I can honestly say that I never wished I lived in New Jersey before. This makes me think about it at least a little. I particularly like the reference to the Black Rhinoceros party at the beginning of the page. (that will have to be a whole post later I searched for a good link to put in here but could not find anything but an article which you have to wade thruogh about a dozen other stories to get to a storie about the RCMP 'fessing up to spying on and harrassing the members of the party back in the Heyday.) I'd vote for Dinizio. His thoughts on the the issues are well reasoned and honest. Most importantly he has a backbone. He will certainly not be elected. but I'd vote for him. But then I'd vote for Jel-o Biafra. I'd have to think long and hard about Henry Rollins though. I'm not a big fan of that much jockishness.

I got this little tidbit on the crappy newsfeed on my pager last week while at lunch with some of my coworkers. At the time I said that I thought it was a good idea. I think we need politicians who will say what they think. and show a little unpopular opinion if it is the right thing to do. I can see it now.

"Mr. Dinizio, As the lead singer of a punk band in the 80's, did you ever participate in recreational drug use?"

"Fuck You. Next question please?"

"Mr. Dinizio, we'd like to know your opinion of campaign finance reform."

"Well what we have done up till now has sucked Great Big Hairy Syphillitic Moose Cock. However I have a plan which should remove most of the corruption and vote-buying that big-ass corporations like GM and GE use to get the laws they want passed."

"Errr well then... Mr.... umm Biafra, as the vice presidential running mate is there anything you hope to achieve in office?"

"Yes, I'd like to see mandatory Drug Use training for police and tolerance classes for police administrators. I'm tired of watching people getting their ass beat for mouthing off to the pigs."

" Umm yes well thank you folks for that fresh and interesting outlook. We'll see you in November"

It's not that I feel the need to have swearing in public ok for politicians. It is just that I would like to see more of them actually doing what they believe instead of sucking the money of large corporations in exchange for corporate welfare. And once in awhile they need to be able to say "fuck you that's none of your business".

I had thought of running for office a couple year ago my in my hometown not affiliated with any party. I let my Dad and friends talk me out of it. You see in a town populated by over thirty five thousand people only about 800-1000 to a thousand actually bother to show up for the election. I was pretty sure I could mobilize enough freaks and wackos to get me in. I was confident of my ability to do a honest and good job that I could stay in. Now I am thinking a little more seriously about it. When I get back home I need to visit the board of elections. I've got a little less than sevenyears till I am old enough to run for President according to the copy of the constitution I keep in the palm. and less than two till I am old enough to run for senate. hmmm food for thought. Does anyone know how much it costs to enter a senate race? not the advertising and whatnot, just the paperwork. The advertising would have to be free and the staff even more so. I am not exactly flush with cash and I am not about to be taking much in the line of donations.

thanks to Elise for the Dinizio link.

But, the Leatherman that has sat comfortable in my port bow (left front) pocket is starting to get a little bit nervous.

One small note it turns out that spyderco has a web site. I've updated previous post(s) to reflect this. The hitch to the deal? I can't find the left handed mariner available on the site. damn. I carried one of those for a long time. There was hardly a day it didn't get used. Now there is hardly a day that it isn't sorely missed.

If you have never owned a spyderco it can be hard to describe just how much you notice the absence of one. They sit comfortably in your pocket, clipped in place so your hand always knows exactly where to find it. no thought necessary. It is just there. My mariner had the clip mounted in a manner so as to make sit in my port stern (left rear) pocket just perfectly. It could be out in fractions of a second ready to slice anything that was refusing to cooperate (fedex paks, parachute cord, fishing line, even those annoying but necessary pieces of plastic around the top of a snapple Iced Tea). The mariner has a sensible sheepsfoot shaped blade so it was hard for me to accidentally harm myself or others around me. The blade is, however, around four inches long and serrated the entire length with the patented SpyderEdge.

Because of my comfort and the relative safety of the knife in my hands I often forgot how disturbing the sight of such a thing could be to those unfamiliar with them. Tom has an interesting story to tell about me me doing this very thing in a place that turned out to be a very inappropriate place for a knife of any sort let alone one like that. I don't have much call for a knife while I am here working in the veal fattening pens( I think the term that use here is cubicle), but I still miss it every time I get the mail.

Ok boys and girls Switch to full on Geek Mode now. Somebody just did a bunch of work I've been thinking about doing. This is good news because it makes it a lot easier for me to build this thing that has been living in my head for a while.

