• From the “KITT” Department – The transportation department appears to be poised to mandate the inclusion of data recorders, or “black boxes” on all passenger vehicles.  These devices are already in use on a lot of cars, but the new rules would mandate them and also mandate an expanded amount of data they would gather for analysis after an accident.  Just another reason that my dream vehicle is a 1971 Ford pickup.  Yeah, it’ll look like crap and need almost constant maintenance, but I’ll know how to do more than half of that maintenance and the darn thing can’t be called as a witness in a lawsuit.
• From the “Bottoms Up” Department – A Japanese study has found that a substance found in hops may be beneficial to children suffering from RSV and adults with a cold.  However, the study cautions that an adult would have to drink 30 beers to get the recommended dose of humulone.  I see nothing wrong with that.  Drinking myself into a stupor when I feel like crap is never a bad idea.  At least now I can claim that it’s for my health.
• From the “Trust in Me” Department – The state of Florida is planning a contest for who can kill the biggest wild Burmese python and who can kill the highest number of the wriggly rascals.  I see a bad TV reality show in the immediate future, complete with the suburban guy who wants to show he’s a man, the redneck who knows what he’s doing, and the PETA protester who mysteriously disappears right after discovering a nest of the things out in the Everglades.
• From the “Freedom to Choose” Department – The legislature of Michigan has approved a bill that would prohibit union shops from requiring that workers join the union, and the governor has indicated that he will sign the bill into law.  Basically, it’s saying that if you want to pay dues to the union, you can, but if you don’t want to, no-one can break your knees, figuratively or literally, over it and expect to be protected by the law.  Of course, unionists are losing their collective cool over it, with Democratic legislators being described as “livid” that their constituents can now decide on their own whether or not they want to pay dues out of their salaries.  They also seem to be angry that Michigan is going to be more competitive when it comes to attracting jobs. Apparently losing good paying jobs has been part of the state Democratic parties platform for two generations, and it’s hard to let tradition go.
• From the “Allegory” Department – A large whale carcass is sitting on a beach in Malibu, California, and local agencies are in a pissing match over who will get the choice assignment of getting rid of it.  Basically, a stinking corpse has washed up on the doorstep of the rich liberals who live there, and they want something done about it.  The evil partisan corner of my mind snickers at this.  They’ve foisted a stinking corpse of a presidency upon the rest of us while they stay comfortable little Eloi, so I say let the darn thing stay there until it’s a grease spot on the sand.
• From the “Dumbass” Department – A man in New York has been arrested after shooting his girlfriend over whether or not zombies are real.  Apparently he was so upset over her not believing that it could be possible for the dead to rise and feed upon the living that he went and got his gun to make a point.  I wish him luck, because he’s about to learn that, although zombies might not be real, there are indeed monsters in the world.
• From the “Eau de Napoli” Department – Pizza Hut Canada is introducing its own perfume, which is reported to smell like a hot pizza.  You know, I’ve been around people who smelled like garlic and cheese, and it’s not something I would promote.  Hopefully this doesn’t catch on.

You’re a mother of two small children.  Your husband is away on business.  In the middle of the night, you hear someone in your home, and when you investigate, you are attacked by a man armed with a pipe and a knife.  He lands a couple of blows on you, but you’re still on your feet.

What do you do?

If you’re Yael Matzpun, who lives in a small community a few kilometers from the border with Gaza, you fight through your injuries, lay a beating on your attacker, lock him in a bathroom, and call the police after you get you and your kids to safety.

This tough-as-nails woman was physically harmed, but knew that if she didn’t fight, she and her kids were dead, so she defended herself, her family, and her home with her bare hands.   Unfortunately for Mr. Piece-of-crap-murderer, he chose to attack someone who is trained in hand-to-hand combat.  He was, however, able to crawl out a window and be shot down like the jackal he was by the police when he refused to drop his weapons.

I will say this: Mrs. Matzpun is to be commended for her actions, and I’m glad that her injuries weren’t worse and that her children were unharmed.  But she is a person with an uncommon skill set, and even with that, she got lucky.  The first blows with that knife could have been lethal, or at least debilitating.  Bringing your fists to a knife fight doesn’t work very well most of the time.  Heck, bringing a knife to a knife fight usually means you’re getting cut up as much as the other guy, even if you win.

Unless I have no other choice, I’m forcing the other guy to bring his knife to a gun fight.  I don’t trust my own unarmed combat skills to be able to knock someone back enough that my family and I could escape, and I’m not trusting our safety to my ability to corral someone long enough for us to get out of the house.  I don’t know Krav Maga, ju-jitsu, or anything else, but I do know trigger control and good sight picture.

