The Screaming Viking

For the past little bit I’ve been feeling the pressure of everyone around me having a cell phone.  I shook off the temptation a few times, but then I bought the nook…that device only enhanced my desire for an android based cell.  I’ve had a cell for work, and while it’s locked down and there isn’t a whole lot I could do with it…at the very least it allowed me to txt message and get calls.  Since I’m departing the office, the desire for a cell phone has become stronger and stronger.  My new position apparently comes with a phone, but I’m doubting it’s a droid..maybe it’s a blackberry, and I’m not sure what kind of plan it’s on.  It probably would have been smarter to wait things out and see what the details for that phone are…but I jumped the gun and pulled the trigger on getting my own.  I justified this by saying I would use it to figure out what we would have to do with Sara’s phone when we move up to the farm.  The farmstead is literally yards outside of the coverage map for Verizon.  There are parts of the yard that work, and some that don’t.  It will lock on to Canadian towers as well…it can be a pain.  I don’t expect there is much incentive for them to cover that small area…as there are only a hand full of people that are potentially effected. Read the rest of this entry »

You’d have to be a pretty big war buff to have heard about Frank Buckles before yesterday.  He was believed to be the last known American WWI vet.  Was…he died yesterday at 110 of natural causes.  I don’t feel bad for this dude’s passing.  110 years is a good long amount to live.  It’s unfortunate that he had to endure war and the hell that comes with it.  I’m not sure I would want to make it that long…watching all those around you die isn’t my idea of a good life.  Seeing my parents/grandparents and even my wife die is all part of life…and while sad it’s somewhat expected.  But if you make it to post 100 the odds of seeing your children die increases quite a bit.  I wouldn’t handle that well.

link

Frank Buckles, who fibbed his way into the U.S. Army at age 16 and lived to become America’s last known World War I veteran, has died. He was 110.

He died yesterday of natural causes on the West Virginia farm where he lived since 1954 with his daughter, Susannah Flanagan, the Washington Post reported.

More than 4.7 million Americans served in the military during World War I, which wracked Europe from 1914 to 1918. When 108-year-old Harry Landis died in Florida in February 2008, Buckles became the last known surviving American participant.

While Landis served without ever leaving Missouri, Buckles sailed for England in 1917 and worked as an Army ambulance driver and warehouse clerk in Germany and France. Two decades later, as a civilian working in the Philippines at the outbreak of World War II, he was captured by Japanese troops and endured three years in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was saluted at ceremonies in Washington and West Virginia when it became known that he was the last of a generation. At a meeting at the White House in March 2008, President George W. Bush thanked him “for your patriotism and your love for America.”

“I had a feeling of longevity and that I might be among those who survived, but I didn’t know I’d be the number one,” Buckles told the Associated Press.

In December 2009, at 108, Buckles testified in Congress in support of a proposal to turn a Washington, D.C., monument honoring local residents who fought in World War I into a memorial honoring all Americans who served in the war. He was honorary chairman of the group leading that charge, the World War I Memorial Foundation.

‘Fitting and Right’

“These are difficult times, and we are not asking for anything elaborate,” he said in a statement in November 2010. “What is fitting and right is a memorial that can take its place among those commemorating the other great conflicts of the past century.”

Frank Woodruff Buckles was born Feb. 1, 1901, in Harrison County in northern Missouri, near the Iowa border.

At 16, he said, he was turned away from a U.S. Marines recruiting station because of his age. Then, even lying about his age, he said he was rejected by the Navy because he was flat-footed. Finally he was accepted at an Army recruiting station and sent for ambulance-serving training at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Reading Newspapers

“I was interested in the war,” Buckles told an interviewer for the U.S. Library of Congress’s Veterans History Project in 2001. “I’d been reading the newspapers since I was a child, and I was a wireless amateur, and the war was interesting to me.”

His unit was sent to England, where Buckles drove a motorcycle sidecar, ambulances and cars while “pestering every officer of influence” for the green light to be sent to France, closer to combat.

He finally got his wish and drove cars and ambulances in western France, getting within 30 or 40 miles of the fighting.

After the Allied forces reached an armistice with Germany in November 1918, Buckles joined a company that escorted German prisoners from France back to their country.

After the war — and still just 18 — Buckles took business classes in Oklahoma and moved to Toronto, where he joined the White Star Line, the British shipping company. He later worked in the bond department of Bankers Trust Co. in New York.

Back to Europe

Back in the shipping industry, he spent much of the 1930s in Europe, learning languages — he spoke German, Spanish, Portuguese and some French even in his later years — and watching the rise of the Third Reich.

In 1940, the American President Lines dispatched him to Manila to expedite the movement of cargo at the start of World War II. He was there when Japanese troops invaded the Philippines — “I knew we were going to get into the war, but I didn’t expect it was going to be so soon,” he recalled — and became among 2,000 non-military prisoners of war, surviving three years, two months in a prison camp.

For most of his life, Buckles kept his World War I stories to himself, his daughter and his wife, Audrey, who died in 1999.

Also in 1999, Buckles and other American veterans of World War I were awarded the Chevalier Cross of the Legion of Honor from French President Jacques Chirac.

