It has been a slow week for news items that interest me.  I really dont care who we tortured in order to get info that might have saved someone life.  The tortured do not torture as they have simplified things by simply chopping a captives head off while filming for news at 6.  The folks in Wasington are spending way too much time on this subject.  The tortured, or some of their folks, have vowed to retaliate in some way.  Okay, so until this thing has blown over I will not eat at the new middle eastern restaurant here in Corpus.  I like the stuffed grape leaves but can forgo them if it keeps in out of a jihadist shoot out during the lunch hour.

I dont care who has knocked up any of the Kardashians.  Period.

Labron James, a basketball player has committed an error by touching the Princess while she was having a picture made with him.  Hey, she is not the princess of anyplace this side of the pond.  Over in Britain, well, dont touch the little gal.  Over here, you want your picture made with a basketball star, you have to suffer the indignation of being touched.  Again, too much being made of this situation.  No one seems to ever say what they mean in these cases.  Labron should have simply said, I dont give a damn and be done with it.  The worst thing to happen would be the Queen would refuse to come to a Cav game.  Again, who gives a damn.

I will continue to watch the news to see if there is an event that can really get me revved up, but it is looking grim.  I search the internet news items each morning but mostly see articles on the top ten most beautiful skinny women in VS underwear.  Does anyone know anyone who wears that stuff?

Chuy the newshound

I occasionally watch the news shows such as the Kelly report, O’Reilly, etc.  I don’t have a favorite because all them apparently have an agenda.  They are not reporting the news in  an unbiased manner, but simply are doing what I am doing at this very moment, giving you my views and thoughts on a subject that I am not an expert on.  There are several jokes about opinions and about things that we all have one of that I wont be specific about.  You have all heard the joke.

The recent events in Missouri have reinforced my thoughts about racial equality.  I know that African americans were brought to our shores against their will.  My family owned many of these individuals back in Mississippi in days gone by.  I have not ever owned anyone.  I have employed people who might think I was a slave driver but they got to go home at night and got paid a fair wage so dont think they were in too much stress.  It baffles the hell out of me when I see a person of color running out of a liquor store carrying 3 quarts of lemon flavored vodka and a big orange drink, hollering about polilce brutality.  The sumbitch just broke the window out of the store with a baseball bat and he is yelling that he is not getting a fair shake.  Free vodka is pretty damned fair to me.  The step father of the young man (deceased) that caused this ado was taped while he stood on a car hood urging the mob to burn things down.  He grabbed his crotch more times than MJ.  He did not, and I remind you that I may not have been present, look to me that he was in a great deal of discomfort about the loss of his wife’s son.  He appeared to me that he might have been a tad disappointed that he wasnt on the vodka run down at the liquor store.  It seems to me that if we had a few less apperances by Al Sharpton and persons of his ilk in times of strife that we would be much better off.

I dont think the Furgason, Mo situation has helped relations between police and the public. I dont think it ever had a chance to do that.  Setting up a commission to study whether police have become too much like a military unit will not help matters either.  What I think will help is for each of us to try to do the best we can to be nice to our fellow man, no matter what the color of their skins.  I dont mean that you have to be nice to the guy who loots your liqour store, but I know that I can improve my relations with some people.

G

It is holiday time again.  To say that our family is a foodie family would be an understatement of vast proportions.  We live the food industry. We subscribe to more cooking magazines than most family know exist.  We watch cooking shows on TV. We have cookbooks from almost every ethnicity on earth and can cook from some of them.  One of my favorite cookbooks in entitled “White Trash Cooking”.  Our holidays are defined by our menus.

My favorite meal, hands down, is Thanksgiving.  It consists of Roasted turkey, cornbread dressing, giblet gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, fruit salad, dinner rolls, and pumpkin pie.  There are very few variations from this menu.  I always cook a slightly larger turkey than we can eat and we make way more dressing than that.  These two items are critical for late night snacking, and meals in the days following.  Dressing, my wife makes the best cornbread dressing in the country.  No, there are no damned walnuts, oysters, or any other foreign matter in her dressing.  It consists of cornbread, biscuits, onions, celery, Swanson’s chicken broth, crushed sage and salt and pepper.  I usually hope the green beans get eaten that day at lunch because they serve no purpose on a late night dinner roll slider containing turkey, dressing, a little dab of cranberry sauce and a spoon of gravy.  Hot or cold, a damned fine snack.

