Beech Tree News Network

BITS AND PIECES. I love em' bettern' a Baptist preacher loves a long-range planning program.  Here are some:
When I was in junior high school, and clear on in to high school, in English classes we stared learning how "COMBOBULATE"  discombobulated sentences.  Trips to the blackboard and miles and miles of diagramming sentence structure accomplish this.  This was to keep us from saying, "Go throw the cow over fence some hay."  We used to call them misplaced modifiers and/or out of placed prepositional phrases, goodness knows what they are called now.
---When old Aunt Lola bent over to pick up the crippled hen, I saw her bloomers.  Whose bloomers did you see, Aunt Lola's or the hen's?
---Despite his discomfort the cowboy went ahead and rode his horse with hemorrhoids.  Did the cowboy have hemorrhoids or was it his horse?
---As the color guard raised the flag up the pole, a fat lady followed after singing the Star Spangled Banner.
---I'm sending back to you my son's birth certificate which was baptized on a half a sheet of paper.
---I've been in bed with the doctor for a month and he's done nothing.
---The matron of honor wore a lovely blue dress with a large bow across the extended part behind.
Enough of Aunt Lola's Bloomers.  We have just finished another presidential election.  Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all others, right on, Winnie.
In the year 1923, the 29th president, Warren G. Harding, died suddenly after only two years in office.  Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, was visiting his parents in Massachusetts, helping his father harvest hay.  He did not receive the message of the President's death until around four o'clock the following morning, when he and his dad arose to go to the hay field.  Naturally, the trip to the hay field was put on hold.  With neighbors called in as witnesses, Calvin Coolidge's dad, who was a justice of the peace, swore his son in as the 30th president of the United States.  Calvin held the coal oil lamp as his father read the oath.
President Coolidge later remarked,  "No one ever questioned the legality of a mere country justice of the peace swearing in a president of the United States so I suppose it was OK."  That's democracy.
I don't know, but I'd guess that was the cheapest presidential swearing in on record, it hardly cost the tax payers anything.
   I see where they are trying to capture asteroids in space now, they think they may contains so kind of fuel.  Why are they spending taxpayer's money on that, when we are told there remains enough half-spent uranium to furnish this country with power for the next hundred years....not to mention a hundred years of proven oil reserves at Prudehoe Bay, Alaska?  Are they grabbing at straws, still trying to justify to the taxpayers the costly space program?  I'm retired, but I still pay taxes on income which has already been taxed once before.
   I really did see my old great-aunt Lola's bloomers when I was seven or eight, they were called gollybusters and came down below her knees while she was bent over a butter churn.

Kindest regards....