This week’s Massacre of the Week comes from the City of Light in France. It seems two young men, brothers, had an axe to grind with a satirical magazine called “Charlie Hebdo.” These two nuts, now martyrs to their cause, have brought down the wrath of Allah upon the infidels who dared make fun of their barbaric religious fanaticism. Said wrath promoted more than a dozen people to room temperature.

The free world recoiled in shock and horror as the scene, beginning to get old by repetition, played out on the International stage. Police in riot gear with automatic weapons are becoming commonplace, not only in Paris but almost anywhere you go.

One of the pictures filtering down through the Interslush depicted a crowd holding up signs that spelled out, “We are not afraid.”

Give the French some credit here. It takes some grit to get slammed to the ground, get right back up and say, “bring it, bitches.”

It’s the only attitude we can afford because we, anyone who desires liberty, are at war with an amorphous, insidious, vicious group of people bent on returning the world to the Middle Ages.

What do these people want? Do they really want everyone to carry around some beads and a little rug so we can pray toward Mecca on the hour of every day? Do they really want women to be again relegated to cattle, mentally and physically, to be owned? Will slavery once again become commonplace?

Wealthy and powerful people are financing this jihad against the bulwarks of liberty, people who, apparently, want it all. Worse, they think they have a chance to get it.

Evil often gets the upper hand in our history. There are plenty of examples and no need to go into them here. However, History shows us evil is always destroyed in the end by ordinary human beings who just want to get on with their lives and don’t give a rat’s patootie about the ludicrous beliefs of Legion.

What would be the consequences of turning the other cheek? Dire, at first, and the main reason people choose the “eye for an eye” approach being taken at present. What would be the consequences of showing love to terroristic transgressors instead of retaliation? Would the forces ranged against us just mow us down, every last man, woman, and child? Or would they?

To change a man you must change his heart. Can that really be done with oppression, barbarism, and merciless brutality? You may well be able to do it, but the change in heart you engender will not produce the results you desire.

S’all for now . . .

I looked out my back door this morning and winter revealed itself in full glory, shaking its frozen dandruff all over like a Times Square party. About an inch had accumulated by the time I glimpsed it and I was glad I got a new snow shovel about a month ago.

Snow shovels are such necessary items when you live in the northern climes. There are so many from which to choose. Most of the ones I saw when shopping were made of plastic. PLASTIC??!!! Guaranteed to break after one season, you mean? I wanted a shovel that would do the job for many seasons. You could throw money at the problem but even the high-end, cleverly designed for ease of use, etc., were made of materials that would not stand the test of time.

Back in the early 1980’s I was boarding during a hiatus from the road band work I’d been doing. It was a nice break–hotel rooms, the food, the nightclubs, the road, the people, band mates, and all that blur into a treadmill and it can get old pretty quick.

My keyboard player, Lawrence Hess, a few years younger than I and gifted with musical talent as well as perfect pitch (he could tell you what tone that fart was), had joined another band and was traveling. His father, Lawrence senior, gave me a cot up in their attic and there I stayed for several months until Lawrence junior returned from the band that had crashed and burned.

(This was a pivotal point in my life because, with Lawrence and a gifted drummer named Russel Yohe, we then began a road trip that lasted several years as a trio called “Pure Magic.” More later . . . )

My duties in the household, a way to earn my keep, included stacking and moving firewood around (they had a Franklin stove in their living room that heated the entire building), shoveling snow and just about anything else Lawrence senior could think of. I cleaned and pointed his chimney during that time.

Old man Hess had a couple of coal shovels, one of which I used as a snow shovel. The handle had a T-shaped grip and you could shovel a lot of snow with it. Ordinary snow shovels have a straight handle and sometimes balancing a big shovel full of snow, due to the lopsided weight, can be problematic because the handle rotates in your wet gloves  and dumps the cargo back on the sidewalk.

I never forgot that little lesson. Coal shovels are made of steel and in consequence are fairly heavy. I was young then and the exercise was good for me.

So, there on the rack at WalMart, I spied what a sticker called a “scoop.” I believe it could also have been called a “grain shovel,” as the scoop was made of aluminum. It had a short T grip like the coal shovels but it was plastic so I rejected it at the time.

I shopped around a little more, going to hardware stores, etc., and most of them didn’t even have coal shovels, let alone a grain shovel. So I went back to WalMart, swallowed my pride, and bought the scoop, plastic handle and all. It cost about $30, the median price for a plastic “snow” shovel.

Today my new shovel, “the Iceman,” had its baptism of fire ( 😀 ) as I shoveled the 25-30 yard walk from my back door to the parking lot where I park my car. The shovel was light and so was the snow and I removed about 2 inches of snow from the walk in about 15 minutes. I’ll have to repeat that in a bit as it’s still snowing.

If I could have found my ideal shovel the handle would have been longer, the short handle of my new shovel makes me stoop a little. Being metal, snow stuck to it and I had to give it a little tap to unload it into the yard. Those issues are small negatives in my mind and, though I’m not so young these days, I can still use the exercise. I expect to have that shovel for a long time–at least until the plastic handle breaks! (I’m told there are no snow shovels in hell, so that will be a relief!)

I wrote a little poem about how I feel about snow and it appears on the poetry page of this blog. Check it out, it’s cute.

S’all for now . . .