works for the social services, mowing old ladies’ lawns and stuff—and they start teasing him and then they follow him. Well, old Joe, after about a block, he stops in his tracks and turns around and faces these kids. And he says ‘you better back off,’ or something like that. And they keep teasing him. And he says ‘Back off now!’ And finally, he pulls out his snubbie and he points it at the ground in front of them. And they keep mouthing off, so he fucking shoots the ground in front of them! And the bullet splatters on the concrete and cuts the one kid’s leg up.
Well, I get a call from the town police saying they’ve got Joey in their cell, and he asked for me. So I drive all the way to town and talk to Joe. And he tells me this story about these big young men chasing him and attacking, and I talk to the cops for him, and eventually, somehow, it all goes away. I was a retired cop, and they figured my word was good. Somehow, the DA never charged him—maybe they thought he was doing a service keeping that neighborhood in line or something—and I thought I’d done a favor for a friend, and that’d be the end of it.
Well, that wasn’t the end, and sometimes I really wish I’d never done him that favor.”
Roy had finished his beer, and as the afternoon shadows got longer, he reached and grabbed another out of the cooler. This story wasn’t over.
Joe always was a pain in the ass.
Joe sounds like a case study in red flag law.
You will not believe
I have to admit I was rooting for Joe.
Is Jimmy or Roy Corn Pop?
That’s my bet. The story ends with “…And now the SOB is president.”
Hoooooo boy.
No good deed goes unpunished – you think Roy might have known that.
*grabs beer from
coolerfridge*I swear this story, and the installments to follow,
are true.
[Law and Order: bum-dump]
Did you at least change the names to protect the innocent.
Whist, is there somebody innocent in the story?
All except one
I know Joe. That was literally his name. He lived in the same town as us. He was the product of his mother and her first cousin doing the horizontal tango. He was always a little off. He was 5 years younger than me (same age as my little brother). There was no mellow situation that Fuckin’ Joe couldn’t disrupt – from a young kid until present day.
Fuck Joe.
It’s fuckin’ Joes all the way down.
Joe went by a different name in junior high, he carried a switch blade then and used it one day on Dave, when Dave got a little deep. He rarely brought a gun to school though.
I liked both those guys
Joe fired me from the band (well, trio) I used to play with…23 years ago.
I got over it. Sorta, 😒
What was your instrument, what style of music did the trio play, and why were you fired?
(If I’m not prying)
I played hand drums (djembe and doumbek,) an electronic kick drum, various other hand percussion, and sang (as all three of us did.) We played a pretty eclectic mix of folky acoustic stuff, some classic rock, a little blues – whatever we could pull off credibly with two guitars and my percussion, in particular some early Jackopierce and VERY early Vertical Horizon. (Obscure enough for you?)
The problem was that TT and I had a standing monthly gig, though we had a little flexibility with the scheduling. That meant I could play a gig with the trio on the second Friday OR the third Friday, but not both. This minor conflict, in Joe’s mind, was “holding them back.” So they fired me.
Very nice. We would very occasionally have djembe in our church worship when I was a sound tech. The guy who manned it had a… perhaps over-exuberant physicality to his style of playing, such that he’d frequently end up smacking the top side rim mic, and/or knock over the bottom side floor mic. The upshot being that his stage monitor was basically the only place where any djembe made it into the mix.
I hadn’t heard of Jackopierce, but I was a Vertical Horizon fanboy in high school, so I’m familiar with their pre-top-40 stuff.
I bet you felt awfully silly once they inked that 5 album deal with Warner Music Group…
Also, when you said 23 years ago, why was I thinking of the 1990s instead of y2k? Jesus.
Ackshually, I had the last laugh – they replaced me with a bimbo who was obsessed with Stevie Nicks (and sang like Stevie with a sinus infection) and an electronic drum machine. I went to their first gig after they replaced me, scared to death they’d be SOOOO much better than when I’d played with them.
They were terrible.
I got drunker than a hooty owl and was banging on our table and laughing my ass off. I didn’t go to any of their other gigs after that. They might have gotten some better, but they called it quits within about six months.
