Warning: You might discover typos, grammatical errors, misspellings, and other flaws in the following writing. If this offends you or you feel the need to feel superior and point out every error please stop reading now. Thank you.

As you leave the elevator you can smell the competing odors of hot coffee & chocolate, the freshly baked pastries the Patrons enjoy and the day old donuts the rest of you get all wrapped up in and wafted to you by the scent of the peat fire Lethal always lights in the stove when its chilly out. The Patrons are all snug in their recliners ensconced with their beverage of choice, lap blankets and in a few cases a Ninja cat who favors them for an early morning nap.

Lethal has once again broken out his fleece wear, fingerless gloves and watch cap collection. Until you entered he’d been fussing with the stove, trying to coax a few extra BTUs out of it while alternately warming hands and arse in front of it. When he sees you he carefully places the fire tools back on their stand and steaming coffee in hand makes his way to the podium.

Morning folks~

Our temps here in Texas are going up and down faster than than a paddle ball’s ball yet never actually reaching warm. Just about the time we get to with in putting distance of warm another cold front replete with rain/sleet/hail come roaring through. Consequently as you can see Keebler Towers is tightly shuttered against the cold.

A couple things of note before we get to the issue. Next week marks the 333rd issue of Leprechaun Laughs. While granted not a normal mile stone observed it will be a bit of a special issue in that it will be themed. Recently I’ve gotten a couple private comments from non regular readership of the holy roller variety who somehow stumbled upon an issue and have taken it upon themselves to judge me in place of my creator and inform me I was going to hell. As many of you know such hubris and hypocrisy does not sit well with me and is a large part of my problem with organized religion. From where I sit on the problem anyone presuming to speak for an omnipotent and omnipotent deity should immediately self immolate burning away to ash as a warning. Unfortunately things don’t work that way with religion. You just have to have ‘faith’ they’re going to get their just due in the end.

Anyway as a result of these notes I got to thinking how 333 was half of 666 (the biblical number of the beast). Ergo I figured the issue, given I was bound for hell in a custom built hand basket, anyway might as well be half evil. You see what I mean next week.

Secondly while exercising my administrative and maintenance functions with the WordPress site I noticed we’re creeping you on another milestone, this one worthy of note simply because we’ve never actually known the information before. That is that we are rapidly approaching 300,000 total hits on the blog since it started. Now that really doesn’t sound like much when you compare it against the millions of hits and views some sites and videos get, but when you realize we’ve less than 500 registered viewers and put out only twice a week that means we should be generating roughly 1000 hits per week. It should take 300 years for us to generate 300K in hits under these conditions and it has not. When I checked we were about 2700 hits away or so. I’ll try and see that Impish ort I let you know when we hit that mile stone.

And now without further delay, largely because I’m freezing and can’t wait to get back to my nice peat fire warmed office and a fresh pot of coffee, let’s light this puppy and watch it take off.

Them darn Ninja cats! You never know where you’ll find one watching you!

And now from our only in New Jersey files…

New Jersey woman gets sued for writing ‘adult child support’ on memo line of alimony checks to ex-husband

A New Jersey woman is being sued by her ex-husband for writing resentful messages like ‘loser,’ ‘bum’ and ‘adult child support’ in the memo line of her alimony checks to him.

Diane Wagner’s ex-husband, Francis Wagner, claims he suffered emotional distress from the nasty memos and that they exacerbated his health problems, according to a lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Morristown, N.J.

A New Jersey woman is being sued by her ex-husband for writing resentful messages like ‘loser,’ ‘bum’ and ‘adult child support’ in the memo line of her alimony checks to him.

Diane Wagner’s ex-husband, Francis Wagner, claims he suffered emotional distress from the nasty memos and that they exacerbated his health problems, according to a lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Morristown, N.J.

“As far as I’m concerned I can write anything I want on the memo line because it’s a note to myself. I was the victim in that marriage. What more blood does he want from me? I pay him religiously,” Wagner, 57, told the Daily Record.

