Country Great Lynn Anderson Dies; Hangs Out In Heaven's Rose Garden

Lynn Anderson died this past week of a heart attack at age 67. 

Lynn Anderson.  

The country great had a long string of hits. She's probably most remembered for her song "I Beg Your Pardon, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden."

It was a wonderful song about how nobody is perfect in a relationship, but just try to enjoy the good times when they come along.

My dad owned a tavern back then, when the song came out in 1970. I remember always hearing it on the jukebox when I stopped in to say hi to dad as a kid.

I guess it was a decent cry in your beer song.

Anyway, rest in peace, Lynn Anderson.

Here's a fun video from Britain's Top Of the Pops television show of Anderson performing "Rose Garden" when it was a big hit. Props to the British kids trying to figure out how to dance to country music

I also love the big hair female country singers had in the 1960s and 1970s.

Here's the video:

Lion Killer Is No He-Man, And Everybody Knows That Now: 8/1/15 Update To This Story

Virile he-man (yeah, right!) Walter Palmer
with a leopard he killed a while back.
He's now being pilloried for killing Cecil the lion. 

UPDATE: Reports that Cecile the Lion's brother being shot turn out to be (probably, hopefully) untrue. 

Unconfirmed reports are spreading this Saturday afternoon that poachers have also killed a lion named Jericho, who was Cecil's brother.

Fortunately, at least I hope, a newer update from Reuters indicates Jericho is still alive and OK,

Reuters is reporting that the reports of Jericho's demise were false and premature. Let's hope that the Reuters reporters are spot on accurate. 

Jericho was or is looking after the cubs left by Cecil, so if he had died, the cubs would be in great peril.

Other groups of lions might kill them, or poachers might get them if Jericho had died.

Early reports of Jericho getting killed by poachers set off another firestorm on social media

I'm guessing potential killers of Jericho came partly and unwittingly as a result of all the publicity surrounding Cecil's death. The poachers, who'll apparently do anything for money, figured they could
find Jericho easily enough and there you go.

Again, I hope Reuters is right in that the wildlife group monitoring Jericho says his GPS indicates he's moving around normally and hanging out with a female. Good for him!

I've heard some complaints from my previous posts that shooting lions and tigers and such in Zimbabwe and other such places is good for their economies and to lift locals out of poverty.

I haven't found convincing evidence that the monetary gains are actually real, but here's the much larger point:

Must EVERYTHING in this world be some sort of financial transactions? Can't we just leave some things alone and find other ways to make money other than violence, corruption, and destruction?

This whole thing with the lions is getting sicker and sicker, and making me more and more heartsick

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:

My guess is Walter Palmer, the creepy Minnesota dentist who went to Zimbabwe to kill Cecil the Lion, has got a microscopic dick, can't get it up and is absolutely horrible in bed.

I don't now this for a fact, of course but I can't come up with any other explanation as to why this loser would kill a lion.

Maybe he's overcompensating?

That's not an original thought, of course. Everybody has been saying this about Palmer all week, and he's basically now Public Enemy #1.

Palmer has been getting more press than Donald Trump, and, as Jimmy Kimmel put it, he has become the most hated man in America who has never advertised Jello pudding on television. 

So much for the idea of parents saying their daughter should marry a nice dentist. Obviously, not all of them are so nice.

Oh, I know. He says he didn't realize the lion was Cecil, thE guides he hired lured Cecile out o a national park without his knowledge, yada yada yada.

He's sort of apologized, basically for not knowing it was Cecil he killed, but why would he kill ANY lion?

It's not for food. Target practice? Couldn't he just shoot cans off a log in the woods?

I guess the reason Palmer shot the lion is he because he just likes killing things. He's a serial killer, but he knows that serial killers of people have a high chance of being caught and going to jail. Plus he probably doesn't want to kill people. Some are probably his friends.

So, he did what he thought was socially acceptable. Killing animals for fun. Now he's finding out it's not all that socially respectable.

Palmer's  "apology" to his patients over the disruption is rich.

"I want you to to know the situation and my involvement. In addition to spending time with my family one of my passions outside of dentistry is hunting. I've been a life long hunter since I was a child growing up in North Dakota."

That's what you call this? Hunting?  Luring a lion out of a protected national park in Zimbabwe with the help of corrupt guides, and then subjecting the lion to a painful death. Shot with a bow and arrow, then left to suffer until being shot later.

