This morning the Irish Woman and I attended the funeral of an old family friend, Bob.

Bob was the father to one of the women who raised the Irish Woman, and we count her as a mother to her, so Bob was an adopted grandfather to us.

Bob was rarely called by his name. We all called him Pawpaw, from the adults to the smallest children. My children and I met him over two decades after the Irish Woman did, and he introduced himself to us as Pawpaw immediately, and stepped right into the role of grandfather to my kids.

Bob never met a stranger, and never hesitated to help someone out. He always had a cheerful greeting for us, and loved to just sit and shoot the bull. He outlived two wives, but never let their passing away make him bitter or melancholy towards us.

Bob was always as active as he could be. He loved to fish, and I was lucky enough to go fishing with him. He was as happy sitting on the bank of a quiet lake fishing for bluegill as he was on a chartered boat fishing for striped bass. He became a favorite fishing buddy of his son and son-in-law, and the image I have in my mind of him will always be the smile he got when he hooked a fish.

When I met Bob, he had already started to fade, but was still spry. As the years went on, his memory started to fail him, and talking with him became difficult as his speech suffered. None of this changed his attitude or how he treated everyone. We introduced him to Baby Bear earlier this year, and he smiled and cooed over the baby as if he was in his 40’s not his 80’s.

As Pawpaw continued to fade, he was cared for by his children. They made sure they followed his wishes to stay at home, and made sure he always had his therapy and the small things that he enjoyed. He went on trips with the family, and was always around for a good conversation and to reminisce.

Pawpaw passed away this past Friday. His grandson had returned home to visit one last time, and had a chance to spend some time with him. After the visit, Bob sat down, fell asleep, and never woke up. He died in the company of his family in the home that they had made together.

Go with God, Pawpaw. The world is smaller now that you are not with us, but we know that you have moved on to a better place. We and our children will remember you always as a cheerful, pleasant man who was always happy to see us. We will miss you until we join you.

Apparently Captain Success and his buddies decided to do some drinking at a baby shower, and it degenerated into a brawl. Someone got hit in the head with a beer bottle, and then someone got hit with a CAR JACK.

OK, kids, how many times have you been to a baby shower and people were drinking beer? I don’t go to many baby showers at all, much less ones with a cooler of beer available. Mama shouldn’t be drinking, and I don’t imbibe in front of those who can’t.

And I’ve never been to a baby shower that turned into a fist fight. I’ve been to a couple where there were some sharp words said, but nothing even approaching the use of beer bottles and automotive implements as weapons.

And a car jack? I guess someone reached out and grabbed whatever was available at the time to use as a weapon, but a car jack?

The State Department has announced that Tijuana, Nogales, and Cuidad Juarez are getting kind of dangerous for Americans to be in at any time, day or night.

No kidding. I expect soon that they’ll be telling us to not try to run our cars on sugar water.

When the Army tells its soldiers they can’t go to Juarez to raise hell because it’s too dangerous, it’s pretty obvious that it’s become a free fire zone against anyone who happens to be there.

TJ has been getting a bad reputation for years, and now it’s come to the point where I wouldn’t go there for any reason.

I lived about an hour northeast of Nogales when I was in the Army, and we made frequent shopping trips there for booze, vanilla, and Christmas presents. I never went more than a few hundred yards into the city, and it got rough pretty quick once you got outside of the shopping area close to the border. I only went there at night a couple of times to go drinking with my fellas, and we were smart enough to always have a big guy along who stayed sober enough to get us out of bad situations. When we heard that a group of young soldiers was going down there for an evening of fun, we made sure to give them a nice, calm talk about being safe and getting home in one piece.

Now apparently, there are shootouts in the shopping areas in broad daylight. No way I would be going there for any reason without a lot of friends and a lot of weapons.

Mexico as a country has started coming apart at the seams due to the narcotics trade that flows through the country from one end to the other. The level of violence in the conflicts between the drug gangs and their collective fight with the government is escalating fast, and doesn’t appear to be slowing down. When thousands of your citizens for one reason or another are being murdered over smuggling, it’s not a fight against drugs, it’s a fight for survival of credible government control of the country. Mexico City isn’t trying to enforce its laws so much as it is trying to squelch a state of revolt in its northern states.