I’ve read, heard and seen some of the stuff that this guy has been doing lately and it seems pretty crazy to me.  I would hope the things he’s been saying and doing are caused by the drug spiral of crap.  It looks like there is going to be a lot of chest pounding between Sheen and the 2.5 men producers/cbs…whomever makes decisions about that show.  Sheen seems to want a 50% increase in his salary…taking him to 3mil an episode.

Below is an interview he did for today that should have aired this Monday 2/28.  Some of the stuff he says is really crazy…

By Seamus McGraw

TODAYshow.com contributor TODAYshow.com contributor

In an interview with NBC’s Jeff Rossen that aired on TODAY Monday morning, Charlie Sheen, the combative star of long-running hit “Two and a Half Men,” demanded a raise from approximately $2 million to $3 million per episode to come back to the set of the show. CBS and Warner Bros. Television have currently halted production for the show’s ninth season in the wake of Sheen’s very public rants against “Men” creator Chuck Lorre and Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I’m not angry, I’m passionate,” Sheen told Rossen. “It’s everybody thinks I should be begging for my job back, and I’m just going to forewarn them that it’s everybody else that’s going to be begging me for their job back.”

Though he claimed he has been swamped with offers for movies, Sheen said: “I am a man of my word, so I will finish the TV show. I’ll even do season 10, but at this point, [because of] psychological distress, oh, my God, it’s 3 mil an episode.”

Reportedly the highest-paid actor on television, Sheen has been hospitalized three times in three months. Production of “Two and a Half Men” was put on hold last month after Sheen’s most recent hospital stay. Taping was to resume Tuesday, but that plan was put on hold last Thursday after Sheen inveighed against Lorre, CBS and A.A. on a call-in radio program.

Video: Sheen: ‘Tired of pretending I’m not special’ (on this page)In the interview with Rossen, which was taped Sunday in Sheen’s Beverly Hills home, the actor accused Lorre of “trying to destroy my family.” He also again took aim at Alcoholics Anonymous, calling it a failed system developed by a “broken-down fool that was a plagiarist.” He claimed he has conquered his own drug and alcohol problems by the sheer force of his will: “I closed my eyes and made it so.”

After checking himself out of rehab, Sheen set up his own home rehab facility called “Sober Valley Lodge,” from which the principles of A.A. had been banned. “I will not believe that if I do something then I have to follow a certain path, because it was written nice,” he said. “It was written for normal people, people that aren’t special. People that don’t have tiger blood, you know, Adonis DNA.”

“I’m tired of pretending like I’m not special,” Sheen continued. “I’m tired of pretending like I’m not bitching, a total fricking rock star from Mars, and people can’t figure me out; they can’t process me. I don’t expect them to. You can’t process me with a normal brain.”

Sheen insisted that the drug- and alcohol-fueled behavior he described as “epic” never interfered with his work on “Men,” and that despite all the headlines, all his bosses saw when he showed up on the set was “a guy hitting every mark, nailing every line, every joke, with a full house screaming.” He claimed he never missed a day’s shooting: “Not a day that cost anybody any money,” he said. “I missed practice. We’re talking about practice … practice is for amateurs, you know?”

The actor also insisted that he has no fears about his children someday reading the lurid headlines about him. “Talk about an education,” Sheen said. “That’s the guy, and he’s our dad, and we can get all the answers and the truth? Wow, winning. That’s how you perceive it.”

Video: Sheen to CBS: Apologize while ‘licking my feet’ (on this page)War with a warlock
Regarding his demand for a 50 percent pay hike, Sheen declared, “Take or leave it.” He added caustically: “Look what they put me through … I’m underpaid right now, sure … When you look at the money they’re making, it’s ridiculous.”

Sheen accused his producers, Lorre in particular, of trying to destroy him and his family by “trying to take all my money, and leave me with no means to support my family. It’s not rocket science, you know?”

Related: Sheen claims network bigwigs tried to destroy his family

He was now “at war” he said. “They picked a fight with a warlock,” he said.

As that war has escalated, Sheen has called in to several radio programs to vent, and his outbursts against Lorre have been described as anti-Semitic, a charge he adamantly denied. But he defended his sometimes bellicose verbal attacks.

“I think my passion is misinterpreted as anger sometimes. And I don’t think people are ready for the message that I’m delivering, and delivering with a sense of violent love,” Sheen said.

Rather than apologizing, Sheen said it was he who was owed an apology, by CBS: “A big one. While licking my feet.”

Read on the wire that Lovie got a 2 year extension from the bears.  After the season they had this past year I would say he deserves to not go in to the last year of his contract as a “lame duck”.  This extension brings his term in line with Angelo’s, which is what it should be.  I believe these guys should be heavily tied together in their tenure in Chicago.  I still don’t really have faith in Lovie, but I believe this past year he finally surrounded himself with assistants that could handle their jobs.  We’ll see how another year of Martz’s offense pans out…if it’s next year or the one after.

I heard that Chicago denied Mike Tice an interview with another club as a coordinator (jags maybe?).  Hopefully they did that because of the impending lock out…I’d hate to think they are trying to keep their assistants from advancing…that’s not the way to build success and a cohesive coaching staff.