Another story from my military days. This one from my Army years
It was a lot less scary than you would think. Training? Or just youthful belief in my indestructibility?
Another story from my military days. This one from my Army years
It was a lot less scary than you would think. Training? Or just youthful belief in my indestructibility?
Posted in About me
I’m working on my confidence in front of the mic, so here’s a little story about the time the US Navy took me to Falaraki, on the island of Rhodes, Greece.
Topless pool bars are pretty sweet.
Posted in About me
I had fun doing my audio blog post a few days ago. (Check it out if you’ve not listened) I’d like to do some more audio blogging. I’m not yet ready to try a full on podcast, but maybe. I’d need a co-host to do that.
So to get me started, ask me some questions. If you’re hard core, you could use Audacity (or any other MP3 recording device) to record your question, comment, rant, whatever, send it to me, and I’ll respond.
Even you gun haters out there. Go ahead, ask away. Email your questions, or recordings, to [email protected]
Posted in About me
Since the story came up on Facebook, I thought I’d fire up the microphone and tell you all about the time I told all my high school peers how to beat a traffic ticket in California.
I spent my July 4th Independence Day holiday riding my bicycle. Not just any little spin around the neighborhood. I rode the Firecracker 100K bike ride out of Cary, NC with the Capital Bicycle Club.
Almost 65 miles of pedaling.
I’m fortunate that my father-in-law likes to ride, and went with me. It was pretty nice to spend the day riding with him. We completed the entire route in 5 hours 36 minutes and 35 seconds for an overall average speed of 11.1 MPH, including three official rest stops plus one extra rest stop. The big drops in the speed line show you where we rested. Our on-the-road time was 4 hours 55 minutes 1 second for an overall riding speed of 13.1 MPH. Not bad for my first organized bike ride in about 8 or 9 years. Also, pretty impressive on my Father-in-Law’s part given he was riding a mountain bike with dirt tires.
Best part of the ride? My really awesome ninja shower
I hauled up the shower bag, stripped to my shorts, and showered off right there in the grass next to the truck. 5 plus hours in the sun and the water was nice and warm.
Then, on Saturday, I got a phone call telling me that they had drawn my raffle number and I’d won a $100 bicycle pump. SWEET! My previous pump died about 3 weeks ago, so it was just what I needed.
I’m looking forward to my next organized bike ride which will be the Tour d’Orange. I’ll be riding the 68 mile loop. If you’re local and you can ride at least 36 miles, you should sign up and we’ll ride together. They have 36, 68, 80, and 100 mile routes, all of which share the same first 36 mile loop. FiL is planning on getting some road tires, so we should be a bit faster this time.
And yes, I was carrying concealed.
Posted in About me
This post has been removed. In it’s place, here’s a photo of me getting two buckets of .22LR ammo at Gander Mountain.
Posted in About me
I finally cleaned my desk. And my office.
Several things happened that led to me finally cleaning up my desk. The company gave me a new printer/scanner/fax to replace the old broken printer that used to sit on my desk. I moved the new printer to a box off to the side. You can see it next to the Michael Z Williamson signed special edition on the left side of the picture.
Since I had all the new space on the desk, I thought I would haul out the second flat screen monitor my wife got for really cheap. Two monitors, one computer! But that didn’t work. I don’t have the right cables. But the new flat screen is a lot bigger than the old, so I swapped them out. Now I have the big monitor on the main computer.
So then I thought, why not pull out the spare laptop, the one I use for Skype? So I pulled it out and hooked it up to the old monitor. This meant a trip to the store to get a new keyboard. I dumped water into my old keyboard and broke it, so I’ve been using the spare keyboard. I got a wireless keyboard and mouse, swapped the wired keyboard to the Skype machine, along with the wireless mouse I already had, and presto, I’m all set to give myself computer monitor sunburn.
I must admit that it’s a little strange to be working on the computer without having to elbow piles of junk out of the way.
Posted in About me
Five days ago I received this handsome offer from the email account of Martha Rosenberg, Editor for Elliot Fineman’s National Gun Victim’s Action Council
Hello Sean,
Would you care to appear on our radio show, It’s the Guns, Stupid in upcoming weeks? Each show features pro and anti guests interviewed separately by CEO Elliot Fineman.You would have 20 minutes or so to explain your positions and have a conversation with Elliot.
