Eight Feet Deep

Some  good news, sort of.  Author­i­ties have man­aged to get indict­ments against nine of the so-called “Huta­ree” mili­tia group in Michi­gan for var­i­ous charges  includ­ing sedi­tious con­spir­acy and attempted use of weapons of mass destruc­tion. But the FBI does not believe that the recent arrests against the group, which allegedly con­spired to attack police, does not sig­nal an increase in anti-government and hate groups.

A fed­eral intel­li­gence report obtained by The Asso­ci­ated Press indi­cated the like­li­hood of vio­lence from  the Michi­gan or other groups is low. That no vio­lence erupted upon the arrests of the Chris­t­ian mili­tia mem­bers or some­thing sim­i­lar to the 1993 Branch David­ian stand­off near Waco also low­ered  the chances for such con­flict, say fed­eral authorities.

Still, a lot of ani­mus exists out there against the gov­ern­ment in gen­eral and the fact we have a black pres­i­dent specif­i­cally. The lat­ter has to be par­tic­u­larly galling to the many hate groups that have lit­tered the land­scape for many years.

The South­ern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” shows 66 such groups alone in the Lone Star State, where I live. Sev­eral of these, mostly com­prised of Klan mem­bers, are rooted in my com­mu­nity. The scope of such groups as defined by the SPLC, which mon­i­tors domes­tic hate groups, are some­what wide-ranging. Included in the SPLC def­i­n­i­tion of hate groups along with Klans are anti-immigration, the black sep­a­ratist Nation of Islam and the con­tro­ver­sial Fun­da­men­tal­ist Lat­ter Day Saints which live in a com­pound in Eldo­rado, Texas.

Gov­ern­ment can some­times pla­cate anger while other pissed-off peo­ple might even­tu­ally mel­low, espe­cially in times of national unity. But there seems to be no one easy fix for hate. It’s the lat­ter we need to keep in our minds and on our radar screens.

Do you ever read the lit­er­a­ture that comes with new pre­scrip­tion drugs? Well, I think you should unless you feel your phar­ma­cist explained the med­i­cine, how it works and its side effects to your sat­is­fac­tion. Even then, I would still read about the drug.

Some­times a med­i­cine will come with a warn­ing that side effects may include “vivid or dis­turb­ing dreams” or words to that effect. I often won­dered what that meant. Now I know.

I have had dif­fi­culty sleep­ing lately because of the pain caused by neu­ropa­thy in my feet. I once had a pre­scrip­tion for help­ing me sleep occa­sion­ally as I have had insom­nia on and off for years. That pre­scrip­tion worked very well but it ran out and my doc­tor, or pri­mary care provider (physician’s assis­tant), decided to pre­scribe another drug. That med­i­cine bore the warn­ing about dis­turb­ing dreams.

Here I should make an expla­na­tion. I have never been trou­bled with night­mares or what I con­sider fright­en­ing or dis­turb­ing dreams. That is, I didn’t have such dreams until tak­ing this med­i­cine or that I can remem­ber. I say “that I remem­ber” because I have been told of dis­turb­ing oth­ers in my sleep and not just with snor­ing. When I worked as a fire­fighter and slept in a room with other guys, they told me I used to scream and yell in my sleep. They even went so far as to jok­ingly say “you’re possessed!”

And I have had my share of odd dreams includ­ing a cou­ple in which the sit­u­a­tion of which I was dream­ing would in some way present itself upon wak­ing. But I have never had night­time excur­sions like I have had the sev­eral nights, includ­ing last night, on this drug which is gener­i­cally called Temazepam, or by one of its trade names Resto­ril. The med­i­cine itself has not worked well at all in help­ing me go back to sleep after wak­ing, which is why I needed it in the first place. I have some Lorazepam on the way, which is what I pre­vi­ously used with suc­cess. But I have been des­per­ate for sleep a cou­ple of times like last night so I took this other drug.

One thing about the dreams I have had on Temazepam is that they include a lot of clut­ter. When I say clut­ter, I mean that a lot of what is in the back­ground is often a myr­iad of com­plex items that often tend to prove a phys­i­cal chal­lenge for me. Last night, this clut­ter appeared in the way of junk, as one might see in the His­tory Chan­nel series “Amer­i­can Pick­ers,” about a cou­ple of guys who go around the coun­try­side buy­ing junk they sell as antiques and collectibles.

