Are_grits_groceries
Are_grits_groceries's JournalGood gawd: NFL Red Zone footage of Soldier Field is scary! (Vine link up)
No link. Just up.
Vine footage:
https://vine.co/v/htjx3AdzFrL
Those people would have drowned and then blowed away,or vice versa, if they hadn't moved.
Whoa! Looking out a window in Peoria, IL as a tornado bears down:
@MeredithFrost: Eyewitness view of the tornado that struck, in Peoria, IL (Photo: Anthony Khoury via @JamesGhareeb) http://t.co/PFmoibimxm
Washington, IL:
Pekin, IL
Jeebus!
People in Soldier Field,Chicago for the Bears game better watch out!Stopping now.Tornado warning
There is a nasty storm with possible tornados less than an hour away.
There are plans to move them to a safer place. They better hope they can move them in time. If a tornado forms near them, good luck!
Sunday fun exercise. Caption this photo:
I would like to see the next pic after that.
Today would be my Daddy's 96th birthday.I learned about his WWII experiences from his Army jacket:
The yellow ribbon is the Army Defense Medal Ribbon
The red Ribbon is the Good Conduct Medal Ribbon
The green and brown ribbon is the European - African - Middle Eastern Campaign Medal Ribbon
The European - African - Middle Eastern Campaign Medal Ribbon has 5 battle stars for being in these 5 major engagements in the ETO during WWII:
Normandy
Northern France
Rhineland
Ardennes-Alsace
Central Europe
Old Hickory -The 30th Infantry Division(represented by the patch on his upper left sleeve)
The green and red crest represents the 113th Field Artillery Batallion.
<snip>
On 12 February 1944, the 30th Infantry Division sailed for Europe, and settled on the south coast of England to participate in further training for the coming invasion of the Continent "at some time in the future".
In June of 1944, after being fully trained and prepared for the greatest invasion of all times, the 30th Infantry Division started crossing the English Channel to France on 6 June, D-Day, to replace some of the units of the 29th Infantry Division which had become almost immediately lost during the initial attack of the invasion, and then the balance of the Division went into the beaches of Normandy, Omaha Beach on D plus 4, the 10th of June and up through the 15th, and was almost immediately committed into combat against the experienced German Army.
During combat, the 30th Infantry Division was known as the "Workhorse of the Western Front". It was also familiarly known as "Roosevelt's SS Troops", so named by the German High Command because of the consistent vigor and terrific pressure the 30th Infantry Division brought to bear on Hitler's 'elite' 1st SS Division. The German 'elite' 1st SS Division was the main force of resistance just prior to the breakthrough at St. LO, and again at Mortain, which the 30th Infantry Division literally tore to shreds, thereby allowing Gen. George Patton's armored forces of the U.S. Third Army to go forward and race across France, thereby shortening the war by many months. The German 1st SS Division was then reorganized over the next few months, and was again faced by the 30th Infantry Division in the "Battle of the Bulge", during the great Ardennes-Alsace Offensive, near Malmedy, Belgium, during the winter of 1944-45. Again the 30th Infantry Division tore to shreds this 'elite' enemy division, which was never again to return to battle.
<snip>
http://www.30thinfantry.org/history.shtml
I learned one other thing from his jacket. It fit me perfectly in my senior year of high school. From that, I realized how small many of the service members were then.
In 1973, a school board head decide to burn Kurt Vonnegut's books. Vonnegut sent him a letter:
In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.
On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply.
November 16, 1973
Dear Mr. McCarthy:
I am writing to you in your capacity as chairman of the Drake School Board. I am among those American writers whose books have been destroyed in the now famous furnace of your school.
Certain members of your community have suggested that my work is evil. This is extraordinarily insulting to me. The news from Drake indicates to me that books and writers are very unreal to you people. I am writing this letter to let you know how real I am.
