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Just to let you Pards know of the danger lurking to you North with the current (Mis)Government. Hint: Google Steven Guilbault's name.

ONE LAST RIDE!!!

one of the greatest TV skits of all time. Les was perfect in his description of the events.

OK, OK, so they were Canadians and were released right away!

MORE FROM THE BOOKMARK, THAN FROM THE BOOK Jacob Keller opened the family Bible, picked up the bookmark, read it automatically. It was a single note sized sheet, folded in thirds, and it was originally sealed with absolutely bright-scarlet sealing wax. He tilted it a little to catch the light across it, and it was exactly what he expected. The impress was a rose. He looked at his father, a pale eyed lawman in the comfort of his own home, a man comfortable in moccasins and children: a small boy, and a girl of identical vintage, each occupied a thigh, and the Grand Old Man's arms were around both: Jacob wasn't sure who looked the most pleased -- his pale eyed Pa, who held the children; the children themselves, delighted to be in such proximity to a man who so obviously cared for them; or the green-eyed woman who looked at them with an expression of warm approval, the same expression she wore when she looked at the pale eyed youth standing with the fingers of one hand light on the open pages. Linn was looking at his children and laughing quietly, then he looked at Jacob, nodded. Jacob took a deep breath and read, his voice measured, deliberate, his pronunciation flawless: Esther leaned back and closed her eyes and rocked a little, smiling as she did, remembering what it was to be a child on her Daddy's lap, back in the Carolinas, back on the plantation. Esther's Daddy used to read Scripture aloud of an evening. Esther remembered feeling safe, and loved, sitting on her Daddy's lap with his arm around her middle, feeling the words vibrating in the chest she cuddled into as a child: she remembered feeling in that moment that everything was absolutely right with the world. That was before the War, of course, before the internecine hell that ripped her life apart, that saw most of her family murdered, that saw her turn into a red-headed Goddess of War when that small bunch of damned Yankees came to plunder more than the family silver: she'd killed with pistol and with shotgun, she'd laid wait in a closet and she'd run a damned Yankee through the belly with a saber taken from another damned Yankee, and as he lay choking on his very life on what should have been the inviolate territory of a teen-aged girl's bedroom, Esther Wales, as she was then, took a grim and dark satisfaction with knowing she'd looked into the eyes of the man she'd killed, both in the moment he reached for her, and in the moment when the light went out of his eyes, and he sighed out his last breath, and his soul with it, a damned Yankee, killed with Yankee steel. Jacob Keller read aloud, his syllables confident and reassuring, and Esther could hear the maturity he would achieve: he had not his father's deep, fatherly tones, not yet, but that would come with time. Jacob read with his fingers on the bookmark, and its handwritten message from a man he remembered. He read one chapter, as was their nightly custom: either he, or his father, would read from the Book, after supper and after the young were cleaned up and almost ready for bed: Jacob knew that before he was halfway through the chapter, the twins on his Pa's lap would be asleep, leaned against him, warm and safe in a protective father's arms: he knew he would step forward and take one, his Pa would carry the other, and they would bear the twins to bed, and tuck them in, and withdraw silently. All this Jacob realized, with one part of his mind, while another part read the words and turned silent print into spoken language. He came to the end of the chapter, and he read the note, his eyes passing over the distinctive handwriting -- the hand of a man who took pride in what he wrote, and that told Jacob the writer very likely took pride in all else that he did. He folded the note, closed the Bible, stepped around the little podium, advanced on an absolutely silent tread toward his father. Jacob picked up his little brother, hoisted him so the lad's cheek lay over Jacob's shoulder: Esther gave him that warm, approving, motherly look, and Jacob closed his eyes, briefly, an old grief aching in his young heart. Esther was not his birth-mother: she who bore him, she who'd looked at him with those same gentle, motherly eyes, was long dead, murdered, and her murder avenged: that Jacob was here, with his actual father, was little short of a miracle, and the miracle was due to the man who wrote the note that was now folded as a bookmark in the family Bible. It wasn't much of a note, just a few lines -- A father needs a son, A son needs a father. It was signed simply, S, and the Rose was sealed beside the single sinuous letter inked onto good rag paper. Father and son carried the Keller young to their bunks: they withdrew afterward, usually Linn retired to his study, and Jacob, to his studies: uncharacteristically, Jacob followed his father to the study door and said, "Sir, a moment, if you please." Linn stopped, turned: Jacob had the immediate impression Linn was not only not surprised, but that he expected Jacob's words. "Please come in." Linn's study smelled of books and just a light whiff of brandy: the stove pushed enough warmth to be welcome, but not so much as to be stifling, and Jacob saw its draft was most of the way shut. He nodded when he saw it, just a little bit of a nod, as he recognized the competent hand of their hired girl. Jacob waited until his Pa poured two brandies, handed him one: the two hoisted their heavy, cut-glass tumblers in silence, drank. Two pale eyed Keller men placed their empty glasses on the desk. Linn