… an owl’s attack on a rabbit in UD‘s backyard. Or a cat’s attack

on a bird. Many predators visit UD’s land.

Deason built a small private, elevated beach for lounge chairs. Not a fan of the coarse California sand, the billionaire spent about $40,000 to import the Georgia sand found at Augusta National Golf Club …

“Everyone who watches the golf tournament knows it is a spectacular shade of white.”

Here’s the list of all the goodies (many of them baubles) Rudy must turn over to the two women whose lives he ruined.

… goes to Poland this week.

It’s happening at Albany State!

Background on Guncoming here.

It’s impressive to see Americans finally perceive the reality of much of the amazing bloodshed around here. Literary types like UD know this as a variant of Chekhov’s Gun Principle:

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

If you’re going to hang weapons in every corner of your state, the weapons are going to be fired. We tend, like traditional playwrights, to affix motives to this firing, but the world has moved well past Chekhov and Ibsen, into Beckett and post-Beckett, and this is a world in which people just do things. No reason.

“Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!”

What about shooting into a crowd of people?

Garden, currently being guarded, is in the background.

The biblical mandate from Walters

Now faces a lawsuit and falters.

“But I ain’t forlorn.

My obsession with porn

Sustains me against all assaulters.”

Stage One: Clear a biggish circular area at the very top of our property. Decades of twigs, vines, trash trees, and odd elements (some previous owner lay down a small square outlined in bricks) had to be raked and lopped through, leaving a well-established vinca/English ivy ground cover. A rough circular dirt path already sort of exists; parts of it also need to be cleared.

Happy Soldier Mr UD carries a red rake full of leaves away from the garden (on the left).

Dog poses in the garden-to-be, amid stumps and bricks.

This stage will continue for awhile. In line with the garden’s purpose, I listen to Life Wisdom (Alan Watts, Carl Jung, the Stoics, others) while I work. One immediate problem: They mainly disagree with each other.

I’m thinking a lot about elements. A fountain definitely appeals. A fire pit. Solar lamps. Aromatic plants. Grasses for motion… Yet the place is pretty shady, closely circled by very big old trees…

‘So why are none of its executives going to prison?‘

News reports … said the city could be short as many as 300 police officers… Birmingham was [in fact] short [only] 63 “patrol officers,” [insisted the mayor]… [Later that day he admitted] the number was actually 172 patrol officers… That number didn’t include other officers such as homicide detectives responsible for investigating the city’s record-setting murders. 

… Between 2021 and 2023, the city lost 200 police officers.

That’s 24% of its police force gone in just two years.

The department is losing civilian employees, too, but more steadily and over a longer period. Between 2014 and 2023, the department dropped from 277 civilian staff to 177.

By the summer of 2023, combining sworn officers and staff, the Birmingham police department had at least 294 vacant positions.

***************

Bama thinks it can pass laws making guns of any kind available to people of any kind, at any time, and NOT have trouble attracting police to its municipalities. You got idiots shooting off guns all over the place, and you think rational people will take jobs that put them in the way of all those bullets every single day? Bama is SOOOO STOOOOOPID.

So this guy helpfully explains that banks can’t really do that much drug money policing; so UD assumes that TD Bank will now reform itself by issuing stern warnings to employees that they MUST NEVER exchange emails about drug money.

While we understand that our laundering of vast amounts of drug money is amusing, there is nothing amusing about the penalty you will receive (instant firing) if our surveillance of your work as well as private email/texts/etc uncovers even cursory use of words like COLOMBIA GET AWAY WITH LOLOLOLOL DRUG MONEY BAD GUYS EASY LOOK OTHER WAY VENEZUELA DEPOSITED A MILLION BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

In Howard County – a locale mere miles from UD‘s Montgomery County – Howard High has among its students a seventeen year old who wears an ankle monitor because of unspecified criminal activity, carries a loaded gun in his backpack, and just got arrested for murder! If he makes bail, will Howard High put him back in class – loaded gun, ankle monitor, murder arrest, and all?

It had to happen. America now has gun diffusers.

What a scent! Gentle notes of sulfur and ammonia.