the slim, "shiny dime" is infinitely useful in a variety of places and situations. Parking meters, vending machines, candy stores and a myriad of other applications. No, it won't work in the condom machine in the men's room, but if you want to place a friendly wager, a shiny dime does come in handy at The Paddock in York, PA. Must be some kind of "tradition". When I hear either Ned or Mike say to anyone within earshot, "Okay, get out your shiny dime, shithead!", I know there's a controversy brewing, and I usually pay a modicum of attention to the commotion. Someone in the Restaurant Bar's south-end feels lucky and certain of winning a wager. Everyone involved frantically searches for a dime — "gotta be shiny!", says Mike, as he inspects and rejects a few out of hand — and the rules of engagement are drawn up amongst the contestants. Hell, I've lost a couple of dimes there in verbal wagers. I now stockpile (thousands of) them in a 3ft tall Rolling Rock plastic bottle-bank, for just such occasions. I know the dumber-than-stumps, 19,000+ Palm Beach Senile DemocRAT Idiots For GoreBore could have used some shiny dimes to keep those chads from dropping all over the voting booth floors. Funny how they — the Dolt Vote — can play 17+ bingo cards at a time and not miss a number called; they can pick 6 for the Daily Florida Lotto, as well as select their Pick 3, Fantasy Five, and Mega Ball numbers; they can read 5 papers, 4 scratch sheets, and handicap 3 horses in the Tri-fecta at the same horse race; they can spot a shanked golf ball in an acre of elephant grass 300 yards away; they can eyeball a non-resident in a 1,000-unit senior retirement subdivision at 200 yds; they can report a scarred manatee at 10 fathoms to the Greenpeace hotline; they can take 37 different colored pills every morning and never mess it up. But they can't read a 4-line ballot which was published earlier in the newspaper and mailed to them a week in advance, and pick one candidate. Gimme a break. I'll bet a shiny dime that someone wins in the endgame. Any takers? Around The Garden Center. It looks more and more like Fall is almost over, Winter is settling in over the Plains States, Midwest and parts of the Northeast, and is gradually moving east toward Pennsylvania. Biting cold, frost, snow squalls and single-digit wind chill numbers are the norm almost everyday on the weather forecast URLs. I was kind of hoping that my landscape crews would be able to work another 4-5 weeks, but we may "lose the weather" sooner than that and have to shut the operations down when the ground freezes. Our first snowfall was Monday, 20th, and the skies look ominously gray and it smells more and more like Winter every day. For the past 6-7 weeks, I've been roasting Winter Squash almost every week, making assernut Squash Bisque and Roasted Squash and freezing some for use later in the Winter, since it must be processed by Christmas (or sooner) to be any good. Delightful stuff; I just wish it would be available for a longer period, but I take it when I can get it. Saturday and Sunday were busy, despite the cold and blustery winds. I had several landscape appointments at customer's homes, and spent an inordinate amount of time on the road. On the way back to the Garden Center on Saturday afternoon, I stopped to bury a small calico kitten laying in the middle of the road, on RT 24 southbound. I curse the lowlife scumbags who let their animals breed and run wild, putting them into harm's way. And the animal always loses in a battle with a motorized vehicle. Well, at least that innocent little kitten won't be cold or hungry or scared anymore; it's now in a far better "place" than us. Whatever happened to the Fall rains? Once again, it's bone-dry and what little ground moisture we had, is now gone. Yeah sure, I sound like a broken record, but the ground moisture level is critical going into Winter, before the ground freezes and any subsequent water — excluding s-l-o-w snow melt — just runs off. If the plants don't get adequate moisture at the root system level prior to the Spring thaw and leaf-out, there'll be lots of casualties and a meager show in Spring. Nothing wet in the 10-day forecast ahead. In The Dumber Than A Palm Beach DemocRAT Dept: on Sunday evening, yours truly stemmed, seeded and peeled over 200 hot, hot, REALLY HOT peppers, dropped them into the Cuisinart with fresh-peeled tomatoes, lime juice, onions and garlic, and then went to take a "whiz" (a guy thing). Uh-Oh. Uh-Ooooh. Ooooops! Jeeeezzzzzzuuuusssss! Too much vino, I guess: I forgot to wash hands thoroughly. I raced upstairs to the shower, soaped-up & -down & rinsed within seconds. After an appropriate "recuperation period", I finished the hot sauce and refrigerated 12lbs of it. Awesome, unbelievable stuff. Never again without surgical gloves, a welder's mask and protective gear. 37 years ago on Wednesday, Nov 22, 1963, JFK was assassinated in Dallas, TX. I was 13, a freshman in Prospect HS, Mt. Prospect, Ill, in algebra class when the announcement came over the PA system. School was immediately dismissed and the Nation and World spent the next 5 days in front of our B&W TV sets watching sad events unfold as we came together and grieved the loss. Gas prices in York (PA) are still holding steady at $1.54.9 (89oct); it cost $32.00 for 20.66gal to fill-up the Jeep Grand Cherokee V8 LTD. I've seen the 87oct for as low as $1.47 somewhere in town, but my V8 doesn't like the cheap stuff. Traffic was unusually heavy on the way home from work Wednesday evening; zillions of people were going "somewhere" for the Thanksgiving