I want you to know, too, that my publisher and I have done absolutely nothing to exploit the disgusting news from Drake. We are not clapping each other on the back, crowing about all the books we will sell because of the news. We have declined to go on television, have written no fiery letters to editorial pages, have granted no lengthy interviews. We are angered and sickened and saddened. And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands. It is a strictly private letter from me to the people of Drake, who have done so much to damage my reputation in the eyes of their children and then in the eyes of the world. Do you have the courage and ordinary decency to show this letter to the people, or will it, too, be consigned to the fires of your furnace?
I gather from what I read in the papers and hear on television that you imagine me, and some other writers, too, as being sort of ratlike people who enjoy making money from poisoning the minds of young people. I am in fact a large, strong person, fifty-one years old, who did a lot of farm work as a boy, who is good with tools. I have raised six children, three my own and three adopted. They have all turned out well. Two of them are farmers. I am a combat infantry veteran from World War II, and hold a Purple Heart. I have earned whatever I own by hard work. I have never been arrested or sued for anything. I am so much trusted with young people and by young people that I have served on the faculties of the University of Iowa, Harvard, and the City College of New York. Every year I receive at least a dozen invitations to be commencement speaker at colleges and high schools. My books are probably more widely used in schools than those of any other living American fiction writer.
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
After I have said all this, I am sure you are still ready to respond, in effect, “Yes, yes–but it still remains our right and our responsibility to decide what books our children are going to be made to read in our community.” This is surely so. But it is also true that if you exercise that right and fulfill that responsibility in an ignorant, harsh, un-American manner, then people are entitled to call you bad citizens and fools. Even your own children are entitled to call you that.
I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.
If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive.
Again: you have insulted me, and I am a good citizen, and I am very real.
Kurt Vonnegut
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html
Good on Kurt Vonnegut!
BTW "Letters Of Note" has been issued in book form. It is a fascinating read.
As if Ken Starr wasn't loathesome enough, he is now up to this:
What’s Ken Starr up to these days? According to Virginia court documents, the famously pious former Clinton prosecutor recently pleaded with a Fairfax County judge to let a confessed child molester go free. Because he’s a family friend.It was just one of dozens of letters sent by as many Washington, D.C., and New York City power players—including former ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson, a former aide to Laura Bush, a former GOP congressman, and a powerful partner at the insider law firm Akin Gump—who wrote in praise of Christopher Kloman, a 74-year-old retired Potomac School teacher who has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting several female students under the age of 14. Kloman received a 43-year prison sentence in October.
According to the Washington Post, Kloman “estimated that he molested girls ‘less than 10 times’” from 1966 to 1985, sometimes by luring them to a isolated location under the guise of helping them with homework. One victim, the paper reported in October,
said Kloman invited her and a friend over to swim at his house after a seventh-grade field trip. [...] But once in the pool, Kloman pulled her onto his lap, pinned her arms behind her back and thrust against her, she testified. Sullivan said Kloman held her so tightly his arms were like “lobster claws.”
Another victim, Laura Gill, “testified that Kloman pinned her down and assaulted her in the basement of his home while his family was upstairs” when she was 14 years old. The rest of Kloman’s victims were the same age or younger. The youngest, who was 12 at the time Kloman molested her, sparked an investigation in 2011 when as an adult she discovered Kloman was substitute-teaching at her daughter’s Maryland grade school.
Yet Starr, a retired federal judge and former Solicitor General who single-mindedly pursued a criminal investigation into President Bill Clinton sparked by Clinton’s sexual behavior with an adult, signed a letter to Kloman's sentencing judge arguing that “community service” would be a more appropriate punishment for someone who repeatedly sexually assaulted children entrusted to him by their parents.
<snip>
http://gawker.com/he-took-the-time-to-chat-ken-starr-s-plea-for-a-chil-1464516616
Dear Assholes,
Pedophiles cannot be cured. He hasn't reoffended because he was locked up.
All of you should have to spend 6 months working with abused kids so you have a clue what they go through.
If it was up to me, he would never see the light of day again.
PS Maybe you should check with your kids if they were around him and find out if they have been holding something in.
This Marine deserves kudos from all of us:
From the Halls of Montezuma,
To the Hearts of all!
A little girl walking on ice for the first time:
That's exactly what I still do on ice. lol
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