Good Morning Florida Keys

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There is a in God’s eyes, we all are homeless – Key West, and everywhere else post today at www.goodmorningkeywest.com.

Meanwhile …

At duplicate bridge in Marathon yesterday, one of the ladies passed around a petition to Tallahassee protesting the Marathon City Council passing an ordinance, over her loud objections at a council meeting, legalizing the ownership of pet pigs throughout Marathon. I quipped that the reason her protest went unheeded was she had protested to pigs.

Then, I told my playing partner, Al Morgan, and our two waiting opponents, of when I was in a coastal village in South Africa during a rest stop made by the tour van in which we were traveling. My wife and I went into a bar to unwind, and we sat next to several young Afrikaner men, Dutch stock. South African beer was ordered.

Then, a conversation was struck up, and when the Afrikaners learned I was from Alabama, specifically Birmingham, home of serious Apartheid in a time past, they were enthralled, wanted to hear about Birmingham. I said, well, the most interesting thing about Birmingham right now is men who are men all have themselves a pet pig, which they walk on city sidewalks before and after work each day. It’s quite the fad.

My wife and I actually had seen a woman walking a pet pig on a leash on a sidewalk near where we lived, before we left the States and now were in a bar in a South African coastal town talking to Afrikaners.

My wife kept kicking me under the bar stool, fearing I was about to get us both killed, but somehow we didn’t both get killed, and the young Afrikaners wished us well, and we headed back to the tour van, my wife giving me hell all the way. I thought maybe she had wet her pants, laughing.

Speaking of barrels of laughs, actually, there are a few laughs …

novelist Allan Clark Morgan, of Key Colony Beach, Florida, adjacent to Marathon, just above Seven Mile Bridge, Florida Keys

My dream maker last night told me I better write today about Al’s book signing Sunday at the Key Colony Beach Government Center. Al told me he would be there by maybe 10 a.m., and be there until closing time. Key Colony Beach is on the ocean side, just up US 1 from Marathon.

Al now has published three of at least four novels in a serial people with chemical engineering backgrounds and a love for spy-terrorist tales ought to seriously enjoy. I have no chemical engineering background, and am a klutz in all things engineering and mechanical, electrical, etc. Even so, and even though Al and I are miles apart politically, but not so far apart that we don’t both see that USA is seriously SNAFU’d and due for A GREAT KA-BOOM Al and I both heartedly hope we ain’t around to bear witness, I look forward to receiving each new installment in the unfolding product of what Al claims is his robust  imagination, but, well, here’s the review I wrote of the first installment in the unfolding unwinding unpredictable tale that hatched in Al’s twisted mind and twisted its way into paperback and Kindle books:

The Baby Phoenix, allegedly written by a civilian, February 21, 2012

By not Mark Twain

This review is from:

The Baby Phoenix (Paperback)

The Baby Phoenix, a spooker spy Arab terrorist intrigue set in the Arab realm and in America during the Soviet inversion of Vietnam, which is Afghanistan. It purports to have been written by Al Morgan, who is my duplicate bridge partner about six months of the year, when he lives in his home near Marathon, Florida Keys with his lovely wife Alice and their love slobber mutt Bailey. The rest of the time, Al, Alice and Bailey live, they claim, yes Bailey is fluent in human and golden retriever, near Boston, Mass, where Al claims he once attended M.I.T. and majored in chemical engineering and minored in mechanical engineering. All of which finds credible evidence in this rather interesting and sometimes amusing and sometimes not amusing tale. As does Al’s claim of having gone to work at Oak Ridge on something he won’t tell me, in pursuit of his Masters at M.I.T. – some kind of top secret Uncle Sam-MIT exchange program, is all I can make out, lend credence to his experience to write such a tale as The Baby Phoenix, a miniature and perhaps a bit more diabolical version of the American Phoenix missle. Actually, a Stinger kinda shoulder-launcher missile with lots more smarts. From Oak Ridge, Al claims he returned to M.I.T. and finished his Masters and taught, and then he took his PhD and taught and helped one of his M.I.T. professor’s earn a chair, or maybe Al earned the chair but the professor ended up sitting it it. Then, Al claims, he went into private industry with a Mass-based company, sort of rhymes with Company, and designed factories in America, South America and elsewhere overseas. A great legend, if you are a spook spy freak, which I sort of must be, given how many spook spy novels I have read. Along the way, it slipped out a few times in our senior babbling that Al did some inventing that led to patents, which led to perhaps more than some wampum headed his way. Like I said, what a great legend! I had no clue Al was a pastured spook until I read The Baby Phoenix. Ain’t no way a wannabe spook could write such a tale, is my spook spy novel lover ignorant opinion. Of course, Al denies his spook spy past, not terribly covertly revealed in the tale, and pretends to be his legend, which is fun to bat around at the old folks’ bridge game every Thursday afternoon, six months a year. Al’s a pretty darn good bridge player, too. Pretty darn better than this wannabe bridge ace not. I suppose the character in the tale I most enjoyed meeting was a goatherd in Western Pakistan, whose most immediate philosophy was it was his job, not the neighboring wild dogs’, to eat his goats, and he was mighty glad to end up with a CIA-provided M-16, or something equally vicious, with several loaded clips to share with the wolves. About one-fourth of the way into the tale the action slows a bit and the chemical and mechanical engineering takes front seat. But only to set the stage for the pace quickening and the tale weaving and juking, and, well, why tell the story when the point of my writing this review is to get you to buy The Baby Phoenix and learn how a Saudi terrorist prince got a hold of it, and more than just one of it, and set out to drive the airline companies and intelligence agencies of Israel, America and a few other easily-irritated countries, such as France and Saudi Arabia, a bit more than wankers, as the intrigue races toward a finale you might think was invented by Mozart and not by an alleged M.I.T. graduate, if you probably didn’t know better. All to set up the sequel, and the sequel’s sequel, both soon to be hot off the press, according to Al. You do not want to read the sequel before you read the genesis of this evolving spook spy Arab terrorist thriller saga. You can get The Baby Phoenix in either hard copy or Kindle at Amazon.com. 505 pages, the print was large enough for this sight and otherwise challenged senior to read with eye-glasses and not get a head-ache or eye-strain.

