A Eulogy

I always thought my father would live forever.

Of course, that's not yet possible, but it always seemed that if anyone could do it, it would be Dad. I don't know anyone who did more things, went more places, or had more different kinds of experiences in their lifetime than Dad did. He and I didn't always see eye to eye, maybe because we were a lot alike, but there was never a time when I didn't respect his opinions, judgement, and experience.

I know to other people it may not have looked like it, because we fought every time we had the chance, but Dad was the only hero I ever had, or needed. We fought a lot, because it was his way of testing my ability to think for myself, something he prized. He always told me that the worst thing you could do was to let someone else think for you. Even if you make the wrong decisions, they have to be yours.

Dad worked all his life to take care of his family, and to take responsibility for his decisions. He taught me to do the same. Dad wasn't perfect, but he never stopped trying to improve himself. He knew more than most people ever imagined, and kept learning new things every day. He struggled against more adversity than most people ever get in one lifetime and, for the most part, overcame it. He had the greatest intellect I ever met, and the courage to admit when he was wrong, something that most people lack.

Dad's courage in the face of adversity, strength, intelligence, determination, and dedication to what he believed were a great inspiration to me, and I'm sure, many other people who knew him.

He was the only hero I ever had, and I loved him.

This concludes my portion of my father's eulogy. What follows is my brother's.

When I was nineteen, I got into a car accident in a Honda which I had owned for two weeks at the time. The collision was in the front end, and left all the important components sitting about two feet shy of the bumper. Perhaps out of unwillingness to give up my car, I decided to repair the vehicle myself at home, an ambitious project to say the least. My father and I spent nine months of Sundays pulling damage out of the frame, and squeezing in replacements for every imaginable part. I must have driven that car a full hundred miles before it caught fire, perhaps a mile for every hour my dad spent working on it with me.

And that's the kind of person my dad was, that regardless of how ill-advised were my goals, my dad would have invested any amount of time and effort to help me achieve them, making me feel I was capable of anything.

I want to thank my father today not only for raising and providing for me, but also for being able to tell me when I was wrong, but be on my side looking out for my best interests even when I was.

My dad was one of the few people in the world who shared my sometimes peculiar sense of humor, or perhaps I shared his. I want to thank him today for teaching me to see the humor in any situation, as he always could.

In my dad's life, he's owned businesses, scraped animal hides, run a convenience store and a transmission shop, been a mechanical engineer, a boxer, a taxi driver, and even a war hero. Through his example I've learned to work hard, and that no honest job is unacceptable if it provides for your family.

My parents have told me a story again and again about when I was a child, learning to ride a bike for the first time, and I fell down over and over. I want to thank my dad now for watching me, even though it must have been difficult sometimes throughout my life, letting me fall so that I could learn for myself how to keep getting back up.

I want to thank my dad also for teaching me loyalty and honesty, teaching me to think for myself, teaching me through his myriad examples to be a loving husband to my wife, and a nurturing father to my son, and most of all for teaching me that there's always something else to learn.

I hope that as I move on in life, that ultimately I can answer to that legacy that my father has passed on to me with his love.




F. J. B.
8/12/1933 - 12/20/2005
Rest In Peace, Dad.

Oh, My God, This Is Gonna Suuuuuuuuck....

Woman falls 3,000 feet, lives!

Of course, as high up as I was, I was still about 3,000 feet off the ground, I was gonna give it a try. I was doing everything I knew to do to correct the malfunction. But, ultimately, I was prepared for it to be a fatal accident."

No kidding.
Ya know, I'm glad she's ok.
By ok, I mean alive - she DID get a little *ahem* mussed by the impact - try this on for size:

Richardson now has 15 plates in her face for fractures after four operations. She also suffered two breaks in her pelvis, as well as a broken right fibula.

Wanna know what's REALLY cool? When they were putting her back together in the hospital, they learned that she was 2 weeks pregnant - and the fetus not only survived, it did so completely unharmed! Damn, Shayna, your uterus RULES!

In other news of things that suck, I give you: the Japanese XBOX360 launch.

And while I'm on the subject of sucking, blind drivers suck. No, really, he even admitted it:

"He kept saying, 'Driving was the dumbest thing. I shouldn't have drove. I don't know what I was thinking,'" Des Moines Police Officer Ryan Doty told the Des Moines Register.

Only in Des Moines, folks.