What they did is write a set of python classes for garmin GPS units. Wooo Hooo. They did it to be able to upload and download their waypoints to their linux computer. What they haven't done is get NMEA working but that is going to be a lot easier now.

Here is my vision of the thing I want to build:

in a mini AT case(or something even smaller) A big harddrive that is easily removable with an ok processor, a killer sound card, a video card with ntsc output for this screen.
power it all with a nice inverter

run a stripped linux on it. no unnecessary drivers or daemons just a kernel and some libraries. Maybe an x-server. mount the hd as read only. use a version of mp3 player like his. pack the hard drive with mp3's ( 20 gigs is a lott of music. nearly every cd I own.)
And this is the cool part. get some good cartography software and use it with the Garmin TracPak screwed right to the trunk lid of my car. I'd never have to be pissed about forgetting the CD I wanted to hear right now and I'd never have to get lost in some sorry industrial wasteland like cleveland again.

Am I the only one who think this might be cool?
hope not

I just repaired the archive link. apologies to the the literally 1 or 2 of you this may have inconvenienced.:-) It was a result of me being careless when I moved here to be the guinea pig/canary. the canary is still breathing. the pig isn't squealing. I'd highly recommend the place.

I have said this before and I still think it applies

We are the sum of stories we believe about ourselves.

Or at the very least our Self Image is. Who we are is VERY strongly determined by our self image. Having your self image out of whack can cause some unpleasant things. Things like anorexia, compulsive needs to shop for shoes/toasters/new wardrobe/etcetera, depression, addiction to various things, you name it.

The stories you believe about yourself can be affected by the people around you. When you are with people who believe good stories about you, it is very easy to believe good stories about yourself. Unfortunately, the same is true when we are with people who believe bad, nasty, unproductive, or ambivalent stories about us.

You could even experience difficulty from having an older sister who still see you as her sweet, bumbling, little brother who couldn't get a date to the prom. For her, it would be a fond memory. For you, it could contaminate your set of stories and cause you to be unable to make good decisions about potential lovers.

A further unfortunate thing is that we don't always have the ability to simply avoid the people whose story set could harm ours. We might not even consciously know who they are. Family, coworkers, friends. Any of then could contaminate us with good stories or bad stories. The good stories let's not worry about. They shouldn't hurt anyone. Instead let's focus on a tool to defend ourselves from both other people's stories and our own(sometimes we do do things that make for bad stories)

Looking back at each time in my adult life that things have really started to get fucked up and out of control, I see the coincidence of me not writing, not hanging out with friends passing time. Not Telling Stories.

There is an extrapolation of a huna principle called repatterning. It works like this:

you slam you finger in a door. You mangle it. Badly. You look at it. In your mind you back up a few minutes and the slam the door again, this time without your finger in it. Then do it a bunch more times. The finger will heal very quickly and may even heal instantly(rare, but it happens).

The technique uses your Lono (the thinking part of your self) to trick your Ku(the physical part of yourself) into thinking that it never happened so the Ku's image of it self hastens to match the Lono's image. I don't claim that this is a cake walk but it is doable with a good amount of self-awareness and discipline. I tell you this as someone who has walked through fire pits unscathed. I don't think I could walk through one where I am in my life right now, but I could get back there if I needed to.

I believe that we can use the same tool the get our Lono to to trick itself. By telling stories about ourselves to ourselves when someone one harms (unintentionally or not) our self image we can undo the damage or at least hasten the repair of damage. So here is my advice:

Tell stories !

About ourselves, about people we care about, about our cars, about our boats, about completely Imaginary things. (my oldest boy has an incredible array imaginary friends and he uses them to great success in this. Tink is his troublemaker, Deezhy-Dazhah(a black dragon that breathes fire AND ice and has Strong Magic) is his protector.)

The important thing is for the stories to reflect things you want to be, or parts of yourself you want to change. This way we become in control of our Selves. And our strengths, weaknesses, and assorted neuroses.

This morning I actually spent a little time reading the free McNewspaper that the hotel provides me. There was an article about Marshall Mathers aka Eminem aka Slim Shady. The usual uproar about his hate filled lyrics and violent themes. Yada yada bla bla bla.