Wagner, of Hopatcong, N.J., divorced her 61-year-old former hubby after a 10-year marriage because of his heavy drinking, she told the Daily Record, and was forced to cut him checks for $800 a month in alimony to supplement his disability checks.

She paid the alimony out in weekly payments.

Wagner found out she was being sued when she discovered a photo of one of her alimony checks posted on her husband’s law firm’s Facebook page.

“Adult child support,” read the memo line on the check Trautman & Trautman posted to their social media page.

“Alimony for the man! What’s funny is that the now ex-wife so hated paying our client–the husband–$800 per month for the next six years as alimony and she had written Alimony/Adult Child Support in the memo of the weekly checks–until we put a stop to the harassment,” the law firm posted to their Facebook page.

After the law firm wrote Wagner a threatening letter, she didn’t change her tune.

Instead, she started writing FOAD in the memo line: “f–k off and die. “

Diane Wagner said the acronym is her private notation to herself, not an expletive. Francis Wagner could not immediately be reached.

The lawsuit also alleges that a bank error in the spring resulted in a $5,000 deposit by Francis Wagner being accidentally placed in a joint account with his ex-wife.  The lawsuit contends that Diane Wagner learned of the accidental deposit and withdrew the money. She told the Daily Record she did not do anything wrong.

The lawsuit is seeking unspecified compensation for the alleged emotional distress.

“A reasonable person under similar circumstances could not be expected to endure such harsh and extreme abuse that is being applied by the defendant in her compounding intentional acts designed to hurt the plaintiff,” the lawsuit said

Apparently sucking a person’s financial life out through their wallets is still only ok for women despite their demands for equality.

Shot at my local auto care center last week. They don’t have a cat but came in that morning to find it sleeping in the basket. It never even moved when we applied the pens and turned it into a furry pencil cup for the shot. The working theory is it stowed away under one of the cars that were kept in the shop over night.

Strong with the flush this one is hmm?

Banish these words in 2016, school says

(Melonyce McAfee, CNN) If the phrase “break the Internet” makes you want to break your computer monitor, you’re not alone.

Lake Superior State University in Michigan has released its annual list of words and phrases that it says should be banished in the new year. That pithy phrase, popularized by a November 2014 Paper magazine cover story on Kim Kardashian, makes the cut.

The 2016 list also includes the notion of starting a sentence with the word “so,” calling issues “problematic,” describing the way a fellow sits as “manspreading” and declaring that something positive is “giving me life!”

The school solicits public input on its website year-round to pick a list of words we can all do without. Its official title: “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use or General Uselessness.”

“Through the years, LSSU has received tens of thousands of nominations for the list, which now includes more than 800 entries,” according to a statement from the school. “Word-watchers target pet peeves from everyday speech, as well as from the news, fields of education, technology, advertising, politics and more. A committee makes a final cut in late December.”

Dictionary.com names 2015 word of the year

The school shares arguments for word banishment on its website, like this submission in opposition to the opener “so”:

“Tune in to any news channel and you’ll hear it. The word serves no purpose in the sentence and to me is like fingernails on a chalkboard. So, I submit the extra, meaningless, and overused word ‘so,’ ” said Scott Shackleton of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.

Several submitters found the word “problematic,” well, problematic.

“Anything that the speaker finds vaguely inconvenient or undesirable, such as an opposing political belief or bad traffic. Contrast things that are self-evidently taken to be problematic with, say, actual problems like a hole in the ozone layer or a job loss,” said Adam Rosen of Asheville, North Carolina.

Business-speak such as “stakeholder,” “walk it back,” “presser” and “price point” grated on many nerves in 2015.

“Often used with ‘engagement.’ If someone is disengaged, they’re not really a stakeholder in the first place. LSSU, please engage your stakeholders by adding this pretentious jargon to your list,” asked Gwendolyn Barlow of Portland, Oregon.

See the 2016 list in all its glory here.

