Monthly Archives: November 2009

This is how bar pilots get to their job site:

The Somali Pirates have been giving the old, honored profession a bad name lately, and one reason is that they don’t use nifty phrases like these:

What we know of as “Pirate Talk” really started when British actor Robert Newton portrayed Long John Silver in the 1950 Disney version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Newton’s pseudo-Cornish accent became the standard for rougish, salty talk for the past 60 years.

Take the time to say”Thank You” if you see a man or woman in uniform today.

There’s a long line of veterans in my family going all the way back to the U.S. Revolution (on the winning side). My paternal grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War. My dad was on board ship in the Pacific during WWII. I’m a vet, too, and a lucky one at that. I got my DD214 (Discharge Papers) six months before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution passed. I have one nephew who just finished his second tour in Iraq and is now out of the Army and another nephew who is in an Army school learning how to disarm bombs.

One thing I’m grateful for THIS Veteran’s Day is not having to see those disgusting cowards George (putting the W into AWOL) Bush and “Five Deferrment” Dick Cheney laying wreaths at the graves of people who epitomize the phrase that “Freedom Isn’t Free.” Watching them doing that always made me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

From time to time I check out the online edition of the Cape Cod Times, the old hometown newspaper. I used to trudge around half of the Town of Orleans delivering it when I was in high school and then worked as a general assignment reporter in 1964. It was called the Cape Cod Standard-Times back then.

I happened to look at it Wednesday and there was this video of Leo Cummings, one of my favorite people from the old days. Leo owned the Sunoco gas station in town and also drove the school bus we all used to ride to school on. He’s looking pretty good for 90.