I'm sick of it. Sick of the bitching. Sick of the talk of censorship. Sick of the self-righteous rantings of people who pretend to be above hate. The country we live in guarantees us the right to free speech. The current Supreme Court interpretation includes art as a form of speech. I have no desire for that to be changed. It could restrict what I write here. Or worse, restrict the writing I try to sell. If you don't like try moving to another country where they don't have that freedom(like Canada where even Dr. Laura is restricted as hate speech)

The thing that has to be remembered about this guy is that he is doing satire. Yup, satire. Just like H.L. Mencken, or Gary Trudeau, or Hunter S. Thompson. I have to be honest with ya here I do find him at least as funny as HST. Sometimes even funnier.

If you look at the "hate lyrics" a little closer you find that he hates nearly everyone on a more or less equal footing. Gays, straights, women, men, his wife, himself, even Dr. Dre, the guy who fronted the cash for him to make this a career. He hates them all.

Having some experience with walking the Earth filled with hate, I can say with some authority that it is not a healthy lifestyle choice. Neither is smoking cigarettes, and I have friends who do that. Smoking isn't funny. Ever.

Sometimes Eminem is.

Let's just leave it at that.

For anyone who cares,
my caroscope

Driving to Ciao! Bella! I followed the most amazing truck. It was a 3/4 ton Dodge with the big diesel. The only way it would be possible to be more macho would be a Hummer with the snorkel kit.

Now here is the kicker. The tailgate was totally covered with bumperstickers. 1 I heart cops, 1 jesus was a hippie, and 22 of the vaguely pro-lesbian humorous variety. These ranged from "Boys Lie" to (my favorite) "Mom, sorry I missed church, I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a Lesbian".

If it wasn't 3216 miles from my wife and kids I'd love this town.

This week's underlying theme has been girls from my high school. More specifically girls from high school who wouldn't date me. To be fair though, with only two exceptions, that describes pretty much all of them.

It all started at the airport. 0200 at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport, my friend Brian was there to meet me. Brian, whose brilliant, beautiful, and currently far away girlfriend lives and works in Honolulu, cuts short his conversation to greet me. Knowing the ins and outs of maintaining a relationship over long distance( and that's really the on the deal on thelong distance thing. Not much growth or development, but plenty of maintenance) I send him off to reestablish contact and proceed over to where the luggage will be unpacked at a positively glacial pace because all but one baggage handler was sent home at 0015 when the airport closed.

There stood Tara Richards as beautiful the day I met her in the ninth grade( this time however without the skinned knee and black eye( apparently due to a softball incident but I noticed that the other girls treated her with a level of respect that may have been mixed with fear so I to this day believe that the story was some type of secret all girl cover up)). I had always had a little bit of a crush on her. She had always been civil to me, and occasionally even talked to me like I was a worthwhile human being. Now here she was eleven years later standing in front of me, greeting me warmly and talking about the time in between.

So friendly in fact that the boyfriend that she is here to pick up starts giving me the eye. I briefly wonder whether the jealousy is self inflicted (he is a cheating bastard and assumes everyone else is), mutually inflicted(the relationship just isn't that stable and he doesn't feel that confident in his position), or her-inflicted( she's cheating and he allows himself to be a victim). There is a part of me that wants to toy with the guy, leave him in a quivering state of jealous rage. That's the part of me that still has trouble dealing with the misery that was high school.

Instead I changed the subject to my wife and immediately copped a beta-male posture and countenance. I'm turning into a nice guy, I really am.

Then after the burial fiasco I took my eldest boy to his karate class. I sat near to yet another girl I had a crush on in high school watching her daughter in the same class. She wasn't nice to me when I finally worked up the courage to talk to her back then. This time I couldn't remember her name, not that it mattered. She spent the entire class avoiding eye contact of any sort.

She did still look good. However,( and this is the kind of thing that brings joy to my petty and small minded heart) she did not look as good as my wife does and my wife has had three times as many children.

Then the crowning point of my trial by former fellow high school classmates. My wife is invited to a tupperware party. A tupperware party with one of the most popular girls in school and one of the smartest(she beat me at chess, but date me, not on your life). I had to resist the temptation to beg my wife to spend the evening bragging(and probably lying) about what a perfect husband I am. Still I hope she made some subtle mention of me. I wanted them to see not only that I have this beautiful, wonderful wife/mother of my three perfect boys but also that she enjoys being married to me. Petty, definitely, but I didn't beg, I didn't even mention it. I know my wife loves me and is proud of me, and if she felt like telling them about it she would and if not she wouldn't. The fact that she feels that way is enough for me.

My Uncle Noel Died last week.
In the comedy of errors that is my family's frequent blight, it was decided to have the funeral out in Massachusetts and then move the body back home to Lockport and interr him in the family plot. This was accomplished by the lovely young Nancy, a girl about my age who was Noel's neighbor for ten years, and also happenned to be a mortician.

