All Entries in the "Lifestyles at Risk" Category
Bronco defense requests trade
(The following was penned after the Rams debacle and before a coaching change and a decent performance against the Chiefs).
(Dove Valley) The much beleaguered Denver Bronco defense has requested a trade. The unprecedented petition, delivered en masse Wednesday, did not spell out how the players might be distributed or when the coveted transaction might take place.
Despite a ranking of 5th in team defense, the squad has reportedly grown tired of sharing the sidelines with an offense that rarely moves the ball.
A muffled voice from the Bronco front office suggested that nothing would happen until the end of the current season in January.
“It’s like the offense out there on the field,” he said. “Nothing happens. We ran the ball effectively against Arizona then opened up with passes against the Rams. Who pray tell is writing the script here?”
At present league officials and the players’ union are engaged in tense discussions with one eye on their pocketbooks and the other one on their pocketbooks.
– Syd Fardt
Nisei Christmas
“…Men speak of them well or ill; they themselves are silent.”
– Stephen Vincent Benet, Ode to Walt Whitman
One Christmas near Granada, Colorado in 1942 two soldiers sat in a dark cafe watching the snow come down. Snow was not a familiar thing to these two who would be shipping out for Sicily in a few days. There was no visible sun in the sky and the windows of the cafe looked as if they hadn’t been washed since the First World War concluded almost 25 years ago. One of the soldiers, Private Thomas Okamoto, would go on to be one of the most decorated fighting men in the European Theater. The other, also decorated, would serve for two years in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and see action at Salerno Bay, at Naples, at Cassino, and at Anzio. His name was Kiyoshi Nakamura. He was killed by a German sniper near Saverne, France in November of 1944.
It was in late December of 1943, just north of Naples, that Nakamura met my uncle Clifford, and shared the following story.
We were staring out the window onto the soggy Colorado street. Private Okamoto was talking about his uncle’s strawberry garden back in California. We were not afraid to go to war but we were afraid of what may happen to our families behind barbed wire at Granada. A tall, thin rancher stumbled into the cafe, ordered coffee and sent a bone-chilling stare in our direction. It wasn’t a hostile look, more one of astonishment, of lassitude. He turned tiredly away from us and asked the walls and ceilings if we were spies.
Then, without warning, he approached our table. We thought he must be drunk.
“Looks like snow,” he said. “How long you been in?”
Private Okamoto answered him, followed by a crisp sir. He sat down.
“I’ve heard a lot of you pups were joining up,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to stare but you two are the first I’ve seen in uniform. Where they sending you?”
“Afica or maybe Europe,” I answered, “for the time being. We’re nor supposed to talk about it.”
“Loose lips sink ships,” said Okamoto.
“You won’t see much snow in those parts unless you make it up to the Dolomites. Where are you boys from?”
“Santa Ana, California, sir. We are only here for two days to visit our families in the camps. They were moved here in October,” I answered. “We brought them Christmas presents.”
“My name is Walters, Frank Walters. I remember spending a cold, wet Christmas at Cambrai, in France in 1917. I was at Belleau Wood as well, and with the Brits at Chateau-Thierry after the Germans broke through in 1918. I survived. At least I think I survived. A lot of them didn’t.”
“My uncle Joe was killed in the Argonne Forest,” I said. “His father and mother had only moved to the California in 1880 and they were proud of their native American son. They were presented his Silver Star.”
“And now our government is involved with another war with Germany…and this time with those bastards, the Japanese,” said Walters, catching himself. He looked at the floor.“You got a lot of family interned here at Granada?” he asked.
“Most of them,” I frowned. “The others, a cousin and Private Okamoto’s brother are in the army. We are Japanese-Americans, you know.”
“I know,” breathed Walters. “Good farmers. Good family people. I don’t think they deserve what they’re getting. Scaliwags up to no good. War profiteers of another stench, but the country’s in a panic.”
“After Pearl Harbor it’s not hard to believe,” said Okamoto.
Walters returned to his previous state, not saying anything for a few minutes, just staring out the window and then to the door as if expecting a visitor.
