. . . and see if they’re missing a fountain!

I took this photo of the elaborate fountain in front of the clubhouse at Trump National Golf Club in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The sheer gaudiness made me think of the line from a movie where one of the principal characters made the remarks about the Vatican missing a fountain. Can you remember which movie?

It’s springtime and the garden is sprouting - but there are those who would help themselves to our veggies-to-be. The answer to controlling pilferage isn’t always pesticides - especially when it comes to controlling cute little fuzzy squirrels. Our preferred method in this case is to catch and repatriate. A nearby park will provide shelter and a place for this particular squirrel to forage.

In the picture above - squirrel’s eye view of a Havahart trap - later at the park, the release and scamper up a convenient pine tree.

During my lunchtime walk, I spotted this interesting-looking vehicle parked behind the mall. One side was an undersea scene and the other side was parrots in trees. I did not see or smell any hippies, however.

Keep in mind that Cho Seung-Hui is the only one responsible for the massacre at Virginia Tech. Nobody else was involved. He was absolutely determined to cause death and pain to those whom he had come to despise, including himself.

So, what would Cho have done if nobody were to have sold him a gun? My thoughts are that he would have gone to the dorm, bludgeoned the woman to death with a legally-purchased hammer or other trauma-inducing “weapon,” and then proceed to engineering classes with a home-made explosive device (again, made with legally purchased materials) and proceed to blow himself and an unknown number of students to kingdom come. After all, the latter method is used almost daily by homicide bombers in the Middle East — why not by Cho as well?

Continue reading » No Guns for Cho - What Then?

Our choice this week for Weblog of the Week is Blog Idaho. In his profile, Retired Geezer, the proprietor, says, “The Sportos, the Motorheads, Geeks, Sluts, Bloods, Waistoids, Dweebies, Dickheads - they all adore me. They think I’m a Righteous Dude.”

We’ve been reading this blog for a long time now and enjoy the humor and the interesting, everyday and extraordinary stories about RG and Mrs. Geezer. We are pleased to recognize Blog Idaho as our WOW.

Oh yeah . . . I stole the picture from one of Geezer’s posts.

I took this photo of this beautiful tiger lily in the garden shop last weekend. I love the lighting on this colorful flower — partial shadows and sunlight add to the texture of this already gorgeous flower.

Please take a moment and reflect on the tragedy in Virginia yesterday. We have the victims, their friends and families in our minds and hearts as we try to find a way to cope with this mindless act. Beautiful flowers like this give us a little consolation as we realize there is still abundant beauty in life.

Over the weekend in Saint Louis at the NRA Convention, former UN Ambassador John Bolton told 3500 banquet attendees that foreign anti-gun interests are intent on depriving Americans of their second-amendment right to own and bear arms. Bolton cited a 2001 UN conference on small arms and light weapons wherein the majority of participants decided that private ownership of weapons should be banned worldwide.

Bolton also said that US proponents of gun control are turning to international interests in their efforts to deny gun ownership. Bolton said the United States’ bottom line is that this country will not agree to anything that infringes on the constitutional right to bear arms.

“Had the NRA not come forward … one could only guess what our State Department bureaucracy would have done,” he said.

The United Nations instead should focus on nuclear threats from Iran and North Korea, he said. Negotiations with these countries are more dangerous than productive, Bolton said.

The United States should not make general contributions to the United Nations, Bolton said. Instead, he said, “We should pay for what we want and expect to get what we pay for.”

Hear, Hear!

Hat tip NRA-ILA.

Today was a busy day for us. We started out appropriately with breakfast and prepared dinner immediately afterwards. Really - we put our pork stew in the crock pot so it could cook all day while we were doing other chores; things like mowing and working in the yard, making a periodic donation of used stuff to charity, going to the garden shop for some supplies and target practice followed by the cleaning session.

While we were at the firing range all we could talk about was that beautiful B17 that we saw yesterday. This is a shot of the plane while it was taxiing in from one of several flights that day.

Earlier today we were out doing errands and stopped at Zamperini Field in Torrance to see the EAA’s “Aluminum Overcast,” a restored WW2 B-17 (like the Memphis Belle). What a beauty! Damsel got this shot of this magnificent plane when it was on short final approach to TOA runway 11L.

I took some short videos of the event and spliced them together in the 90-second video below.

Continue reading » The Aluminum Overcast

I have these little daisies growing in a hanging planter by the patio. I noticed that one of the flowers was actually almost split into two. One side is almost the mirror image of the other. A normal bud is shown for contrast.

The little flowers are about an inch across (2.5cm). When they first open, their petals are bright crimson with a yellow center punctuated by a crimson dot. After several days, the crimson fades to pink. I’m not certain about the name of these daisies since we got them several seasons ago and I don’t remember what they are called. I’ll make it a point to notice next time we see them in the garden shop.

UPDATE: As promised, we found this flower at the garden shop and noted its name. For such a tiny flower, this little guy has an enormous name - Argyranthemum Red.