Congratulations to Mrs. Matzpun.  Let those murdering slimes think twice before they try to work out their warrior fantasies on sleeping innocent women and children.

• From the “Something Sphinx” Department – Mohammed Morsi, member of the Muslim Brotherhood, president of Egypt, and internationally honored sheep pimp, has announced that until a new parliament is elected, his decrees are beyond judicial review.  Basically, until the people of Egypt are given the chance to elect new representation, he’ll just be holding the reigns of state without any help from those pesky judges.  He, of course, promises to give back power at a later date.  This is one of the classic promises that never seem to get fulfilled, along with “The check is in the mail”, “I will withdraw from this newly conquered territory once peace is established”, and “I only want to cuddle.”.
• From the “My Favorite Year” Department – The U.S. and Russian space agencies have announced the names of two men who will be spending a year on the International Space Station to see how the human body and mind deal with long voyages in space.  Subjects to be studied include how the human body is changed by weightlessness for such a long time, whether an American fan of the original Star Trek can live with a Russian fan of Deep Space Nine, and whether or not these two skilled spacefarers can share a space station without driving each other crazy.
• From the “Tape and Time” Department – Revelers at the Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York were surprised to find that some of the confetti being dropped on them came from a local police department.  The poorly shredded paper appears to reveal the names of police officers, their Social Security numbers, and details from arrest reports.  There is no word on whether or not the police chief and his staff had been up late the previous evening preparing for a federal investigation.  In unrelated news, two representatives from an office equipment supply company were found hanging upside down from the George Washington bridge.  Law enforcement is investigating.
• From the “Can’t Fix Stupid” Department – An man in New York is trying to avoid being put to death for the murder of two police officers.  His tactic is to claim that he is too unintelligent to be executed.  Apparently being as sharp as a sack of wet mice makes your veins impervious to needles or something.  Talk about a disincentive to doing well in school.  “You better stop working so hard in math class, young man, or you might be held responsible for your actions one day.”  Thank goodness my oldest son hadn’t heard of this when he was in high school.  That kid needed another reason to slack off like he needed another hole in his head.

Hostess, the company that brought the Twinkie and Ho-Ho to the American apocalypse food cache, has announced that it will be closing its doors, selling off everything that it can, and laying off each and every one of its 18,500 employees.  The company has taken a gut punch in the past few years, and was trying to get through bankruptcy, in part, by getting concessions out of its union employees.  The Teamsters, of all people, accepted less of a piece of the action rather than lose everything.  The Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, on the other hand, decided it was better to douse itself in kerosene and light up a Pall Mall.  Instead of losing a chunk of their pension but keeping their jobs, now they have neither a pension nor a job.

Now, consider this:

Hostess was founded in 1930, at the dawn of the Great Depression.  It survived the Depression, and probably thrived during World War II.  Over the next few decades it figured out how to get Baby Boomers to buy its products and then feed them to their kids.   It survived health food booms and economic hard times.  Now, in really bad economic straits, weighed down by bloated union contracts, it went into bankruptcy.  The bankruptcy court ordered a reduction in pension and benefits for their bakers, who went on strike.  The company warned the union that it would shut its doors if strikers didn’t return, the union called their bluff, and now the company is being shuttered.

In other words, a company that was able to withstand 80 years of boom and bust was killed off by obstinate bakers who were more worried about giving up a little than than they were about losing a lot.  The union decided that letting the company die was better than doing their part to keep it alive.

Good luck finding work in this economy, members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union.  I’m sure there are lots and lots of jobs in your area for an industrial baker.  Also enjoy explaining to the Teamsters why thousands of their drivers are now on unemployment.  I hope y’all enjoy your holidays while a long-lived American company is dismembered and sold to the highest bidder.

And before you ask, I hate Hostess baked sweets and Wonder Bread.  I will admit to using some of their sandwich breads that at least looked like someone had sprayed on a bit of nutrition.   But that’s beside the point.  I was just as pissed at the UAW over the state of Chrysler and GM when they went into meltdown.  Unions, especially unions in well-established companies, are a cancer that is eating away at the core of our industry.  Companies that have no way to get control of their costs, including the cost of employee benefits and retirements, are not going to do well, and that means more people out of work.  I hope the members of the bakers’ union are happy now that they’re the forefront of the latest wave of American unemployment.

