Eight Feet Deep

Perhaps I was a little premature about a “new look” for the old blog. Maybe that should be called “premature eblogulation?”

My friend Paul worked furiously to get EFD back in to fighting shape after some type of virus got into the “wires.” There is still a good intention — and you know what we say about those — to make changes here and there that will continue to improve the blog … so we can start and do it all over again. Life is a wheel, friends and neighbors.

Today I am in an undisclosed location in the Dallas-Fort Worth-general area undergoing a training mission. I decided I would call it that rather than a “class” or a “week-long conference.” Words spice up the dull in life. That’s why lies were made.

A lot is going on in the country, in the world back home in Beaumont, Texas, where I live. Wow, four murders in two days. A mother and daughter murdered, one man shot dead in an apartment courtyard and a convenience store clerk killed last night. That’s a lot of carnage for a town of some 115,000. It’s not unheard of, but it is shocking for most folks. Who knows why such things happen. One of the murder suspects in one of the cases allegedly held up an arcade recently and made the workers take off their clothes before he left. Well, let’s hope this is an anomaly. Elseways, we in a heap o’ trouble, boy.

My friend Paul, who knows the workings of this WordPress world much better than I, spent a lot of hours blowing up the old WP version and putting this one together. There is still some tweaking. There’s always tweaking. Nonetheless, Paul of Tokyo, you did a great  job. Many thanks dude.

I’ll be up in the land of Brave Combo next week, a.k.a. Denton, Texas. I doubt I will be doing any polka, much less nuclear polka as I will be there for a training mission. (That sounds much more mysterious than saying I have a class next week.) So I may miss a day here and there on this space. More space for others?

Dick’s First Law of Expectations

For every expectation: a, there is a postulated result: b, that is presumed to produce a known or unknown state: c. However, the realization of that state is instead the known and much dreaded result of xyz$@*%!@*#!

A federal judge in Arizona has struck down some of the most controversial parts of that state’s new law that would require state and local law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of those who have been stopped. This is just the first strike in what will likely be several stops in court. Of course, it could end up in the Supreme Court and the law might be totally upheld because of that court’s conservative majority. Remember the “election” of President Bush?

The requirement that a local police officer check the immigration status of someone they have detained for traffic or other reasons makes no sense other than the dislike for one’s skin being a different color. Should this law eventually get the go-ahead, how many Latinos “born in the U.S.A.,” as Mr. Springsteen once sang, will be arrested and go to jail for nothing but being Latino? It doesn’t just threaten those of darken skin shades. Local police officers have different ways of interpreting different laws and sometimes those interpretations are wrong. So ask yourself this: Is the wrongful arrest of your son or daughter or grandchild worth your wrath over those who are here illegally?

That’s something to think about, Jedge.