The site in which my dream occurred was a very large and ram­bling house — this has often been some­thing I’ve dreamed about even before my most recent excur­sions — that is the site of what appears to be some­thing like an estate sale.

Some of the peo­ple with me on this out­ing I know although I can­not remem­ber any of my close friends there. The woman who appar­ently owns the home and I meet said that I know one of her cousins and men­tions a name. This is really odd. The guy’s name is of some­one whom I don’t know other than hav­ing talked to him once, inter­view­ing him for a news story in 2004, the story being a one-year anniver­sary piece on the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia dis­as­ter over East Texas.

Now I have had some scary dreams on this sleep med­i­cine. They occurred the first cou­ple of nights I took them. As I noted they were dis­con­cert­ing expe­ri­ences because I don’t have fright­en­ing dreams. Well, I say I don’t. Some­times I do have dreams that most peo­ple and even I would think are fright­en­ing. I just don’t react fright­ened in those dreams. You see what  I am saying?

The scary dreams included men whom I thought were out to do me harm and I man­aged to escape them although I went through a very dis­turb­ing expe­ri­ence to do so. My get­away was helped by stand­ing upon a steel plat­form even though I was being threat­ened at the time by a bunch of half-rat, half-monkey crea­tures below who were bounc­ing off the ground. You see what I am say­ing about scary? If this was the old days, 60s and 70s, peo­ple would just tell you that you’re hav­ing a bad trip.

Last night’s dream wasn’t so scary as it was just plan weird. My out­ing around the big home where the junk sale was enhanced  by rid­ing a pig.

The pig was about the size of a horse and very friendly. I had a very fun ride on the pig whose name, believe it or not, was “Babe.” One dif­fi­cult ter­rain Babe and I encoun­tered before return­ing to the large house was plug­ging through part of the estate’s yard which was  full of molten choco­late.  Yum.

I believe I know where the clues to the pig’s exis­tence lies, at the very least.

I am read­ing a book about a man’s canoe jour­ney down the Neches River, here in East Texas. Richard M. Donavon’s “Pad­dling the Wild Neches,” is about his expe­ri­ence, which was to call atten­tion to a fight to have the Neches des­ig­nated as a National Wild and Scenic River. This would help pre­vent devel­op­ment such as the build­ing of two dams on the mid­dle reaches of the river. In addi­tion to his descrip­tion of the wooded Neches coun­try, Don­avon recalls sto­ries he heard from his youth and his own expe­ri­ences grow­ing up in the 40s and 50s near the Neches. Among his sto­ries are about killing wild hogs that roamed the river bot­tom, some of which can be quite large. (When I ran a small weekly paper in the area which he writes about, a cou­ple of guys came by to have their pic­ture made with the “Piney­woods Rooter” of some 800 pounds that they had killed hunt­ing. They had the pig tied upside down on their ATV in the back of their pickup with its feet –hooves, what­ever — stick­ing in the air). I wish I had the pic­ture available.

The “Babe” ref­er­ence also was easy to pin­point. I never saw the movie “Babe” but am famil­iar with it. It was a 1995 fam­ily film, for those who are not, about a pig who wanted to be a sheep dog. A sequel was made. In the midst of all the talk recently about threat­ened vio­lence on politi­cians came news of an actual threat against U.S. House minor­ity whip Eric Can­tor of Vir­ginia. The man arrested after some­one reported his rants on a You Tube video was described by neigh­bors as “a loon.” In addi­tion to Can­tor, sus­pect Nor­man Leboon also threat­ened movie stu­dios over “Babe.” You got it. Pig movie. Cap­i­tal­ist pig?

Just where the choco­late ride on a pig comes from, who knows? Some­where in the deep recesses of my mind I am rid­ing down a path on a pig and am detoured on a choco­laty path by the drug Temaza­pam. Bring on old faith­ful, Lorazepam and hope­fully pleas­ant dreams along with a good night’s sleep will be some­where around the bend.

Being bald I some­time find myself wish­ing I had hair again just so I could tear my hair out.

I am find­ing out the more I deal with cel­lu­lar and com­puter com­pa­nies that if you think some­thing needs fix­ing, you should just keep it to your­self lest some­body screws things up worse. That is the ordeal I have found myself in over the last day or so. I finally had to restore my oper­at­ing sys­tem to fac­tory settings.