• From the “Get A Rope” Department – Two men in Louisiana are under arrest and charged with animal cruelty and violations of hunting regulations.  The men are specifically charged with shooting deer without a license, from a vehicle, while said vehicle is on a road, after dark.  In addition to that, they shot someone’s dog while they did it.  Assuming that the men are guilty as charged, I hope the judge throws the book, as well as the bookcase the book sat in, at these two yutzes.  Crap like this is one of the reasons that it’s so hard to get people to let considerate hunters hunt on private land.  It also paints a bad picture of hunters and gun owners to everyone else. 
• From the “No Good Deed….” Department – A bartender in San Fransisco was cleaning up his bar recently when he found a cell phone someone had left behind.  Apparently this isn’t that big a deal, but when he tried to figure out whose it was, it had no SIM and no way to unlock it.  He showed it to someone, who figured out that it was an example of a yet unreleased cell phone from Google.  After alerting Google that their prototype had been left in a bar, the friend and the bartender had a run-in with the “Google Police”, which I take to mean that they were threatened with huge civil penalties if they breathed a word to anyone about what they had found.  Eventually, the phone was returned to Google.  If it had been me, it would have gone back in about 50 small sandwich bags, component by component, after I caught grief from the mega-corporation that lost the bloody thing in the first place.  I seem to remember us doing the same thing with the Mig fighter that a Soviet pilot used to defect with during the Cold War, and I would want it to have the same effect.
• From the “Useless Endeavor” Department – Secretary of State Clinton, along with her European Union counterparts, is leaning on the governments of Kosovo, Serbia, and Bosnia Herzegovina to try to get them to start cooperating more and fighting less.  Apparently the crowning achievement of her husband’s foreign policy, the Dayton Accords, didn’t do much more than get the three-cornered fight in Bosnia to stop being a shooting war.  The Serbs still don’t like the Muslims and the Croats, and the other two share not only animosity toward the Serbs, but also don’t care for each other.  The Serbs and Kosovars aren’t exactly chums either, so that 1999 air war that gave a copy of our stealth bomber to the Chinese seems to have done not much more than stop the shooting, if only for a generation or two.  I suggest that Secretary Clinton go to Sarajevo and Belgrade, try the local slivovitz, and get the heck out of dodge before the next shooting war flares up.  I predict it will happen about 8 seconds after a new generation of Serbs, Croats, Muslims, and Kosovars reaches military age in 2014 or 2015.
• From the “Someone Needs A Hug” Department – A man in Florida is under arrest after making online threats to blow up his neighborhood and a school.  Apparently Mr. Rogers had been the target of frequent complaints about noise and believed that his neighbors had killed his dog.  As I look around my little village, I can say I’m happy that we can work out our difference without the use of high explosives.  We reserve those for demolition and entertainment.
• From the “Sea Kittens” Department – A California woman is asking that the city of Irvine erect a sign memorializing the truckload of fish that died when the truck got into an accident.  The city has declined the request.  I’m sure that PETA, an organization for which the woman volunteers, will go ahead with their own pescetarian vigil, complete with speeches about how fish are people too.  I can see their point.  I also love all the creatures under heaven, including fish.  I guess the difference is that I love my fish with wide cut fried potatoes and malt vinegar.  And people wonder why I never moved back to California.  
• From the “Darth Mickey” Department – George Lucas, creator of both Luke Skywalker and Howard the Duck, has sold his companies to Disney for over four billion dollars.  Disney will now control LucasFilm, Industrial Light and Magic, and Skywalker Sound, as well as the rights to the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises.  Disney also announced plans to release at least three more Star Wars films.  My sources advise me that Episode 7 will be entitled “The Quest for the Unholy Abomination”, which will entail what happens after Return of the Jedi, and will include new characters like Goofinimus, the illegitimate offspring of Jar Jar Binks, who has worked in a spice mine for 30 years, and Princess Minnia, a diminutive lass with a high squeaky voice.  For those of you who can hear that high-pitched keening, it’s my childhood being violated in ways both unholy and unwholesome.

Bowling Green is a nice city about 2 hours or so from here.  It’s a sleepy college town, and also has the Corvette Museum, which is a must see if you’re into cars.

Apparently, even college towns have their problems:

Two people are injured and many are still in shock after a man armed with an ax began attacking doors and swinging his weapon at residents of an apartment complex in Bowling Green.

Paul Bunyan apparently decided to reenact his favorite Stephen King novel and took an axe to his neighbors and their doors.  One person got 12 stitches when he was caught outside, and I’d say that as much as that must hurt, he got lucky.  Axes make great weapons for cutting and smashing, and they’ve been used as instruments of war for millenia.

