The Deer Hunter

Reuters / Thu Oct 22, 3:15 pm ET
PALERMO, Sicily (Reuters) – A Sicilian builder transferred from prison to house arrest tried to get himself locked up again to escape arguments with his wife at home, Italian media reported Thursday. Santo Gambino, 30, did time for dumping hazardous waste before being moved to house arrest in Villabate, outside the Sicilian capital, Palermo, Italian news agencies reported. Gambino went to the police station and asked to be put away again to avoid arguing with his wife, who accused him of failing to pay for the upkeep of their two children. Police charged him with violating the conditions of his sentence and made him go home and patch things up with his wife. (Writing by Stephen Brown; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

This is the kind of thing that would never happen on Shelter Island; imagine, a man preferring to be put in jail rather than be home with his wife....

Joe: "Roger, did you see this article? This guy gets himself put in jail rather than hear his wife yammer on and on about nothin'."
Roger: "Yeah , I saw that. Jeannie is already bitching about me waking her up at 4 AM when I go deer hunting."
Joe: "Do you make a lot of noise?"
Roger: "Never. I tiptoe around, get my gear, guns, it's not me, it's Terry, he wakes her up when he pulls up to get me and the top lights on his truck cab shine into our bedroom. Then he comes in for coffee. He's not noisy, but sometimes we have to wake her up to find the filters, y'know..."
Joe: "Well, that's not unreasonable, she can go right back to sleep."
Roger: "She says the smell of the coffee wakes her up. I thought it would have been the bacon, but I guess it's the coffee. She always wakes up for some reason. Then she starts in about not leaving egg dishes all over and she's over at the sink rinsing dishes and complaining that it's now five in the morning and there's no sense going back to sleep since she has to get up at seven with the kids. Man, I can't want to get out of that house in the morning."
Joe: "We all put up with it, man. You think they'd be appreciative that we're bring home free venison. Jennie always rags on about how the venison is actually about $116 a pound. She does this weird calculation thing, adds up the cost of my gear, guns, bullets, boots, knives, gas, everything."
Roger: "You don't tell her the truth do you? You always trim off 25% of the price of anything you tell your wife you bought."
Joe; "I know that. I never tell her what the guns and gear really cost, then the venison would come out to about $182 a pound, and I'd NEVER hear the end of that!"
Roger: You know, if we could work out something, we could get arrested together after deer season and share the cell in the jail, there's only two."
Joe: "You know, that's not as crazy as it sounds. We could do something to get jailed for about two months, get three hots and a cot, no complaining about how much money we spent or how much time we spent away from the family..."
Roger: "No lectures on not letting the baby play with the empty rifle..."
Joe: "No complaints about washing clothes with deer blood on them."
Roger: "No one yelling at you not to throw your bowie knife at the shed door because someone might open the door at that exact moment and get a knife in the head."
Joe: "Women worry about the most trivial stuff, y'know...."
Roger: "I know, I always lock the shed door before I throw my knives."
Joe: "What about the time you nearly clipped Tom when he opened the door?"
Roger: "That was two years ago. Besides, Tom is a big guy, the knife couldn't have gone in far enough to do much harm."
Joe: "So what can we get arrested for?"
Roger: "We're a coupla bright guys, lets bring a six pack and we'll figure something out in the deer blind."

CANNONBALL!

What’s a Little Zoning Variance Between Neighbors?

AP Friday, Oct. 16, 2009
UNIONTOWN, PA. – A Pennsylvania Civil War buff faces a felony charge for accidentally firing a 2-pound cannonball through the wall of his neighbor's home. Fifty-four-year-old William Maser had been charged with reckless endangerment, criminal mischief and disorderly conduct. Authorities on Thursday added a felony count of discharging a firearm into an occupied structure. ... Maser has acknowledged firing a homemade cannon outside his house in George's Township..... The cannonball, about two inches in diameter, ricocheted and hit the neighbor's home about 400 yards away, smashing through a window and a wall before landing in a closet. Police say nobody was hurt.