Sloan Bashinsky

Little Torch Key

goodmorningfloridakeys.com

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Like Father Like Son came next, then No End in Sight. I don’t remember what Al calls the 4th installment, now at the publisher, and a 5th installment is hatching, he says. Each set of bad guys, who get dispensed by a certain super bad ass CIA black op fellow and his confederates, is replaced by a set of even badder guys, and maybe an even badder woman. I still ain’t convinced Al ain’t a retired CIA bad ass black op specialist.

He says he is writing and engineer’s cook book, too.

When I met Al several years ago, he was called “Big Al”, because he was BIG. Then, he had some pulmonary/cardio upheavals, and was put on oxygen, and dragged an oxygen bottle behind him everywhere he went. Then, he did some reading up on eating, and he designed a no-salt engineer’s diet that knocked about 150 pounds off of him, and, shazam!, not having all those extra blood cells to oxygenate, he didn’t need to be dragging the oxygen bottle around any more.

Al invented stuff and got it patented, as part of his legend to hide he was a spy. Maybe the diet he invented to save himself from oxygen bottles, and a host of other medical problems pigging out can cause, will save lots of other people. Everytime I eat with Al and Alice and Bailey, Al tries out a new recipe on me. So far, it ain’t killed me.

No pigs allowed in Key Colony Beach yet, but who can say what might happen if a man pig and a woman pig get together on a walk, and get loose from their owners and run off and hide some place and make baby pigs, which go feral and wander over to Key Colony Beach, and parlor themselves therre. Maybe somebody ought to be thinking about opening a BBQ place at the turn off to Key Colony Beach, by the Shell station, as I recall. Ask anyone in Key Colony Beach for directions to the Government Center, and don’t go over the 25 m.p.h. speed limit, if you don’t want to get stopped by pigs in blue uniforms driving cars with blue flashing lights on top.

Meanwhile, cartoons Al recently forwarded:

RETIREE’S LAST TRIP TO KROGER

Yesterday I was at my local Kroger’s buying a large bag of Purina dog chow for my loyal pet, Jake, the Wonder Dog and was in the check-out line when a woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

What did she think I had an elephant?

So because I’m retired and have little to do, on impulse I told her that no, I didn’t have a dog, I was starting the Purina Diet again.

I added that I probably shouldn’t, because I ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IVs in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a Perfect Diet and that the way that it works is, to load your pants pockets with Purina Nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry. The food is nutritionally complete so it works well and I was going to try it again. (I have to mention here that practically everyone in line was now enthralled with my story.)

Horrified, she asked if I ended up in intensive care, because the dog food poisoned me. I told her no, I stopped to Pee on a Fire Hydrant and a car hit me.

I thought the guy behind her was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard. Kroger won’t let me shop there anymore.

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We need to be reminded…….As General Eisenhower said at the time, “we want plenty of photos so no one can ever say this did not happen”.

Remember this lady?

Irena Sendler Died: May 12, 2008 (aged 98) Warsaw, Poland

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.

She had an ulterior motive.
Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried.

She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.

Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.
During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.
Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi’s broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, In a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family.

Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected.

Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming.
Later ano the r politician, Barack Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.

Does this indicate to you that the Nobel Peace

Prize is now a joke?

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I didn’t know about Irena before receiving this forward, but I knew the Nobel Peace Prize was a joke when it was awarded to Barack Hussein Obama for continuing to wage the two wars of his predecessor in office, that would be the previous mass murderer traitor war criminal, George W. Bush.

Meanwhile, Al wasn’t quite finished …

Me, personally, I’m relying on being able to write about people on my blogs to keep me safe.

Sloan Bashinsky

keysmyhome@hotmail.com