Island Moon
July 15, 2011
Stuff I heard on the Island
A 11
Creating Dreams for Island Homeowners
WHITECAP LIQUOR
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By Dale Rankin The nouveau riche I talked to my friend Robert Bob up in Bypass, Oklahoma last week. He called to say he switched to Geico Insurance because they gave Foghorn Leghorn a job. “Do you know how hard it is for older actors to find work?” he said. “Especially in the fowl thesbian community? And they hire woodchucks too!” “I can’t argue with logic like that Robert Bob.” Then he sent me a copy of the classified ad his mother ran when his uncle passed away last month. John Smithson has died, used truck for sale. Low miles. “She’s a survivor” Robert Bob said. “And she reminded me Big Mother is watching.” Lately me and ole Robert Bob have more in common than we used to back when he was the Membership Chairman for the John Birch Society in the greater Bypass Statistical Metropolitan area. He’s moved to the Right since then but now he’s fired up about people who have recently made big money after having oil wells drilled on their property.
per plates out of the water. She’s no worse for the wear but the experience has made her claustrophobic and she won’t go into her litter box. That Big Black Tom Cat better watch out or I’ll sick Riley P. Dog on him. Bust Out Another Thousand Last time I told you about me buying my first boat. A small wooden boat with no trailer that was suspended in a slip and had a hole in the bottom. It was a swell buy.
When finally confronted with the realities that surrounded him Capt. Newby did the only thing that he could envision when such Captains are pressed; he poured on the power. What I haven’t mentioned is that The Good Captain had
A big hole where a boat used to about a dozen fellow travelers in tow. Half were on tubes and the other half were in the water hanging onto ropes. A few hours earlier I watched them go up the main canal in the direction of the ski basin and this was their return trip. They had been out a while and now had lobster tans and from the looks of things had consumed many adult beverages. I say this because it was easy to follow their trail down the canal by the floating cans and flip flops they left behind. So when the Good Captain pours on the power the Zodiac takes off like a shot. In his wake he leaves a string of floaters who would have been hard pressed to swim out of a decent sized hot tub. “I can’t swim!” one yelped as he dog paddled with one hand and held his beer aloft with the other. Me and Robert Bob need to get us an oil well so we can buy us a Zodiac and tow our friends down the canal. Wing tipped pickers I went to see a band the other night and the guitar player was wearing black and white wingtip shoes. That’s never a good sign. You never really know what to expect when you go to see a zydeco band anyway and the fellow turned out to be a pretty good picker it’s just that I never could take my eyes off those wingtips. A guitar picker in an accordian band wearing wingtips. Its just ain’t right. Not even for cajuns. Attack cat Our fifteen year old cat got attacked by the neighborhood tom cat last week and ended up in the canal. We’ve got a fifteen year old cat, a fourteen year old cat who is her daughter, and a fifteen year old Riley P. Dog. We seldom get through an entire night without some kind of animal emergency. The cats like to sit out on the balcony by the canal and occasionally venture down to the ground. The old lady was walking around smelling stuff when the Big Black Tom Cat with white feet from down the block attacked her and she went running. The only place to get away was in the canal and over the bulkhead she went. It’s amazing how fast animals panic when they hit that canal water. She swam around like her tail was on fire until she finally ended up clinging to the barnacles on a piling with her claws. We fished her out with the long handled dip net we usually use to fish beer cans and pa-
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Well, me and Moon Writer Ronnie and our friend Diver Dave managed to wrestle that thing onto a borrowed trailer and get it out of there. Diver Dave says me and him can fix it up so we hauled it to a storage unit where we decided to chip away the bad wood with a hammer. That was one busy hammer.
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“All they did was sell the right to dig holes in some dirt their greatgrandfather sweated over and now they eat fried catfish with salad forks,” he says. “I’m not exactly sure why but I’m pretty sure it’s Obama’s fault.” I’m not sure about that last part but I must say I do see an increase in the number of visitors to our Island who have only recently come in to some money and it seems to be mostly mineral right oil money. The other day there was this fellow in an eight foot-long Zodiac going down the main channel with two of his friends and a really cool dog. They were going right down the middle as boats on either side realized there was a novice on the route and chopped their power to try and keep from splashing water over his gunwale. After a couple of unavoidable splashings the captain realized he was running right down the middle of a really busy channel in the smallest vessel that would hold three people and a really cool dog. It was obvious at first glance that the dog was the Brains of the Outfit.
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As you can see from this photo there was a lot of bad wood. By the time we finished there wasn’t much left except the top deck and part of the bow and a big pile of rotten wood filled with ants and termites. As I said it was a swell buy. But Diver Dave has a plan and we’re going to fix her up and launch her out. Me, I just do what I’m told as best I can. So far I haven’t busted out an entire thousand but I’m just getting started. I need a name for her and I’m told there is a whole procedure for renaming a boat. But before you need a name you need a boat and what I got right now is mostly a big hole where a boat used to be. As of this writing the joys of boat ownership have yet to overtake me. Run for your life Speaking of Diver Dave he had a harrowing experience on the high seas last week. He and a friend were fishing offshore when they noticed some dark clouds. Dave whipped out his Iphone and was taking pictures when he noticed that the clouds weren’t blowing along like regular clouds, they were going in a circle. When you are six miles offshore in a small boat having clouds circle over your head is seldom a good thing.
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They made for shore as fast as they could but there were four feet swells and the going was tough. It took only about fifteen seconds for two spouts to form with an inside and an outside wall in each one. They dodged and weaved but as they would get away from one the other one would come at them. They got splashed with water from the spouts and Dave didn’t have enough time to move out of the be bow where he clung to the canopy support rods with his phone in one hand. It took them about twenty minutes to finally get away and in the run Dave’s cell phone took up residence in Davy Jones locker where it now resides. They did manage to save the giant red snapper that fed eight of us. The fish is now gone but the story lingers on. A representative body While listening to a friend complain about the recent special session of the state legislature I was reminded of a couple of observations from friends during my time lurking around the state capitol. Columnist Molly Ivins once wrote: “If you removed all the idiots from the legislature it would no longer be a representative body.” Back when Bob Bullock was State Comptroller, long before he became Lt. Governor, he used to hang out at the Quorum Club down on Red River and one day someone asked him how come so many skallywags got elected to the legislature. He expressed the same sentiment in a slightly different way (I paraphrase): Inside the capitol building we got thieves and preachers, scoundrels and saints, wise men and fools, tall and short, clean and dirty. Just the same as there is outside the capitol building.” And as I watch our city council and state and federal legislatures struggle to balance their respective budgets lately I’m reminded of a quote by the first Republican Governor of Oklahoma Henry Bellmon. Bellmon was locked in a hopeless struggle against an incumbent Democrat back when Oklahoma was a one party state. The sitting governor was so confident in his position that he agreed to a live televised debate with Bellmon, something that political pros will tell a big frontrunner to avoid at all cost as he can gain nothing but can lose a lot if he makes a misstep. The state budget was several million dollars out of balance and someone asked the incumbent how he would fix it. “Well, I’m going to ask the legislature to raise taxes,” he said. And what if they refuse, he was asked. “Well, in that cas e I’ll eliminate waste, graft, and corruption and we’ll managed with what we have.” And that’s how Henry Bellmon became the first Republican governor of Oklahoma.
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