Twenty Years Gone: Jim Barrett and Dr. John Britton

Twenty years ago today, Jim Barrett and Dr. John Britton were murdered by a religious terrorist.

The clinic where they died was firebombed January 1, 2012 by some homeless jackwagon who'd been watching the weekly terrorist "protests."

The clinic reopened in a different location, in the same shopping center as a Hobby Lobby.

A repost of my 2009 write-up:

On this day in 1994, Paul Hill walked up to a pickup truck in the driveway of a Pensacola clinic and killed Jim Barrett and Dr. John Britton with a shotgun.

I stood in a parking lot across the street with some of the other clinic escorts (Jim was one of ours) for a few hours. The bodies were laid out and covered with sheets while the crime scene guys did their thing.

I never met Dr. Britton; he was one of the volunteers who stepped up when David Gunn was murdered barely a year before.

Jim was a good guy, a sort of grandfather figure. He's buried at Arlington:

www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jbarrett.htm

I'm gonna hoist a drink in his honor sometime today and hope that someday crazy religious douchebags will no longer exist.

And for the rest of us, if you know a guy like Jim, buy him a drink.

Remembering Jim Barrett & Dr. John Britton (7/29/1994)

Hard to believe it was 19 years ago that they were murdered, barely a mile from where I'm sitting. The clinic was firebombed in January of 2012. Bastards finally destroyed the building, but the clinic reopened pretty quickly in new digs.

I'm just gonna repost what I wrote July 29, 2009:

On this day in 1994, Paul Hill walked up to a pickup truck in the driveway of a Pensacola clinic and killed Jim Barrett and Dr. John Britton with a shotgun.

I stood in a parking lot across the street with some of the other clinic escorts (Jim was one of ours) for a few hours. The bodies were laid out and covered with sheets while the crime scene guys did their thing.

I never met Dr. Britton; he was one of the volunteers who stepped up when David Gunn was murdered barely a year before.

Jim was a good guy, a sort of grandfather figure. He's buried at Arlington:

www.arlingtoncemetery.net/jbarrett.htm

I'm gonna hoist a drink in his honor sometime today and hope that someday crazy religious douchebags will no longer exist.

And for the rest of us, if you know a guy like Jim, buy him a drink.

Pic of the Day: R. I. P. Tunch

Part of my daily routine is reading the "Balloon Juice" blog.

The blog's owner, John Cole, just had an utterly awful weekend. His beloved cat, Tunch, was killed by a visiting dog. It doesn't look like he suffered much (broken neck) and he left some claws in the dog's face.

There has been an incredible (and humbling) outpouring of support from the Juicers: almost $12,000 in donations to Marion Animal Resource Connection. They handle dog and cat rescues and until now they were on a shoestring budget, paying for spaying and neutering and other expenses out of their own pockets.

Awesome.

One regular sent John this:

[Update: Just read that the donations have topped $15,000! That's a lot of help for rescue pups and cats.--11:37pm]

Lots of love from the Juicers for that 20-pound floofball.

Song of the Day: Awesome young woman busts up some Goppers.

Awwww, yeah. (more here)

Funny how she was such a threat that it took FOUR deputies to get her out of there.

Fark republicans.

"Awe" and "Heroes" tags for the young lady who busted 'em up, all the other tags for the scumbags.

Song of the Day: Cheerios Spoof

A few weeks ago, this happened:




...and the wingnuts predictably fell all over themselves trying to come up with the most vile thing to say about the ad's interracial couple and their little girl.

Too bad they won't see the humor in this spoof:



The song? Yeah, wingnuts as they scream scream SCREAM!!!!! over the rest of us living our lives the way we damn well see fit.

ADDING: Bonus! 11-year old kid sings National Anthem, wingnut scum crap their cages (some Twitterrhea at the link)...and the kid's doing an encore tonight. bwahahaha!

Two-Buck Wound Vac (update!)

In the weeks after my right kidney was taken out, I did some research on "wound vac" equipment. Wound Care staff told me it would accelerate healing by drawing fluid out of the incision site and promoting blood flow to the surrounding tissue.

I couldn't afford the $1000-$2000 weekly rental, and I wanted to see if there was a cheaper alternative. There were several writeups about Danielle Zurovcik and her inexpensive hand-operated vac. Her invention was tested in the field in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The team was only there for ten days, so they couldn't test for quicker healing. But the dressing and negative pressure did keep wounds cleaner than a traditional dressing and allowed for less-frequent dressing changes.

Dr. Zurovcik followed this with a 2011-12 clinical trial in Rwanda. From there she was able to finalize the design.

Her invention is the first product from her new company, WiCare (Worldwide Innovative Healthcare Inc.), which aims to get medical devices to those least able to afford them. If I'm reading things correctly, that includes here in the States.

Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia

I consider anyone a hero if they're willing to ride a column of flame into space. This week we mark the anniversaries of losing some heroes in the line of duty:

Apollo 1, January 27, 1967
--Command Pilot Virgil "Gus" Grissom
--Senior Pilot Edward H. White
--Pilot Roger B. Chaffee

Shuttle Challenger, STS-51L, January 28, 1986
--Commander Francis R. Scobee
--Pilot Michael J. Smith
--Mission Specialists
----Ellison S. Onizuka
----Judith A. Resnik
----Ronald E. McNair
--Payload Specialists
----Gregory B.Jarvis
----S. Christa McAuliffe (Teacher in Space)

Shuttle Columbia, STS-107, February 1, 2003
--Commander Rick D. Husband
--Pilot William C. McCool
--Mission Specialists
----David M. Brown
----Kalpana Chawla (Flight Engineer)
----Laurel B. Clark
--Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson
--Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon

Best way I can think to honor their memory is to put up this NASA Astronomy Pic of the Day, Atlantis (STS-30) taking the Magellan Venus probe into orbit (click on it to enlarge, or follow the link).

Song of the Day: Countdown (Rush)

Instead of a sad song for the passing of Neil Armstrong, I wanted something that expresses the excitement of seeing human ambition paying off.

This is the sort of thing we should be focusing upon--reaching for the stars, walking on the moon, exploring our little corner of the sky.



I'm sad to see Mr. Armstrong go--but what a life he led!

Neil Armstrong, RIP

The man who did the Coolest Thing Ever has died at 82 from complications of a heart-bypass surgery a few weeks ago.

It took a legion of nearly half a million people on the ground and an enormous rocket to put three men into orbit around the moon, a quarter million miles away.

It takes a badass to sit on top of one of those Saturn rockets, feeling it swaying in the winds on the Cape, then riding a column of flame into orbit, coasting in silence to our closest neighbor. I'd settle for being the guy who stays in the Command Module, looping around the moon, but how awesome to be The First to walk on it. Mr. Armstrong's boot prints are still up there, an eternal "I was here."

The Onion's "Moon Landing" describes the utter badassitude of Mr. Armstrong and the 11 guys who followed him (not safe for work, but this is how people should STILL be reacting to walking on the moon).

Of those twelve, only eight are left:

02. Buzz Aldrin

04. Alan Bean

06. Edgar Mitchell
07. David Scott

09. John W. Young
10. Charles Duke
11. Eugene Cernan
12. Harrison Schmitt


01. Neil Armstrong
03. Pete Conrad
05. Alan Shepard
08. James Irwin

Pic of the Day: The Vulture Picks the Granny Starver

The MittBot has picked Paul "Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver" Ryan as his running mate for his 2012 presidential campaign.

With that in mind, we've selected yesterday's Pic of the Day and its companion video, since rMoney couldn't really have picked a better way to hand Obama another four years without picking Sarah Palin.

Ryan is the guy whose "budget" would gut Social Security and Medicare--and the National Park Service, among other things. rMoney's the guy whose company guts smaller companies and feeds off the corpses. They're perfect together!

AND...



A huge thankyouthankyouthankyou!! to Charlie Pierce for starting the "Zombie-eyed granny starver" nickname.

Bonus snark: WereBear coined the campaign name: "Dunning/Kruger 2012." Here's why that's funny.

Bonus bonus snark: rMoney's such a shit that he outsourced notifying the runner-up VP candidates to one of his offspring units: "Dad says you're not it."

Super Extra Bonus Snark from The Thin Black Duke: "And if Romney reminds people of the asshole boss who fires you on Christmas Eve, Ryan is the ratfuck snitch in the office who tells lies to the boss behind your back."

Ryan is the S.S. Mittanic's iceberg. It's all over but the sinking.