“Hello, is Mrs. Lowry there?”
“Hi, Mrs. Lowry? It’s Sharon the babysitter. Um, there’s a problem. You know your neighbor, Mr. Maser, the man who you were saying just moved to the Island from Pennsylvania after he got into some kind of trouble?
......Yeah, that’s him. Well, he’s a Civil War buff and he likes to do that reenactment stuff......the police just told me.....
They told me just now, when they got here.... no, they’re all busy with him right now, but I can tell you what happened.
Okay, we were all sitting and watching Wall-E on the kids’ TV when, BOOM! There was this huge explosion. I jumped up and there was this big hole in the kitchen over the counter and.....
It was a cannonball, Mrs. Lowry.... no, a real cannonball. Please don’t scream, Mrs. Lowry. I heard the man tell the police he makes them himself. But wait, there’s more.....hello? Mrs. Lowry?
Oh, hi Mr. Lowry. Yes, the man next door, he shot off a cannon.... yes, I’m sure a cannon is against some Island ordinance, but I don’t know about that stuff. Anyway, the cannonball came through the wall in the kitchen....no, none of the appliances got shot... but wait, it kept going you see....it went through the wall on the opposite side and into yours’ and Mrs. Lowry’s bathroom....yea, through the tile, I know it was new, it was very pretty, maybe you can tell Mrs.’ Lowry about that later.....it was pretty loud the kids got really scarred. No, all the police are busy with the guy and they’re all over the house taking pictures of the damage, they said to tell you they’ll talk to you in just a little bit. Yeah, but wait a minute Mr. Lowry, it gets worse....please don’t yell at me, Mr. Lowry, I’m just trying to tell you....
Oh, hi again, Mrs. Lowry. You took a Xanex? That’s good. Do you have any you can give Mr. Lowry?.... yea, well, he’ll need them soon. So, after the cannonball went through the kitchen and through the wall to your bathroom, it landed in Mr. Lowry’s closet....no, the gun closet. I know he has that new gun for deer this year. Well, I don’t know one gun from another Mrs. Lowry, two of them are busted in pieces and two are all right. Maybe you shouldn’t tell him until you get home....
Hello Mr. Lowry..... Yes, it landed in your gun closet. I just told Mrs. Lowry, I don’t know one from another, but one of the police said, you were gonna be really upset when you got home and they should take the other guns out of the house as a precaution so you don’t shoot the guy. The cop said your permit got shot too. Well, I don’t know if it was in your lucky hunting vest, Mr. Lowry, I just heard the cop laugh and said, “Damn, he got the permit too!”
......okay, you’re on your way, I’ll tell the police. Oh, and Mr. Lowry, the kids and I are all right, just in case anyone asks.”

So, we lost the 2016 Olympic bid to Brazil, to Rio de Janeiro, the ultimate party town. All they know how to do is parades, very decorative, elaborate, parades. The official opening parade where all the athletes march into the stadium will take forever. We'll have all the teams wearing sequined team outfits with giant feather headdresses to match. Having the Olympics come to their town gives them justification for another five parades next year alone. They'll have to improve all the roads, build a stadium, hire top notch party planners from all over the world to prepare for the international parties. No point in hiring extra security, can't hide much in g-string. Body waxers will open up shops everywhere. You'll go out for a cup of coffee, stumble into Juan's Brazilian Coffee and Wax Works, and come back to the hotel hairless and wired on high octane coffee. I can just see the athletes doing the broad jump in thongs and with the Olympic rings symbol in sequins glued on their chests.

I don't understand why the Olympic Committee didn't choose Chicago. It has all the charm and excitement of New York, but with double the crime. Oprah lives there. You'd think the Committee would have taken that into consideration. She would have done countless shows on Olympians preparing for the big event from all over the world. The Olympic Committee can't buy the publicity that Oprah could give them, but, their loss. I'm not holding a grudge.

Of course, the East End could have bid and gotten the Olympics if we really wanted them. The course for Potato Hampton could have made a perfect course for any of the long distance running events, plus, running through towns, people would have run along side them and given them Evian water or Dunkin' Donuts Coffee Coolata's which is the heroin of iced coffees. Every one here is way too cool to be caught in public in a Brazilian Feathered outfit made of two ounces of lycra and three hundred dyed feathers. Everyone on the East End has beach chairs, we could line any highway and cheer the athletes on, in suitable dignified clothing. They could temporarily rename the Montauk Highway, the LLBeanWay. We have hundreds of beautiful estates to host teams from foreign lands. They have parties at these estate anyway, so why not party in service to your country. Initially you might think that the owners of these big estates might object to hosting teams. But you forget, hosting an Olympic team provides justification for redecorating the whole house, and that would employ thousands. Brazilians look for any reason to party, but Hamptonites look for reasons to redecorate. Parties only last a day or week at most, whereas redecoration lasts for months.