“How old are you boys?” he asked, returning to the present.
“I’m 19 and Kiyoshi is 20,” said Okamoto.
“The same age as my Tommy,” said Walters, after a moment. “He was lost when the West Virginia went down at Pearl Harbor last December, he said as if still not comprehending the trauma. “It was a beautiful morning in Honolulu they tell me.”
We sat there in shock. After two days visiting Granada and 12 weeks in Georgia training to kill Germans, and perhaps even Japanese, we thought we’d reached a certain sense of numbness. Now we were sitting here with a World War I vet who had lost a son to the Imperial Navy, to young men our age, who looked like us.
“My name is Tommy,” offered Okamoto, stumbling over his words in some attempt to ease the pain that all were feeling by now.
“You’re all just children,” said Walters, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “We were children too and it’s another Christmas. Babies with guns and tanks and planes. Germans and Japanese and English and French. Dead because of incompetemnt, greedy and power hungry leaders, or are we just blood-seeking animals standing erect? It’s insane,” he shook his head methodically from side to side. “They put your families in camps and yet you volunteer.”
“No matter how bad things seem we must retain honor,” said Okamoto.
“Honor,” answered Walters, gathering his emotions. “You boys had better drop back a few notches on the honor and hold onto a little common sense when you get over there,” he said. The Germans are entrenched all the way up the peninsula. It’ll be no picnic.”
“It’s a noble war,” said Okamoto.
Walters smiled a distant almost shell-shocked smile and changed the subject to the wine he had drunk, the friends he had made and the women he had met in France during his war. He somehow remembered these things and pushed the other horrors to the side. We both hoped this would be the case with us, if we survived.
He then took us totally off guard and asked us to write him a letter saying that it would get to him in Lamar without an address.
“Just send it to Frank Walters,” he said.
We told him we’d send him a postcard from Rome or maybe Berlin and asked him to watch out for our families if he could.
“I’ll do that,” he said, getting up and disappearing into the snowstorm.
– Kevin Haley
King Finbar in the Americas
(continued from page 4)
and when he actually put in on that North American beach in 993 the playful, tattooed red men had already made off with the barrels of aged whiskey the sailors had brought along for emergencies.
“Let them have it,” grogged King Finbar. “We will simply make more this evening! They have plenty of corn.”
The landing party, comprised of Brian the Fair, McDougal of Ballyshannon, and their numerous squires and harlots stared up at the eucalyptus trees, not knowing that they had been planted by marauding Spanish pirates only months before. There were the straight masts for their boats. The posts were popular too since the ladies of the night tended to dry wet bikinis from them at the end of the day.
Hacking their way through the jungle the thirsty and salty visitors stopped for the night in a small clearing 200 yards from the sea.
“Tomorrow we shall claim this wild land in the name of Brian Boru of Tara,” smiled Finbar, busily mapping the extremities of the beach. “We will create a Celtic empire where no white man has roamed before!”
The band set out that very evening to carve out a little civilization in the encroaching jungle. First they had to erect a still so that the highly sensative fermentation process could begin without another moment going to waste. In addition to corn they would need fresh water, barley and a pinch of rye with which to concoct the evening’s pleasantries…but alas, these were nowhere to be found on the desert isle. It was now simple: The natives must be subdued and the original barrels recovered.*
Then they herd laughter from the brush…Like magic the red men had returned…blasted and back for last call. With them they brought tobacco, pumpkins and a substantial store of corn and barley with which to make more drink. Greeting them cautiously, King Finbar asked to speak to their chief and a fine feathered brave emerged, stepping forward into the light of the moon.
He soon agreed to act as our guide if we would simply share our recipe for our beauty juice where the tediums of life turned miraculously to silly dreams. Everyone agreed and smiled. That may have been the first cocktail hour ever chronicled in North America. The frowning Jesuits who had accompanied the anxious crew across the endless ocean were less than approving of the arrangements with the heathens so they were forced back to the ship to spend the night.
