Category: A Victory!
Redneck buddies form an unshakeable bond. ChatGPT image.
Edgar Simmons and Cletus Bellefontaine had been best friends since the church nursery. They grew up together, gutted through as much school as was demanded of them, and eventually married. Their wives were large, intolerant of foolishness, and best friends in their own right. Edgar and Cletus kept food on the table, serving ably as sign holders for the county road department.
Success turns on perspective. To the outside world, Edgar and Cletus were just barely scraping by. However, they met their respective mortgages and had enough left over for beer and fishing gear. The two buddies felt themselves inordinately blessed.
Prep
“Pass me another Miller Light, brother,” Cletus said amiably. WWE SmackDown roared in the background. Brutus Creed was about to go mano a mano with El Grande Americano, and the crowd was getting properly tooled up. Edgar’s expansive plasma-screen TV caught every nuance. It was almost like being physically in the ring. The effect was all the more compelling during the women’s matches.
“Cooler’s empty, loser,” Edgar responded without taking his eyes off the screen. “You’ll have to go hit the fridge. Get me another bag of Fritos while you’re up.”
Cletus was awfully comfortable.
“This is why God made wives,” he said flatly. Both men snickered.
“Jimmie Earl!” he shouted. “Be a dear and bring us some more beers and another bag of Fritos.”
The raw potato was half the size of a football. It flew out of the kitchen and crossed the living room in an instant. Jimmie Earl Bellefontaine had played competitive softball in junior college, and she still had an arm.
The heavy projectile caught Cletus behind the right ear and lifted him bodily out of the tattered recliner. The man fell unceremoniously across the coffee table and landed in a heap on the floor. Beer cans and empty chip bags skittered across the dingy carpet. Edgar reflexively leaped to his feet and took cover behind his wife’s favorite potted plant. He hoped that Pauline’s weakness for horticulture would spare him from a similar fate.
“Dang, woman!” Cletus said as he lifted himself to his feet with difficulty. His head swam from the well-placed blow. “I am forever amazed at that chick’s rarefied sense of hearing.”
“Yeah,” Edgar said as he surveyed the mess. “You know, it might be best if we wrapped up anyway. It’ll be an early day tomorrow, and them fish ain’t gonna catch themselves.”
With that, both men smiled. They would sooner fish than breathe, and the weather forecast was sublime. Cletus collected Jimmie Earl and bid his best friend goodnight.
History in the Making
The specific location of the Fishing Spot was a secret more closely guarded than the President’s nuclear launch codes. Edgar’s beat-up Ford pickup bounced to a stop underneath a familiar elm. Cletus moved to unlock the chain that secured their old john boat to a nearby tree, while Edgar unloaded the fishing gear and beer cooler. Unbeknownst to both men, however, danger lurked in the skies nearby.
“Sensors detect two bipedal life forms, Captain,” the reptilian helmsman hissed across his bifurcated tongue. “One creature is preparing an aquatic vessel. The other is preoccupied with a piece of equipment of some sort. It could be a weapon.”
The mission of the Archon-class scout ship and her twelve-lizard crew was armed reconnaissance. Their objective was to compile a detailed assessment of the indigenous life forms on this planet and relay that information back to the waiting invasion fleet via tachyon burst transmission. This would be their first encounter with the native bipeds.
“Bring us into position within range of both creatures,” the Captain hissed. “Ready photon cannons. Let us observe their response, but be prepared for any eventuality.”
Scaly three-fingered appendages tightened on sundry controls.
Edgar noticed the bizarre little object first. It was maybe three inches across and resembled a dark grey hockey puck as it hovered motionless some twenty feet distant. The compact object made no sound.
“Cletus, you seein’ this?” he said. “That thing some kind of drone? You don’t suppose anybody else has got designs on our fishing spot, do you?”
Cletus looked up from his tacklebox and spotted the curious little object in an instant. Without a moment’s hesitation, he snatched up his skulling paddle and advanced.
“Ain’t nobody stealing our fishing spot,” he said with authority. “We been fishing this place since we were weaned. It’s ours by rights of eminent domain.”
Neither man really knew what eminent domain meant. They likely intended squatter’s rights more accurately, but the gist was there. Cletus raised his wooden paddle and prepared to strike.
Rednecks for the very soul of the American Deep South. I proudly count myself among their ranks.
“Captain!” the helmsman exclaimed. “The creature is positioning itself to attack!”
“Right,” the senior officer said flatly. They had trained for this eventuality. “Forward batteries, fire as you bear. I had hoped not to have to resort to violence, but this will send an indelible message.”
There was a modest blue spark, and the air reeked of ozone. In an instant, Cletus Bellefontaine was simply gone. All that remained were his two pig boots, smoke trailing lazily up from the gory stumps where they were insulated by the rubber. Edgar processed the scene in an instant.
“Sweet holy crap!” the stunned man exclaimed. There was no time to grieve. Reaching through the open door of the pickup, Edgar retrieved his well-worn Remington slide-action 12-bore.
He cycled the action by rote and had the front bead on the malevolent hockey puck before the reptiles could respond. Edgar Simmons had a near-supernatural gift for wing shooting. At twenty feet, his tight bolus of number sixes struck the little starship squarely. The snuff can-sized cylinder spun crazily away and plopped into the lake without further fanfare.
Edgar cycled his gun without conscious thought. His ears rang, but his lizard brain was too preoccupied to notice. The confused man switched his gaze between the ringlets now propagating uniformly across the lake and his buddy’s smoldering footwear. He struggled with the decision regarding who to call first.
The tachyon feed had related all of the gory details in real time. The Commodore of the invasion fleet reviewed the pertinent data several times from three systems away before making his decision. He possessed the firepower required to subdue these primitive apes.