“And that man would one day become the President of the United States…”
Hahaha! Great minds think alike.
LOL…DOH!
Can’t believe nobody’s posted this banger on gas stoves yet.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/the-only-proper-response-to-a-national-gas-stove-ban/
Good grief that website has turned into a usability dumpster fire.
I’ve got a subscription, so it clears up a lot of the ads, etc – but yeah, still a little irritating.
It’s the second or third website I’ve come across in recent weeks where the scroll bar thingie literally jiggles up and down all on its own, as if the page is in a death-match with my adblocker, struggling to shove all kinds of crap onto my screen.
Whatever, dudes. I stopped reading you long ago.
Works OK for me, but I’ve experienced exactly what you’re describing before. Sometimes just toggling JS off and refreshing the page will allow the page to load without the offending element so you can read it. Toggling “reader mode” in Epiphany/GNOME Web sometimes works as well. Firefox used to have a similar feature, but I think they deprecated it.
I’m on Edge and the reader view is blocked – some sites have figured that out.
You’d think the eggheads would have “micropayments” figured out by now but here we are still at the stage of pissing off your potential readers.
Well. I appreciate the forthrightness but let’s be honest.
We are way, way past the point where it matters.
The administrative state will get their way like it always has and everyone will eventually get used to shitty cooking at home and/or what few restaurants are left.
“a world without any rough edges is a world that is less worth living in.”
Heh. I remember a college buddy once making the argument that, for this reason, his “going to Heaven would be Hell.”
The entire prospect of a an eternal afterlife sounds unimaginably unpleasant to me, whether you end up in the “good place” or the “bad place.” That was a fun conversation with one of my youth pastors, who was so clueless he wasn’t even familiar with the term “annihilationism.”
I spent a lot of time thinking about this concept when I was about 15, and came to the same conclusion as you.
For the sake of my sanity I decided that since it’s unknowable until you get there, it’s probably better to strive for the “good place” as the least-bad option and hope it somehow makes sense eventually. Perhaps existing outside of time itself has properties that a time-bound consciousness cannot comprehend. At the same time, if my religious beliefs turned out to be wrong and there wasn’t anything after this, there’s peace in that as well.
Ah, the good old Pascal’s wager.
Although it is not what we believe, I’m low-key hoping for reincarnation.
More or less. Although Pascal’s proposition accepts that eternal life is the best of all the outcomes, and thereby creating the inducement to wager on God. I think I’d prefer annihilation in all cases, but that not being an option, I’d take eternal banality over eternal torment (I know you guys have vastly different afterlife beliefs).
Reincarnation doesn’t interest me much if there’s no continuity of memory and consciousness. But if that’s what ends up happening, I apologize in advance to the poor son of a bitch who gets mine.
If I’m very, very good, can I come back as an otter? 😃🦦
Some time ago, you and I were talking about [[[our]]] idea that one is born saved, which you said obviates Christ’s sacrifice, but I never really had a chance to explain that.
We actually DO have a bad place, but its inhabitants will be so (relatively) few, it’s not usually worth mentioning. Those who murder in cold blood and those who deny God (in a very specific way I’m not going to bother to try to explain). We call it “outer darkness.” In my mind, it’s like a pitch-black vacuum without God’s presence. Silence. Eternally.
So in a vacuum, yes, being born saved would obviate Christ’s sacrifice. I think I remember explaining our 3 levels of “heaven” (aka “glory”), and that everyone (excluding the outer darkness people) get some level of heaven. Think of it like, the lowest level being a turbocharged Earth and let’s face it, Earth is gorgeous. The next level up is better than that. The top level is where you get to go learn to be a god. The top level is the one you earn your way into.
Anyway, herein enters Christ’s sacrifice. Since he is our judge at the last day, and he took on the sins of the world in Gethsemane, he can accurately judge people as to what they did, but more importantly, has empathy for why they did whatever it is. You will get what you deserve, but it’s tempered by the mercy of a god who is perfectly empathetic to your situation.
For us, Christ’s sacrifice is for him to be able to accurately determine where you will spend eternity, but it does not include a burning lake of fire.
Alas, I am not in charge of that.
