The Passport

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For weeks, I’ve been mentioning a certain something in my life that’s been going on and which has, on occasion, interfered with my normal routine. I’ve hinted at it during my tastytrade show, and I’ve mentioned it off-handedly in the comments system. Now that it has an ending, I’m ready to tell the tale. (TRIGGER WARNING: If you do not have utter and complete disrespect for anyone who works for any government, you might want to give this entire post a miss. I have a lifelong disrespect for all civic employees. Every single one. So, like I said, I would suggest perhaps you pop over to the Kardashian website or something instead. Kiss, kiss………………..Tim)

The Trip Forthcoming

As long-time readers know, the vast majority – – virtually the entirety – – of our family’s travel is due to fencing. Our children are elite, internationally-seasoned fencers, and we’ve been to a dizzying number of cities and countries to the sport.

Now, having never been an athlete myself, I’m not sure what kinds of places other athletes go, but when it comes to fencing, I am convinced the organizers of any of these events pick from a list of the world’s least desirable locations and choose those for the venue. I’m not going to enumerate them, but let’s just say that, were it not for fencing, I’d have never visited any of the cities are countries to which we had traveled.

In that spirit, the next trip up was in…………..Romania. You remember them, right? The impoverished former member of the Eastern Bloc whose dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was so hated by his countrymen that, when the USSR fell to pieces, he and his wife were shot to death by his own army on Christmas Day, 1989. So, true to form, the fencing destination was a former Warsaw Pact shithole, and a place no one would ever want to visit. Ever.

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Tuba Mirum Spargens Sonum

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I rarely got told ‘no” as a child.

The reason, mainly, was that I asked for so little. It’s not like we were destitute. We were a perfectly normal middle-class family. It’s just that, for whatever reason, I never felt inclined to bug my parents for this-or-that. Even if the thing I wanted cost maybe two bucks, I didn’t have the heart to bug them.

It isn’t that I didn’t want anything, though. I would see things on television, or in stores, which would absolutely captivate me, but even though I was never admonished to not ask for “stuff”, I instinctively refrained from doing so. Maybe it was a sense of decency toward my family. Or maybe I was too afraid of being disappointed. Whatever the reason, I didn’t ask.

But the memories are still there. Allow me to share with you some of the trifles that I wanted so badly as a child, but never asked my parents to buy.

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This Man is Made of Chalk

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It seems that no matter what the time zone, I wake up at 5 a.m. Thus, I never need an alarm clock

So here I am in arboreal North Carolina, and I saw on ZH a very lengthy letter, anonymously written, about Covid and vaccinations. Given how much eye-rolling I’ve thrown at our own comments section at the obsession over this topic, I read the entire (very long) letter, and I’ve got to say………..there won’t be any more eye-rolling.

As with the chap at ZH who shared it, I have no idea of the source, so I reference the original here (but be warned, there are all kinds of pop-ups and spammy-looking things on that site). Below is the original text, without the 17 pages of footnotes. My sharing of this is really meant to provide a piece which, on its face, appears to be well-researched, thorough, and thoughtful, which is all I’d ask for any point of view.


My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough.

We have been forced to watch America and the Free World spin into inexorable decline due to a biowarfare attack. We, along with countless others, have been victimized and gaslit by propaganda and psychological warfare operations being conducted by an unelected, unaccountable Elite against the American people and our allies.

Our mental and physical health have suffered immensely over the course of the past year and a half. We have felt the sting of isolation, lockdown, masking, quarantines, and other completely nonsensical acts of healthcare theater that have done absolutely nothing to protect the health or wellbeing of the public from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

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