Scared residents tried to barricade themselves in their homes, and when he started cutting his way through, they jumped out the window and ran.  Luckily for them, the attacker was subdued by police before he killed someone.

But what if they hadn’t gotten there fast enough, or if he’d been more determined to kill someone?  Surviving by luck or because he doesn’t choose to chase you when you run isn’t what I would call a good plan.  Hoping that the crazy man passes by your door on his way to the neighbor isn’t any better.

I’m thankful that this incident ended as well as it did, but it could have been much worse.  Someone with an effective tool for either deterring this madman or stopping him if he insisted on persisting could have ended this quickly.  For most people, that tool will be a firearm.  Remember, the time to realize you need a gun is not when some nut is beating on your door with an axe.

• From the “Whoopsie!” Department – Two U.S. Navy captains are at pucker factor 7 after a submarine and a destroyer collided off the east coast.  The incident is under investigation, and both craft are moving under their own power.  Thankfully, no-one was hurt in the accident.  In other news, two slots for morale officers at the Antarctic research station have just opened up.  
• From the “Call the A-Team” Department – The Canadian company that is fabricating the steel that is supposed to be used for the antenna on top of the new World Trade Center is refusing to provide it to the construction company in charge of the project.  It seems that this kerfluffle is related to a dispute over payment for another project.  My sources report that John Claude van Damm, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Joe Pesci have been placed on alert for “Expendables III:  Men of Steel”.
• From the “Bad Things” Department – Hundreds of crocodiles escaped from a reptile farm in Vietnam the other day.  Some of them ended up in the pond at a nearby elementary school, which probably went a long way toward keeping those darn kids out of the water.  Only 72 of the reptiles have been recovered, but the company promises to find them all.  They are currently using acoustic equipment to pick up the distinctive ticking sound a crocodile makes in the wild.
• From the “Silly Old Bear” Department – A honey company in Washington was recently raided, and the thieves made off with 100 pounds of honey.  Authorities believe that the perpetrators were local bears, who are trying to fatten up before the lucky bastards start their winter hibernation.  Seriously, I am jealous.  Do you know how much I would give to eat until I’m fatter, then sleep until March?

• From the “Brotherly Love” Department – The police union in Philadelphia is holding a fundraiser for a police officer that has been suspended and may well be fired, at least for a few days, over an incident in which he punched a woman at a parade.  You know, in IT, when someone gets caught abusing their privilege, like going through other people’s email or hiding their own unethical or illegal activity, they are kryptonite.  In the army, someone who abused his rank, such as a drill sergeant who used his troops as a personal harem, was somewhere between whale scum and the bottom of the ocean with the rest of us.  In this case, the police union is reinforcing the belief in an “us versus them” mentality in the police force.  If the police want to have the trust of the rest of us, they need to be willing to single out those egregiously violate codes of ethics and conduct.  Put another way, if the police won’t condemn one of their own who breaks the law, why should we allow them to condemn us when we break the law?
• From the “Big Plane, Small Plane” Department – The city of Minot, on the beautiful wind-swept prairies of North Dakota, is raising funds to build two models of B-52’s.   The models are going to be donated to nearby Minot Air Force Base to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the B-52.   The 1/8 scale models will have a wingspan of 32 to 36 feet, which will tell you how big a B-52 really is.  Also, how many things in our world are still working after 60 years of almost constant use, including when people are shooting telephone poles at them at high speed?
• From the “Lying or Incompetent, You Make the Call” Department – Vice-President Joe Biden has started using our intelligence services and the State Department as wheel chocks for his tour bus after claiming that neither he nor the president was aware of requests by diplomats in Libya for additional security prior to the attacks of September 11, 2012.  One of the things I look forward to in the event of a Romney victory is a plethora of hearings in Congress that feature a tape of the Watergate hearings saying “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” being played in a loop.  To my brothers and sisters at Fort Meade and Foggy Bottom, you have my deepest sympathy, but at least you are in good company with the President’s grandmother under that bus.
• From the “Long Live the King” Department – The prince of Sealand, which is an artificial country situated on an old ocean platform the British military abandoned in the 1960’s, has died.  His son, the crown prince, can now be expected to assume the throne.  It’s been a long time since we’ve had a European coronation, so I expect to see the staff at the major news outlets freezing their butts off to cover what the new ruler and his family are wearing as they take control of their fiefdom.  I’m guessing it will be a lot of fur and long underwear, accesorized with the scalps of all who oppose them.