@Mojeaux, I remember the discussion, and appreciate the explanation.
Christian universalism is similar in that regard – essentially arguing that God’s grace is not eternally resistible, and therefore everyone will eventually be reconciled to God, even from the depths of hell. But even within mainline Christianity there’s a lot of debate as to what, exactly, the lake of fire represents. The annihilationists believe that the references in Revelation to the lake of fire represent the total annihilation of evil itself, satan as its embodiment (which in and of itself is an interesting controversy), and those who have chosen evil over Christ. No eternal torment, you just get consumed, the “second death” being a one-time event rather than a conscious, eternal experience. Even among non-annihilationists there’s debate as to whether the “second death” entails eternal torment/suffering, or just eternal separation from God without the possibility of reconciliation (which of itself is a variety of torment, but not the Divine Comedy “satan skinning you alive every day for eternity” type of thing that people tend to think of).
“strive for the “good place”
Old college buddy’s answer to Pascal was “Christians believe that Jesus will forgive sinners who accept him, even on their deathbed, after a life of sin and corruption. So why worry about going to the ‘bad place’ if all can be forgiven?” [Admittedly, he didn’t allow for sudden death with no time to accept Jesus as one’s savior and the rest of us in the discussion were either too drunk or stoned to bring that up.]
Sad that NR is not libertarian than reason.
More libertarian*
Bullshit. It’s exactly what the feds have been doing for years and fully in line with that. Lawn darts, lead paint, incandescent lightbulbs, normal flow toilets, post-86 automatics, wheat, bird feathers, the list goes on and on.
Yup.
The question is whether I’m willing to kill a man over my gas stove.
I think I am. Particularly since the type of person who would take it from me isn’t worth keeping around.
Things to do: Get added to another list. ✔️
and sometimes I really wish I’d never done him that favor.”
You can’t change the past.
Fuck Roy. God I hate the above-the-law “brotherhood” shit with cops. If the DA didn’t want to charge Joe, fine enough. But the decision shouldn’t have been made because a one-time government functionary vouched for him.
This is…glorious.
Fucking internal server error. Testing
1001001 – SOS?
not clicking
Wise
SOS
SOS
Well done PM.
The other day someone mentioned James Hong (Lo Pan in Big Trouble In Little China) had 450 credits on IMDB. A few days days after that I saw him in one of his earliest roles (only 30th or so) in the Peter Gunn TV series which I started watching while suffering through a long-lived head cold.
I knew the theme song but had never seen the show. I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who likes Noir or private eye stories…or jazz. It’s really a great show. Gritty stories with mature, smart dialog that must have been fairly rare on TV at that time (it ran from 1958-1961) Music plays a prominent role in the show, as Gunn’s “office” is a nightclub called Mother’s. Nearly every episode features some period jazz music, and in a handful of episodes there are songs from other genres as Gunn travels around the city’s night clubs and bars in search of clues. Many of the Jazz numbers are sung in Mother’s by the gorgeous and talented Lola Albright, who plays Gunn’s love interest. It’s good TV.
So, the theme from Peter Gunn, which I love, because Mancini and Mancini is god.
Anyway, the YouTube keeps coming up with the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra. Dafuq. Bunch of fresh-faced young white dudes in ill-fitting tails.
No, wait. There’s an Asian dude. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcHmf8vCil8
And also, Monica Mancini’s voice is just lovely.
Middle east countries have a habit of paying top dollar to attract [insert profession typically associated with “the west” here]. It’s bizarre AF.
I deduced that after thinking about it a tidge.
Whereas, China just imports the sheet music, plonks their babies on a piano bench, and says, “Learn that by tomorrow or no supper for you!”
China does the same a little too – there have been several has-been European soccer players in the Chinese Super League in recent years IIRC.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@glibertarians.com to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
*tap tap*
Is this thing on?
Maybe stop trying to post dick pics.
You’re not my supervisor.
If all else fails, put the text in pastebin and then post the link.
That was supposed to be a reply to MikeS.
I get that error all the time without any links.
There is some mysterious filtering on certain words going on.
Oh, you’re suggesting something else. WTF is a pastebin?
