Greenjeans was Always Smarter

Let’s start the day with a fresh quotation from the memoirs of Christopher Walken:

Keeshan thought he was a player, until Mr. Greenjeans sold him out to Rogers. He was always at Keeshan’s side, with a 12-gauge pump under his overalls. He kept Keeshan safe while he muscled his way into cereal sponsorships and got free content by obtaining compromising photos of Tom Terrific and Mighty Manfred. Sick stuff. Straps and ropes, I mean. Pulleys, I’m talking about. Cables. Not just the bestiality angle.

Anyway, one day Greenjeans put chloral hydrate in Keeshan’s corn flakes, and when he woke up, he was in the Land of Make-Believe, in Rogers’s compound, tied to a papier-mache mountain. Sad scene. He looked around and figured out where he was, and then he looked at Greenjeans. And he said, “I always thought it would be Dancing Bear.”

So Fred offers us milk and cookies and then he gets down to brass tacks. “Boys,” he said, “I have a wonderful opportunity for you. That’s a very big word, isn’t it? ‘Opportunity.’” We both agreed that it was quite large. So Rogers goes on. “There is this fellow down at PBS, and I’m afraid he doesn’t know how to play nice. He doesn’t know how to share. Sharing is very important, don’t you think?” Definitely. No argument from us. Then Keeshan starts mumbling, like he’s having a dream. “Ping pong balls…NO…no more ping pong balls. Jesus help me…can’t breathe…” But he shut up again, and Fred went on.

I had a real crisis this week. I lost my Winn-Dixie reward card. I’ve written about it before. This is a bar-code keychain tag that opens the door to a world of glorious discounted pork. It’s not really mine. Years ago, my father got one, and I stole it. I don’t want to get one in my own name, because they use the damn things to spy on you, and I don’t want David Chertoff monitoring my pork habits. Although now that I think about it, it would probably convince him I was not a terrorist.

I tried signing up online and having them send me a new one, using my customary alias, “Red Butz.” But I guess they smelled a rat, because it never arrived.

Fortunately, I thought to look in my jeans. I wear long pants about five times a year, sometimes for periods as short as two hours, so the jeans don’t see the washer very often. I’m not one of those disgusting people who wear jeans until they get greasy brown stains on the thighs and they stand up all by themselves, but I’m not washing my jeans after two hours. Come on. So anyway, it turned out the precious card was in the pocket, and I am overjoyed.

WD has center cut pork chops on sale; buy one, get one free. Not quite as good as the regular chops, but I’ll take them. No word on chitlins this week. The lamb chops look tempting.

If you are willing to brine your pork, you can eat dirt cheap for the rest of your life. Picnic hams and Boston butts often stink, but a nice baking soda brine kills that, and then you have like ten pounds of great pork for eleven bucks. And if you bake it with the skin on, you get delicious, crunchy crackling-type things. I baked a picnic ham last week, and even though I eventually got sick of it and gave up, I still got five meals out of it for eleven dollars. I’m not cheap about food, but when you can get top-quality grub for ghetto prices, why not do it?

Switching subjects due to the discontinuation of my Ritalin prescription, I guess you’ve heard about my wacky neighbor, Mr. Calin Wong. He lives in Homestead, a few miles down the road. The cops just busted him for making online threats to reenact the Virginia Tech massacre. It would have worked, at the University of Miami. Gun-free, brain-free, safety-free. On the streets, however, he would have lasted a maximum of five minutes. Red state.

Wong owns several AKs plus some other crap. Like a number of people I could name (cough), he had a lot of ammunition. Scary! HELLO, ammunition is cheaper when you buy a lot. And no matter how much you have, you can only shoot one bullet at a time.

Even right-leaning Fox News went into pants-wetting mode over this guy’s “weapons cache.” Greg Kelly, a Marine reservist (colonel!) who used to appear on camera in a windcheater haircut, marveled at this character’s paltry weapons collection of a dozen guns. Thanks, Greg. That was very helpful.

Here’s a quote from The Miami Herald’s typically even-handed coverage:

He’d been banned from websites for fraudulent selling tactics, he’d been buying and selling weaponry over the Internet for two years, and he owned six or seven AK-47s and other firearms.

Still, they couldn’t charge him with a crime until they unexpectedly received a fax a month later from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.

Good God. All this apparent kook did was complain to the sheriff about an Internet ripoff, and the Herald says, “Still, they couldn’t charge him with a crime.” They mean before he supposedly made his threats. So if you work at the Herald, your default position is, if a person has a gun collection, it’s amazing that he can’t be arrested!

