He's Alive!! The Joe Hoffman Story

No, there is not a religious message in this post. It's about my old high school classmate, Joe Hoffman. If I remember correctly, Joe may have abandoned high school sometime in our senior year to get married. Of course, it has been 55 years, so maybe I have him confused with someone else. But I don't think so.

Joe Hoffman is famous in the Leto High School Class of 1971 as being the only guy who they have to keep telling us is still alive. Why, you may ask? Apparently about twenty years ago, someone must have reported to our class website that Joe had passed away, became past tense, took a dirt nap, whatever expression you prefer for death. They have spent the last thirty years telling us that he is still alive. Old habits die hard?

Joe and I were both in the Leo Club at Leto High School. The Leo Club was the only group that I ever joined in school. We were both charter members of Leo when the club was started in our junior year. We did a lot of good stuff in our time in the Leo Club. The guy who was our club President was Dennis Barry. I think that Dennis lives in the Knoxville, Tennessee area. I have unsuccessfully tried to contact Dennis over the years. If you guessed that I have never had a response from Dennis, you are correct. There seems to be a pattern here?

Anyway, I received a message from Joe today on the Classmates website. I had sent him a message a little more than three years ago, so I was a little surprised that there was a response. 

I did let Joe know that there is a 55-year class reunion planned for October this year. My beloved and I are not attending as I had already bought tickets to a concert with the Bellamy Brothers taking place about 15 miles from home. That's 674 miles closer than the class reunion in Tampa.

What's the downside to not attending the reunion? I won't be able to tell them that I can confirm that Joe Hoffman is actually still alive. Myabe Joe will even attend? I don't think so. Beyond that, the fifty-year reunion provided me with enough material for about five or six blog posts. I doubt that I will get that kind of story mileage out of the Bellamy Brothers concert. But I would rather stay home and complain about something else.

I "Googled" the "Leto High School Class of 1971". This is the response generated by AI.            

"The Franklin D. Leto High School Class of 1971 in Tampa, Florida, is, is planning its 55th class reunion for October 3, 2026. Alumni connect through dedicated online platforms to share memories, post updates, and view memorial lists."

Unfortunately for AI, it is the "A.P. Leto High School Class of 1971". I have never heard of "Franklin D. Leto". 

Anyway, thanks for sending me a response, Joe!! It's good to hear from someone who you haven't heard from in 55 years.

Making the Big Time, The Encore

In my post yesterday, "Just Thinking", I have apparently angered the content gods on Blogger/Google. For just the second time in twenty-one years and 1571 posts, they placed a "content warning". on my post. This will cause the six people who read this to pay more attention to my words.

I think that Google has an issue with slang terms. Whether it was my writing about Clinton placing his manhood into some young intern's oral opening or Joe Biden losing control of his bowels on the carpet at the White House, they just don't tell you anything other than that their system was offended. If George Carlin had tried writing his seven words on Blogger, Google would not have known whether to defecate or go blind.

I am fascinated by the fact that Google will not list this blog, which they host on Blogger, in their search results for "Random Moments of Lunacy". These guys are working way too hard to "protect" their users. Basically, you can go to a porn site or a site celebrating the joys of homosexual behavior quicker than you can read the swill that I write. Basically, Google doesn't want you to find this blog. If you do end up here, they want to make it difficult for you to read. WOW!!

While the Internet gods and goddesses proclaim that the people must be free from government interference with freedom of speech, they are more than willing to tell the great unwashed what ideas that they are free to express or the terms that they may use to express those same ideas. This is the arrogance of the overeducated. Go figure!!

The construction people working on the new wing at the White House have workers on the job site more than sixteen hours a day. This doesn't mean that each worker is there sixteen hours a day, it means that there are workers are out there working most of the day. This concept is unknown in government circles as most government workers struggle to put in an eight-hour shift. 

The pantywaist whiners on the USS Lincoln are heading home. I believe that the actual whiners are a small percentage of the crew. They are probably the guys who joined so that the taxpayers could pay for their college later. They probably won't finish college either. They will become military analysts for CNN, Newsweek, MSNOW or Newsweek. Those who can't, teach. Or they create standards for Blogger?

Enough about the hypocrisy of Google, we will move on to other subjects tomorrow.

Just Thinking?

 I graduated from Leto High School 55 years ago. When I was in high school, Newsweek was a second-rate news magazine. Fast forward 55 years and Newsweek is still a second-rate, horseshit news magazine. There's more honest and accurate information in the National Enquirer. 

Democrats and other assorted dumbasses are losing their minds about the ballroom that Trump is building at the White House. Today, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that construction could continue while the case festers in federal courts. 