Pastebin. It’s just a web clipboard, basically. You can (quasi)anonymously paste some text there, make it public or private, and set an expiration. It’s useful for things like piracy and clandestine document distribution, things about which I, of course, am only familiar in the academic sense.
That error, when it hits, does seem to have something to do with certain words or HTML tags, but there doesn’t seem to be any consistency to which ones, so it’s up to you to figure it out or give up.
The only constant seems to be that I had something especially witty and/or insightful to say.
Can’t relate.
Very nice. Although, I was just emailed by Joe from the local range I am joining. Coincidence?
Almost certainly.
Another gun story with a feel good ending.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/01/10/hammond-louisiana-mother-carjacking-shoots-suspect/
Woke Twitter loved that the Golden Globes had a black “comedian” as host who started off lecturing them about how racist they all are and apparently this was far more hard hitting than anything Ricky Gervais had ever said to them, per Twitter NPC’s.
DID YOU KNOW THE FOREIGN PRESS CORPS HAD NO BLACK PEOPLE ON IT? NOT ONE!!11!!!
Gervais put those people in their place in a way that genuinely offended many of them and spoke for the majority of consumers of Hollywood’s trash. He managed to do it while being funny. Black guy saying the approved thing in a way that is completely humorless is not entertainment.
People still watch those circle jerk award shows where rich people praise each other and kiss each other’s asses for money and a ticket to the next producer’s casting couch? Well I’ll be.
Gervais was brutal and hilarious.
They should have just canceled he awards after he was done.
You know what else is racist?
https://afru.com/dmt-entities-beings-racist/
Yes, the DMT Machine Elves are racist. I don’t think this is parody or satire but it’s getting hard to tell nowadays.
That is some fine frontier gibberish right there right from the start. Bottom of the line shit.
To me it just reinforces the notion that a lot of the perceived, if you believe it’s really perceived and not being claimed cynically, racism is just psychologically damaged people making claims of something that largely rises from within. DMT isn’t a doorway to another dimension or an AI, it’s just the brain getting flooded with neurotransmitters obviously and any perceived racism there is independent of the real world. It’s just so damn stupid.
Time to make the donuts, Glibs.
🍩 ☕
No, you don’t get to make sugary carb rings. You’d make them strange.
Almond flour donuts for everyone!
I’d love to keep joking around, but I have to head in to the office.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/10/tons-of-food-gets-tossed-by-nyc-hotel-because-migrants-wont-eat-it/
Lol…Corona…
JFC what a shitshow.
There’s about half a dozen lessons in there that will be completely ignored.
https://www.pennlive.com/farm-show/2023/01/thanks-to-virtual-reality-you-can-easily-ride-a-horse-at-the-2023-farm-show.html
Lame.
Or maybe, thanks to the presence of actual horses, because its a farm show, you can easily etc.?
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2023/01/10/lower-merion-cops-tase-black-woman-wawa/
“I demand to see a supervisor!”
Getting tased in the Wawa has got to be especially unpleasant.
LOL
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/man-narrowly-escapes-giant-falling-boulder-in-malibu-as-car-gets-crushed/
Unlucky guy gets lucky.
“Parade Launches Re:Play Underwear in Sizes up to 5XL”
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/parade-launches-play-underwear-sizes-015757221.html
This fat positivity BS has gotten way out of hand, that poor lady on the right needs someone to tell her it a. looks terrible and b. you’ll be lucky to make it to 40.
Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.
If you take the washers out, those damn plastic eggs fall down and stay down.
Ask me how I know.
How do you know?
Beca- **INTERNAL SERVER ERROR**
*ahem*
Because I had a habit as a kid of disassembling things. I got the weebles back together, but wasn’t always successfull at that stage.
https://youtu.be/cFElidiwxYU
🎶
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/national-international/three-rescued-from-tesla-that-crashed-into-pool-in-pasadena/4040076/
Unintended acceleration. Still, at least they’re not wrecking my local car wash.
a local car pool?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/zelensky-in-golden-globes-speech-there-will-be-no-third-world-war/ar-AA16ccvu
Because, of course he made a special appearance. 🙄
It’s just not an awards show till Vladdy Z shows up.
