Bill the Butcher

  Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. We’ve all heard of that fifteen minutes of fame. That light of notoriety that shines on someone for a moment and then dims and goes away. If the fabled fifteen minutes becomes more, it is usually because the recipient really does have something to offer. Their ship will sail while others sink. Why did “Macarena” not launch the career of Los Del Rio like “She Loves You” did for The Beatles?     Because Los Del Rio didn’t have a “Hawk Tuah!  And in the world of Woke a good stroke  is rare. So let’s examine this phenomenon and spit on that thang.     Crazy ideas occasionally fly. Catch phrases resonate through the years. Are the lambs still screaming? I suspect Hailey Welch can make you scream.  She had rhythm and humor and was every man’s idea of the girl next door. You remember her. The one someone else married and you still recall fondly in your declining years of ED? Yeah! THAT one. Hailey condensed fift...

      As 2024 winds down and we remember those we left in the ground we must look ahead, forget about the dead because like a record made of wax, they’re never coming back. Now all you rappers and hackers, you write an opening line that good you tell me all about it.   My closing words for this year are simple. While you may wipe a tear away from the memories of those we lost don’t let it cloud the vision of things to come. Unless some unforeseen comet cashes in our chips January 1 st will arrive with hangovers and prayers and January 2 nd will not be very much different from the next 363 days that will follow until on December 31 st 2025 we’ll do her again and lament those we left in the boneyard for that year.   That’s the way life goes. And every year it goes and goes. And every year there are those who never come back. Years ago, as I watched the bodies being brought out of Luby’s I thought in my youthful mind, “Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been me!” Wha...

      The kids are not alright! Today I was watching a video of one of those staged, fake courtroom dramas where some mythical judge hears absurd cases from dinged out contestants explaining situations that almost never occur except on reruns of “I Love Lucy,” but as it dragged on it began to ring true because certain things had been woven into the storyline that so perfectly explained the “Z” generation they should be added to the Bible in a completely new book called Generation Lost! Let me elaborate.   There was this twenty-one-year-old kid, man, neutral gender, whatEVER suing his father for sixty-thousand dollars for failure to fulfill. Failure to fulfill what, you may ask? Seems as the kid grew the father had promised wonderful things to him when he achieved manhood, which, from his claim adequately demonstrated that he was yet to arrive at that point. He just turned twenty-one and stuck his hand out for his reward whereupon his father asked, “WHAT?” and he said...

    The line extended from the teller ’ s cage to the door. About fifteen yards. In that span was room for around twenty people. Everyone had a mask. From the expensive “ 95 ’ s” to the cheap drugstore brand made for pollen while mowing grass. None of them really did any good. The Pandemic was government approved, nuclear powered influenza of the highest sort and masks of any kind were required if you were to eat, drink, be merry, or put money in the bank. Everyone had a mask.   He was standing in line. Nineteen people in front of him, bank bag in hand, mask on face. Sixty-five years of hard knocks and for him he was just a nail and COVID was just one more hammer. Going to the liquor store, the supermarket and the bank had become his routine since COVID rode into town. Bottle of whiskey, cigarettes, and money to do it all over again the next day. Go home, be alone, and drink himself to sleep.   He had kids. All grown and gone. Grandkids? Who in the hell knew who the ...

  We aren't the only human species to have ever walked on the face of the Earth.  We, homo sapiens, have a close relative with a tragic history - the Neanderthals or the neanderthalensis.  These cousins of ours lived in Europe and West Asia about 45,000 years ago. Even though we share 99.7% of our DNA with the Neanderthals, we look slightly different from each other. Compared to humans, Neanderthals were shorter and thicker, had more developed jaws and weak chins.  They also had large nostrils that allowed them to breathe the cold air in Europe. Interestingly, Neanderthals had bigger heads and thus bigger brains than our ancestors. It is unclear whether this made them extra clever. But if we were so similar in many ways, why did we survive while they went extinct? The Neanderthals disappeared from different parts of Europe at different time points. The reasons behind their disappearance varied from one location to another. Similar to modern extinction of animals, Nea...