thrust his chin toward a chair; he turned, backed into his own, and the two sat together. Jacob did not miss the approving look his father gave him: Jacob showed due respect in accepting the brandy, in sitting as his father sat, and not before. "Speak your mind," Linn said quietly. "Sopris, sir." Linn nodded, once, slowly, his eyes veiled. "I owe him a great deal." "I owe him more," Linn admitted. "Sir?" "You know him as Agent Sopris." "Yes, sir." "He was that," Linn said quietly, "and much more. He did a great deal for this country no one will ever know about. His work ..." Linn frowned, considered. "We were members of ... multiple societies," Linn said carefully, "two of which I retain, one of which is utterly vital for reasons I will neither explain, nor will I accept question." "Yes, sir." "You remember he took you in and healed you." "He did, sir." "He treated you with courtesy." "He did, sir." "You were hungry and he fed you, you weren't quite naked but he got you scrubbed clean and into clean clothes, he healed your back and he held you when you woke with nightmares locked behind your Adam's apple, trying to scream their way out." Jacob's expression was haunted, the look of a man who was seeing an utter and absolute horror, something a thousand miles beyond the far wall, something that would shock a normal man into insanity and curl the hair on a bald man's head. "Yes, sir," Jacob said. "That is so." "You have been wondering about him, here of late." "I have, sir." Jacob did not wonder that his father divined his thoughts: he'd observed his pale eyed old Sheriff of a father knew things, it was simply a fact of life, one that Jacob accepted as a truism. “When did you see him last, sir?” Linn closed his eyes and turned his head a little – something Jacob saw only once before, when something caused the man considerable pain – Jacob opened his mouth to apologize, but Linn raised a forestalling palm without looking. “You remember your Aunt Duzy.” “Yes, sir.” “Sopris … thought a great deal of her.” “Yes, sir.” “She was a most admirable woman, Jacob. Let that be the memory we keep. She was a most admirable woman, a most capable woman, a woman of beauty and of breeding and …” Linn stopped, swallowed: Jacob held silent, seeing the genuine sorrow that escaped his father’s usual reserve. “He – Sopris – thought well of her,” Jacob hazarded. Linn nodded, slowly. “Was she not family, Jacob, and had not your mother set her cap for me” – his grin was quick, there-and-gone, and surprising – it wasn’t what Jacob expected to see – “well, I might have put one knee in the dirt and pled my case for her hand.” Jacob considered this for a long moment. “I see, sir.” “Sopris … held her in … very high esteem.” “Yes, sir.” Jacob frowned a little, leaned forward. “Sir … when Aunt Duzy died …” “He and I were the only ones at her interment, yes, and that was at his request.” Linn rubbed his palms together, slowly, thoughtfully, hard-earned calluses whispering to one another in the room’s quiet as he did. “I was the closest thing to a father she had.” Linn closed his eyes, took a long breath, blew it out. “He never said as much, but I’ve a notion he was about to ask my permission to pursue her hand.” Jacob nodded slowly. “And now, sir?” “I’ve not been back to Sopris Mountain but the one time since.” “They are buried side by side, sir?” Linn looked at Jacob: his was not the look of horror he’d seen in his son’s eyes, but rather of a deep and abiding sorrow, the kind a man knows when someone closer to him than his own brother, is no more. “Yes, Jacob,” Linn said slowly. “Yes, they are.” “Thank you, sir,” Jacob said quietly. “Normally … normally a man like him would have a grand funeral, a state occasion with orators both secular and religious.” Linn leaned back in his chair, his eyes wandering the juncture between wall and ceiling above and behind Jacob’s head, then he looked at his son and grinned a little. “He would have none of that. He said to let the streams deliver his oration, let feathered throats sing his praises, and instead of men declaring that he was flying with the angels, let those feathered angels that know the length and breadth of the skies, carry word of his deeds to the Almighty.” Jacob considered this, and was quiet for a long minute and more. “You’ve answered my question before I could give it voice,” Jacob finally said, his words slow, thoughtful, then he looked at his father and grinned – that same half-crooked grin he’d seen on his Pa’s face, a grin he honestly didn’t realize he wore. “Sir,” he said finally, “this is the first time I got more from the bookmark, than I did from the Book!”

When my hitch was up, my First Sergeant said, “I suppose you want to spit on my grave when I die.” ”No, First Sergeant, I never want to stand in line again.” PS: I think he actually said pee.

Google Maps even has the location listed!

..... top bit: ....... "... and my name is Karen!"

that Sir , is a goose on a moose

Hippie Christmas tree!

Back in 1959, a cement truck crashed near Winganon, Oklahoma. By the time a tow truck arrived to haul it away, all of the cement had hardened inside the mixer, making it too problematic to move - so they just left it there. The locals have since repainted it to look like a NASA space capsule.

An aspiring young lawyer was sitting in his office late one night, when Satan appeared before him. The Devil told the lawyer "I have a proposition for you…" "You can win every case you try for the rest of your life. Your clients will adore you, your colleagues will stand in awe of you, and you will make embarrassing sums of money. All I want in exchange is your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, the souls of your parents, and grandparents, and the souls of all your friends and law partners." The lawyer ponders this for a moment, then finally asks: So, what’s the catch?