Wow, the past few weeks have been pretty busy. On July 4th I had my daughter, mother, brother and niece come into town. We went to Disney first and had a lot of fun. It was great having the girls together as they don’t get to see each other much. Everyone is already gone and I miss them already.

I have had this domain since sometime in 2004. The previous owner was/is a radio announcer in Pensacola, no relation. I’ve used it to pretty much just post random things every so often. Since I’ve started USA Carry I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t done anything with this site. I’ve really just used it to link other sites I want to help get picked up in Google and other search engines, which explains all the random links on the main page.

So it is Friday, May 23, 2008 and I’ve decided to update the design a little. I also plan to start posting more here. I’ll continue to post the humor, news, or other random things I get sent from family and friends everyday. I also plan on posting information about the domaining and search engine optimization I’ve been learning over the years but am primarily focused on now.

I thought this one was worth passing along and a big THANK YOU to all who serve, past, present, and future.

Hooray for this Teacher! Too bad there aren’t more like her.

Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a social studies school teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock , did something not to be forgotten.

On the first day of school, with permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she took all of the desks out of the classroom. The kids came into first period and there were no desks. They obviously looked around and said, “Ms. Cothren, where’s our desk?”

And she said, “You can’t have a desk until you tell me how you earn them.”

They thought, “Well, maybe it’s our grades.”

“No,” she said.

“Maybe it’s our behavior.”

And she told them, “No, it’s not even your behavior.”

And so they came and went in the first period, still no desks in the
classroom. Second period, same thing, third period too. By early afternoon television news crews had gathered in Ms. Cothren’s class to find out about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of the classroom.

The last period of the day, Martha Cothren gathered her class. They were, at this time, sitting on the floor around the sides of the room. And she said, “Throughout the day no one has really understood how you earn the desks that sit in this classroom ordinarily.” She said, “Now I’m going to tell you.”

Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it, and as she did 27 U.S. veterans, wearing their uniforms, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. And they placed those school desks in rows, and then they stood along the wall. And by the time they had finished placing those desks, those kids, for the first time, I think perhaps in their lives, understood how they earned those desks.

Martha said, “You don’t have to earn those desks. These guys did it for you. They put them out there for you, but it’s up to you to sit here responsibly to learn, to be good students and good citizens, because they paid a price for you to have that desk, and don’t ever forget it.”

Friends, I think sometimes we forget that the freedoms that we have are freedoms not because of celebrities. The freedoms are because of ordinary people who did extraordinary things, who loved this country more than life itself, and who not only earned a school desk for a kid at the Robinson High
School in Little Rock , but who earned a seat for you and me to enjoy this great land we call home, this wonderful nation that we better love enough to protect and preserve with the kind of conservative, solid values and principles that made us a great nation. **”We live in the Land of the Free because of the brave.” ****

Please remember our Troops!

From an email I received last week:

The older I get, the more I enjoy Saturday mornings. Perhaps it’s the quiet solitude that comes with being the first to rise, or maybe it’s the unbounded joy of not having to be at work. Either way, the first few hours of a Saturday morning are most enjoyable.

A few weeks ago, I was shuffling toward the garage with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand and the morning paper in the other What began as a typical Saturday morning turned into one of those lessons that life seems to hand you from time to time. Let me tell you about it:

I turned the dial up into the phone portion of the band on my ham radio in order to listen to a Saturday morning swap net. Along the way, I came across an older sounding chap, with a tremendous signal and a golden voice. You know the kind; he sounded like he should be in the broadcasting business.. He was telling whom-ever he was talking with something about “a thousand marbles.” I was intrigued and stopped to listen to what he had to say.

“Well, Tom, it sure sounds like you’re busy with your job. I’m sure they pay you well but it’s a shame you have to be away from home and your family
so much. Hard to believe a young fellow should have to work sixty or seventy hours a week to make ends meet. It’s too bad you missed your daughter’s “dance recital” he continued. “Let me tell you something that has helped me keep my own priorities.” And that’s when he began to explain his theory of a “thousand marbles.”

“You see, I sat down one day and did a little arithmetic. The average person lives about seventy-five years. I know, some live more and some live less, but on average, folks live about seventy-five years.

“Now then, I multiplied 75 times 52 and I came up with 3900, which is t he number of Saturdays that the average person has in their entire lifetime. Now, stick with me, Tom, I’m getting to the important art.

It took me until I was fifty-five years old to think about all this in any detail”, he went on, “and by that time I had lived through over twenty-eight hundred Saturdays.” “I got to thinking that if I lived to be seventy-five, I only had about a thousand of them left to enjoy. So I went to a toy store and bought every single marble they had. I ended up having to visit three toy stores to round up 1000 marbles. I took them home and put them inside a large, clear plastic container right here in the shack next to my gear.”