Since Shelter Island has a bonafide Olympian, Amanda Clark, we might be willing to rent her out to the East End Olympic Extortion and Facilitation Committee as the Master of Ceremonies. We'd be reasonable really. Since we have no fast food restaurants here, we would accept tributes of fast food from anyone who uses the ferries. Bic Macs, KFC Family Buckets, Taco Bell, any Chinese food, anything like that would be suitable. Just pay your ticket and hand over the bag and no one will get hurt.

Plus we have Tim Gunn here and we might be induced to let him redesign the East End for an East End Olympics, for the right price of course. He'll have to have carte blanche from all the stores and no limit to his budget. All Shelter Island will ask is that no one let any of the Olympic visitors know that Shelter Island exists and that no one else moves here for a moratorium of ten years. I think for that arrangement, we could "make it work".

For music, I think we can coerce Montauk into giving over Paul Simon. As far as living on the East End, there none Easter than Montaukers. Paul has pretty good experience, his resume isn't too bad. There's a few performers here and there, like Billy Joel, he can recruit.

And of course, we have the newly officially recognized tribe of the Shinnecocks. Let's give them their permits and get that casino in place! We'll give those Olympic tourists a place to spend their money, it's only right, it's the American way. The Shinnecock Rock 'Em and Roll 'Em Olympic Lodge.... works for me.

I'm telling you, we need to get the Olympics here. I think Dan's Papers might even devote a special insert into the paper for the Olympics. If that doesn't tip the scale, then I give up.

Caller ID, I Love You!

Caller I.D.

One of my favorite developments of this new tech era is Caller Identification on the telephone.

When I was a kid, we didn’t Caller ID.  No Call Waiting, not even answering machines. If the phone rang, you answered it. It was a pure crap shoot whether you got a friend, foe, bill collector or beau.

We had rotary phones in those ancient times.  They only had one ring sound, a bell - because there was a real bell inside the phone - and one volume - piercing. You could hear the phone ring from anywhere in the house. That bell could go through any wall.  If you wanted to put your phone on “silent” you put it in a desk drawer or under a pillow. I had an uncle who worked nights and put his phone in the refrigerator during the day. If you were handy, you could unscrew the plate underneath the phone and wrap a piece of tape around the little clacker between the bells, and that was your “soft” setting.

It was just awful on days when you were eagerly waiting for a calll from a boyfriend, hoping for a call from a good friend, dreading a call from your boss, and fearing a calll from Sears because your payment was late, all at the same time.

You’d wait and wait for the phone to ring and hours would go by.  I learned that the only sure way to get the phone to ring was to move out of answering range.  There were no cordless or portable phones then. The phone was either the desk model on a ten foot cord, or a wall model which was bolted to the wall in the kitchen with a 25 foot curly cord from the phone to the receiver. A watched pot never boils and an attended phone never rings. You’d have to be clever to get the phone to ring. You had to walk just far enough away that the phone would think you couldn’t get back to it in time to get the call, or use the bathroom. As soon as the phone was certain that you were out of range, it rang. 

There are stories people of my generation can tell you about taking a flight of stairs in three leaps, high jumping over furniture, tripping over cats and dogs, stepping on Barbie shoes or Army men in our bare feet, hurtling our bodies through space by any means possible to reach the receiver before the ringing stopped. There was no “Star 69” either because these were not the days of touch tone. You either got that ringing phone and took a chance on talking with whomever was calling, or you had to wait for their next try - if there was one.

That’s why I love Caller ID so much. If I can’t get the phone in time, I can see who tried to call me and call them or ignore them.  And I can even hold the ringing phone in my hand as they call and look at their name for a moment or two and decide if I feel like talking to them today or not.... oh the power!  Plus, I can give my own names to any callers. I have “Too Talky” as a name for a very chatty neighbor of mine, I have “Elvis” for my friend who is an Elvis  impersonator, and lot of special names that only I know.

I was visiting a friend of mine once and my mother called there from my home phone to talk to me.  It never occurred to me that it occurred to other people to have code names for their regular callers too.  I picked up the phone and saw my number with the ID “NY Mouth”.  Ooooooohhh!
    “Kathy, how come my number says NY Mouth on your phone?”
    “Because you talk forever.”
    “Oh yeah? Well next time I call, I’m just going to use three sentences. I have self control you know. And how come it says NY? You live here too.”
    “It says NY Mouth to distinguish you from my sister-in-law, NJ Mouth.”