In a way it’s kind of good. You can get rid of a lot of stuff you didn’t need. But I also ditched a lot of data I would like to have kept. A lots of book­marks and things of that nature, noth­ing too seri­ous. I would have done some mas­sive back­ing up if I had more time but I just needed this thing to work and it wasn’t work­ing very well after Ver­i­zon and Dell got through “fix­ing” it.

So in the next days, I shall be see­ing what I can recover and what I need to recover. Spring clean­ing for a computer.

This after­noon I feel a need to decom­press so I won’t be bang­ing away at the key­board for very long. If you don’t know to what or whom I refer below, I am sorry. I think most peo­ple who keep up with polit­i­cal news will rec­og­nize what I have to say. I just don’t feel like spoon-feeding today.

I will say though that after this week of see­ing the oppo­si­tion party at what unfor­tu­nately appears to be their finest it seems the Repub­li­can party seems to be headed head­long toward self-destruction.

It isn’t just that GOP con­gres­sional mem­bers at the height of their biggest defeat in at least 40 years did their best spoiled brat act. It isn”t that half of the GOP seems to have joined the “bat s**t crazy” wing of their party by egging on the nuts to vio­lence. It isn’t that the GOP con­tin­ues to excom­mu­ni­cate its best and bright­est such as David Frum when given a cold taste of truth.

No it is all that and more. This very well could be the pre­lude to a “Whig moment” for the Repub­li­can party. Maybe that is what it needs to get on track or per­haps to let the more thought­ful mem­bers move to the Demo­c­ra­tic party while the remain­der form their own Party of Nuts. Per­son­ally, I pre­fer the for­mer option, for either of the first two options.

One can rea­son with those who are sane and lis­ten. I don’t even want to think about the other alternative.

Sarah Palin was in town today sup­pos­edly to sell moti­va­tion. Just how she is sup­posed to be moti­vat­ing who knows? Maybe she was hawk­ing the mes­sage: “You too can be an obscure politi­cian with the sense of a pis­sant who can help lose a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion and then make mil­lions of dol­lars by being a famous person!”

In keep­ing with the cur­rent trend of pissed-off, right-wing rhetoric, she told the crowd in the city just across the river from a one-time Ku Klux Klan haven “Don’t retreat–reload.” What a genius.

Her appear­ance at the forum,  which sup­pos­edly includes for­mer New York mayor Rudi Giu­liani and for­mer Hall of Fame quar­ter­back Terry Brad­shaw, comes the day of news that Palin will be the focus of a real­ity show on TLC. That ought to be inter­est­ing espe­cially con­sid­er­ing the sub­ject is known for mak­ing state­ments that have no basis in real­ity. Some­one once said Brad­shaw couldn’t spell cat if you spot­ted him the “c” and the “t.” I think he’s kind of funny though. Giu­liani, not so much.

Peo­ple are just get­ting their bow­els in an uproar over national pol­i­tics and hav­ing a black per­son as pres­i­dent. I think a good num­ber of folks, I am just guess­ing, prob­a­bly hate the fact that Sea­mus O’Bama, is not a black Irish but rather a black Kenyan-American. Of course with his health plan and the oppo­si­tion party which has just decided not to do did­dly squat on any­thing, a lot of peo­ple are being whipped up in a frenzy. They are threat­en­ing Demo­c­ra­tic politi­cians and being all nasty and s**t.

Me, I am more pissed over this.

Our local police depart­ment appar­ently hasn’t been catch­ing enough peo­ple speed­ing by stopped patrol cars lately so they use a decoy. Now I know that police offi­cers are in dan­ger on the side of the road, as they are on the road, in the office, out on the streets and hang­ing in cop bars. That, plus the fact that you can get a ticket if you don’t, is the rea­son I try to get into a far left lane if I can or slow down 20 mph below the speed limit in the lane next to the stopped po-lice car.

Here in Beau­mont, they are park­ing a patrol car on the shoul­der and stop­ping peo­ple who vio­late the police-passing law.

I just have this pet peeve about being entrapped. Police seem to have more and more rea­sons to pull you over and get in your busi­ness. There is a data­base here in Texas where offi­cers can instantly run your license plates and tell whether you have lia­bil­ity insur­ance. If you don’t, you get a big ticket. I won­der how many of these same peo­ple writ­ing tick­ets com­plain of the manda­tory insur­ance pro­vi­sion of the new health care law? Don’t see the iron in the irony?

Another trap I don’t like is where game war­dens use fake deer to lure hunters to ille­gally shoot their weapons. To me that is just wrong and I don’t even hunt. I won­der how many Sarah Palin has shot? Decoy deer that is. And, what’s next fake fish? Fake bald eagles or whoop­ing cranes? The nerve of people.

Per­haps it is an omi­nous sign that lit­tle has been heard recently of the sea­far­ing war against pirates along the east African coast.

I would have given lit­tle or no thought about the goings-on there had I not read an arti­cle a short time ago about a Somali pirate hav­ing been fatally shot by a pri­vate secu­rity guard on board a Panamanian-flagged freighter owned by the United Arab Emi­rates. The inci­dent appears to be the first such pirate killing by a pri­vate contractor.

In fact, some quick read­ing showed just how clue­less I was about the sit­u­a­tion over there. First, I had no idea of the mil­i­tary struc­ture among inter­na­tional navies patrolling the Indian Ocean for pirates. Oper­a­tion Ata­lanta is what the mis­sion is called and involves the Euro­pean Union Naval Forces, an entity I had largely for­got had existed.

The EU Navy is made up at the present time of navies from eight Euro­pean states: Italy, Nether­lands, Ger­many, France, Spain, Bel­gium, Lux­em­bourg and Greece. Other coun­tries, notably the United States, Aus­tralia and Japan are also among nations in the pirate-fighting busi­ness there.

But what I like­wise didn’t know and is most dis­turb­ing is the extent of the prob­lem right now over there. Two more cargo ships were hijacked Tues­day. One is a Bermuda-flagged ves­sel with own­ers from the British Viri­gin Island and a Maltese-flagged ship with a Turk­ish owner. This was the same day that the pirate was killed while the MV Almezaan man­aged to repel hijackers.

The fatal shoot­ing of the pirate has set off alarm bells among some in the ship­ping indus­try. There are wor­ries that the killing might spur more vio­lence among pirates. Legal issues also com­pli­cate the sit­u­a­tion espe­cially where Soma­lia is involved as that coun­try stews in anarchy.

It’s not a good sit­u­a­tion over there and, as much as I would like to get back on the high seas, I wouldn’t want to be any­where near that east African coast.

Any­time you receive unex­pected money it has to be good. Even if it’s bad or if it turns out bad, when you look and see that check or cold, hard cash, it’s a good thing in my book.

I just got two very clean, very crisp $1 bills in the mail that look at the very least like the I-notes haven’t yet been used to snort cocaine. My serendip­ity comes cour­tesy of The Nielsen Com­pany. Yes, the very ones that rate tele­vi­sion programs.

The rat­ings com­pany sent me a short ques­tion­naire about television-related top­ics and I answered it and used my spit to seal it in their postage paid enve­lope. They even paid for the freak­ing postage after giv­ing me $2 for about three min­utes work, what guys!

I don’t know if they will send me more ques­tions or if I will become an offi­cial mem­ber of the “Nielsen Fam­ily.” I hope so because, as peo­ple who read this blog either occa­sion­ally or reg­u­larly know, I will sure as shootin’ give my opin­ion. Espe­cially for cash money. Espe­cially for serendip­i­tous cash.

Whether one likes or dis­likes the out­come of the U.S. House vote last night approv­ing the Senate’s health care reform pack­age one might think some agree­ment could be found in that it was a his­toric moment.

Or so it would seem.

You don’t have to have spent 20 years in the news­pa­per busi­ness as I did to know there are some vast dif­fer­ences between elec­tronic and actual news­pa­per con­sump­tion as to how news sto­ries are con­veyed to the reader. Head­lines are what I am thinking.

Sure news via the Inter­net has head­lines or what­ever they’re called this week. But there is a world of dif­fer­ence — at least in my opin­ion­ated opin­ion (laugh track) — in the affect (yes, with an “a”) of the “72-point hed” of a news­pa­per and what­ever size of a computer-generated head­line. Those big, black, bold let­ters, be it on broad­sheet or tabloid, just jump up, grab you and often times slap you silly. Then there is the judg­ment, or not, behind the big head.