My uncle Noel was a Marine. It was impossible to know him for more than five minutes and not know this. He became a Marine in 1942 in the South Pacific. It was a hard time and place to be a Marine, but the ones who survived that time were Marines at a level that may not be achievable anymore. He never felt particularly like a hero for the things he did, he was just a Marine, and he did what Marines are supposed to do.

The USMC provided an honor guard at the burial. I am pretty sure these weren't real Marines. Their dress pants had visible wrinkles. There were only 5 with guns so Noel got a fifteen gun salute. The worst thing was the flag. They didn't fold it tight enough to tuck it properly. They undid and refolded it twice and finally resorted to folding the end into a point and jamming it in.

I make a big deal of this because this type of flubbing around was the sort of thing my uncle taught me to associate with squids or regular army (he never spoke ill of the air force,they provided close air support). In matters of ritual the Marines were always superior. In my admittedly limited experience I have found this to be true. I am doubly disappointed because I know that it would have mattered to Noel. Like a great Viking being buried in a common grave instead of being burned in his funeral ship these things matter to warriors.

I came home for a funeral But as long as I was here I would be damned if i was going to miss a wedding too!

Congratulations Patti and Tom. Words fail to express how happy I am for you two. So instead I'll use the words of the other participants.

Mahoney: "A surprise wedding?!!!?! Tom,,,,!,,Patti,,,,!,,, I have to go to this!!"

Tom's father: "Hi, I'm Tom's Dad"

Patti's father: "Hi, I'm Patti's Dad. Kind cool that we got to meet."

Tom(on bended knee just finishing the public proposal) "OK you all heard her say Yes. Now, quick before she comes to her senses, Ed you are the justice of the peace in Brocton, would you please come on up here and marry us?"

Patti: "< bawling size="medium"> I'll be Ok, Just a second.</bawling> I Do."

Billy: "this doesn't mean I have to call you Dad, Does It?

Ed: "You Know for an extra hundred dollars I won't file it for thirty days."

My eldest son(5): "You mean this is a wedding-picnic-party?....Cool!"

my middle son(2): "Pretty."

my youngest son(6 mo): "coo,, babble,, gurgle"

If I had to marry my wife all over again I'd do it like this:

With friends, family, and Chiavetta's chicken.

I am reading Hannibal on the plane. I have been a longtime fan of Thomas Harris. Silence of the lambs was the first and to this day only movie made from a book that didn't leave me disappointed.
On page 210 I learned that Hannibal Lecter uses a harpy. a spyderco knife originally designed for commercial fishermen for working on seine nets. It is constructed entirely of stainless steel. It has a hook shaped blade with the patented spyderedge serrated blade. It will make short work of virtually nonmetallic material(and even some metallic ones). It is probably my 2nd favorite knife. I can whip one open, cut a piece of technora line and have it closed before most humans even notice what is going on. Spydercos are bar none the finest production knives in the world, and, in fact , are better than the vast majority of custom knive available. There are few practical purpose for a knife that spyderco does have a solution.
At this point I have to admit at this point that I am a hard core knife freak . I am not ashamed of it, it is just me. FWIW given the choice I'd rather play with Angelina Jolie's knife collection than her. (although if you knew the wife I have at home you'd know that Angelina wouldn't be all that tempting)

Holy cow does he have taste in knives. p331 After having to abandon his knives in Florence he replaces them at a gun show:
another harpy
a mariner(my favorite)
a civilian (a modification of the police model similar the original worker, fits inside an altoids tin.)

In literally moments I am boarding a plane to go to a funeral. That part is a bummer. however my father's family only gathers at weddings and funerals and there have been precious few weddings of late. In fact the last time I saw this particular uncle was at another great uncle's funeral. almost three years ago. this is the opposite extreme of my wife's family. I think I would like it somewhere in between. Oh well.

Hello out there boys and girls, I have a desire for a particular thing and I figure that since the percentage of readers here do HTML you might be able to help me. As some of you know I do most of the work for this page on my palm. I would really love a list of html colors in some form that is searchable and portable to the palm. the less than nice colors you see on this site are related to fact that I don't have this little thing. thanks to anyone with advice.

ok McEwinisms is now up and ready for all the world to see. Please feel free to send Ideas. also I need some type of graphic to use as a backdrop for the page that has more to do with him than me.