Unless the Mexican government can get a handle on this thing, I expect Mexico to be considered a failed state within the next decade. And that would be a damned shame. Mexico is a beautiful country, with a history that goes back thousands of years. The people I have met who are from Mexico have tended to be honest, hard working folks who just want to get a good pay for a good days work and use that to raise a good family. When you go shopping in Arizona, the native born American kids look like something out of a bad thug-rap video. The Mexican families are neat, pressed, polite, and well-behaved.

The loss of a good neighbor like Mexico would be a great hit to our nation.

And I don’t expect the problem to stay south of the border for long. We’re already starting to see problems in border areas like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, and all of the cities along the Texas-Mexico border. If the drug gangs can have free reign in Old Mexico, they sure as shooting aren’t going to allow the border to stop them from trying to have their way in our country.

I’ve heard some people talk about a “reconquista”, in which radical Mexican-identity believers want to take over the lands that we took from Mexico in the 19th century and make it a hispanic mini-state. I don’t believe that will ever happen, any more than I believe that neonazis will create an aryan state in the northwest or that the South will rise again.

What I do see happening is the problems of Latin America becoming the problems of the southern half of the continental United States. I see the areas along the border becoming more and more crime-prone unless the violence is quelched in Mexico itself.

Here are my ideas:

1. We have to starve the drug gangs out by getting rid of their business in the United States. They won’t have the money or incentive to do these horrible things if their business model collapses. Either we cut demand for illicit drugs in our country by getting people to stop using them, or we make them legal for personal use. There’s no money in smuggling something that people can purchase legally at the liquor store or local headshed. I’m not going to go down the rathole of drug legalization, at least not today, but we need to discuss whether or not continued prohibition is worth the damage that illegal trade in drugs is causing to our country and our neighbor.
2. Provide as much assistance to the Mexican government as we can so that they can fix their problems as quickly as they possibly can. The Mexican government will have to spill a lot of blood to do this, but it’s necessary. You can’t negotiate away this problem. Someone will have to tell Amnesty International to figure out the difference between rooting out a revolt by narco-terrorists and the normal operations of a criminal justice system.
3. We have to secure our border with Mexico. A fence, either made of cameras or steel and concrete won’t do it all by itself. We need men and women with guns and radios patrolling the border from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. The Border Patrol either needs to be beefed up in manpower and firepower, or we need to re-activate some of the old cavalry regiments and have them patrol the border.

Just my two centavos.

How this fool has continued to be employed is beyond me. He’s been an embarrassment to humanity for years. He’s been on the wrong end of every comment he’s ever made, and now he’s saying that his own constituents are a bunch of racists that won’t support Obama because of his race.

Pennsylvania, please, elect someone else. Please.

Police in Chicago are looking for some creep in a clown costume that is trying to entice children into his car. Creepy enough if it wasn’t being done in the territory of another Killer Clown.

Copycat or just a recurring theme? You be the judge.

Idiots like this are the reason that no smart kid will talk to a person they don’t know.

It’s also the reason that I, as a normal person, would never try to assist a child that didn’t appear to be in danger, or try to assist a woman with children that I don’t know.

Today was a case in point:

I was at a government office today to take care of something. There was a young mother there with three children, a boy about 4 or 5, a boy about 2 or 3, and a very small infant who mostly slept.

The boys got bored waiting, and Mom had a hard time keeping them in line because they were tag teaming her. When she was trying to control one, the other would be off getting into something or climbing up onto something.

Not her fault. Not even their fault. Boys are boys, and young kids that aren’t absolutely afraid for their lives don’t just sit quietly for an hour or so in a strange place. The young lady was obviously getting tired and cross with them, but child abuse is prosecuted in this jurisdiction, and they outnumbered her.

When I was a child, any adult would have felt it was their duty to intervene and try to assist this young mother with her two barbarians. The non-family adult wouldn’t have disciplined them, but he might have talked to them sternly or tried to entertain them while Mom got herself together or did whatever business she was there for.

In the world we live in today, if I had offered to help her, she probably would have thought I was some pervert, and at least have very loudly and firmly told me no. Best case would be being embarrassed. Worst case would be me answering some questions to a nice police officer.