The show runs on Thursdays at 6PM EST. Here is a link to recent shows. http://gunvictimsaction.org/bl og/category/its-the-guns-stupi d-radio-show/
We are attaching a description of the show.
Thanks. Please let us know.
Sincerely
NGVAC editors
They attached this press release type thingy,
Sweet! How could I possibly resist? So after consulting with several gun blogger friends to see what they thought, I sent her this.
Dear Martha Rosenberg, NCGVAC Editor,
I have carefully considered your offer to appear on Elliot Fineman’s pejoratively named radio show as well as my possible responses. I have chosen, by way of a response,
“Are you freaking kidding me?”
Elliot Fineman? Why should I, a third tier regional gun blogger, use my tiny amount of fame to prop up the failed attempts of a gun grabbing rich man who is clearly insane? Sure, he’s not Mike Bloomberg rich, but he’s a whole lot wealthier than me. And to judge by his very few appearances on TV, his grasp upon reality is tenuous at best.
I’m sure that he looked like a good bet when Brady Campaign basically went bankrupt and CSGV descended into the Twitter version of the Jerry Springer Show. All the angry anti-gun figureheads from Brady’s farcical board of directors must have loved the idea of someone actually promising action instead of cynically using them to fundraise Paul Helmke’s salary while he did absolutely nothing to advance their agenda. But a couple of TV appearances later and the TV stations stopped calling Elliot, didn’t they? They just don’t forgive a rambling grumpy old man who’s so far gone that he openly attempted to extort Starbucks. It’s one thing to threaten a boycott. It’s quite another to demand a $10 Million cash payout.
The press will happily put lunatics on TV if they can use those lunatics to discredit gun owners. But by and large the press supports your gun grabbing agenda. Why would they wish to discredit their own side with a person who appears one step short of senility? I guess that’s why Elliot is now running his own radio show instead of appearing on TV.
This brings up an important point. Why are you exploiting the poor man? He clearly needs help and instead of making sure he gets it, you take his money and edit… something for him? What’s the matter, didn’t make the cut to join Bloomie’s paid staff? They’re rolling in cash. They claim 10 paid staffers in North Carolina alone! And the chance that they will make any meaningful changes to North Carolina gun laws is somewhere between a snowball’s chance in hell and the chance that I would lower myself to abusing a poor old man on his vanity radio program. Why don’t you get on Bloomie’s payroll. He might be crazy, but he’s at least got it together enough that no one feels sorry for him if you take his money.
I wish you well in any of your future endeavors that don’t include attacking the civil rights of 300 plus million Americans.
Sean D Sorrentino
I think that should prevent any further attempts on their part to return to fame on my back.
Posted in About me, Fineman is a Fool
I spend a lot of time in the car. I drive from location to location and do inspections of a nature I will not reveal for a company that will remain nameless out of respect for their undoubted desire to remain out of my political activities. I will go so far as to say that I work for an insurance company and leave it at that.
In any case, I’ve been driving a great deal since I started the job over 7 years ago and it’s only just occurred to me that perhaps listening to Pandora Radio (and Sirius Satellite Radio before that) all day long isn’t making me any smarter. A working knowledge of music that can be loosely categorized as Electronic Dance Music has helped me to catch the cultural reference during an episode of the really great TV show Grimm, but I have a feeling that if I just read a few of the more well known books I might at least feel a bit smarter for all the time invested.
For very good reason, the NC State Troopers frown on reading actual books while driving so I’ve turned to the Wake County Library’s extensive audiobook collection. And by “very extensive,” I mean “I didn’t know that many audiobooks existed, let alone in one easily searched, easily ordered, conveniently located place.” And that’s just the ones on physical audio CDs. They have more that are downloadable.
When I received my new company car, I found that Chevrolet had kindly installed a USB port that allowed me to connect a flash drive to the radio. Neat! I already had ripped most of Harry Potter, so I put it on a flash drive and I listened to it again, all the way to Book 4. Then I discovered the Aubrey-Maturin novels. These books were the basis for the Russell Crowe movie, Master and Commander: Far Side of the World. The books, not surprisingly, are even better than the movie. I am working my way through them at a prodigious pace. I’ve read the books up to book 13 and I just finished listening to book 10. I cannot recommend them highly enough. This leaves me with a serious problem. I’ll be done with book 20, and the series, in just a month or two. Then what? What should I listen to then?