Christmas dinner usually follows the dark meat menu.  That is, prime rib roast, maybe a leg of lamb, or a pork roast.  Some roasted potatoes and other root vegetables.  Mandatory green beans along with some au jus gravy, dinner rolls and a dessert  of some kind.

New Years day is almost always chips, dips and finger food.

Easter Sunday consists mostly of leg of lamb, mint jelly, roasted veggies.

You can almost always tell what season it is by what we eat.  I like it that way.  I like tradition and I dont normally like surprises.  There are things that are just too good to be changed.

Chewey Cowan

Just learned last night that a class mate from High School had died on Sunday.  I cant remember having seen Diane since High School but do remember her .  I hate to hear that anyone I know has passed away but most especially hate it when they are my age.  It makes me painfully aware that I am no longer bullet proof.  I am aware that each morning I take 8 pills and one injection but somehow that addition of medication to my system does not have the same shock value as that of reading an old friend’s obit.  That brings it home.

God bless you Diane

We rarely ever hear of a town drunk anymore.  When we were growing up there was one in every small town in America,  He was usually a fellow who got along well with others, worked most of the time and was generally avoided or pitied by most who felt he should have had his life on a different track.  When sober, the town drunk would do anything for anybody and was glad to do the favor.  He was generally an amiable fellow.

We no longer have that fellow to look at.  We now have homeless people, who are of a totally different genre, and we have celebrity drunks.  The homeless are mostly not amiable.  The celebrity drunks are becoming less amiable all the time.  However, the celebrity does have rehab to fall back on.  Screw up Joe Bob?  Check in the clinic for a non-specific period of time in order to allow someone to help you find the true meaning of life.  Find out what is making you a person who self destruct.  Beat your wife and then check in so you wont have to face the consequences.  Lay around the rec room at the clinic and listen to other people who can’t cope.  Announce that you are a better person for the treatment and go back to doing what you did before.

Phelps, the swimmer, has just checked into a rehab clinic to find out why he is hell-bent to perdition.  I can tell him in a short number of very carefully chosen words. Buddy, just because you can swim fast doesn’t make you bulletproof or superhuman.  GET A GRIP.  Yes, a cocktail or a beer tastes good.  Probably much better than jail sandwiches, which are normally made of stale bread and week old baloney.  Check into a rehab clinic whose dietician used to work for Sheriff Joe Aparo out of Phoenix.  A few weeks of that dietary regimen and you will be back on the straight and narrow, never to vacillate again.

People of great and grand stature should be extra careful where they step because dog doo is so much harder to scrape off a foot made of clay.

G

As many of you know, Dorothy and I just returned from a 33 day visit to Scandinavia.  Yes, 33 days.  It was a long time to be away from the comforts of home.  We were fortunate to be able to stay in some of the best hotels in the world but even with that, they are not our home.  Little things, like the toilet, are things you get used to.  A couple of years ago we refurbished our home and we replaced our toilets with the ones that are designed for old people.  They are a bit taller and easier to get up and down on.  A little thing but something you notice when your are sitting on a toilet that has you doubled up like a 12 year old gymnastics student.  Yes, there is a telephone right there on the wall but who wants to be the one to call the front desk and tell them to send someone up to help you up off the potty.  We stayed at several hotels where our bathroom had a magnificent view of the port or the city or the park nearby.  I can only assume that if I am sitting there contemplating the world’s troubles and can watch a cruise ship sail by, then there is a fair chance that an observant tourist could just as easy be watching me contemplating.  A small thing but one that can cause one some second thoughts.  These particular bathrooms had not drapes for the windows by the toilet so I have a feeling they may have been charging for the show.

Well, I havent seen any photos of myself appearing on the news or on facebook so think maybe I was lucky.  Photos could have gone viral.

Gary (marco polo) Cowan

When Dorothy was an elementary student she saw a picture of a ship sailing down a fjord in Norway.  We all saw the same picture in our geography books.  Dorothy loved that picture and put that on her bucket list.  After thinking about it for 60 years, we said, hell why not.  She spent  6 months plus planning a trip that would allow us to see Scandanavia.

We left Corpus Christi on August 18 th and returned yesterday, September 21, 2014.  We toured Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.  Wow. it was a trip.  We rode airplanes, ferries, automobiles and trains.

We ate like kings, slept like royalty and walked like a foot soldier.  I lost 17 lbs in the process.  However, my posterior is dragging today like I was 71 years old,  Oh, that is how old I am.

I am going to bore you who read my little blog and I am sorry, but I will try to keep things interesting from the perspective of a person who sees things a shade different from most folks.  I hope I dont get redundent or boring but I will see what I can do.

