Creative Endeavors, The Home of BoxcarOkie.com

June 10, 2011

Lock N Load

A woman walks into the kitchen, her husband is sitting at the kitchen table, with a shotgun in his hands, and he is crying. 

She asks him “What is going on?”

The mournful husband replies, “Twenty five years ago, on our wedding day, your father walked in with this shotgun and said to me … If you don’t love that girl, then take this shotgun go over there to that other room and blow her brains out, she is hopelessly in love with you.”

So why are you crying the wife asks.

He looks her straight in the eye and replies, “I would be getting outta prison today.”

[San Jose Mercury News]:  
An unidentified man, using a shotgun like a club to break a former girl friend’s windshield, accidentally shot himself to death when the gun discharged, blowing a hole in his gut.

[Kalamazoo Gazette]:
  James Burns, 34, (a mechanic) of Alamo, MI, was killed in March as he was trying to repair what police describe as a “farm-type truck.” Burns got a friend to drive the truck on a highway while Burns hung underneath so that he could ascertain the source of a troubling noise. Burns’ clothes caught on something, however, and the other man found Burns “wrapped in the drive shaft.”

[Hickory Daily Record]:
  Ken Charles Barger, 47, accidentally shot himself to death in December in Newton, NC. Awakening to the sound of a ringing telephone beside his bed, he reached for the phone but grabbed instead a Smith & Wesson 38 Special, which discharged when he drew it to his ear.

[UPI, Toronto]:
  Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the buildings windows to visiting law students.

Hoy previously has conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lawson, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was “one of the best and brightest” members of the 200-man association.

[The News of the Weird]:
  Michael Anderson Godwin made News of the Weird posthumously. He had spent several years awaiting South Carolina’s electric chair on a murder conviction before having his sentence reduced to life in prison. While sitting on a metal toilet in his cell attempting to fix his small TV set, he bit into a wire and was electrocuted.

[The Indianapolis Star]:
  A cigarette lighter may have triggered a fatal explosion in Dunkirk, IN. A Jay County man, using a cigarette lighter to check the barrel of a muzzle-loader, was killed Monday night when the weapon discharged in his face, sheriff’s investigators said.. Gregory David Pryor, 19, died in his parents’ rural Dunkirk home at about 11:30 PM. Investigators said Pryor was cleaning a 54-caliber muzzle-loader that had not been firing properly. He was using the lighter to look into the barrel when the gunpowder ignited..

[Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario]:
  A man cleaning a bird feeder on the balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death. “Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheelchair when the accident occurred,” said Inspector Darcy Honer of the Peel Regional Police. “It appears that the chair moved, and he went over the balcony,” Honer said.

She’s got a gun … and she wants to be president.

[ Arkansas Democrat Gazette]:
  The best is always last.

Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early Monday.  Woodruff County deputy Dovey Snyder reported the accident shortly after midnight Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock, were returning to Des Arc after a frog-catching trip.

On an overcast Sunday night, Poole’s pickup truck headlights malfunctioned.

The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. As a replacement fuse was not available, Wallis noticed that the ..22 caliber bullets from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded on eastbound toward the White River Bridge.

After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exited the pavement, and struck a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended.

Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. “Thank God we weren’t on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off, or we might be dead,” stated Wallis. “I’ve been a trooper for 10 years in this part of the world, but this is a first for me. I can’t believe that those two would admit how this accident happened,” said Snyder.

Upon being notified of the wreck, Lavinia (Poole’s wife) asked how many frogs the boys had caught and did anyone get them from the truck?

Have a great weekend …

OOO

Attitude Adjustment

Filed under: Bus Life,Life — ldsrr91 @ 2:34 AM

Being as I am terminally afflicted with a modern illness termed “Road Rage” it is often that I have to self diagnose myself and quickly take measures to protect not only myself, but also the general public at large.

This morning, I am cruising down the boulevard; all is well in my world.  Traffic is light, most of it has cleared out, and the road for the most part is quite empty.  I am pleased, I chuckle and think, “If I was any happier I would have to pay an amusement tax.”  The radio is playing Keith Urban, and I think to myself, “this guy isn’t country; he wouldn’t make a pimple on a country singers …. Uh, he just isn’t country.” Once again, I have to remind myself to …. Leave it alone.

And there he is … Out of the corner of my eye, I see him.

The dumb-bell in the Little Debbie’s Snack Cakes truck, he is going to blow thru that yield sign and push me over.  I feel the heat building; road rage is coming on board to make another trip with me this day.  It doesn’t take much in my old age to set me off like a rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida, I don’t even hit simmer on most days, just go straight to boil.

I have him figured right, here he comes.

Bigger than Dallas, in less than a New York minute, he blows thru the sign and I have to move over, no sense in seeing who has the best insurance this day. Face it, Eagle bodywork is not like taking the family hoopie into the local Ford dealer.  I succumb to his rude entry into my world, and I note that he is also talking on his cell phone.  Man, that rankles me, only thing worse than this would be text messaging, currently illegal in five states and in my opinion worthy of five to ten in the state pen.

Okie drivers (and I suppose drivers in other states) these days leave a lot to be desired.  Most of them have their head so far up their collective hinnies, they need a plexi-glass stomach just to see where they are going.  Adding a cell phone, the modern equivalent of a cigarette in the twenty-first century, just makes it worse.  Often technology does the exact reverse of what it was designed to do, mainly, improving the quality of life.

I heat up, I growl, I wish bad things on this person AND his cat.

Knowing full well that this volatile behavior on my part, is not conducive to good mental health or otherwise, I sit back in the seat, I smile and say to no one in particular, “get out of here moron, I have better things to do with my time this day, than mess with you.”  (When it gets really bad, I find a exit ramp, walk around the bus four or five times, stopped in New Mexico one time and got a piece of apple pie …. Whatever works, right?)

I was in Sweetwater, Texas a few summers back and this woman in a mini-van with a little faces in every window, loaded to the gills with kids, blew thru a stop sign right in front of me.  Standing on the breaks hard, shifting the contents of just about everything to the front of the truck, I wanted to kill her.  But I understand that even in Texas, this is illegal.  So I shouted out at her, “Don’t you know when to stop!”  She yelled back, “these aint all my kids!”  Texas, it is like a totally other world ….. Y’all.

Most truckers look at bus drivers with disdain and something less than outright disgust.  They feel we do not have a right to be on the road with them, same as four wheelers and the like, and have told me so on several occasions.  But the simple truth of the matter is we share a common problem, and that problem is bad drivers and attitudes.  When you get right down to it, where the rubber meets the road, we actually share the same universe, our world’s are not all that different.

The sign reads “Flyin J at exit 194” and a nice looking KW, clearly a garbage hauler, with a half-million dollars in chrome, naked women on his mudflaps and at least five dozen made in Hong Kong LED lights, comes barging onto the scene with a vengeance.  I move over, the lettering on the back of his trailer reads, “Every courtesy of the road is yours.”

Now isn’t that ironic?

Time to back out of it, and get some pie.  Won’t help my boyish figure any but it will almost certainly improve my attitude.

Life is short … enjoy the ride.

BCO

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