I probably have three hundred readers whose collections put this guy’s to shame. I wonder what the idiots at the Herald would think of you. No, I know what they’d think. If “think” is the appropriate term.

Anyway, Mr. Wong allegedly threatened to perpetrate a massacre, and he was turned in, and now he is no longer a gun owner, and he won’t be owning any guns in the future, unless he buys them illegally. Looks to me like the system worked.

Here’s another genius for you. Detective Rocky Rivera, of the Homestead PD: “Unfortunately, the way the law is written now, you can have as many guns as you want.” Thanks, Justice Cardozo. Thanks, Thomas Jefferson. Thanks for offering your help, rewriting the Constitution. I’m sure you’re qualified.

What is it with cops and their desire to control the public? This is the kind of person the founding fathers wanted to protect us from. A possible lunatic in Homestead has a few semiautomatic rifles, so the rest of us should be disarmed. Next, we need to get rid of those pesky fourth and fifth amendments. Because Officer Rocky the social engineer knows how to run your life better than you do. The cops are perfect; the rest of us need to be told what to do. Funny, wasn’t Drew Peterson a cop? Weren’t the Miami River Cops, who murdered in order to protect their cocaine-selling ring, cops? Isn’t Chicago having a major scandal right now, over lovely events like the beating of an unarmed female bartender who hadn’t committed a crime? We just had three faultless, infallible Miami cops convicted for planting guns on people they had shot, and lying about the shootings. And oh, yeah, cops aren’t famous for domestic violence beefs in their own homes. That never happens.

You know what? I’m sorry the cops have a dangerous job. I mean that sincerely. But the answer isn’t disarming the rest of us and trying to create a Nerf environment for the police to swagger and bark orders in. If you think we need to be disarmed so you can be safe while you work, it means you don’t have enough guts to do the job you signed up for. So quit and let somebody tougher than you step up to the plate.

Someone needs to explain to me how the number of guns Wong owned is an issue. How many can he shoot at once and hope to hit anything? Duh. Are you going to be more scared of an assailant with five rifles than an assailant with one rifle and five magazines? Sure. If you’re a moron. If you want to be concerned, be concerned that he didn’t have them in a safe, to keep them from being stolen and distributed to career criminals who aren’t stupid enough to announce their intentions on the Internet.

The folks at Fox were amazed that this guy got out on bail. WHAT? Look, his guns are gone. He’s going to be tried. He didn’t commit any acts of violence, and now he lacks the means to commit them in the future. I would be amazed if he is ever allowed to buy a gun again. He thought he was a big man, but now he’s No-Gun Boy and an object of ridicule. He now lives under a microscope. Bail is almost certainly appropriate, by the standards applied to other criminal defendants. O.J. Simpson got bailed out after being credibly accused of armed robbery with a firearm. Use your head, Greg Kelly. Due process exists, even for complete idiots who make Internet threats.

You know, I love to shoot. It gets me outdoors. It gives me a feeling of accomplishment. It’s tremendous fun. I think I might want to hunt in the future, because it’s a good skill to have, but I can’t stand watching anything die, and would much rather hand over my wallet than shoot another human being. While I believe in the right to self-defense, I’m not at all sure I could exercise it, unless another person was in danger. But the tiny minds at the Herald conflate boring, harmless hobbyists like me with immature cranks who threaten to murder people over the Internet. And if you have guns, you’re in the same boat. You should be arrested NOW, because some day you MIGHT make a threat. It’s Minority-Report-style pre-crime, only instead of relatively intelligent psychics, we have far-left fascist pinheads.

Great. Always nice to know you’re going to get a fair shot from the media.

I can’t believe Greg Kelly’s reaction to the guns. Which part of the Marine Corps does he belong to? The Martha Stewart Brigade? The Marines still have weapons, don’t they? There’s a fan site dedicated to him. It calls him the King of the Embeds. I’m sure he saw a weapon or two in Iraq, and I know he has a positive attitude toward the military. How could he get so excited over the obligatory “entire collection piled on a table” photo? Those photos represent a classic cop and newspaper tactic intended to inflame public hysteria and help get gun control laws passed. They rarely pose with other confiscated items. Gun collections? ALWAYS. How could he fall for it? I’m a Fox fan, but come on.

“Weapons cache.” I used to have an “arsenal,” but now I have a “weapons cache.” I guess I also have a CD cache and an aged beef cache and a beer cache and a birdseed cache. David Koresh had nothing on me.

Anyway, if you’re ever in Homestead, feel free to drop in on Calin Wong and demand his lunch money. There isn’t a hell of a lot he can do to stop you now.