Two-Fourteen, Twenty-Fifteen

Bupid

 

Tomorrow is Valentine’s day, so I’m reposting my Valentine poem.  I plan to repost it every year until I find someone who likes it as much as I do.

Cupid’s Twin

An Original Valentine’s Day Poem by Bob Couch

You all have heard of Cupid, or at least I guess you know,

How he flits about both day and night with his arrows and his bow.

But Cupid has a brother (this isn’t widely known)

Their parents named him Bupid, though he was seldom shown.

He looks just like his brother, and his brother looks like him

If they were not little Pagans, they could both be Cherubim.

They both are prone to shoot you with the arrows in their quiver,

But Cupid’s darts go for the heart; Bupid’s for the liver,

Or the stomach, or esophagus or some other vital part

So if Bupid’s arrow strikes you, it won’t be in the heart.

With heart aflame you probably think that Cupid nailed your ass,

But give it just a little while, the feeling just might pass.

Cupid’s shots bring love or lust,

But Bupid’s give you gas.

Saint Kayla

Since the confirmation of her death while a captive of terrorists in Syria, there has been a concentrated effort by the media to portray Kayla Mueller as a saint.  She may well have been.  I have no doubt that she was a wonderful person who felt a true calling to alleviate suffering in the world.

But – coming just days before the President’s request for authorization from Congress to fight ISIS - the timing of the campaign to portray her as a Christian martyr has me wondering.  How much of what we see and hear is sincere, and how much is a cynical attempt to use her tragic death to achieve an agenda?

There is no question that by any name, ISIS - or ISIL, or Da’ish or whatever they are calling themselves today – represents true evil; evil somehow made worse by claiming their despicable actions are being done in the name of their God.  Still, I wonder what Miss Mueller would think of being used as a rallying cry, as a Standard for leading men into battle.

Wednesday

Not much to report today, so I decided to take the advice of that great philosopher from Oklahoma, Will Rogers….

Lists

Forbes Magazine publishes a lot of lists.  They are always interesting, but if you read them carefully, they are also often contradictory.

For example - one recent post on their website has Texas and California tied for 10th place in a list of the best states in which to retire, while another recent article had California in the 10 worst states for retirees and Texas somewhere in the middle of the pack.  Granted the two lists were using different (and very subjective) criteria, but they both seemed to be stating facts.  The casual reader wouldn’t know what to think.

God only knows what the first list was based upon, but the second considered things like state taxes and the cost of goods and services – still opinion, but at least it used measurable criteria.

This color-coded map accompanied that second article.  It shows tax burden for retirees, with maroon being the worst and dark green as the least.  I wasn’t surprised at where Texas or California fell on this spectrum.  Montana, on the other hand…..  

The Other Side

Since the Moon always shows the same face to us as it orbits the Earth, I suppose that people have always wondered what the other side looks like. Thanks to a  just released video from NASA, now we know.

Jackrabbits and GPA

In the fall of 1961, I attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas as a sophomore transfer student. 

Attended may be a bit of an exaggeration - I did show up for most of my classes, but formal education was not even near the top of my priority list.  The majority of my time and effort went to learning to play contract bridge, singing in a folk-music quartet called the Converts, and hunting rabbits at night from my pickup truck.

We had a five man cadre of rabbit hunters, and three of them – all mediocre shots – used shotguns.  John Stuckey and I used 22 rifles. Mine was an old open-sight single-shot Savage that was older than I was.  We usually used my truck, and I usually drove, but one night Johnny was driving.

That was when I made what had to be the shot of a lifetime. 

Johnny had seen a jackrabbit out in a pasture, and stopped the truck at the end of a dirt road.  The rabbit was no longer visible - just past the edge of the high beams – all we could see was the glow of his eye about a hundred yards beyond the barbed wire fence.

Standing in the truck bed, I propped my elbow on the top of the cab and squeezed off a shot.  The glowing dot disappeared.

“You missed” yelled the guys in the back of the truck.  I’ll admit I didn’t know if I hit it or not – I wasn’t even sure that there was a rabbit out there.

Johnny got out, ducked through the fence and walked out into the pasture.  A few minutes later, he returned with a dead rabbit, shot through the eye.  “He got it.” he said, “He never misses.  That’s why he always drives - to give you other guys a chance.”