“Every Saturday since then, I have taken one marble out and thrown it away. I found that by watching the marbles diminish, I focused more on the really important things in life.

There is nothing like watching your time here on this earth run out to help get your priorities straight.”

“Now let me tell you one last thing before I sign-off with you and take my lovely wife out for breakfast. This morning, I took the very last marble out of the container. I figure that if I make it until next Saturday then I have been given a little extra time. And the one thing we can all use is a little more time.”

“It was nice to meet you Tom, I hope you spend more time with your family, and I hope to meet you again here on the band. This is a 75 Year old Man, K9NZQ, clear and going QRT, good morning!”

You could have heard a pin drop on the band when this fellow signed off. I guess he gave us all a lot to think about. I had planned to work on the antenna that morning, and then I was going to meet up with a few hams to work on the next club newsletter.

Instead, I went upstairs and woke my wife up with a kiss. “C’mon honey, I’m taking you and the kids to breakfast” “What brought this on?” she asked with a smile. “Oh, nothing special, it’s just been a long time since we spent a Saturday together with the kids. And hey, can we stop at a toy store while we’re out? I need to buy some marbles.

And so, as one smart bear once said..”If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”
- Winnie the Pooh.

From The Dude @ MoviesOnline.Ca

300 Movie Review

By: The Dude

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that the movie looks full of obscenely ridiculous action sequences that would kick unholy amounts of arse. The movie is a two hour, R-rated version of that trailer. It inspires many an exagerrated obscene comment, but it’s completely deserving in doing so. 300 is adapted from the graphic novel by Frank Miller.

It tells the story of the 300 Spartan warriors led by their bad ass King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), as they stand up against the tens of thousands of Persians awaiting to conquer and absorb Sparta into the empire. The Persians are lead by Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro), who figures himself a god among men. And the movie is about their battle. Sure, there’s a fair amount of political intrigue amongst the Queen (Lena Headey, who is quite yummy) and a traitor among the Sparta elite (Dominic West), but really the movie is about the battle, which is a technically accomplished series of fight scenes like I have yet to see before. Seriously. You’ll want to compare them to scenes from Lord of the Rings or Gladiator, but you’d be wrong. Oh my, you will be wrong. One example would be the long, unbroken shot of Leonidas fighting in the first battle, the one that doesn’t cut and keeps speeding up and slowing down, was quite invigorating, and a stand out among many great epic battle sequences.

Jaw dropping, and I might even be so inclined to say awe inspiring, battle sequences. The visuals themselves, even when not involving bloodshed or carnage, are a sight to behold. Much like the previous Miller adaptation Sin City, 300 was made with generous help from all digital environments. I don’t know how faithful the film is to the graphic novel, but I can say that it looks damn fine, like the novel had come to life. Although what I viewed tonight was a workprint, most of the effects and digital rendering had been completed, and it never looked obnoxiously fake at all. It’s a beautiful looking movie. The actors do well for their roles, with Gerard Butler as a very convincing badass leader, even though he doesn’t need to keep shouting everything as if it were a grand statement. But you know what? It doesn’t matter because I’d follow him into battle any day.

Mainly because I know that he could pretty much single-handedly take care of everyone for me, but he’d know I have his back. Zach Snyder, he of Dawn of the Dead (’04) fame, directs 300 with a sure hand, telling a rock solid tale of honor and valor and mostly about kicking ass. Looking back upon the film, I’m starting to pick up on some themes that are a little freaky if you stop to think about them. (Spartans discard imperfect babies, so as to keep their army full of the strongest. This leads one to realize that the Spartans are kind of creating their own master race. And when you think of creating a master race, Nazis also come to mind. And yet, we the viewer are supposed to identify and support these Nazis. These superior soldiers who, by the way, all kind of look like He-Man action figures, and made me feel inadequate about myself.)

There is a lot one can take away from this film. But purely on a knee-jerk visceral level, it’s going to be very hard to top this movie. It’s an adrenaline shot to your standard epic film. It packs a lot of testosterone into a two hour gap, but when compared to the bloated epics of late (Troy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven), it’s quite refreshing. I don’t know if I can keep lavishing praise on this film. I know this much, I can’t wait to see it again. It’s nice to see a movie that’s not afraid to do new things while at the same time telling a solid story. A story of fighting. A lot of fighting. A hell of a lot of fighting, but done so well, and in such a damn good looking movie. It’s a movie that makes you excited about movies again. Hell, it reduced me to obscene fan-boy gushing like I lost my virginity or solved the world’s economic crises, full of hyperbole and nonsensical ramblings. That’s what this movie does!!! 300 is one hell of a film.

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I can’t wait to see this film. My roommate had me read Gates of Fire which is the same story and it was a great read. I actually need to finish it before the movie comes out. I’ll be giving my own review after we go see it next Friday at the Imax.

Click to watch video: