Beech Tree News Network

You can rent a casket now in some places. 'Course it goes without saying only if you plan to be cremated. Three days rent on a casket is cheaper than buying one.

I don't know about now, but back when I was a kid every boy dreamed of coming out on the basketball floor in a uniform, before a cheering crowd.

Mine came true to an extent . . . but the crowd wasn't large. Just the kids that didn't ride the bus; we played after school.

The notion that the past predicts the future has been around long, and proven to be true over and over: we could almost call it a law--like gravity or centrifugal force. We welcome calamity when we fail to heed this.

If a boy slaps his girlfriend around before they are married, he will after they are married, or worse. If a man cheats on his first wife and they divorce, he will do the same with his second wife if he remarries.

Few things equal the pleasure of crawling back between the warm bed covers after having left them minutes before. At my age I get to enjoy this several times each night . . . if you get my drift.

Even more pleasurable is when this happens around day-break, when back in my other life, I was getting up to go to one job or another . . . for some 40 years or more. Now I just praise the Lord, roll back over and pull up that good warmth and drift back off . . . thinking about that first good cup of coffee I'll have later - much later.

Help, I'm caught in a state of mind . . . I don't know whether to fish-cutbait-or call hogs. I was under the impression we were living in the age of ultra-sophistocated communications, the likes of which the world has never known.

I see where the HARLEM GLOBE TROTTERS are, or were, back in our area recently.

When they were at the top of their success back in the late 1940s and fifties . . . and into the sixties, some of the sports "experts" said they were good tricksters and ball handlers, but they really couldn't play basketball . . . "Just a bunch of razzle-dazzle." The TROTTERS got wind of this and challenged that year's winners of the NBA to a game. The GLOBE TROTTERS BEAT THEM. The NBA said it was a fluke. To prove it wasn't an accident, they played a second game. They beat the NBA champs again.

There are two sides to a flap-jack . . . but you knew that. However, sometimes we never see the other side, or sometimes we discover it on down the road . . . maybe way-down the road. The liberal media is good, very good, at hiding the other side . . . the true side.

Most of us remember the NASA shuttle disaster twenty-plus years ago, when the shuttle rocket booster blew-up just after lift-off . . . killing all the crew. When it happened we only heard the media-side of the flapjack. Years later we learned the other side.

Ode to the hospital gown:

As the nurse brought me mine it looked familiar, it had more gown at the top than the bottom. It should be called a "keister" gown; they tend to show a lot of that.

They tell us there has been more technology progress since 1900 that there was all time before that. That's probably true . . . with one exception: THE DREADED HOSPITAL GOWN. If you HAVE NEVER BEEN SO BLESSED, a hospital gown would not be a good candidate for a "bucket list" (pun intended).

Greg Boyington (Col. Gregory Boyington, USMC, ret. . . deceased), said he was never mistreated badly by the Japanese guards who could speak English. It was the illiterate and the ignorant who were brutal. That's interesting but not surprising. Eric Hoffer once wrote, "The unintelligent are often frustrated with their own shallowness, therefore they lash out at others."

Boyington, famous for the Marine Black Sheep squadron he commanded in the Pacific in World War Two, was shot down and taken prisoner by the Japanese near the island of New Britain in the South Pacific.