Coming later today the much anticipated page of McEwinisms. it is far from complete so submissions will still be accepted and occasionally updated. I heard rumour that someone else was considering a page of Gradyisms. I can't be that interesting, Dave. Don't waste your time.

I haven't posted in awhile. The mental writing muscles have begun to atrophy. So I realize that I need to get back to it. There is much going on in my life now, but I won't talk about it. In fact I'll subject you to a series of small observations based on the crappy newsfeed on my pager.


K-tel records fired 123 employees on Friday to stop "growing losses". This may be the first time I have sympathy for anyone in the record industry. Who is gonna pay 13.99 for a mix CD that virtually anyone can burn for themselves. Screw Mettalica, K-tel should sue Napster. Or just cave and accept that their cool little scam/market niche is obsolete.

On Sunday in Montana a moose nailed a cop car chasing a speeder at about 85 mph. The speeder escaped, the officer was relatively unharmed. The patrol car nearly vaporized. No word on the moose, sausage I suspect.

note to dumbass cops who don't wear your seatbelt just because the law specifically exempts you. This officer had his belt on. He's alive and kicking today. Would you be?

Only six people were injured in the running of the bulls in Pamplona this year. Is it just me or are the Spaniards turning into wussies?

Yesterday was the anniversary of the re-establishment of the USMC in 1798. Who the hell de-established it? What were they thinking? "Well, we've just finished a revolution against the reigning world super power. I don't think there will be any hard feelings, let's disband our elite group of soldiers who a trained to go places quickly by ship to kill people and break stuff". Which segues nicely into:

Today is the anniversary of the US sending troops to Ft. York (Toronto) and reducing it to a pile of ashes. This provoked the Brits to attempt the same thing in DC. Oops minor tactical error. It's built on a swamp and doesn't burn well. Lots of smoke damage, though. It caused us to paint a certain yellowish house White.
The canucks have rebuilt a portion of Ft. York and wedged it between the QEW and Lakeshore. It's cute.

ok those two had been building in the palm for the last week or so. I have enjoyed being home immensely. while the writing has suffered, I am better for it. the next thing to do is get some serious bandwidth here at home. I had been spoiled by the redundant t3 connections at work. I will continue to post as family time and bandwidth allows.

For those of you who don't already know me, I drive a huge car. A 1984 pontiac parisienne, with 226,000 miles, a 350 cubic in small block v-8, a slightly modified quadrajet carburetor, and the Ralph Lauren interior. That's right, the former ecoterrorist drives a huge wasteful tank. Why? Well, that's a complicated answer.

I bought it from a beloved friend for 700 $ before he moved to Alaska. I was kind of broke and had just busted the front axle of my jeep. He let me pay him 400 and the next 300 he got in Fiji. I know how to fix everything on it. It has a small block chevy, an engine I believe in the way a Southern Baptist minister believes in the word of God. Parts for it are available everywhere and cheap. If you are not familiar with the car it is identical to the Chevy caprice that every cop and cabbie drove in the late eighties. The ecoterrorist rationalizes that not expending resources to build a new car in some way balances the wastefulness of the pontiac. I may yet prove to be correct.

I was driving this fine steed (all by myself, no less) to Cleveland from Buffalo at 0630. It hadn't been driven in at least six weeks, necesitating a jump from my brother. I had apparently left the GPS on that functions as a speedometer(p.s. we should all thank the President for finally clueing in and signing the executive order to shut off Selective Availability). My little brother being the conscientious sort that he is, felt that we should let it charge a bit before we started the beast up. Blammo, up she roars then off I go.

Just over one hundred miles away at the NY-PA border I notice that my GPS/ speedometer has shut itself off. While I push the power to turn it back on, the radio goes off. Then as I flick on the turn signal to pull over at the first exit in PA I notice that there is not even enough voltage to make the turn signal relays click. As I coast off the exit manage to get into the parking lot of the gas station/service center before my engine just shuts down down due to lack of voltage to run the distributor. They have a two bay service center there, and a tow truck. They won't do alternator work. They agree with my assessment of the problem. They point me to another place "that white building over there on top of that little rise". Then they charge me $10.60 to borrow their battery charger to jump the car and make it the quarter mile to the place where "they'll be able to take care of ya, son".

The sad part of all this is that I have a spare alternator and all the tools necessary to replace the obviously bad one. I normally travel with them in the trunk. The only hitch is, I took them and most of my other spares out of the trunk and put them on a shelf in my father-in-law's barn six weeks or so ago to fit
something in my trunk. I forgot about them until just as the engine died. So I am at the mercy of the folks at the white building at the top of the rise.

