Britain's oldest bouncer retires on 90th birthday

Britain's oldest bouncer, 90-year-old Bob Dudley, has retired after a quarter of a century keeping guard at a working man's club.

The hardy nonagenarian came to bouncing late in life. He joined the army in 1939, was captured at Dunkirk and subsequently spent 5 years in a prisoner of war camp. After that he worked at a factory until retirement. But in 1983 he decided to become a doorman to keep himself sharp.

"I think it is important to keep working into old age," said Dudley. "It keeps you lively and active and stops you from slouching about all over the place. It is really fulfilling."

Dudley was chosen ahead of younger candidates because of his "experience and mental toughness."

"He could hold the fort...," said Irchester Working Men's Club president Clifford Bates. "If he tells them to leave, they go. No one takes any umbrage with him."

But now, on his 90th birthday, Dudley has finally handed in his bouncer's jacket. On balance he's probably earned a rest.

(By the way, we're assuming that unless Mr. Dudley has been leading an incredibly well-organised double life, he isn't the same Bob Dudley who runs BP in Russia and recently went into hiding amid suspicious circumstances... But considering his amazing life story we wouldn't be surprised if he had pulled this off.)

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Palestinian poet was a political, cultural icon

Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry helped make him one of the leading cultural voices for the Palestinian experience, died Saturday in Houston of complications from open heart surgery. He was 67.

A revered cultural icon in the occupied Palestinian territories and among the Palestinian diaspora, Darwish in his poetry often touched on the themes of exile and resistance. He wrote the symbolic Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared a three-day mourning period, saying Darwish's passing "will leave a great gap in our political, cultural and national lives. . . . Words cannot describe the depth of sadness in our hearts."

Darwish's death prompted scattered vigils around Ramallah, the West Bank city where he had lived since the 1990s.

Born in 1941 in the village of Al Birwa near the northern coastal city of Acre, Darwish fled with his family after the founding of Israel in 1948. They later returned and settled in the northern village of Deir Al Assad.

In 1960, at 19, Darwish published his first book of poetry. He quickly emerged as a leading cultural voice, writing at least 20 books of poetry and five books of prose. His works have been translated into more than 22 languages.

Some of his most popular and evocative writing vividly and angrily depicted Palestinian life, both in the diaspora and under Israeli occupation. His 1964 poem "Identity Card" recounts the experiences and frustrations of a Palestinian dealing with Israeli security restrictions. The following is an excerpt:

Record!

I am an Arab

And my identity card is number fifty thousand

I have eight children

And the ninth is coming after a summer

Will you be angry?

Record!

I am an Arab

I have a name without a title

Patient in a country

Where people are enraged . . .

Despite his consistently nationalist themes, Darwish sometimes chafed under the title of Palestine's unofficial poet laureate.

Darwish was repeatedly imprisoned for his writings and his political activities. He again left Israel in 1970 and spent decades living outside the country, including stops in Moscow; Cairo; Paris; Tunis, Tunisia; and Beirut.

One of his most famous volumes of poetry, "Qasidat Beirut" ("Ode to Beirut"), recounts the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut to drive out the Palestinian Liberation Organization, of which Darwish was both a longtime member and a frequent critic.

In 1987, Darwish was elected to the PLO's Executive Committee, but he resigned in 1993 in protest over the Oslo Accords, which he said were lopsided in Israel's favor. In 1995, he was granted permission by the Israelis to return and settled in Ramallah.

This year, Darwish gave a rare public reading in Ramallah to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Israel's creation, known among Palestinians as Al Nakba, which means "the catastrophe." The event drew crowds that overflowed the auditorium, leaving large groups outside listening on loudspeakers.

Despite his former prominence in the PLO, Darwish often expressed frustration about the state of Palestinian politics. At a 2007 reading, he mourned the ongoing clashes between the Hamas and Fatah factions in the Gaza Strip, which he called "a public attempt at suicide in the streets."

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Pulling the lid off pot

Jerry Large

Marijuana has an image problem.

That's not the only problem with it, but its image probably keeps it lurking in the shadows: People who smoke pot are unkempt, unruly, counterculture. Best just to drink scotch or pop OxyContin.

If marijuana had the ad agencies that cigarettes have had, it would be legal, too.

I'm not craving a joint. It's not my thing, but I noticed that Hempfest is coming up this weekend.

Speakers at the Seattle festival will try mightily to pull the weed from darkness.