The 2015 list included “bae,” “polar vortex,” “swag,” “foodie” and “cra-cra.”

The tradition was started on New Year’s Day in 1976 by university public relations director Bill Rabe and kept alive after his departure in 1987.

Definition of Obliviot :. 1. (n.) Someone who is completely unaware of their idiocy.
2. (n.) Synonym for a Democrat or Liberal.

This is an Election Year, and I have a dream….

It was the day before a big presidential election primary, and hordes of candidates from both parties arrived to campaign. As environmentalism was identified as a major issue in the state, the candidates curried favor by deciding to ride from town to town in the same bus.

All went well until sunset, when the bright sun on the horizon blinded the bus driver at a critical curve on a rural road. The driver missed the curve and the bus overturned. A farmer saw it happen and drove over in his tractor to help.

Two hours later, the farmer was back at his farmhouse and called the sheriff to report the accident.

“What took you so long to call?!” demanded the sheriff.

“I had to bury them all,” the farmer said.

“What?!” the panicked sheriff screamed. “They were all dead? Every single candidate for president?!”

“Well,” the farmer drawled, “they were politicians, after all.”

“What do you mean?” the sheriff said.

“Well, some of ’em said they weren’t dead, but I din’t believe ’em.”

Seem turning a blind eye to 50,000 homeless Vets, largely ignoring the effects of Agent Orange and sending troops out in Body armor &/or vehicles that are easily defeated while screwing with the burials of Veterans here at home by denying them a religious graveside service just isn’t enough for the Liberals in charge. They’ve found a new group to kick around, dishonor and disrespect by going back on their word and for this group it’s the norm not something new!

Arlington Cemetery bars remains of female WWII pilot; family fights back

Elaine Harmon and her comrades flew Army planes across the country. They helped train pilots in how to operate aircraft and instruments. They towed targets behind them while soldiers below fired live ammunition during training. Harmon was aware that her service might cost her life – for 38 other women, it did.

But few people in 1944 wanted Harmon or women like her to be part of the military. Not Harmon’s mother, who believed that Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs) “were all just awful, just probably loose women” and was ashamed that her daughter would be one of them. Not civilian male pilots, who felt threatened by the female recruits. And not Congress, which voted down a bill that would have granted the female pilots military status for fiscal and political reasons.

As World War II drew to a close, the program was disbanded and largely forgotten. It wasn’t until the Air Force began accepting women for pilot training in 1970 that anyone remembered women had flown for the military previously, and it was not until 1977 that the WWII female pilots were finally granted veteran status.

Harmon, who helped campaign for WASPs to get that status, was at the very first full veteran’s funeral for a WASP in 2002. It was a world apart from the brief affairs she’d attended before, when urns containing the women’s ashes were unceremoniously placed inside an outdoor structure at Arlington National Cemetery. It made Harmon proud to know that she too would be afforded full military honors when her time came – in April of last year.

Which is why Terry Harmon, Elaine’s 69-year-old daughter, was angered when Secretary of the Army John McHugh reversed the old rule and said that ashes of WASPs can no longer be inurned at Arlington.

“These women have been fighting this battle, off and on, for over 50 years now,” Terry Harmon told the Associated Press.

Now Harmon’s relatives are working to overturn McHugh’s decision. A change.org petition to incoming Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning asking him to make WASPs and other “active duty designees” eligible for inurnment at Arlington has garnered more than 28,000 signatures as of Wednesday morning. Terry Harmon also hopes that Congress will bring the issue up at Fanning’s confirmation hearing.

The WASPs were formed midway into World War II, when the huge numbers of service members being sent overseas meant the military was in need of pilots who could ferry planes around the country, test-fly repaired aircraft and help with combat pilot training. According to the AP, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who commanded the Army Air Forces in World War II, created the WASPs intending for the women pilots to gain full military status, but Congress never approved it.

Harmon, a 25-year-old from Maryland with a husband overseas, joined up in 1944.