Palmer goes on: "I deeply regret that my pursuit of an activity I love and practice responsibly and legally resulted in the taking of this lion."

Notice he says "this lion." In other words, there's the proof right there that he thinks there's nothing wrong with killing something like a lion to, I don't know, prove he's a big virile man who is so tough he can kill a lion for no reason other than to inflate his ego.

And not so fast, buddy with that "responsibly and legally" line.  He might have violated the Lacey Act, which makes it a federal crime to trade in wildlife killed in violation of foreign law, the Huffington Post notes.

From the Huffington Post: 

"'The U.S Fish and Wildlife is investigating the circumstances surrounding the killing of 'Cecil the lion.' That investigation will take us wherever the facts lead,' said Edward Grace, the agency's deputy chief of enforcement, in a statement.

'At this point in time, however, multiple efforts to contact Dr. Walter Palmer have been unsuccessful. We ask that Dr. Palmer or his representative contact us immediately," Grace added."

Too wimpy to face the (potential) music from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Dr. Palmer? Gee, you were so "brave" hunting lions, what happened?

True there have been a large number of death threats against Palmer, which is stupid. Anytime someone does something stupid or mean they get death threats from the multitudes of trolls lurking out there. I'm not sure how that helps, but trolls tend to be as unhelpful as Palmer himself.

People are so mad at him that it's forced the shutdown of his dental practice, hence the apology to his patients.

Palmer is obviously horrible to lions and other wildlife. But he's also possibly pretty lousy with people, too.

Raw Story reports that Palmer settled a sexual harassment claim against him in 2009 for $127,500.

A receptionist who worked for Palmer over five and a half years ending in 2005 said she was subject to Palmer's comments about her breasts, buttocks and genitalia.

The report said the receptionist asked that the behavior stop, but it didn't She alleges she was fired for reporting the harassment, Raw Story says. 

At least Palmer didn't then go on a safari to shoot and kill the woman's cat if she had one.

If there's any good that has come out of Palmer's atrocious behavior in Zimbabwe and probably elsewhere, at least there's more awareness that this kind of "hunting" goes on and must stop.

The Internet is beginning to move on to other topics, now. Though I'm sure there will be more news when and if Palmer surfaces.

I just hope he doesn't make any money selling the rights to his story.  He doesn't deserve any kind of reward.

A lot of people have also noted there's plenty of outrage over Cecil's death, but not about other likely more pressing matters. (Black Lives Matter, anyone?)

However, I think it's possible and a good thing to get riled up over Palmer's atrociousness, while also caring about other issues, ones involving human lives, too.

Maybe there will be a payoff of sorts to the kind of wildlife Palmer thinks are his playthings to kill. There certainly is more interest in the issue, at least for now.

Jimmy Kimmel's monologue the other night about the killing of Cecil the Lion, which is a must-watch, by the way, resulted in more than $150,000 in donations in fewer than 24 hours to Oxford's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, or WildCRU.

WildCRU had been monitoring Cecile via GPS before his death, and Kimmel flashed the organization's Web site on screen during his monologue.

Jane Goodall, that reverential hero of African wildlife, is of course crushed by what happened to Cecil, but sees hope nonetheless:

"Only one good thing comes out of this - thousands of people have read the story and have also been shocked. Their eyes opened to the dark side of human nature. Surely they will now be more prepared to fight for the protection of wild animals and the wild places where they live. Therin lies the hope."

A Fantasy ESPN-Type Show For Teachers Will Have You Cheering

Imagine watching news like this about
teachers instead of sports figures.  

If you've ever tuned into ESPN, the sports network, you might have seen the overblown news shows they have on multi-zillion dollar contract deals for athletes, spectacular plays on the field or the basketball court and that kind of thing.

It's all done with the yelling and screaming of the too-excited anchors.

Now picture the same thing, except the focus is on teachers, not professional sports.

The comedy dual Key and Peele have come up with the teacher scenario, and the result is hilarious, and has gone viral.  I bet teachers are playing this one over and over again.

Stick around in the video and watch the BMW ad toward the end of it. Precious:

Complaints About YouTube? Watch This Video

The woman on the left handles YouTube complaints
 deftly in the latest YouTube complaint desk video Add caption

 I know, I know, those of us who watch a lot of YouTube videos get frustrated at the ads we have to sit through, the misleading headlines, the promises of an exciting videos that don't pan out, all that stuff.