I agree with them that it makes sense to decriminalize marijuana use.

Bring it out into the light, regulate it, tax it, put trafficking gangs out of business and let police and courts do more important work.

Rick Steves, the travel entrepreneur from Edmonds, will be one of the main speakers at Hempfest.

We had a story in our paper Friday about a television program he and the ACLU made to get people talking about marijuana laws (marijuanaconversation.org).

Some local television stations were not willing to air the TV show, though I can't think of a station that hasn't carried entertainment programs in which weed played a part.

I guess it's like sex, which you can display a bit, but not discuss seriously.

Outlawing grass doesn't seem to have the intended effect, assuming the intent is to keep people from using.

According to the 2001 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, more than 83 million Americans older than 12 have used marijuana.

Marijuana production earns billions every year.

Think of what we could do with the taxes on legal marijuana. And we'd save the $7.5 billion a year the nation spends enforcing pot laws.

One of the big raps against pot is the idea that using it leads to using more dangerous drugs.

The other day, I asked a roomful of people about marijuana. One man, an educator, said that when he was in high school in 1972, he had a drug-education class.

The kids were told marijuana was the same as heroin.

The ones who experimented with it found out it wasn't, and some went on to try heroin figuring that since marijuana hadn't done them in and heroin was the same, it wouldn't hurt either. How's that for a gateway effect?

I'm sure arresting people for using pot has a gateway effect. A little time in jail gives a person the opportunity to learn more about other drugs and bigger crimes.

But if marijuana were legal, we could institute some controls and even have serious conversations about it.

I spoke with Steves, who is in Belgium. He said his interest started with "knowing so many people who were closet smokers but couldn't talk about it. I thought, 'What if everybody agreed [it should be decriminalized] but was too afraid to speak out.' "

He figured maybe people would listen to a straight-laced businessman.

Steves is pushing democracy, not pot. It bothers him that Americans shrink from discussing drug laws.

That's a truly sorry image.

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Danielsville man with homemade vibrator arrested on drug charges

A deputy investigating a call about a broken windshield arrested a Danielsville man on a variety of drug charges this week.

Charlie Van Wilkes Jr., 31, was charged with Violation of the Georgia Controlled Substances Act (VGCSA), possession of tools for the commission of a crime and dangerous drugs.

Deputy Timothy Nix drove to the home of Charlie Wilkes Jr. on Hudson River Church Road Monday to investigate a report that someone’s windshield had been broken by a large object that reportedly fell off a work truck.

According to the incident report, as Nix got out of his patrol car, he noticed that Wilkes had a “large lump in the front of his blue jeans, with wires running from inside his pants and hanging down dragging the ground” as he walked toward him. There was also a syringe hanging out of Wilkes’ pants pocket.

As Nix talked with Wilkes, he removed the syringe from his pocket and asked him if he had any other illegal substances. Wilkes told him the object inside his pants was a “homemade vibrator” and he then removed it by pulling on the wires. He told the deputy that the wires were hooked to a small battery in order for the vibrator to work. “Further examination of the item revealed that a small motor had been removed from an item and placed inside a pill bottle, and then wrapped in a piece of pipe insulation before being placed inside his pants for a pleasurable sensation,” the report stated.

The syringe tested positive for methamphetamine and a further search of the residence and outbuildings yielded a quantity of methamphetamine, additional syringes and other paraphernalia.

Wilkes was transported to the Madison County Jail.
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Orson Scott Card Wants YOU (To Rise Up Against The Gay Menace)

by Michael Swaim
To those to of you who haven’t read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott card, warning: two spoilers follow.

Spoiler 1: Your childhood was incomplete.
Spoiler 2: You know that part where Ender fights that kid Bonzo in the showers and kicks him so hard in the nuts that he kills him?

Well, Card basically did the same thing to logic and decency last week when he tried to convince the American Citizens in his thrall (myself once among them) to invoke their right of revolution and overthrow the government to stop gay marriage from being legalized.

That’s right, people. The Mormon guy who wrote all those books about the innocence of a child winning out over war and hatred wants us to raise arms against any queers who feel like expressing their love legally. I mean, I understand a devout Mormon having some issues with gayness, but when your brain tells you that it’s an important enough issue to divide the country in a bloody coup, it’s time to get a new brain.