Did they pass around the donation plates?
Who doesn’t have at least a few rounds on them at all times?
Those are for defensive purposes only. I never sell or give them away.
Will he be hosting SNL? Should be a great monologue.”How many Russians does it take to change a light bulb? None, we wiped them out in glorious battle!”
https://twitter.com/ScottHortonSho/status/1612961709039263744
“Account Suspended”
What happened?
Good morning, Stinky, Sean, Roat, and U!
Whew! I almost overslept! See? That’s what comes from NOT using the snooze alarm!
I shut off my alarm and stared at the clock a few minutes, but otherwise got up more or less on time.
Mind you, I’ve never intentionall hit the snooze button.
A certain little black cat was miffed at missing his cuddle time while the coffee brewed (and tried to climb my leg as I filled my mug,) but is he here making it up with lap time? He is not.
Cats are weird.
“I had time in my schedule, but you were too busy getting coffee. Now I’m otherwise occupied.”
Somehow I was up at 3:30, and replied to a Slack thread. Boss (in Tel Aviv) responded “go back to sleep you old fool”. Or something. He’s a good kid.
Did you follow that instruction?
Of course. I am a model employee, very good at following orders.
‘Alter kaker’ isn’t really ‘old fool’
Not really sure what it was. At first he forgot to switch his input from Hebrew to English.
Well, I’m in the office. I should pack another box to get out of here. I should also prep more knowledge transfer materials.
I don’t want to do either. I just want to wander off and write.
Mornin’, reprobates.
Love the story, db. The ending was perfect, I’m dying to see what Joe does next.
Good morning, ‘patzie!
Heard on the radio, all flights in US grounded due to an FAA computer glitch.
Damn, wife just left for the airport.
Traveling for business or pleasure?
Overnight trip to NYC for work
“Well, darn the luck! Guess we’ll just have to do it remotely, eh?” 😁
Going to press the flesh with alums (she does fundraising for a local school)unite the same remote.
We’re both looking forward to this trip 😉
‘Not’ not ‘united’
Aaaaand wife’s flight just announced they’re deplaneing.
I wager I’ll be seeing my wife much earlier than expected.
I should probably put some pants on.
Link
OBE has been busy.
Heh. News ran this story this morning.
“OBE dun fucked up.” was my first thought.
Gremlins.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-vfqkeI1tmBg/VPbjeplBxgI/AAAAAAAALXo/zFbR5ARKUTk/s1600/Falling%2BHare%2B-%2BBob%2BClampett%2B(21).jpg
It was Johnny, wasn’t it?
::glances around suspiciously:: So….what was it OBE claimed to be working on this past weekend?
I’m concerned for your well-being, you’ve started thinking like me. Studies have shown that to be unhealthy.
Or are YOU starting to think like ME? Hmmmm?
My first thought as well
OBE at work
😆
LOL
Perfect.
🤣
Hoo boy, gonna be a fun day. Pepsi Syndrome?
Had to look that one up – ah, for the Golden Age of SNL! Somehow that one got past me. 😄
Hi, GT. Was also thinking of the computer guy in Jurassic Park.
What a shit show…..
A documentary on the history of wastewater treatment?
Hey, that would be interesting….
(that classwork is what my Masters in environmental engineering covered)
I’d watch it.
Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?
Re: this morning’s Big News – what was that you were saying Sunday about Mercury Retrograde?
Mass
shootingknifing in Paris. We need stronger knife control laws!https://nypost.com/2023/01/11/paris-knife-attack-injures-six-at-gare-du-nord-train-station/
More stabbiness. It’s an epidemic!
https://nypost.com/2023/01/10/four-vacationers-stabbed-at-drug-fueled-party-at-north-carolina-airbnb/
They need to restrict pointy knife possession to licensed chefs.
some local trash news
trailer park + night + manchild = FAFO
Showdown at the Lakeshore Trailer Park
It’s got a certain ring to it.
Wife keeps seeing Zdeno Chara and his family in the terminal. I can’t imagine what flying commercial is like when you’re 6’9”