Holiday. But on Thursday morning, when I went down to the Garden Center Complex to feed Pickles and do some watering, the roads were empty. Guess everyone had totten to where they were going. I stopped by Joe's Cafe & Seafood Grill in Winterstown, just above my business, and picked up a 10lb piece of prime rib w/ au jus, for $25, to make sandwiches over the weekend. Maybe the best prime rib I've ever had. Joe's was expecting over 130 people for Thanksgiving Day Dinner and had a buffet spread of "all you can eat" for $12.95. Awesome. After finishing up at the Garden Center — a hose cracked in the Main Greenhouse and it was partially flooded and had to be drained — I went to my Mom & Dad's for our traditional afternoon dinner; wow, what a festive cornucopia-like spread, as usual. Mom always outdoes herself each succeeding year. I brought a Roasted assernut & Apple Bisque w/ Sour Cream and Chives along, as my contribution. Becky, my younger sister, still lives in San Francisco, so we called her to wish her a happy one. Needless to say, I was stuffed when I left in late afternoon, went home and slept into the evening in front of my condo's roaring fireplace with my two cats, Murphy and Mama Kitty. Another wonderful day with Family. I hope yours was a Happy & Festive Thanksgiving with lots of Your Family involved, too. Back to ugly reality of work on Friday; lucky are those who get the next few days off. No rest for the weary. Why AlGoreBore Sucks. AlGoreBore faced a true test of character on Election Night when the final vote tally in Florida showed him narrowly losing to George W. Bush. He could have issued a brief statement conceding the election, with the caveat that some overseas ballots remained to be counted and that state law mandated an automatic recount, which, though unlikely, might alter the outcome. Had he done so, he would have appeared gracious and statesmanly as opposed the lying lowlife scumbag he is. And if he emerged the winner after all the ballots were counted and the recount was complete, he would have earned the trust of all Americans. Nothing in this scenario would have stopped a recount from taking place to ensure the validity of the Nov. 7 count or prevented the absentee ballots from being counted. The ultimate outcome could have awaited the Nov. 17 deadline, which has come and gone, with no resolution. But, if AlGoreBore had done the sportsman-like thing, these procedural matters would have been conducted soberly and impartially, without the intense passion and partisanship that have marked the last week. Instead of choosing this course, however, AlGoreBore unleashed a bitter and dangerous campaign to win the presidency at all costs, even if it means undermining the very legitimacy of the electoral system itself. And in the process he has shown himself to be unfit for the high office he seeks. Not since Richard Nixon has anyone launched such an antinomian crusade against our Constitution. Since the election, AlGoreBore's henchmen, most notably his campaign chairman, William "son of the Chicago criminal mafia union boss Richard J." Daley, have attacked the very constitutional basis on which presidents are chosen. Their first line of assault was against the Electoral College, with Daley warning ominously of the necessity that "the people's choice becomes the president" — this despite the Gore campaign's having run an election strategy based entirely on winning the electoral vote. When that argument failed to carry the day, the Gore camp brought in the lowlife demagogues and took to the streets in noisy protests, with racist, bigot idiot scumbag Irrev Jesse "Hymietown" Jack-scum demanding a re-vote in Palm Beach on the dubious proposition that Gore's black voters alone were too impatient or inept to properly cast their votes on the same ballot that some half million other voters in the county managed with no difficulty. To allege that blacks were so stupid as to f*ck-up their Ballots is sad; they're probably dumb, but not totally stupid, as the rest of the US Population is. Sad, but true. NOT! Having failed to erase George W. Bush's edge with the state-mandated machine recount, DemocRATs have tried to divine voters' intentions in heavily DemocRATic counties through a hand recount. The DemocRATs have held ballots up to the light to see whether a punch card has any dimples that might possibly indicate a voter's intent to vote for one or another candidate. They've attempted to discern what a given voter might have meant to do when he or she failed to mark a presidential choice at all but voted for other offices. And they've counted votes even when the ballot marks were improperly made. In many, if not most, instances those officials involved in the hand recount are partisan DemocRATs themselves, and there have been some reports that Republican observers have been denied access to the rooms where the recounts took place. Elections are governed by rules. In every polling place, those rules are posted. The rules remind voters how many candidates they may vote for, for each office. They remind voters to mark their ballots clearly or ensure that holes are punched clean through. A voter who has inadvertently spoiled his ballot can ask for another. Failure to follow these rules invalidates the ballot, and properly so. The DemocRATs, however, want to rewrite the rules. They want to gauge "the will of the people" but ignore the Constitution. They want to read the minds of voters who cast invalid ballots. Most of all, they want to keep counting votes until their candidate wins. And they will take to the airwaves and streets