I’ve combined one of the online “100 books to read before you die a horrible death because some idiot wasn’t paying attention during his morning commute” lists with the Wake County Public Library’s helpful online card catalog (we can still call it that even though the cards are virtual, right?) and I’ve developed the following list of books to borrow and listen to. This list is alphabetical by author’s last name.
Title | Author |
Watership Down | Adams, Richard |
Little women | Alcott, Louisa May |
Pride and prejudice | Austen, Jane |
Sense and sensibility | Austen, Jane |
Persuasion | Austen, Jane |
Emma | Austen, Jane |
Jane Eyre | Bronte, Charlotte |
Wuthering Heights | Brontë, Emily |
Captain Vorpatril’s alliance | Bujold, Lois McMaster |
The secret garden | Burnett, Frances Hodgson |
Ender’s Game | Card, Orson Scott |
Alice’s adventures in Wonderland | Carroll, Lewis |
The Canterbury tales | Chaucer, Geoffrey |
Heart of darkness | Conrad, Joseph |
Charlie and the chocolate factory | Dahl, Roald |
Robinson Crusoe | Defoe, Daniel |
Minority report and other stories | Dick, Philip K |
A Christmas carol | Dickens, Charles |
A tale of two cities | Dickens, Charles |
Great expectations | Dickens, Charles |
Oliver Twist | Dickens, Charles |
Crime and punishment | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor |
The adventures of Sherlock Holmes | Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir |
Rebecca | Du Maurier, Daphne, Dame |
The Count of Monte Cristo | Dumas, Alexandre |
The sound and the fury | Faulkner, William |
Tender is the night | Fitzgerald, F. Scott |
Madame Bovary | Flaubert, Gustave |
Memoirs of a geisha | Golden, Arthur |
Lord of the flies | Golding, William |
The wind in the willows | Grahame, Kenneth |
Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Hardy, Thomas |
The return of the native | Hardy, Thomas |
The scarlet letter | Hawthorne, Nathaniel |
Catch-22 | Heller, Joseph |
Dune | Herbert, Frank |
The wailing wind | Hillerman, Tony |
The Odyssey | Homer |
The Iliad | Homer |
The remains of the day | Ishiguro, Kazuo |
A portrait of the artist as a young man | Joyce, James |
Ulysses | Joyce, James |
On the road | Kerouac, Jack |
To kill a mockingbird | Lee, Harper |
The lion, the witch and the wardrobe | Lewis, C. S |
Prince Caspian | Lewis, C. S |
The horse and his boy | Lewis, C. S |
The last battle | Lewis, C. S |
The magician’s nephew | Lewis, C. S |
The silver chair | Lewis, C. S |
The voyage of the Dawn Treader | Lewis, C. S |
The call of the wild | London, Jack |
The prince | Machiavelli, Niccolò |
Life of Pi | Martel, Yann |
Atonement | McEwan, Ian |
Moby Dick | Melville, Herman |
Cloud atlas | Mitchell, David |
Anne of Green Gables | Montgomery, L. M. |
Lolita | Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich |
The time traveler’s wife | Niffenegger, Audrey |
1984 | Orwell, George |
Animal farm | Orwell, George |
Frankenstein | Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft |
A town like Alice | Shute, Nevil, 1899-1960 |
Of mice and men | Steinbeck, John |
The grapes of wrath | Steinbeck, John |
Dracula | Stoker, Bram |
Gulliver’s travels | Swift, Jonathan |
The hobbit | Tolkien, J. R. R. |
Anna Karenina | Tolstoy, Leo, graf |
The time machine | Wells, H. G. |
Charlotte’s web | White, E. B. |
I am surprised by the number of books on this list that I have never read.
Any suggestions? Did I miss any that you think I should add? Are there any that I should avoid like the plague?
Posted in About me
Six days. That’s all it took for Utah to send me a renewed Utah Concealed Firearm Permit. I applied for a renewal on Sunday and I received the new CFP in the mail today. That’s service for you. And the best part is that they renewed it for 5 years from the date of the original CFP’s expiration date, so I’m good until 5-18-2019.
Posted in About me, Joan Peterson is ignorant