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Camo camo everywhere and not a place to hide

Camouflage has long been a popular item in the world. Animals use their natural colors and patterns to blend in to keep from getting blasted from a hunter who is dressed in camouflage to keep from being seen by the animals they are a’ blastin’. Of course, the military has long used camo to keep from getting whole armies blasted by whole other armies wearing camo. Seems like a lot of blasting is associated with camo.

Of course, camo has become a fashion statement over the past number of years. It seems it is something the chic and the redneck have in common. There are all sorts of camo clothing — camo bikini tops and bottoms, camo prom dresses and tuxes. It isn’t limited to people. There is various camo wear for that special dog in your life, cars, trucks and SUVs can be found in different camo patterns and of course, your favorite deer stand.

I thought I had seen it all in camo until today while driving down a country road in nearby Hardin County near the Big Thicket National Preserve. Just past a field of donkeys or jackasses or whatever they were I spotted a mobile home with a forest-type camo pattern. Parked next to the mobile home was about the reddest, uncamouflaged pickup truck I have ever seen with tires that seemed as if they were my height — I am just a 1/2 inch short of six feet not accounting for surgery on my neck which may have taken off an inch or so — that made the top of the pickup cab seem as if it was about as tall as the trailer house.

Trailer houses are what we folks from East Texas used to call mobile homes before companies started calling them “manufactured homes.” Yeah, they’s manufactured all right. They’s manufactured like a trailer house. I am not being snooty or anything here, believe me. I lived in a trailer house one time, right by a railroad track that ran through the woods so that when a thunderstorm came up at the same time a train went by you didn’t know whether it was the SP freight train or a F-3 tornado.

Back to camouflage, it’s now in every color imaginable. Camoclothingonline.com has got your traditional woodland camo patterns, city camo (which I don’t understand at all,) sky blue, stinger yellow, desert camo, ultra violet, OD, pink and a few more.

The best gag gift I have seen comes from Stupid.com.  They’ve got Camo golf balls. “Bring the frustration back to your golf game,” their ad says. That is just pure fun, unlike the stupidity of the new “shipboard” camo found with the new Navy Working Uniform. The NWUs, as they are assigned with an acronym, are basically the same as the Army and Marine Corps working uniforms, BDUs in the ARMY and MARPATs in the Marines, only with blue camo. That camo is supposed to hide stains and blend in with colors on shipboard as well as utilize the traditional Navy blue, according to a Wikipedia article. That’s probably the best explanation I’ve heard so far. Although I think the Army BDU is a very functional, and not a bad looking combat utility uniform, I think it has no place on a sailor.

Even the blue jumpers with the rolled collars which I used to wear for working uniforms in the 70s look better for a sailor than does something making them look like GI Joe. That is, unless of course, they are in a combat situation that calls for the NWU and camo, such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. And while we’re on the subject, and I know I have probably covered this here somewhere before, but the Navy Service Uniform is just hideous. No more Winter Blues or Summer Whites. The Winter Blues were really a black shirt and black pants but I thought they were a sharp looking. The summer whites were a pain to wear for more than a special occasion during the summer like a change of command, but they also looked pretty snazzy. The new uniform combines the two, I guess to save money, and makes sailors look more like Marines. That shouldn’t be, you know, because of the relationship between the Navy and Marines. The Marines are a corps, which is part of the Navy. It isn’t the other way around. Not saying anything. That’s just the way it is.

Well, I glad I got that off of my chest, especially since I cannot foresee myself ever getting back into any kind of Navy or other military uniform. I am sure the young sailors who actually do the work these days have their own feelings. This is just what a Navy veteran says and I doubt my opinion counts much in the Pentagon, the Octagon or even the Trapezoid.

The camo trailer house though, that was something pretty unusual to see even for Southeast Texas.

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Here’s hoping a storm doesn’t Richard us around

Everyone who matters in the world of weather in my region seemed to have pretty much said this year’s hurricane season is dead. The best local TV weatherman said so. The second-best local TV weatherman said so. Even the lousiest local TV weatherman said so.

To top it off, even the real professionals from the National Weather Service office in Lake Charles told me so in person just about two weeks ago. A couple of forecasters from the NWS had a little booth set up at the fire festival and Dog-Tober-Fest in downtown Beaumont on Oct.  9. I asked them point blank if you could stick a fork in the hurricane season here and they said yes.

I hope they are right. That does not prevent me from looking at a tropical weather system that is centered about 160 miles southwest of Grand Cayman. The National Hurricane Center gives the low about a  70 percent chance of becoming a tropical cyclone over the next 48 hours. If named, it would be — sigh — Richard. That would be really unfortunate wouldn’t it, Dick? Why yes, it  would.

The computer “spaghetti” models on Weather Underground have the budding storm going here there and everywhere, even in the general direction of Texas and Louisiana. Let’s hope not. We should hope all our weather guys are right and you can close the barn door on this year’s hurricane season. You see, I’m on vacation and I’ve got, at least, a few plans. I hate to sound selfish, but if not me, then who?

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Is something out there? Maybe it’s an extracted molar

This afternoon I went to a new dentist and had what I consider as the world’s record for a dental office visit for a tooth extraction or anything else for that matter. I went right in, the doctor was the only person who works there. He yanked my extremely loose back molar and the whole thing took 30 minutes from the time I entered until I exited. The visit went so fast that I forgot to ask him the question I had intended to: Where do all those teeth go when you pull them? Do sell them to jewelers who make chains to sell in foreign countries? Are they gathered up and put onto a rocket and shot into outer space? It would make sense. Unless they are recycled. I mean, we are running out of landfill space. I know this because I once served on a sanitary landfill task force in an East Texas county.

I say all that because I came across this article. I hardly ever read Women’s Day and I seldom read or listen to anything about UFOs, but I found this story … well, I found this story. So check it out. My mouth is still numb and I have a hard time thinking straight when my mouth is numb. I don’t know why. So don’t ask me.

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Right wing candidates behaving like drug cartel thugs

Some of the loudest squawking about illegal immigration is coming from the Right and specifically Tea Party types. Those same types are also using the drug cartel violence as a major reason for supporting moves such as mass deportation or imprisonments of illegal immigrants not to mention locking down the borders.

So perhaps it is ironic that some Tea Party candidates are using the same type of intimidation against reporters that has led to the deaths of more than 30 Mexican journalists in the past four years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalist. Nothing so extreme has come from the Right as killing reporters on el Norte side of the border, at least yet. But the recent roughing-up of an Alaska journalist who dared to ask Republican and Tea Party Senate Candidate Joe Miller a valid question at an event shows that the Right is not  above using violence to intimidate U.S. reporters.

Then you have the Republican and another Tea Partyier running for New York governor who threatened to “take out” a reporter. GOP candidate Carl Paladino became engaged in what was described as a near scuffle with a columnist who had been writing about his out-of-wedlock daughter.

What is even more shameful is the American public is letting this kind of behavior become the norm. Perhaps some in the public dislike the press or at least those who don’t report subjects slanted in their favor like the GOP state-run TV channel Fox News. Will this country have to resort to protection details for reporters like in Mexico? I can’t see U.S. journalists allowing that to happen because they rightfully don’t want to be subsidized by the government.

Yet, until some Americans start complaining about the behavior of these thug politicians and their entourages, we will tread more and more down the path being traveled by those journalists down South of the border. And where those reporters are increasingly ending up is not at all a pleasant destination.

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Breaking: I’ve been eating healthy all these years at Jason’s Deli

There had to be some reason I ate at the original Jason’s Deli at Gateway Shopping Center in Beaumont. Texas. There was. I was hungry.

I could have lied and said I ate there because it made the list — featured on Yahoo — on foodie site Shine of top 5 healthiest fast food restaurants in the country. Admission: I have only dined at two places on this list, Jason’s and Au Bon Pain. This Beaumont-based chain of 206 locations in the West, Midwest and South, was named No. 2. Not too bad for local boys Joe Tortorice Jr. and his partners Rusty Coco, Pete Verde and Pat Broussard who started the restaurant business in 1976.

It is hard to say if I ate at Jason’s before the mid-90s when I moved to Beaumont for the second time — this is time three — I would have think so. But whether I did or didn’t, it’s one of my favorite places to eat although they seem sometimes to verge on getting too big for their britches. That’s not good, especially for the second healthiest fast food place in the country.

All these years of eating there, and today, I never knew it was so healthy. Just watch out for the sodium.