A case in point is my local daily news­pa­per, the Beau­mont Enter­prise. The Hearst-owned pub­li­ca­tion is con­ser­v­a­tive in its edi­to­r­ial page side but usu­ally doesn’t appear to cross the line too far on the news side with that stance. Their Web site is a whole dif­fer­ent story and I just don’t have time to rant about it although the rel­a­tively new front-page makeover brings the dot-com ele­ment about a stan­dard col­umn and a half all down the paper’s right-hand side. Today it dis­plays one of their idi­otic Web polls which any think­ing per­son — but if you read the reader com­ments on sto­ries on their Web effort you will see think­ing is in short sup­ply — should real­ize means absolutely nothing.

News­pa­pers are a band wagon sort of enter­prise, par­don the pun. One fad is a one-story front, or two, or three, big pho­tos and so-forth. Today’s Beau­mont paper has a main story and a sider as well as a third story on the bot­tom. Now one might guess that since the health reform pas­sage was his­toric that it would be the main story per­haps with a sider of local reac­tion, doc­tors, polit­i­cal lead­ers and the like? No, it was a story titled: “Climb too steep” in an eye-grabbing but not “Sec­ond Com­ing” sort of point. The story was how the local Lamar Uni­ver­sity women’s bas­ket­ball team, which was seeded 14 in the NCAA Regional Tour­na­ment in Austin, was defeated by the No. 3 seed West Vir­ginia 58–43.

Now I watched that game while click­ing back and forth to CNN to check on the sta­tus of the leg­is­la­tion as well as hav­ing had to sur­ren­der both alto­gether for the sea­son open­ing episode on AMC of “Break­ing Bad.” It was fan­tas­tic as I expected.

I sup­pose I can’t blame my local news­pa­per too much for its lead­ing with the local team play­ing in the regional, los­ing, although I think some­thing is a lit­tle out of whack when­ever a huge sports story leads PI and is vir­tu­ally absent in the sports sec­tion, clev­erly named “@ Play.” My thought was: “Well, maybe I was wrong and the pas­sage of a land­mark health care bill wasn’t that big of a deal after all.”

So I checked out some of the papers show­cased in the Newseum’s “Today’s Front Pages” sec­tion. I checked a few papers out at ran­dom and also looked at sev­eral which had local teams in the NCAA March Madness.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Jour­nal, the Post and Courier in Charleston, The Des Moines Reg­is­ter, The Dal­las Morn­ing News, sev­eral of these fairly con­ser­v­a­tive pub­li­ca­tions, all led with and had notice­able head­lines on the leg­is­la­tion. The Spokesman-Review in Spokane had a large ban­ner head: “Health Care Bill Passes.” It had a men’s and women’s teams from Gon­zaga play­ing in the NCAA. Now only the women are left. They did have a large photo of the men’s team, which lost, with the head­line inside the photo: “Bul­lied in Buf­falo,” relat­ing to where their defeat was suffered.

In Green Bay, Wisc., which one would think is a huge sports town despite its pop­u­la­tion being about 100,000 and about the size of Beau­mont, the Green Bay Press-Gazette ran with the large ban­ner “Health care reform passes” and a sub-hed “Repub­li­cans unan­i­mously oppose $940 bil­lion bill.” The Wisconsin-Green Bay women’s team beat Vir­ginia last night and advances. It has a “reefer” or referred to the story at the top of the page for the sports sec­tion. The other front-page sto­ries were about local cen­sus issues and on a statewide hate crimes report.

And what about the area paper of the team that beat Lamar? Well, The Herald-Dispatch in Hunt­ing­ton, W.Va., had a col­or­ful ban­ner with a reefer to the inside on all the region’s teams still sur­viv­ing includ­ing West Vir­ginia, Ken­tucky and Ohio State. Its large photo is of Food Net­work star Jamie Oliver top­ping a story about his show fea­tur­ing Hunt­ing­ton. A large head and text fills the right-hand side of the paper with the story about the health care bill. Oh well. That’s kind of half and half.

You can check out the head­lines your­self and you will find some that ignored the his­toric bill as the huge story that it was but I think many of the edi­tors across the nation real­ized the event’s enormity.

I will not try to second-guess my local news­pa­per. I learned long ago that if you ever tried to bet on how a paper would play a story you would be a big-time loser. I sup­pose one other of the newspaper’s attrib­utes that is lost on the world of elec­tronic news is the his­toric sense of the pub­li­ca­tion. Have you ever saved a news­pa­per after a his­toric event? Maybe it’s just me but I have stored some­where front pages when Rea­gan was shot, the Chal­lenger explo­sion, my lead story in the paper where I was work­ing at the time of the Colum­bia explo­sion, the begin­ning of the Iraq War, 9/11 and more. I think I have saved most, at least sec­tions, of the news­pa­per of just about every major and some minor sto­ries I wrote.