I’m sure there’ll be a whole cavalcade of comments following this post pointing out the merits of homosexuality, its moral deficiency in the eyes of God, and stuff about boobies touching and wieners in butts. So I figured, rather than try to pre-emptively defuse the situation like I usually do, I’ll just say to hell with it and let you know how I really feel. If you totally disagree, feel free to comment, we can agree to disagree, and you can come back in a few days and read something funny I wrote about a celebrity pooping themselves.

HOW I REALLY FEEL:

Orson Scott Card, you are—and I say this with the reservation of someone who read Speaker for the Dead and wept on a city bus—the worst. I will never buy or read your books again, and I am withdrawing my membership from the Card Superfriends Fan Team and Party Brigade (Sorry, Chet and Dale).

The Mormon’s I’ve known (all lovely people) have always been particularly impervious to logic, but it’s all I’ve got so here I go. Mr. Card, you are as evil, and will one day be as reviled by any sane individual, as an 18th-century slave owner.

Let me explain. Throughout the history of America, and indeed in the course of any developing culture, the universal historical trend (with some notable, but temporary deviances) has been towards expanding rights for an expanding number of people. Women couldn’t vote, now they can. Blacks were treated like pack animals, now they get to live in the inner city and some of them own nice cars. The point is, PROGRESS.

There is no question, absolutely none at all, that you are fighting a battle you can’t win. In a hundred years, flamboyant gay guys will be getting married in fabulous dresses on your grave, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

But worse, when that day finally comes, you will be classed with all those others who stood in the way of expanding rights and humanity: the Ku Klux Klan, Apartheid, the anonymous boardroom of fat men arguing about which secretary has the best ass. And if there’s any justice, even though I’ve no doubt you could fire off a response to this post that would be perfectly eloquent and arresting (in fact, you totally should…my hits would go through the roof), your work will be read only as a curiosity, a way to peek into the mind of a caveman. Or else by lovers of great fiction, who will have to read them, set them down, shrug, and say “well, that was super good, even if the guy was a Neanderthal Nazi.”

And really, what the hell does it matter to you if two hot lesbians want to settle down and be respectable (which isn’t the way I like my hot lesbians either, believe me)? Until such a time as they bring down your property values with raging lesbian drug orgies, you’ve got nothing legitimate to complain about, and even then, I’ll trade houses with you.

Nothing to complain about, that is, besides the so called “degradation” of the Biblical standard of marriage. Upon what are you basing that? A passage or two saying that God hates gays? You know, there’s also a lot of passages about stoning your children to death for disobedience, but I don’t see you cleaning your guns on that account.

Clearly you have taken it upon yourself to prioritize certain portions of the Bible. I am forced to ask then, why in the world would you choose to prioritize the relatively tiny portion about hating and oppressing your fellow men and women, instead of giving precedence to the mountain of passages espousing the virtues of love and compassion for all of God’s children? Or at least the hilarious parts about people having sex with gold statues (Ezekiel 16:17 NIV)?

What would Jesus do? If you can answer that question with anything other than “shower the world with endless love and understanding, then flip a wicked ollie on a flaming skateboard,” then you and I have a very different understanding of the man.

So get with fucking program and stop masking your own personal homophobia as a religious issue. It’s not. It’s a nothing issue that shouldn’t even be a question, and yet has been allowed to dominate the political landscape at a time when thousands of deaths around the world are crying out to be addressed.

You’ve spent your life imagining diverse races and cultures, and doing a hell of a good job. Yet your inability to imagine true love manifesting between two members of the same sex almost classifies you as retarded in my mind. It’s not even a moral issue. You’re just an idiot to me.

And not just an idiot. I’ve seen you in person, Orson. You’re fat. And rich. How about working on some of those deadly sins before throwing the first stone?

I know it’s pointless to ask you to change your mind; bigots armed with the intransigence of religion are rarely swayed. But hopefully some of those reading this post will be forewarned that Orson Scott Card has become a poison-spouting lunatic.

And in the interest of providing yet another argument for gay marriage being a non-issue, as well as some modicum of comedy, here’s a list of the gayest things about heterosexual marriage:

It expects everyone to dress well and be on time.

It involves a lot of lace, and at the end the guy cries sometimes.

Unless something’s gone terribly wrong, no one is pregnant.

Those tiny sausages they sometimes serve.

There’s a big foofy cake, like the gays are always having.

Unless I’m sorely mistaken, God’s got no problem with it.

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