They spent three days with the natives and all went quite well. The only real problem occurred when a squire to McDougal was dragged off by a skitish Caribbean Ecelot while securing firewood. After serious consternation the Celts decided that they would continue the festivities and look for the unfortunate soul at first light. Most of the now stumbling revelers were beginning to appreciate their surroundings although several fell sick to the plague of green whiskey and the queer presence of tiny insects that insistently flew up their collective noses.
At the end of the barrels most of the troupe boarded small boats and returned to the mother ship leaving a skeleton crew on the island to establish a colony. Two or three years later boatmen traveling under the protection of Fitzgerald the Imp landed at the site of the first still and found no sight of even a bartender, much less the residue of the brave Irish who had stayed behind. It was the consensus of the Fitzgerald group that the Irishmen had run out of corn and moved farther down the coast. That was that. Fitzgerald himself returned to Ireland in 999 and was killed fighting Vikings who, having taken their own press clippings to heart, engaged in a frontal attack along the bridgets of the River Liffey.
*It was also common practice to add several live lobster to give the blend a kind, old variance.
Next month: King Finbar in the Vestibules of Valhalla
ARE YOU RIGHT WITH GRAMMAR?
BY EDWIN WHOM PHD, BFD
This week’s lesson in proper grammar will focus on the use of popular food names correctly in a sentence or paragraph. Now then try this one on for size: His spam-like gestures began as the very fruit of intuition marinating her eggy disposition and precipitating, as if a noodle in heat, her steamy hambone smothered in green chili sauce. She was clearly overcooked, as if awaiting a steeping rhubarb beyond the kitchen’s intent.
What is the subject of this wry sentence? The predicate? What exactly are spam-like movements? Can you show us? Why would someone use the term eggy when there are so many other words to choose from in the English language?
Now try this sentence on for size: Bill seemed rather adenoid at his half-brother’s lack of concern for the dangling corned beef and verbiage; now stubbornly searching under fat river rocks for further aux pas with a side of angry salmon mothers with little attempt to correct the inaccuracies of interior lighting and general well-being. What about ascetics? Doesn’t anyone here care for ascetics? He growled turning over tables and crashing through a picture window that lurched in his way.
Does Bill find fault with everything and everyone, or just with the tragic members of his immediate family? Where does Bill’s brother work? Should they farm him out for extended therapy or simply hire a nose and throat man? How long should one cook verbiage above 7000 feet?
Until later this be Edwin Whom, PhD saying so long!
“I would rather make love to Lillian Russell stark naked than to Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia.”
– Mark Twain
“Manchurian Candidate” Shown by GOP?
(Montrose) The 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, starring Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra this 1962 is currently showing at local theaters.
The storyline follows as several former prisoners return home following the Korean War and, although they were all brainwashed one standout has an altogether different agenda. Is he a spy? Has he become a traitor or a robot?
Despite up-tech remake in 2004, starring Denzel Washington, the original, less flashy film retains a following. It’s questions are still pertinent today. It carries a warning that a constitutional republic is not free and must be constantly defended from those who seek to steal our rights. Oddly enough it is sponsored by the local Republican Party.
According to persons familiar with Istanbul, a several boxes were delivered via Turkey (and giblet dressing) directly to one Vladimir Putin in sustainable code, but the Russians (idiots with nuclear weapons) have never successfully decoded anything…therefore no crime has been committed. Say what? They insist that Trump did no such thing and that the boxes were filled with red neckties and Christmas cookies for poor children in Red Square.
When pressed, one high-ranking Russian diplomat said he’d never heard anything about blackmail or sexual deprivation mentioned in the Trump dossier.
“We didn’t need to be underhanded or even clever in dealing with Mr. Trump,” he smiled. “The word around the Kremlin was that he was easily manipulated by simple flattery.”
The point? If you still can’t see that a New York confidence man has flim-flammed your ass then maybe you should go out and sleep in the camper.
For more on this turn to Telluride’s Gay Neighborhoods Get a New Coat of Paint in “Money Talks”