Leftists are screaming about the "dignity" of the White House. Obviously, these people were asleep when Joe Biden shit on the carpet and blamed his dog or Hunter. I can't remember which one took the blame. They were asleep when Bill Clinton was getting blowjobs in the restroom adjacent to the Oval Office. Direct me to the plans to remove that restroom from the building. But let Trump decide to build something that we actually need and the left goes apeshit!

When he was President, Barack Obam had a basketball court, just like the one he had growing up in Indonesia, built on the White House lawn.  Please direct me to all of the lawsuits filed by Republicans to block that. What part of the historical theme of the White House did that basketball court fill?

For many years for big state dinners and similar events, they have been putting up a big tent on the White House lawn and having Porta-jons stationed on the White House lawn for visiting dignitaries and other guests to use during these large state dinners. When you invite people over for dinner at your house, do you bring in Porta-jons for them to use out on the lawn? Do you put a tent on your lawn?

By the way, what's the security level in a large tent compared to a ballroom built with security of the President in mind? For years people in government have bitched about the lack of a room at the White House large enough to entertain a crowd. Now that Trump is working on solving that problem, they all claim to be in love with tents and Porta-Potties.

Just for a personal perspective on this, I sell some of my quality collectibles at various venues. Most have a combination of Porta-Potties and real restrooms. I will walk 100 yards to go to a real restroom rather than 30 feet to a Porta-Jon. As a child, we visited some homes where people still used outhouses due to a lack of indoor plumbing. That's not a trip down Memory Lane that I want to relive.

It's time for liberals to get a life. If Trump announces a cure for cancer, Democrats will attack him for putting doctors out of work. 

I think that the Truth in Labeling laws would compel Democratics Socialists of America to acknowledge that DSA is just liberal code for "Communists".

I just want to know which socialist country is it that they want the United States to emulate. While the commie pinko fags that make up the Democratic Party rave about socialized medicine, their Socialist friends from England and Canada come here for important surgeries. If it involves dying while waiting your turn on a list for treatment, is it really medical care? The national Dental program in England is why British people never smile. Socialized medicine is worth every penny that you pay for it. And it's free.

I hate to talk history with any of those morons from the Democratic Socialist of America but here's a fact for those folks. Nobody was ever shot by border guards in Berlin trying to climb over the Berlin Wall to get INTO East Germany. Hundreds died trying to come into the West. 

We moved to Tampa, Florida in 1960. I went to school with lots of kids whose families had fled Castro and Communist Cuba. Zig Ziglar said it best, "Nobody crossing the Straits of Florida leaving Cuba on a raft ever ran into people on a raft headed the other way."

The problem with the DSA and their followers is not about forms of government. Socialism is all about the "Pursuit of Free Shit" by people too lazy to work for something. It's the Great GIMME culture. More on that at another time.

No Mo Ro Co Fo No Ca

 If you haven't figured out the title of this post, it is shorthand for "No More Roy Cooper For North Carolina". It would sound better in a redneck rap video.

After fleecing the taxpayers of North Carolina for almost forty years, Roy Cooper has come out of retirement to "save us" by running for the United States Senate. 

In response to Cooper's decision to run for the Senate, the Republican party is running Michael Whatley who may have slightly more name recognition in North Carolina than I do. While Whatley seems to be making gains in his campaign, it's time to take the gloves off and really attack Cooper. 

Cooper was the North Carolina Attorney General for sixteen years. When he decided to run for Governor in 2016, fellow leftist Democrat Josh Stein ran for the Attorney General position. Stein's biggest campaign promise was that he was going to clear up a huge backlog of rape kits in North Carolina that had not been tested. What Stein never mentioned and not a single reporter ever asked, was that this "huge backlog" was a product of sixteen years of Roy Cooper as Attorney General. Who knew that so many people could keep a secret?

Gov Ro Co kept North Carolina in a state of emergency for COVID that lasted 888 days. I guess that it was just his way of keeping extra power until it got closer to election time. He and his accomplice Mandy Cohen were obviously in the running for an Academy Award in their never-ending moans that we were all about to die. 

I am not going to tell you that Cooper handpicked the questions that he would answer from the press, but nobody ever asked Roy why he was in Tampa on a fundraising mission when the COVID shit hit the fan early on. Trump and Fauci were on television while Cooper was shaking down liberals in Tampa to support his gubernatorial campaign.

Keeping that travel in mind, the NC Constitution says that when the Governor is out of State, the Lt. Governor leads the government. In eight years as governor, Cooper never told the Lt. Governor that he would be out of state. The NC Highway Patrol would not even tell reporters that they had taken Cooper to the airport. They would only tell the press how many miles they had carried him. After several incidents, a reporter finally clocked the mileage to the airport from the Governor's mansion and figured it out. There's a group of slow learners!! Cooper has mastered the art of "lying by omission." Rather than lie, he just ignores the question.

Democrats are screaming that we need to dramatically increase the funding of public schools while they spoke not a word when Cooper had students doing "remote learning". The chances were remote that anyone would actually learn anything in that scenario. Today, they scream "Pay the Dadgum Teachers" while in 2020 and 2021 they didn't believe that we even needed schools. What kind of sense does that shit make? I will be kind and just describe those folks as "slow". 

In Carolina's Cooper Caused COVID, you could only have ten people in a church, but you could have 200 in a Walmart. The scientific data behind that is probably in Fauci's diary somewhere. Cooper tried to legalize "carryout cocktails" to keep bars and restaurants functioning. Cooper was worried about people getting killed by COVID but wasn't worried about anyone dying at the hands of a drunk driver.

My favorite Cooper decree was when he decided that venues like football stadiums and speedways and theaters could reopen with 7% of their capacity being used. Cooper and Cohen must have pulled that 7% number straight out of their asses. That 7% crap rivals the 6 feet apart thing that Fauci the Fraud and his crew created. Fauci still cannot explain where that number originated. In Great Britain they used two meters as the distance required. Did the extra few inches make a difference? Did the disease travel further in countries using the metric system? I want to go to a Roy Cooper event just so I can ask him about the 7% number. Maybe Michael Whatley will ask him.

North Carolina has caught our limit of Roy Cooper. It's time to say "Hell, No!" to mo Ro Co. 

Pay the Dadgum Teachers??

 There's a new campaign to raise public teacher salaries in North Carolina called "Pay the Dadgum Teachers." They are running television commercials featuring former Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams. They also have a bunch of billboards out on the major highways. It is run by a group called Public Ed Works. Every time that I pass one of those billboards, it's a test for my blood pressure meds. If you haven't figured it out by now, I don't believe "Public Ed Works".

While I understand that Coach Williams brings a certain folksiness to the advertising angle, I just don't think that using "dadgum" is a winner in a campaign about improving education. But let's move on to more serious issues.

So where do we start the conversation about these asinine billboards? Let's start with the basics, a practice that they don't use in public education. I attended a Zig Ziglar seminar more than forty years ago and Zig's take on this topic was simple. It was this: There is no correlation between funds expended and educational excellence. There's just not. That was true in 1985, and it is still true today. Parochial schools turn out some great students at a fraction of the cost per pupil as public schools. It's the same story with many other private schools. Say it with me, there is no correlation between funds expended and educational excellence.

How can this be true? Well, you get what you pay for, and public school is relatively free. I say relatively because public education is funded by property taxes and other taxes that some people just don't pay. 

My kids spent their lives in private schools. I may have driven a ten-year-old car, but the kids went to a private school. We went without some things so that they could go to a school where they actually learned. They have been out of school for more than twenty years, but we still have this discussion periodically. They tell me how much better off they would have been in public school.  I always point out that they would not have the knowledge or verbal skills to argue with me if they had gone to public schools.

If you want a visual illustration of one of the big problems in public education, compare the crowd at a high school football game with that at a high school spelling bee. Which turns out a better crowd, a basketball game or a science fair? America's obsession with sports is destroying our goals in education. But I will rant more on that in a future post.

In many homes in America, there are more television sets in the home than there are books. How many years have we been told, "Reading is Fundamental"? I hate to break it to you but, your retention of subjects read in books is higher than your retention of things watched on television. Don't waste your time telling me that books are too expensive for poor people to buy and own. I regularly visit the Salvation Army, Goodwill and other charity stores. At the Salvation Army, books are a dollar or less. At Goodwill, they are a couple of bucks. At a Habitat for Humanity ReStore a couple of months ago, they had books on sale that day, twenty for a dollar. You can get a book for less than the cost of a candy bar or soft drink.

There are lots of kids who have never been in a library. When I was growing up, the bookmobile from the Tampa city library was at the 7-11 parking lot in our neighborhood every Thursday except Thanksgiving. We all went down there and checked out books. I realize that doesn't have the allure of playing a mindless video game all day, but it's worth a shot. 

My mother used to drop me off at the Tampa Public Library in downtown Tampa on Saturday morning and pick me up around four o'clock in the afternoon. I spent the day reading books and rummaging through what they referred to as the "vertical files". The vertical files were filing cabinets filled with old newspaper and magazine articles, as well as some pamphlets. This probably led to my reputation as a "Master of Meaningless Minutiae". The old Tampa Public library was one of the Carnegie Libraries. See photo below.

In April, the North Carolina Association of Educators called for an across-the-board pay increase of 25%. How many people who work 12 months a year will ever get that kind of increase? Did they need that raise to fund the billboard campaign?