Tim Minchin's "Storm"

The plot: Our guy and his wife go to dinner at a couples' place. The 5th guest is a chick named Storm, complete with a fairy tattoo and several mouthfuls of dumb stuff to say through the evening. Our guy finally reaches a point where he can no longer stand it and he cuts loose--brilliantly, clearly, plainly.

The animation and music are just what's needed, with some eye-popping visuals in places.

"Surviving the Cut"--female Captain gets Sapper Tab

I was watching a rerun of this show on the Military Channel just now; the Sapper Tab is awarded to troops who make it through the Sapper Leader Course. Combat engineers--the ones who build bridges and battlefield fortifications, lay and clear minefields, and that sort of thing.

The training looked grueling--rappelling down a tower and a cliff, basic survival training, anything the instructors could throw at them.

One of the graduates was a captain, a woman. You know, one of those delicate flowers the conservative military experts say are too weak and fragile to make it in battle?

Oh wait--most of those conservatives are cowards who dodged the draft themselves. That "delicate flower" outlasted most of the big, tough manly men in her class.

Song of the Day: Rush to Limbaugh: Get off, eh?

I knew the Vulgar Pigboy was using my favorite band's music on his show.

Not anymore.

Bob Cesca broke the story: "The Spirit of Radio" was playing while Pigboy was demanding Sandra Fluke's sex tapes. Cesca contacted Anthem Entertainment and the band to ask about his use of their music. Their attorney sent out a cease and desist (full text posted on Cesca's blog).

In your face, Pigboy.

Here's a Rush song he should have used, since the lyrics are about him and his fellow travelers:



Good tags are for the band, bad ones for Pigboy.

RIP: Ralph McQuarrie

The man most responsible for the look and feel of the Star Wars universe has died. McQuarrie brought us X-Wings, cloud cars, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, and the droids he was looking for.

Ain't It Cool News has a writeup with lots of conceptual art from McQuarrie's Star Wars, Empire, Jedi and Battlestar Galactica.

McQuarrie's own site features a gallery of his work with the American space program during the Apollo missions.

Pic of the Day: Heroes.

Courage can be defined as being afraid and still doing what you have to do.

Heroes are just regular people who do important things at the right time.


I've had this picture in my "History" folder for a decade, now. When I look at it, I don't feel patriotic. I feel humbled that there are people who risk their lives to do the right thing.

Wound Vac.

I'd never heard of such a thing before, but the Wound Care folks are trying to get me set up with one.

It's not much more than a little vacuum pump that draws fluid out of an open wound. It's supposed to increase blood flow to the injury and help it close up. There's some question (see the link) whether it's even effective for non-diabetic treatment, but I was told that it could speed my belly's healing by a few weeks.

Medicaid doesn't cover the rental--and I can understand why: this little handy-dandy wonder of modern medical technology is a grand or two a WEEK. I'm working on the "financial hardship" paperwork for one of these, but in the meantime I went looking for cheaper alternatives and found a story about an MIT student who worked up a hand-operated device that costs...three bucks.

Three. Bucks.

Danielle Zurovcik was going to test her invention in Rwanda, but took 50 of them to Haiti at the request of Partners in Health in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.

Three. Bucks. (There's followup of the Haiti trip at this link.)

The basic design came from an accordion-style toilet plunger. There's a good picture of it at this link. That's pretty damn cool. "Heroes" tag goes to Zurovcik and anyone working with her on this gadget.

Important Day in History

Quite a bit happened on various April 12ths.

The most important, I think, is that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was called "safe, effective, and potent" in 1955.

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space and the first in orbit.

In 1981, the shuttle Columbia took its first flight.

In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died, just months before the end of the second World War.

In 1983, Chicago got its first black mayor, Harold Washington.

In 1861, the South continued--and deepened--its treason against the United States by attacking Fort Sumter.

The Holy Grail of Pickens Drawings

By now it's clear that I'm a fort geek. I've been to Fort Pickens so many times that several of the Park Rangers know me by name.

I've got maybe a hundred pages of sketches and measurements, several hundred photos, some technical drawings, but after nearly 12 years of climbing and walking and measuring and scribbling, I have never put together a complete single drawing of the place. The smaller details--individual rooms, the curtain walls, each bastion alone--are easy enough on their own, but mistakes that aren't obvious in one can keep the whole thing from coming together. That's what happened with the 1:480 scale "hero" drawing I was working on in 2006--I couldn't get the northwest and southwest walls lined up.

