I Vow To Thee My Country

 

Dam straight

Your Friend,

LSP

Gone Fishing

 

So, what'd you do today, so-called LSP, if that's your real name, which we doubt. Well, nothing complicated, a morning visit to the Pick 'n Steal and then off to the lake and its dam to try my luck against the piscine adversary. Would they bite?

No, they did not. Don't get me wrong, I tried, I really did, but the fish weren't having it. There they were, predatory gar lying in ambush downstream of the spillway pool, you could see them loud and clear through cleverly polarized glasses.

But no, they weren't having it, frozen shad didn't cut it today, so I tried my luck at Soldiers Bluff on the other side of the dam. There were fish there, yes, you could see them, but would they bite? No, they would not.

In fact, it was like fishing into a wind tunnel and who can blame the fish for keeping their heads down beneath the surging waves. So I packed up light Ugly Stick rods and headed for home, thankful for a morning under the big clear sky and clean air of Texas.

Don't worry, fish, your day will come. Draw the moral as you care to take it and that, dear readers, is the story of that.

Never Surrender,

LSP

DFTR

 

Feel it's right to post this again.

See you at the Club,

LSP

Litanies de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc

 

I'd say this is as relevant now as it's ever been, which is very. Sainte Jeanne revenez nous sauver, transmettre votre courage, votre Foi au peuple, le Corps de l'Eglise.

Never surrender,

LSP

Storm Front

 

Evening Prayer was no sooner said than clouds rolled in from the West, the temperature dropped, and it began to rain. What a blessed relief and as I type this letter from the trenches of the War on Weather, lightning flickers across the sky and thunder rumbles like a lazy barrage on Ost Front.

Meanwhile, Eduardo's exotic ducks sit nonchalantly on the tim roof of a shed across from the Compound's perimeter, they enjoy the rain, they're ducks and like water. Lately they've taken to rebelliously flying over LSP airspace to the front yard of a local petty drug dealer. There they sit, doing duck stuff, until Eduardo chases them back home.

In related avian news, green parakeets have arrived in this part of the NCTEZ (North Central Texas Exclusion Zone) and I've seen several. They're attractive birds and lend a tropical flavor to the place, perhaps they spread from Dallas where they're well established.

Birds aside, the storm rolls on with a kind of elemental fury and the landline's rung, yes, we still have one. It announces "Code Red." I take this to mean some kind of CorpCom Rainbow Maoist offensive's been launched against our commonwealth and the great state of Texas.

As always, we stand firm, resolute.

Never surrender,

LSP

Taking Care Of Business

 

A busy morning. Get up, feed the Blue, make hot tea, enjoy that tea on the back porch while scanning the news, say Morning Prayer, you might say "Mattins," walk to the Pick 'n Steal, observe a new iteration of the Meth Shack, get back to the Compound, answer emails and then... drive over to Tom's Tire to get your rig inspected.

You have to do it every year, the State demands it, and we must obey. But it's no big deal, just 7 bucks and an excuse to go to Montes for a delicious brisket burrito. Tasty and then some. Next stop? 

A dinosaur museum, conveniently next to the diner. It used to be a filling station and then something else, followed by something else, and something else again, amounting to yet another vacant, asset stripped country lot. But now it's a dinosaur museum. 

I ambled over, pleasantly aglow with brisket and homemade tortilla's, only to be ambushed by a fit young fella with a dinosaur T and a Ho Chi Minh, obviously a paleontologist. "What's up, man!" he asked. I looked him straight in his expensively rimless glasses and asked, right on the nail, "Is this museum open?" To be fair, it rarely is, and he said yes, step straight on in, which I did.

What a great little museum! Big fossils of the ferocious beasts that used to roam North Central Texas, and small fossils too, to say nothing of aboriginal artifacts. These, if you know where to look, which I mostly don't, can be found by the boxfull here in Hill and Bosque counties. How old are they? Good question.

Museum over, collect the rig, get it registered, go to the 1st Inconvenience Bank and then to the lake. I won't lie, it was quite chilly, only about 100*. Is it too hot to fish when your eyelids start dropping sweat on the inside of your cunningly polarized glasses? Hardly, all the more incentive to carry on regardless.

4 Blue Gill later it was time to head home, in yet another episode of being glad to be in Texas.

Your Old Pal,

LSP

Remember The Alamo

 

Lest we forget:

At 4 o’clock on the morning of March 6, 1836, Santa Anna advanced his men to within 200 yards of the Alamo’s walls. Just as dawn was breaking, the Mexican bloodcurdling bugle call of the Deguello echoed the meaning of the scarlet flag above San Fernando: no quarter. It was Captain Juan Seguin’s Tejanos, the native-born Mexicans fighting in the Texan army, who interpreted the chilling music for the other defenders.

Santa Anna’s first charge was repulsed, as was the second, by the deadly fire of Travis’ artillery. At the third charge, one Mexican column attacked near a breach in the north wall, another in the area of the chapel, and a third, the Toluca Battalion, commenced to scale the walls. All suffered severely. Out of 800 men in the Toluca Battalion, only 130 were left alive. Fighting was hand to hand with knives, pistols, clubbed rifles, lances, pikes, knees and fists. The dead lay everywhere. Blood spilled in the convent, the barracks, the entrance to the church, and finally in the rubble-strewn church interior itself. Ninety minutes after it began, it was over.

All the Texans died. Santa Anna’s loss was 1,544 men.

 

Never surrender,

LSP

Never Forget

 

Via 45:

On this National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, we recall the phrase “Remember Pearl Harbor,” which stirred the fighting spirit within the hearts of the more than 16 million Americans who courageously served in World War II. Over 400,000 gave their lives in the global conflict that began, for our Nation, on that fateful Sunday morning. Today, we memorialize all those lost on December 7, 1941, declare once again that our Nation will never forget these valiant heroes, and resolve as firmly as ever that their memory and spirit will survive for as long as our Nation endures.

Amen to that,

LSP

Bats

People have accused me of being discouraged, disappointed. That's a negative, punters. I trust the plan and where we go one, we go all. Yes, to victory. So to that end, here's some morale boosting photos of bats.

Adorable.

Are they not?

Cheers,

LSP

Never Surrender

This seems appropriate, right about now:

The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Never surrender,

LSP