Ok, there are a few more icons of suckness still in the works. I give you: Measurement Incorporated. For those of you who don't know, Measurement Inc. is a company that scores state-mandated standardized tests on behalf of the schools, thus allowing teachers to do more useful things like teach students not to read, to forget history, and most of all, to operate on perpetual auto-pilot. Well, the "wisdom" of outsourcing is proven yet again; the company mistakenly failed 890 of 1600 students in one test, and is now getting bitchslapped with a huge fine. They said that this is the first mistake they've made that was big enough to warrant a fine, which begs the question: how many have there been that you didn't get fined for?

You also suck if you are trying to solicit donations for your child, who evidently doesn't need any more, thanks. I can appreciate the difficulty if you're out of work and can't afford new clothes for your 13-year-old, but if the real problem is that your 13-year-old weighs over 300 pounds and can't fit into cheap clothing, you need to stop passing the slop trough. I've always been a bit hefty - ok, dammit, I'm fat, but I took years and years to get this way. At 13? WTF?!? Anyway, seeing as FARK nailed this one, I'll share the love:

Father of 300lb 13-year-old appeals for money to buy his son clothes so he doesn't get cold in winter, overlooking the fact that other walruses also do pretty well with their subcutaneous layer of fat.

Oh, and while I'm at it: Fort Worth doesn't get cold enough to put this boy in any danger, ever. It does get a mite chilly, but it's not like he has to stand outside in the cold for just HOURS and HOURS.

Telemarketers also suck. A lot. So much so that Verizon, not the least-sucky company in the world, has been forced to recognize that even their terrible service can only be damaged by spam phone calls. To prevent cellphone customers from sending them a lynch mob, complete with torches and rope, they've begun suing cellphone telemarketing companies. Oddly, that doesn't suck; not at all. Go Verizon. Now if you can just charge what your service is worth, and lay off with the 9,000 year service contracts, you might turn into a half-decent company.
Or not.

Also, the Tennessee election commission sucks. They've managed to let three convicted felons, a voter outside the district having the election, and a DEAD guy vote on a state senate seat. Not surprisingly, when confronted with this fact, the Shelby County Election Commission Chairman, a Democrat, said that it's not fraud, and that no election fraud took place (despite the fact that the Republican candidate lost the race by only 13 votes.) In fact, he said

"You'd have to have a conspiracy the size of JFK" to have widespread fraud, he said.

Really. And yet, every election the Republicans won in the last 2 elections, of course, was fraudulent and fixed in every way.

Liquid manure sucks, too. No, really, think about it: liquid bullshit. Which is why, when Stahl Farms recently spilled this noxious substance into their neighbors' wells, they were forced to pay their neighbors $380,000 to get them to shut up about it. That, you'd think, would cause just about anybody to be a bit more careful about how they use the stuff; but no, that would make sense. Instead, Stahl Farms is gearing up to have to pay another huge fine, when they are inevitably sued for the - wait for it - 10,000 gallons of bullshit they spilled the other day. Wow. You know the expression "you're full of shit?" There ya go.

Oh, and your iPod sucks, too, at least if you'd like to, say, have functional hearing for a few more years. See, the digital audio doesn't distort when you turn it up - which means you can listen to it a lot louder - which means you're due for deafness really, really soon. While we're on the subject, anyone in a big city has seen the imbeciles who buy $4,000 car setreos and then cruise around with their windows or doors open, blaring their music of choice across the neighborhood. Well, they'll get their comeuppance soon enough, as well.
Let me simplify for anyone too obtuse to grasp the simple concept: LOUD NOISES MAKE YOU DEAF. Your car stereo and iPod count, dumbass.

Identity thieves suck, as well. Even if you have really crappy credit. Why? Because if you piss them off, they get creative. So Jake Brown, of the appropriately named Apathy, Illinois, found out recently. His abysmal credit rating ruined the attempts of identity thieves to open bank accounts and credit card accounts in his name, which you'd think would be a good thing, except that now they're angry. So now, they've unleashed

other forces... that would prove a bit more difficult to dismiss than declined credit, including an illegal Dutch gay porn website registered under his name, and a subpoena from RIAA claiming he illegally uploaded "No fewer than 425,000 copyrighted songs from his Dominican Republic based server from 2003-2005."

Oooo, that's gotta sting a little.

Well, that's enough suckness for me today. Thursday I will try to find something that DOESN'T suck, just to break up the routine.

SunnComm: Just Another Name For Stupid

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An I-Just-HAVE-To-Blog-THAT Moment, And All Its Friends

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