Best I could do was offer my place in line so that she could get them out of there sooner. She accepted, but still kept her distance from me.

John Wayne Gacy, you and all of the other pukes who ruined my ability to be a nice guy to a stranger, I hope you burn in hell until the world regains some of the innocence that you destroyed.

Apparently AIG just doesn’t get it.

First, we give them $87 Billion dollars to keep the doors open.

Then they spend half a million dollars on a luxury trip for insurance agents.

Then they apologize and ask for another $35 Billion to keep the lights on.

Then they spend $86,000 for a hunting trip to England. Apparently this time actual AIG executives went along for the fun.

I want all of the money we’ve given them back. We can take it in cash or equipment. Either one will work. I don’t care if their business fails and is chopped up and sold to the highest bidder on the courthouse steps. Don’t come to us with your Gucci hat in hand and ask for money then use some of it to take clients to a spa or hunting.

They can’t have spent much of the money yet, but we’ll be nice and give them 24 hours to get it to us.

If we don’t get it, this happens:

Apparently, Southern California is burning, again. Just like it burned last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that, ad infinitum.

OK, let’s get something straight. Southern California is a relatively arid area, and has been for quite a while. Wildfires have been occuring there long enough that the native people of the area used it to manage the land.

In the past few decades, it’s become commonplace for people to build neighborhoods in the areas that formerly burned without causing massive destruction to buildings and/or people. Now, year after year, we’re told how thousands of acres of Southern California burn up houses and schools.

Why are we shocked? Why is this in the national news? Houses and neighborhoods are being built in a semi-desert next to kindling, and we’re supposed to be surprised when said kindling bursts into flame and takes housing developments with it?

Someone please tell me why I’m supposed to be interested in this. To me, it’s like the people who build a village on the slopes of an active volcano, and then seem shocked when their village is destroyed in an eruption.

Come on, people. Don’t rebuild neighborhoods in perenial fire areas. Just don’t give out the building permits. Don’t insure them. Don’t approve the mortgages.

I commented on this earlier. An Ohio man was arguing that his obesity made it impossible to execute him without the act going into the “cruel and unusual” area.

Apparently, the Supreme Court disagreed. Today, the state of Ohio executed him via lethal injection.

I’m not going to say I’m happy about this. As I stated before, I’m not a fan of the death penalty. And it’s saddening to think of the suffering he caused his victims, their families, and his family in the years since his crime. His death won’t erase that pain.

I’ll remember him and everyone he hurt in my prayers tonight, and I ask that all of you do the same. I may feel that his execution was justified by his actions, but I don’t have to like it.

Spent today trying to diagnose one of those “it’s slow and I don’t know why” problems on one of our servers. We’ve actually been trying to diagnose this for the past few weeks, but it came to a head today.

This afternoon we had exhausted all of our other options, and senior management was starting to breathe down our necks to figure this out. We decided to just re-install the OS on the server and see what happened.

The re-install went fine, as did re-installation of the database and app. But when we fired the database back up, noone could connect to it. We and our DBA’s spent hours trying one thing after another, and eventually called the vendor.

All this time the customer is getting antsier and more vocal, and we’re starting to get phone calls from management.

Finally, the DB vendor comes back with some arcane switch to set. The DBA makes the change, bounces the database, and the problem magically goes away.

We’ll see how performance looks in the morning, but I’m not hopeful.

Got home 4 hours late tonight. Dinner was waiting in the microwave, and the kids were finishing up their evening rituals prior to bed. I got a few minutes with them before they headed to bed, then had a few minutes with the Irish Woman before she started to yawn.

I’m currently enjoying an adult beverage and watching Monday Night Football that the Irish Woman was considerate enough to record for me. Got to love a woman who knows what you like.

Blackfive opened a wound on some commenters this morning.

Basically, there’s a tradition in the armed forces for deployed soldiers to lose their significant other while they’re gone. Also happens while a soldier is off at training, or even when they just leave their hometown to go the military in general.

Happened to me, and it’s happened to soldiers since an ape picked up a club and went across the river to beat up another ape.

For those of you who are deployed, I hope this never happens to you.