• From the “Father of the Year” Department – A man in Pennsylvania made a bad decision  worse when he left his one year old daughter home alone while he went off to go rob houses in his neighborhood.  I’m not sure if he’d be considered a better or worse father if he’d taken her along on his little caper.  Talk about using the TV as a babysitter.  Hopefully the little girl is able to overcome such a beginning.  I also hope that this bluntskull doesn’t have any more kids.
• From the “Mother of the Year” Department – A woman in Texas is facing life in prison for using SuperGlue to fix her two-year-old daughter’s hands to the wall and savagely beating her over potty training.   Her defense?  Well, you see, this June Cleaver wannabe seems to have a pretty big marijuana habit, was stressed out by her kids, and just needed a break.  Now, my kids get on my nerves on a regular basis, but I never considered beating Boo with a milk jug while he was glued to the bathroom wall.  Hey, maybe she can be cell mates with the guy in the last story, assuming of course that both of them are fixed so that they don’t make an ungodly mix of stupid and hateful that will bring about the end of society as we know it.
• From the “Backyard Gourmet” Department – Several families were burned out of their homes recently when one of the neighbors used a propane torch to burn the fur off of a squirrel he planned to eat and set fire to his deck.  I’m guessing that the erstwhile chef never heard of, oh I don’t know, skinning the darn thing?  Plus, how hungry could he have been after smelling all that burnt hair?
• From the “No Good Deed Goes Unpunished” Department – The ATF agent who was among the group that brought Operation Fast and Furious, the Three Stooges inspired plan to weaken the Mexican drug cartels by arming them, has been fired by the agency.  The agency maintains that he was let go because of a “lack of candor” in an unrelated case.  If you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Tucson for you to look at.  My guess is that the politically appointed management at the ATF is cleaning house while it still can.  I hope he is reinstated, and if not, lives a long and rich life of the money we are all going to lose when he sues.

• From the “Honor to the Honorable” Department – The Navy has commissioned a destroyer named in honor of Lieutenant Michael Murphy, a SEAL who was killed in Afghanistan in 2005.  His actions to save his team earned him the Medal of Honor.  Now his sacrifice is memorialized in a new ship that will continue his work to defend the nation.
• From the “Bad Things” Department – A fire on a Russian ammunition train caused several explosions recently.  There are no reports on injuries, so I’m hoping that this just goes down as an “Aw crap” moment.  No telling what caused this, but here’s hoping that the train wasn’t loaded by a bunch of conscripts that think that “Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives” sounded like a great combination.
• From the “Hard Time” Department – Jerry Sandusky, former football coach and current pederast, was sentenced today to at least 30 years in prison. Here’s hoping he lives to be a very old man so that he can savor each and every day of those decades.  Hopefully some of those who covered for him and allowed him to continue raping little boys join him soon.
• From the “Aw Crap” Department – The Secretary-General of NATO has affirmed that the alliance is ready to defend Turkey from Syria if necessary.  Those of you who have “The Guns of August” running through your mind at the moment, you’re not alone.  I wonder how hard it is to entrench in southern Turkey?  Unfortunately, almost all of my experience was up by the Black Sea.
• From the “Where Great Britain May Be Again” Department – The British Prime Minister has announced plans to change the laws on defending a home against an intruder in such a way that a person who uses force to stop a burglary will have an easier time avoiding prosecution.  It seems that the limit on what you can and can’t do is to not attack a helpless burglar.  I congratulate Mr. Cameron on his good sense and look forward to watching our British cousins take back their homes from criminals.
• From the “Taste of Things to Come” Department – A guidance counselor at a school in New York, who is reported to have had a stellar 12 year record in her job, has been let go because racy pictures, which she claims were taken when she was 18 to 20 years old, have started appearing at questionable websites.  She is, of course, suing.  With the advent of cheap, high quality camera phones, I see this as the tip of an iceberg that is going to strike the workforce in the next few years.  All those youthful indiscretions would have been nothing more than memories to be dredged up at class reunions are now going to live forever on YouTube.  I wonder how hard it would be to take a still picture of a job applicant and then run it through facial recognition software that mines the various picture and video websites looking for behavior that an employer might disapprove of.  All of a sudden, taking a video of you and your girlfriends having a banana eating contest doesn’t sound like such a good idea, now does it?  Or you and your fraternity brothers might want to make sure no-one has their phone out while you do a butt chug, just in case the people you try to get a job with after graduation do a quick check of your recreational activities.