until they get their way. No matter who the ultimate victor is, our Republic has suffered a serious blow. The losers inevitably will feel the election was stolen. Meanwhile AlGoreBore plays touch football and goes to the movies, gleefully watching an American election turned into pandemonium. He'll do anything he can to win the election. BJ Clintoon Filth. Good riddance to another of Bubba Jeffy Clintoon's lying garbage ambulance chasing lawyers: Up-Chuck Ruff, the lardass liar is dead from an "accident" in his home. No loss at all. Maybe he was "Fosterized", too? The lowlife lib-dem slime are doing anything they can to scrounge votes for the GoreBoreLiar, including fraud and cheating, plus registering felons to vote — highly illegal in Florida. No matter, they'll do what's "required" to keep the GoreBore slimeball in office. The gutless f*cking GOP does nothing except whine; of course the liberals control the major media, so there's very little recourse if no one covers it. And no one does, except the InterNet media. In addition to the 19,000+ Palm Beach Senile Citizens who couldn't handle a simple election ballot — despite being able to juggle 15-20 bingo cards at once — the idiot blacks are now complaining that they're also too stupid to just mark one candidate for elective office, and a disproportionate number of "their" ballots have been disqualified. Hell, they can fill out the welfare forms just fine. Send those scumbags back to the jungle. "PC" Is shit. Politically correct, that is. If it's not the lowlife blacks whining about slavery and reparations, it's the f*cking indians whining about not being shown in a favorable light. Both groups should have stayed in the jungles and forests; they just can't handle the White Man's World. Both are afraid of being a success through hard work and learning how to take responsibility for their lives and actions. Execution Is The Solution. Here's why the mentally retarded child molesters should be executed: just days after his release from prison, a mentally retarded man was charged Tuesday with Killing a 9-year-old boy whose naked body was found in a dugout at a baseball field. He'll walk, since his shyster scumbag attorneys will again argue that he's too retarded to "understand his punishment". I could sure help him "understand" a bullet to the head. The US Supreme Court has let down the American Public many times over the years — re-affirming morals and ethics in the sewer — the lowlife lib-dem Earl Warren Court is but one example. Now, they've halted the well-deserved execution of a rapist-murderer because he's only a 7-year old mentally. Okay fine; exterminate him and we'll have one less murderous, psychotic man-child to deal with in prison. And one less rapist-murderer to worry about. End of problem, for good. Ditto for so-called "retarded" murderers; you do the crime, you get executed. Real simple math, even for a moron. I would have no f*cking problem pushing in the syringe or pulling the electric chair's switch. None, in fact, I'd sleep better at night knowing another murderer is rotting in Hell, where they all belong. And now, some moron judge in DC has ruled that the racist murderous idiot piece of shit who knifed an 8 year old white child to death in front of his grandmother is unfit to stand trial. What f*cking bullshit! He should be executed as fast as possible, instead of the US Taxpayers — that's you and me — footing the $70,000 per year cost of keeping the subhuman piece of shit alive, with lots of expensive medications. This US Legal System is truly f*cked up! I could quickly fix the situation with a 9mm bullet to the idiot's empty head. This cop-whacker is being returned to DC to stand trial for head-shooting an undercover cop during a drug deal gone bad. I say why waste the time and money: execute the piece of lowlife subhuman shit at the first available dumpster and throw the carcass in. Now we have traitors and spies becoming TV celebrities. The stinking piece of yellow dog-f*cking shit, Wen Ho Lee, who stole W88 Legacy Code nuclear secrets from the highly-porous Lost Alamos Nuclear Labs, is making an ABC Miniseries. Can you f*cking believe that? I can't believe that our US Legal System is that f*cked up. He should have been jailed and executed promptly. He's dogshit, as are the f*ck-ups at the Dept of InJustice and FBI for letting him go free. Just how f*cked up the world is today is clearly reflected in a murderous piece of shit on death row being nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. The subhuman piece of filth should have been executed many years ago for the '81 murders. Instead, he's a celebrity. What a f*cked up world we live in today. Gov. Jim Hunt of North Carolina, a lowlife democRAT coward, commuted a convicted whacker's death sentence to life in prison without parole Tuesday, hours before he was to be executed. Ruined my week to see another rapist and murderer be spared the eternal sentence of Hell for his heinous crime. Hopefully, Hunt will soon die a painful death from a heart attack for such negligence and cowardice. The Fat Project. In the proud tradition of the stinky meat project (and it's follow-up stinky feet project) comes the Fat Project. The goal? To turn the tables on the weight loss industry and gain 30 pounds in 30 days. Taking a lesson from the De Niro school of method acting, our brave test specimens Eric and Nicole put some serious chow down last month. The first one to make it to 30 pounds won three thousand dollars. Who made it to the magic number? See for yourself. And don't miss the before/after photographs.