The elec­tronic news plat­form has yet to find a way that will grip its reader with the sense of the moment and the impor­tance of that moment the way the news­pa­per does and has through its exis­tence. I am not par­tic­u­larly happy with my local paper’s choice of story play, but that’s what makes this a great coun­try. That and we have had this extremely con­tentious issue of health care and haven’t had a civil war. That is, not yet.

Dur­ing how­ever long this fight over health care reform has been going on, I have largely been quiet about the sub­ject. Now that it seems to be headed for make or break I will say this: Yipppiiiieeee!!!

I have become so sick of the left and the right and the in between and the media obsess­ing over this issue that I just want every­one to shut the f**k up!

Peo­ple have been get­ting them­selves so worked up in a frenzy with their knick­ers all in a knot that they don’t real­ize just to what extent they are being manip­u­lated — by all sides. The left, the right, the insur­ance com­pa­nies, the med­ical indus­try, the media have all got­ten peo­ple so stirred up that they don’t know what they are fight­ing for or against anymore.

We have a right and we should be pas­sion­ate about some­thing that so affects our lives. But we have to stop and ask our­selves just what it will do to our lives if pro­vi­sions a, b or c of this leg­is­la­tion are passed or what hap­pens if it isn’t enacted. So much of the rhetoric is just that, rhetoric. It’s BS that is aimed more at destroy­ing each other’s polit­i­cal par­ties or stuff­ing the pock­ets of the lob­bies whichever side is court­ing or already receiv­ing their generosity.

I go back to that scene last year where the woman was at a con­gres­sional town hall meet­ing said: “I just want my coun­try back.”

I have to ask: Where did your coun­try go lady? Do you really mean what you are say­ing or is that just some words pro­vided for you to use because you don’t really know what is going on but you know you aren’t for the Demo­c­ra­tic side because of Obama, plus some­body told you you should be out rais­ing hell and you had it rein­forced by Fox News. The Democ­rats are just as guilty. I got an e-mail from Obama’s orga­ni­za­tion today say­ing I should call my con­gress­man to tell him I sup­port this reform and they even gave me a sug­gested script.

It’s  not going to hap­pen though. The main rea­son is because my con­gress­man is Ted Poe, who I con­sider to be on the far right fringe of the Repub­li­can Party. I am not going to waste my breath or a phone call to his office.

Look, I sup­port the reform. I approve much or most of what has been pro­posed. Some of the pro­pos­als stink. I just don’t think that the world is going to end with what­ever out­come hap­pens. I don’t think we will become some new incar­na­tion of the Soviet Union with its pas­sage nor will we all be over­come with a vir­u­lent incur­able dis­ease if it doesn’t pass.

That isn’t to say that our health care sit­u­a­tion won’t become worse with­out the pas­sage of reform. I hardly think it will get bet­ter by itself.

I think Obama and the Democ­rats are right for tak­ing on this issue and fight­ing for its suc­cess. There are scores of issues that need to be acted upon, but like putting off that project at work or pro­cras­ti­nat­ing on that school paper, those things don’t get the atten­tion they need until the last minute or it is too late. For an exam­ple I would look at our cur­rent finan­cial mess.

There is so much that needs to be done in this coun­try and I am talk­ing big things! Among those are infra­struc­ture, mak­ing sure water remains avail­able in the future, I could go on and on.  So I am hop­ing this passes and peo­ple will just be quiet about it for a while. I also know that is the last thing that is going to happen.

A per­sonal dis­as­ter was nar­rowly averted today as I stood in a long, slow line wait­ing to order a buf­falo burger at Novrozky’s here in Beau­mont. That’s not to be con­fused with Roznovsky’s, also a ham­burger joint, some 90 miles west in Houston.

Now since I’ve men­tioned two restau­rants it might look as if I am about to do a review or some­thing. I will get to my short review of the for­mer after the averted disaster.