The drawings I've found online and in Edwin Bearss' Historic Structure Report are low-resolution and don't blow up well enough to get good measurements from. The National Archives has everything I could possibly want--but none of the printing companies I contacted ever answered back (they don't want money? Well then!).

Then there's the #2 Plan that recently made Pic of the Day. I found it in a search on the Library of Congress website. They've got it as a 25mb JPEG 2000 image. It's good for archival, I suppose, since it gives a high degree of compression while preserving image detail. The format was supposed to replace standard JPEG, but 11 years on it's still kind of hard to find usable viewers. I went through several programs and the only thing that worked was the Express View plugin for Internet Explorer. You can open the image and save the visible section as a bitmap, but that's about it; no hi-resolution conversion.

It wasn't until I was looking at GIMP plugins that I finally found a program--IrfanView--that would let me open the JP2 file and re-save as a 75mb JPEG. Big damn file, but all the detail of Joseph Totten's original 1828 drawing is there, including his measurements along the Channel Fronts. This is the part of the fort that just wouldn't line up in my drawings.

I spent several hours just scrolling across the Big Picture, comparing the few sections of Totten's work that got built to my own and was pleased that I'd gotten so close to his numbers. All I was missing was that angle I'd never have gotten without surveying equipment...or an original drawing. Turns out it's just what I needed.

The "Heroes" tag is for Irfan and for Joseph Totten, who spent decades of his life in fortification engineering.

Song of the Day: Anthony Weiner's Civics Lesson

I've said it before. The Goposaurs people keep putting into office are dumb as a box of farking hammers. It seems like they can't help popping in front of any available camera to show just how little they know about doing their job, let alone how the government works.

At the end of March, Eric Cantor (R-Imbecile) and his Red Elephant pals showed that they didn't even have a "Schoolhouse Rock" level of understanding of the legislative process.

Said Cantor:

“What this bill says is it reiterates again the deadline, and that the Senate should act before the deadline, and that’s what the American people are expecting. The bill then says if the Senate does not act, then H.R. 1 [the House-passed bill] will be the law of the land.”

That's right. They wrote language into the bill that claims that if the Senate doesn't vote on a version of the House Bill, it will automatically become law.

There's a longer, better rant than mine at Sooner Blue 2's blog.

Yeah, I suppose that this could just be a dog-whistle gimmick for the Teabagger set, who really are this ignorant of how government works. But then I'm reminded of this raft of idiots:

Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann, who gave a speech in New Hampshire commemorating the Shot Heard Round the World. When she was told that The Shot actually happened in Massachusetts, she didn't have enough sense to just correct the speech. She gave it again the next day. What do you expect from someone who claims the Founding Fathers ended slavery?

Jan "Crypt Keeper" Brewer, who lied about decapitated bodies in the Arizona desert, then refused to talk to the media about it. She tried to weasel out of it--"It was an error." No, it was a LIE.

Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle, who can't tell the difference between Hispanic and Asian.

Christine "wow, she can BREATHE and be this stupid" O'Donnel, who says she wouldn't lie to Hitler to save Anne Frank, but gets caught lying--Live!

James "Land My Plane Anywhere I Want" Inhofe, who endangered workers on a closed runway.

Scott "Screw the Courts" Walker, who first tried to lock protestors out of the Capitol Building (and ignored court orders telling him to stop), and is now ignoring orders to stop screwing around with his anti-union "law."

Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott.

Louis "Duh..terrrr babies!" Gohmert. Fark's sake.

Rick "Frothy" Santorum (bahahahahahaaaaa!!!)

...and so many more that I just have to wonder whether they're as dumb--if not dumber--than their constituents. (What? You say I left out Caribou Barbie? Nope. Just not giving the Snowbilly any Blog time.)


With that in mind, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner has become my favorite member of Congress. To help his poor lost Republican friends to find their way through the complicated legislative process, Mr. Weiner brought a copy of "House Mouse, Senate Mouse" to work and read from it:





This guy's what a Democrat ought to be.

Pic of the Day: Freedom.

I don't know who to give credit to for the picture (I grabbed it from Deus Ex Malcontent), but this is my pick for what the protests in Egypt the last 18 days have all been about. Mubarak is gone after 3 decades of being propped up by the US.

Here's hoping the Egyptian people get the style of governance they've been pushing for--and not what the US gave them.