Now I was intrigued. I scrolled through her saved IDs to see what nicknames she had.
    “Kathy, who’s  “Deadbeat”?”
    “My daughter’s ex.”
    “Who’s “Schizo?”
    “My Aunt Jerri. You can tell right away what she wants when you say hello. If she’s nice, she needs money, if she’s screaming she’s drunk, she’s got, like, 30 personalities. I named her Schizo because if I let the Caller ID try to figure out who she is on its own, the phone would explode every time she calls.” 

I just love Caller ID.   

Location, Location, Location

The Daily Telegraph,  September 16, 2009 10:11AM
A couple making love in a dumpster have been robbed of their clothes and personal possessions at knifepoint during an embarrassing hold-up.
The pair, aged in their forties, had crawled inside the dumpster so they could be alone.  But while they were engaged in what Wichita police described as "an intimate moment," they were robbed by a man armed with a pocket knife.  It all unfolded shortly after 6 pm Saturday in Kansas, police said, when the man and woman, both 44, crawled into a dumpster for privacy.  A short time later, a 59-year-old man and his 64-year-old companion interrupted the couple inside the dumpster.  With the older man encouraging him, the 59-year-old man pulled out a pocket knife and took shoes, jewelry and the 44-year-old man's wallet.

Every have one of those days when just everything seems to go wrong?
Billy Crystal said, "Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place."  I never fully realized the truth of this statement until I read this story. Now, I have been talked into having sex in some odd places in my lifetime, as has every woman.  We've all been attacked in cars, we all get attacked while doing dishes in the kitchen, and if the sands surrounded Shelter Island could talk, we'd all be in a lot of trouble. But never, never, never, have I heard of a woman in any state of inebriation, but still conscious, consenting to sex in a dumpster.  We all have genetic coding, attached to the 'x' chromosome that prevents us from doing certain sexcapades.  I'm not sure where consenting to sex in a dumpster falls, but my guess is it's pretty high on the list, right after 'I will not have sex in a portapotty' and before 'I will not have sex in the middle of the field at the SuperBowl during halftime'.  This woman, whoever she is, needs to come to the Island for therapy.

"Now Betty, tell us what he said that made you agree to sex in a dumpster."
"He said he knew of a nice quiet place. He said he hosed the place down earlier that day, I thought he was making a joke, you know.  It was dark and I didn't really realize he was taking me to a dumpster."
"Didn't the situation smell a little suspicious to you?"
"Not at first, it was a breezy night."
"So when did you start to catch on?"
"He got down on one knee, and for a minute I thought he was going to propose to me or something. But he was just getting down to give me a leg up and help me flip over the side."
"Did he offer you any money at all Betty? For sex in a dumpster, you should have gotten $100,000 at least. I mean, if Eliot Spitzer can pay $5000 for an hour in a nice hotel, sex in a dumpster should have gotten you a down payment for a house."
"No, no money. I'm sorry. I guess I'm an embarrassment to my gender."
"I'm afraid it's true, Betty, you have set us back a hundred years. Now every man will think a rinsed out dumpster counts as a private room and they do as little as they can to get access to us anyway."
"He put down fresh cardboard - does that count for anything?'
"No Betty, it doesn't count, he could have put down a new mattress with satin sheets, it wouldn't matter, as anyone on the Island knows, location is everything.  I think you need to stay here awhile and learn to know your "No Zones" '.
"No Zones?"
"Yes, the No Zones are born into every woman, but apparently you're some kind of throw back to a stupider time.  We will have to teach you the No Zones from scratch.  For example, anything that smells of sewage or garbage is a No Zone.  Anyplace within one hundred feet of any in-law or potential in-law is a No Zone, Ferry lines are a No Zone unless you're in a limo and the driver can move the car forward. Parking lots are No Zones during business hours. Beaches are always No Zone because no matter how romantic it looks on a movie screen, sand gets everywhere and ants crawl on your head."
"Gosh, I guess I have a lot to learn.  Are there any exceptions to No Zones?"
"Of course, any No Zone can become a Yes Zone contingent on the long term benefit."
"You mean, like if he swears he'll love you forever?"
"No, Betty, that's not a long term benefit. "I love you" only lasts until they want the next thing.  A long term benefit would be a house, a car, a boat, an insurance policy, you know, a little something tangible that a girl can hold on to, for that you can endure fifteen minutes of anything."
"Okay, I'm starting to get it now. I just have to remember, location, location, location."
"You'll do fine, Betty, you'll do just fine."