So, once again, we have an update video that walks us through all these complaints. It features a woman at a fictitious help desk at YouTube.

This follows up with previous, very similar YouTube complaint desk videos from 2014 and another great one from 2013. 

It's hilarious. See for yourself:

No, That Movie Is Not "A Comedic Masterstroke"

No, reviewer AA Dowd did NOT say this
movie was "a comedic masterstroke."  

I've got new evidence that those blurbs you see from critics in movie advertisements aren't what they seem.

Yeah, they always say the movie was terrific, an Oscar contender, boffo, all that.

You can never believe those blurbs, can you?

So it was that the cover on a Canadian-produced DVD of a movie called "Nailed" quoted movie reviewer A.A. Dowd as calling it "a comedic masterstroke."

Consumerist says "Nailed" was a widely ignored movie that was released in the United States after many people abandoned working on the film in frustration. Its American title was  "Accidental Love."

Here is the full quote from Dowd's review of "Nailed" that didn't appear on the DVD cover, according to Consumerist:

"To be fair to whoever refashioned "Accidental Love" from the abandoned scraps of "Nailed," there's little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke."

Yeah, Dowd really didn't like the movie. So much for a comedic masterstroke.

Dowd wrote an open letter to Mongrel Media which put out the DVD with the false blurb, calling them out on it.  He wrote:

"Framing me as a big fan of Nailed isn't just a lie, it's an attack on my critical reputation. What if someone reads that and really thinks I see a "comedic masterwork" in "Nailed."? They'll never trust me on a comedy again."

 Dowd asked for an apology, and got said apology from Mongrel Media. Future copies of this pretty bad movie won't have Dowd's out of context blurb about it.

So here's my review: A masterful performance by Dowd! And that's not even taken out of context!

This Sheriff WILL Get His Suspect

Sheriff Lt. Clay Higgins on the trail of
the guy who burglarized Stelly's Supermarket  

Somebody burglarized Stelly's Supermarket and Restaurant in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana and Sheriff Lt. Clay Higgins is on the case.

We've got the proof in this awesome Crimestoppers video he stars in.

The first part of it is just the usual, here's what happened, here's what the suspect looks like, but then Higgins takes a glorious turn.

We learn what a great place Stelly's is, what great food it has, and what lousy food the suspect will have in his small jail cell once he's arrested.

Higgins hints that he already knows who the suspect is, given the great boot print on the door that was kicked in and some possible DNA evidence.

He also noted that the $1,000 reward for the capture of this goon is tempting for a lot of people. He tells the suspect in the video: "People who know you really don't like you anyway, so when it comes down to a choice between you and $1,000, they'll take the cash."

Watch this awesome video, filmed in the Stelly's parking lot:

Family Has Too Many Cars Parked In Driveway, Stupid Regulators Say

The four cars parked in this Kennesaw, Georgia
driveway is apparently a terrible crime.
County zoning enforcers told the people who
live here they need to pay for permits
to park more than two cars in their own driveway  

Readers of this blog know I'm continually fascinated by how some zoning enforcers or homeowner association fascists love to micromanage how people manage their property.

At the garden supply company where I work, a woman recently wanted to buy a purple hose but had to settle on a dark green one because her homeowners' association said purple hoses are just too gauche.

Then today, I saw this one: A family in Kennesaw, Georgia was informed by the county they faced fines because there's too many cars in their driveway: Four of 'em.

These aren't broken down cars on blocks, rusting in the hot Georgia sun. I'd object, too, if that were happening.  I can also see needing to obtain permits for parking on public streets, but this is the family's own home, and they point out they already pay property taxes.

These cars are in good running condition and look fine because they belong to the couple that live there, their kids who are home from college, and visiting relatives.

The driveway is also plenty big enough to accommodate the cars, so nobody is parking on grass and ruining lawns.

But for reasons unclear, you have to get a permit to have more than two cars in your driveway, says WSB-TV in Atlanta. 

"I am angry. I am beyond angry. I don't see how the government can tell me whose cars I can park in my own driveway," said Kim Oviedo, who owns the house with the dreaded four cars.

When WSB-TV and other media attention hit about this, the county government, likely embarrassed, will let the family keep four cars in the driveway this summer. But if it happens again next summer, they said, watch out!

Because of all the things bad that can go on in a neighborhood, four cars in one driveway is apparently the WORST!