The civilian pilot’s training program needed to qualify for the WASPs required a parent’s permission, which Harmon knew her disapproving mother would never grant. So she quietly sent the permission forms to her father’s office, she said in a 2006 interview, and he signed them instead.

“Back in those days, women weren’t expected do things like this, and so many people were against the idea of women flying, endangering their lives,” she said.

During training in Sweetwater, Texas, Harmon and the other women in the roughly 1,000-person paramilitary program lived according to military standards. They lived in uninsulated concrete barracks and dressed in the closest approximation of a uniform they could find (the WASPs weren’t issued uniforms by the Army until well into the program).

“We fully expected – we’d been told we’d be taken into the military eventually,” she said in 2006. “We took the same oath of office that the men took. We drilled. . . . We went to bed at night with taps, and we got up in the morning with reveille.”

But the female pilots were not considered true members of the military. They earned less, for one thing. They weren’t given insurance to fly. They got no GI benefits. During training, they paid for their own food, room and board. Harmon recalled how, when a woman in the program got into an accident and was killed, the other WASPs passed a hat around to collect money to send her body home – the Army wouldn’t pay for it.

Throughout the summer of 1944 Congress was considering a bill that would have militarized the WASPs. But it seemed unlikely to pass.

“There was a lot of negativeness about taking us into the military because at that point there was a lot of politics, for one thing,” Harmon explained in 2006. “We were told keep our mouths shut, don’t do anything. We were good little girls, and we did that.”

“Today,” she continued, “we wouldn’t have done that.”

By the time Harmon graduated from training in November 1944 and flew out to her station at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, it was clear that her days as a pilot were numbered. She was among of the second to last class of WASPs before the program was disbanded the following month.

Records of the WASP program were classified for 35 years after the end of the war, according to the Baltimore Sun.

“She said the reason the program was kept secret was because the government was afraid if enemy nations found out the USA was ‘so desperate’ to allow women to fly planes, it would be seen as a weakness,” Harmon’s granddaughter, Erin Miller of Silver Spring, Md., told the Sun last year.

Whether or not that suspicion was correct, recognition was a long time coming for the WASPs after the war. They were only recognized as veterans in 1977. But in 2009, some 200 still-living WASPs were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal – the highest civilian honor bestowed by Congress.

She looked forward to being interred at Arlington, among the women she served with, her family said.

But Army spokesman Paul Prince told the Associated Press that WASPs are only eligible for burial at cemeteries run by the Department of Veterans Affairs; Arlington is run by the Army and its superintendent had no authority to allow WASPs’ remains into the cemetery, he said.

Arlington, which is running out of room, faces increasing pressure over eligibility requirements for interment, according to the Associated Press, and strict rules govern whose ashes can be laid to rest there. The rule that bars WASPs also covers tens of thousands of others who served in paramilitary or other capacities. In fact, the most-affected group is the Merchant Marine, which had nearly 250,000 members serve during WWII.

But Harmon’s family says the WASPs are just asking for what they’ve earned, and that the small number of WASPs remaining seems unlikely to strain the cemetery’s capacity.

The WASPs “are a distinct group of women with the surviving 100-or-so women all in their 90s,” Texas Woman’s University history professor Kate Landdeck told the Associated Press. “It is just mean-spirited for the secretary of the Army to question their value to their country. Again.”

Sorry folks I saw the comments on the blog site about liking the humor only issue Impish turned out. In truth I was going to basically cut the same corners he did with this issue (it’s way easier just to clip and paste a bunch of jokes in no particular order or theme and call it an issue than to have a theme or try arranging a tone or flow to the issue, find recipes tid bits etc. to include) but when I saw this my Irish just got up and started looking for my soap box. I think you can safely conclude from this that as long as I keep finding reports of bullshit  cheap shots at our service mean AND WOMEN by those in our Government, who should be championing them not attempting to erase them and their due, you’ll be hearing from me on the subject.

Sorry but I’m not sorry about it either and I’ll not apologize for it.