Sev­eral women came in with three or four lit­tle golden-haired girls and joined the already long lunch line. I must have waited 10 min­utes since the restau­rant, at its busiest time of the lunch crowd, had only an aver­age of 1.5 women tak­ing orders. It is easy to imag­ine that hav­ing to stand in a long line, that a bunch of lit­tle chil­dren are bound to become rest­less and bored. That is what appar­ently was going on with this one lit­tle girl behind me as I stood some­what side­ways watch­ing a NCAA March Mad­ness games on one of the restaurant’s TV screens.

Blondie was, of course, cute as a speck­led pup with a pink rib­bon tied around its neck. Or a lit­tle pit bull pup with a spiked, leather col­lar around its neck, if you hap­pen to be of the gangsta vari­ety. The lit­tle girl was about waist-high to me which meant that if she was to start doing windmill-type motions with her arms and hands she could very well hit some guy where it might have just hurt like the dick­ens. I wasn’t hit there but I was acci­den­tally struck once at a loca­tion too close for com­fort. Thank­fully the errant slap from lit­tle wind­mill girl didn’t hit me there because that would have been embar­rass­ing as hell and some­one would have prob­a­bly pulled out a cell phone and took a video of me being bent over in agony where it would have ended up on You Tube.

Guys, watch your valu­ables in a crowd like this!

Now you are prob­a­bly ask­ing why I am telling you this? I would imag­ine most men would not like to talk about being racked by a 10-year-old girl in a pub­lic place. You already know my feel­ings. But I say this to issue a warn­ing to some of you par­ents of younger chil­dren out there.

I know a par­ent can’t pre­pare for every inevitabil­ity. How­ever, had the mother or per­son who was super­vis­ing this child seen what hap­pened — and  I am not sure that she did not — she might have issued an apol­ogy or asked her child to apol­o­gize. Obvi­ously, I could not say any­thing lest I be ostra­cized at the very least, or per­haps even accused of some­thing unseemly. And it wasn’t even my fault!

As it was, the group of par­ents didn’t even notice in the five or so sec­onds in which it occurred that I picked up the kid by her hands and swung her around like a Tilt-o-Whirl. Boy, did she stag­ger around for awhile after­ward. The par­ents just went on talk­ing and didn’t even notice. Only kidding!

On to the food. It was about an hour before my food was ready. That’s kind of slow even for Novrozsky’s. I guess they keep low over­head by putting all the per­son­nel back in the kitchen instead of out front. Seri­ously, they could have used one more per­son to han­dle the crowd. I saw one party of six-to-eight leave because of the long line. Of course, my back and feet hurt­ing didn’t help.

After finally get­ting the food it was good, as it usu­ally is. How­ever, the bot­tom part of my wheat bun was kind of soggy. I am not sure the rea­son for it unless the let­tuce was unusu­ally wet. Nonethe­less, after wait­ing for an hour for my food, I wasn’t about to go back and com­plain. They did run out of unsweet­ened tea, which I men­tioned to the hired help just after order­ing. I wasn’t keen on spend­ing a long period of time with­out drink­ing what I had ordered, espe­cially after almost $2 for it.

The tea was ready only min­utes before my burger and onion rings. I know I shouldn’t eat onion rings on my diet and with dia­betes and all. But it’s some­thing I do once in awhile. I’ll try to do bet­ter, I promise. Hey, at least I don’t smoke any­more. The onion rings were fan­tas­tic. And the burger was good. A good buf­falo burger with fat-free cheese is what it was. The burger itself is low in fat, or so I am told, and miss­ing is sup­pos­edly some of that other stuff not good for you in beef. I still like beef, espe­cially beef hamburgers.

Novrozky’s, with an “N,” can be found in a num­ber of South­east Texas towns and in South­west­ern Louisiana. I rec­om­mend them includ­ing the one where I ate today on Dowlen at Fol­som in the Kroger Shop­ping Cen­ter. I would sug­gest you get there ahead of the lunch crowd or just after. They do have a drive-through and have take-out orders, but you are pretty screwed either way if you go at the height of lunch time. If you have the patience and aren’t afflicted with back or any other kind of pain that might erupt from stand­ing and wait­ing in line for long peri­ods of time, then I would nat­u­rally sug­gest you either come back or go some­where else.

They’ve got great burg­ers as long as they aren’t drown­ing in wet let­tuce or some­thing else. They are also a lit­tle pricey for ham­burg­ers in this area, almost $13 for my buf­falo burger, onion rings and a drink. They are among the best, non-national, of ham­burger places in South­east Texas.