Which turns out to be A + B Service Center of 5452 Station rd. Northeast, PA 16428. I leave the car running and walk inside. After I finish telling the proprietor what happened and what I think is wrong he assure me that he can help. He has a car in each of his garages on a lift in varying states of disassembly, so I am instructed to just pull up close to the first bay and leave it running.

He puts the tester on it, and confirms my suspicions. "Go ahead and shut it down. Well,.... I can order a rebuilt one from town. They'll definitely have it. Prolly get it this afternoon. If ya don't mind used I could get ya fixed up right quick."

Hell yeah I took used.

While I sat on the trunklid, working my way through Cryptonomicon for something like the sixth time, he installed not one but two alternators, "on account of I didn't like the output numbers of the first one". He then took me inside, charged me fifty dollars even, and wished me a safe trip. At his posted labor rate of $42/hr I don't think he even covered labor.

I drove away feeling a little like I had just pulled some kind of trick, like Alec Guinness saying calmly "these are not the robots you are looking for". As I drove further I realized that I was wrong. I had just come across a decent, honest, auto repair shop that gave good measure. They exist, they just aren't as common as we might like.

I am home and will be for a couple weeks. I live in a smallish town. Not like Iowa small, but small. We have a newspaper that is even smaller. Smaller of stature. Smaller of mind. Smaller of soul. Definitely smaller of content.

The headline from Saturday read "Area Couple Miffed By Question". I didn't bother reading the article in question. This is the same paper that printed a front page story about my son being attacked by a rabid cat two and a half weeks after it made the tv news on two of the channels in Buffalo.

My wife did read it. She pointed out the article to me. She thought I might be interested as it was about an incident I had strong feelings about. And strong opinions.

A couple of years ago an acquaintance of mine died stupidly in a stupid(this may be a little redundant here as by definition they are all stupid, but I want to make the point clearly) DWI accident. He and his best buddy went out drinking as they did four or five nights each week. For the sake of protecting the stupid, let's call them Kent( the dead one) and Steve(the living one).

Steve's dad owned, until the IRS took it away last month, a local bar. A real nice hometown bar, where the bar actually owns the jukebox and customers buy the CD's for it so they can have their music. Steve even tends bar there sometimes. But,for them, it's just not cool enough to hang around in. On the evening in question Steve happened to be driving, although they regularly took turns or switched throughout the night. Kent had so much to drink that he just sat in the seat and passed out. No seat belt. At some point Steve also nodded off and wrecked the car. Wearing his seatbelt, Steve survived the crash with pretty survivable injuries. Kent choked to death on the blood that was dripping from the cut on his temple. He was too drunk to remember his seatbelt and died stupidly from a relatively minor injury.

You have probably figured out by now that I don't have a lot of sympathetic things to say to the family of either moron. I liked them both, except for this stupid DWI habit. I had told them both that I didn't mind so much that they kill themselves, but I really didn't think that they should risk other people's lives. Not being a particularly close friend of either one, my opinion wasn't heeded.

The parents of Kent are on a national crusade to make more effective DWI laws. I agree with this in principle. I would also like to see a more effective set of Laws. I'd favor something more Nordic. A fixed percentage of your income as a fine. Removal of your license for a couple of years. And a return to the concept of wergeld in the case of an injury or death. If you kill someone you must make up that individual's potential contribution to society or die trying.

The parents of Kent took their crusade on a national morning talk/infotainment show. The mother of Steve wrote a letter describing something that I and anyone who knew them would agree as true. That they were both irresponsible morons who regularly gambled with other's lives, and that on the night in question Steve happened to driving, but it was a common occurence for Kent to be driving just as wasted for Steve. The world famous talk show host we'll call BG asked the parents about the contents of the letter. From how they reacted you might think that BG was accusing Kent of having anal sex with two year old sheep while selling nuclear secrets to Saddam Hussein.

The next few paragraphs are for the parents of both morons who will probably never read it.

Kent's parents:
Continue your crusade, but remember that your son is a moron who was DWI pretty much from the time he was 17 till he choked to death on his own blood. Also remember that he probably didn't learn that behavior in a vacuum.

Steve's mom:
I am very sorry that your son has chosen to mourn the loss of his best friend by drinking himself right into the state pen. He was a good looking boy. Try not to think of the things that may happen to him there. You were a decent mother who did the best you could with what you were given.

Steve's dad:
Pay your friggin' taxes you fucking worthless drunk.