North Carolina teachers (and teachers everywhere) need to learn a basic business principle that I have demonstrated to thousands of people over the years. People don't get paid for what they are always "going to do". They get paid for what they have done. I had hundreds of employees tell me that if I would just pay them a little more, they would do more than anybody. The reality was and still is, that people get rewarded for what they have accomplished, not what they promise to do. I don't believe in rewarding educators for a system that produces people who can't read, write their name or count. To the NCAE, get back to us when you are serious about educating people.

Tampa Free Library

Opened in 1917

This ain't AI?

Imagine how crazy nursing homes are going to get when trans people get Alzheimer's and start wondering where their dicks went.

I don't know anything about Lindsey Graham's sister, but I don't believe that political positions should be something that one inherits from a relative. I realize that this idea is contrary to what actually happens sometimes in the House or Senate. The framers of the Constitution obviously failed to recognize that government would become a "family business".

The Florida Attorney General is issuing a subpoena for Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world champion liar, who recently lied to the nation just for shits and grins. If Fauci did nothing wrong, why did Braindead Biden or Shadow President Barack Obama give him a pardon?

I think that it is time to investigate whether Pretend President Joe or Co-Presidents Brack Obama and Jill Biden conspired with AI to decide who got pardons. Let's face it! Any intelligence at the Biden White House was surely "Artificial".

Roy "Con man" Cooper is running ads telling us what a great job he did as Governor and why we should send him to the US Senate. Replacing Two-Faced Thom Tillis with Roy Cooper would be the best example of "going from bad" to worse in the history of this nation.

It's been six years and I am still waiting for Roy to explain how you can have 200 people in a Walmart, but only ten people in a church.  Even today, there are more social disease carriers at the Walmart.

I read an article ripping Sen. Rand Paul for publishing Dr. Faucio's diary. Attention morons: Fauci was keeping that diary on a government server. Putting something on a government computer was probably not the best way for Fauci to keep his diary secret. It's the year 2026, if you want to keep something secret, write it in cursive in a spiral bound notebook. If anyone under sixty finds it, they won't be able to read it.

I write my thoughts in a spiral bound database that fits into my shirt pocket. I just throw them into a box when they are full. In my younger days, I submitted my notebooks to Letters to Penthouse. If you believe that, contact me immediately about some oceanfront investment property in Arkansas.

I saw where a couple of former NBA players have declared themselves to be women for the purpose of entering the Woman's National Basketball Association's draft in 2027. One wonders what the next step will be for the WNBA? Will they compel all women's athletes to wear cups? 

The Leto High School Class of 1971 will hold their 55th reunion in October. If you are reading this and will be attending, tell them to start without me!!

Martha, Please Stop!!

 Memo to Dana Bash at CNN: You are fighting above your mental weight when you argue with RFK Jr.  Stick to interviewing Democrats and Communists. I will join with scores of others who reported that Dana got "Bashed".  RFK Jr. fought a battle of wits with an unarmed reporter.

I was wondering how all of this information from Dr. Fauci's "diary" became public. It turned out that the "smartest doctor on earth" kept his diary on a government server. Memo to Fauci: I use a spiral bound notebook. Give it some thought!!

Is there any word less understood by Federal judges than "temporary"? Temporary Protected Status means "TEMPORARY". Only in the federal court system is "temporary" a lifetime. We need add to the vocabulary of many of these judges by acquainting them with the word "impeachment".

 What's the difference between God and a federal judge? God doesn't wake up in the morning thinking that he is a federal judge.

The House Ethics Committee has recommended that the full House vote to censure Republican congressman Chuck Edwards of North Carolina. The committee found that Edwards made "unwanted advances" towards two female staffers. It found no evidence that he engaged in sexual activity with either woman. I am amazed that a bipartisan group had the time to investigate all of this and come to a conclusion while the Congress is unable to fulfil their constitutional obligation to pass a budget that funds the entire federal government for a full fiscal year. I am pretty sure that the word we are looking for here is "priorities". 

I think that a 65-year-old Congressman should not be trying to date his staff of much younger women. But given the sexual atmosphere in the nation today, I am just glad that he was accused of doing this to young women and not young men. If he had tried this with male staffers, Democrats wouldn't know whether to shit or go blind.

If you always do what you always did, you will always get, what you always got. People keep complaining about how things are going, but they keep electing the same schmucks. Stop voting for clowns!!

Finally, at the first game of the new Women's Professional Baseball League, Marth Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas conspired with two other alleged female singers to deliver the absolute worst performance of our national anthem that I have heard in my life. I can only assume that Tiny Tim was not available to perform. Martha, you're 85 years old, it's time to pack it in. Next time, lip sync it!!