Chuy

D and I are leaving tomorrow on vacation.  We are going to far away places that some could call exotic.  I will think of them as exotic and erotic if I run into the Finnish girls luge team.  Just joshing.

I will try to keep up some kind of travelog so check you ghomercowan.com on occasion.  I may try to include some pics of actual snow or something.  Me in a reindeer hat will bring a hoot or two I am sure.

Bon Voyage you all.

Chuy

I have noticed the increase in phone calls that I receive on my cell phone that are objectionable.  I can remember when I first got a cell phone, only people I knew could call me.  No Mas.  Today, on the way home from the ranch I got a call from “UNKNOWN” and I knew right away that this was going to be a call I would not normally get.  I answered anyway because I was kinda in a pissy mood.  A voice identified herself as a political poll taker, seeking opinions about political feelings in the state of Texas.  I said, sure, I would be glad to give my opinion.  Before she could start her list of questions I simply said.  My opinion is that we should hang every damned one of the sumbitches and start over.  There was a silence at her end of the phone and she simply said, Thank you sir for you candid opinion.  Somehow I got the feeling she really didnt want my opinion.  I laughed so hard I damned near run off the road.

One of the things my two cousins and I did during the summer in Pecos was to go to the city dump and catch skunks.  My older cousin Bobby would operate on them and remove their stink gland.  This was a delicate operation as it consisted of unpuckering the rectum to expose the pistols that sprayed the foulest of odors.  Normally my job was to hold the flashlight while Bobby did the cuttin.  Lessie held the skunk down.  You can only imagine how still an animal can become when someone is cutting things off its rectum with the aide of a single edge gillette razor blade.  The skunk was normally inside a burlap bag.  We had the procedure down to a science.  However, there were mishaps and they were not pretty.

How, you might ask, does hunting skunks relate to political polls.  Well sometimes even the best laid plans and the purest of intentions just seem to turn to caca.  The lady who called probably had a very nice and orderly list of questions that someone had told her would reveal the true feelings of the people of Texas, concerning the political fortunes of our country.  However, she had the misfortune to call an old skunk hunter, who knows what a skunk smells like, and her plan turned a bit foul. She is probably still sitting at her desk, looking at her phone, thinking, who in the hell do I give this poll to?

Chuy the opinionated

1.  The check is in the mail

2.  I will not get you pregnant

3.  I will not send troops into Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Ethiopia, etc.

Is there a soul left on the planet that believes any of the above blatant lies?  I would hope not.  We are bombarded daily with a steady stream of I will not’s.  Then while we are sleeping they get done anyway.  It’s kinda our fault for sleeping, I guess.  I only sleep about 5 hours each nite so if some of ya’ll could volunteer to watch while I catch those few hours then maybe we can watch what is going on.  Question?  The man won in a landslide, twice, but I’ll be damned if I can find anyone who voted for him.  Who did and who didnt?

My travel advisor and I are leaving in about a week for a bucket list trip. She has always wanted to see the fjords of Norway and I have always wanted to see the reindeer people.  So, that’s what we are going to do.  I have also always wanted to take a finnish sauna with the Finish women’s ski or luge team.  I dont know how much that would cost but lets all hope it’s less than I think.  However, if they will take AMEX then price is not object, my children can pay for it with my estate.  I am looking forward to having some nubile young Scandinavian beat me with a birch branch. LOL. I have been eating pickled herring for the last week just to get in shape.  They seem to eat a lot of herring and salmon over there.  I am at one with herring, salmon, stinky cheese and lingonberry preserves.  I also like dark bread spread with reindeer butter.  Dorothy is not much on breakfasts but I sure am and the Norse are famous for large breakfast buffets.  Oh, ya’ll dont worry about me getting fat because traveling with D is akin to a trek.  Man can that gal walk. Except for a knife made by the Sami (reindeer people) I can’t think of much I will bring back.  I am going to try to bring back some dried salmon but will understand if customs eats it. But they might not, D and I took the time to apply for a pass that lets us avoid customs in some cases.  We had to apply thru the Border Patrol or home land security and they took care of it.  We will see.  I may be writing from a Federal correction facility later this year.

I want all of ya’ll to promise to stay healthy while I am gone.  I dont want to hear any bad news that would ruin my vacation.  I dont want to hear anyone cough on the airplane either.  That Ebola scares the shitaske out of me and I dont want to be stranded in London.  Their food is not all that exciting.

Take care

Gary