However, none of the raw materials to be found on this wet, cold orb justified the expense or effort. He dictated an order to bypass the planet and signed it with a single perfectly manicured claw. He would have a subordinate draft the notices for the families of the lost crew.
Turning his attention back to his tactical plot, the reptilian commander occupied himself with the particulars of fuel reserves and manpower.
It’s likely tough living with a legit genius. I have known a few truly gifted wordsmiths in my day. They were honestly all just a little bit nuts.
I’m a professional writer. I have the CV to prove it. However, I’m a mechanic, not an artist. I just like to tell stories. It’s not like I am in any real danger of earning a Pulitzer for my collected GunCrank columns.
That’s likely a good thing. I enjoy the best of both worlds. I get paid to write about stuff I like to do, but I’m not all weird and freaky about it. Ernest Hemingway, by contrast — amazing literary luminary that he was — came with a fair amount of emotional baggage. That was a package deal.
Greg Hemingway had an undeniably hard life. Public domain.
The Man
Papa Hemingway has been universally extolled as a paragon of American manliness. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I and was badly wounded in 1918. These sordid experiences formed the basis for “A Farewell to Arms.” In 1937, he got neck-deep in the Spanish Civil War. That led to “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
During World War II, Hemingway conned his way into both the D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris … as a civilian. He was in two airplane crashes and was a legendary hunter and fisherman.
In all, he published 28 books. But in addition to all of that great stuff, he was also a hard-drinking wild man who was legendarily tough to live with. The blowback from that extended throughout his family.
Greg Hemingway and his famous wordsmith dad Ernest had a strained relationship. Public domain.
Daddy Issues
Ernest Hemingway was married four times. His second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, was the mother of his two youngest sons, Patrick and Greg. Patrick attended Harvard and worked as a professional big game hunter, operating his own safari business in Tanzania for over a decade. He died in Bozeman, Montana, in 2025 at age 97. Greg, however, had a somewhat rougher time of it.
Greg struggled with gender issues from a very young age. If you think I am going to dive too deeply into that thorny space here, you have lost your mind. However, as regards pronouns, cut me some slack. Greg Hemingway never quite figured that bit out, either.
Greg went by “Gig” or “Gigi” as a child. He was an exceptional athlete and an accomplished marksman. However, starting about age 12, Greg began wearing his stepmother’s clothes.
When Ernest discovered this, he was rendered apoplectic. After one particularly fulminant exchange on the subject, the esteemed novelist calmed down and told his son, “Gigi, we come from a strange tribe, you and I.” However, his confrontation with Greg’s mother, Pauline, did not end quite so well.
In 1951, at age 19, Greg was arrested attempting to enter a woman’s restroom in a Los Angeles movie theater while wearing female clothing. Ernest and Pauline were divorced at the time, but this revelation resulted in a most extraordinary dustup over the phone.
Over the course of an hour, he vigorously berated Pauline, accusing her of being somehow responsible for Greg’s behavior. These accusations stung. The poor, unfortunate woman fell over dead the following day at age 56. Though she was later found to have had an undiagnosed adrenal tumor that might have played a role, her demise was attributed to an acute state of shock stemming from that livid telephonic trouncing.
Ernest Hemingway and his second wife Paula had their moments. Ernest screamed at her enough on the phone to literally kill the poor woman. Public domain.
Details
Greg served briefly in the military and later attended the University of Miami School of Medicine. He eventually underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1994 and took the name Gloria. However, he/she never found peace.
Greg Hemingway was married to four different women and fathered eight children. He carried a formal diagnosis of bipolar disorder and voluntarily underwent electroshock therapy in an effort to treat it.
When things were at their rockiest with his father, Greg retreated to Africa to shoot elephants. Of this time, he said, “I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic.”
As Gloria, she penned a brutal letter to her father accusing him of having killed Pauline, something Ernest had accused her of doing as well. The following year, the esteemed novelist took his own life in Ketchum, Idaho. He was 61 years old.
Dysfunction On Display
There was clearly a genetic component to this sordid stuff. Five of Ernest’s immediate relatives committed suicide, including his father, brother, and two sisters. His granddaughter Margaux was a successful actress in her own right until she killed herself in 1996. This ignoble mess has been cumulatively referred to as the “Hemingway Curse.”
Gloria vacillated between gender roles while sinking ever deeper into drug abuse and alcoholism. She tried to obtain a license as a professional hunter in Africa but was denied due to her chemical dependency. She wrote a bestseller about her relationship with her father titled “Papa: A Personal Memoir.”
Gloria eventually died in 2001 at the age of 69 of cardiovascular disease while in the Miami-Dade Women’s Detention Center. She was incarcerated for indecent exposure and resisting arrest at the time. Buried next to Ernest in Ketchum, Idaho, the gravestone reads, “Dr. Gregory Hancock Hemingway 1931–2001.” It was a tragic end for a family of exceptional wordsmiths.
Seen above is the map of Flock camera’s that have been verified in operation across that nation, provided by Deflock.org. Readers who visit the organization’s website and visit the map page can zoom into and locate the devices in any city in the continental United States, down to the street level.
Image courtesy of Deflock.org
Leonardo, a company that holds multiple surveillance-related defense and government contracts, recently introduced ELSAG SignalTrace, and its hardware is being offered as a bolt-on supplement to the more than 110,000 Flock cameras taking and storing photos of vehicles on public roadways nationwide. The technology contained within that hardware could conceivably track who has recently purchased a firearm and where they’re taking it.
The SignalTrace webpage explains the system can detect cellphone manufacturer and make, audio system in the vehicle, smartwatches, wireless ear buds and more. Tire pressure monitors, laptops and iPads are also included as part of the “electronic fingerprint.” According to analysis by TechRepublic, this even includes those popular microchips used to reunite lost pets with their owner, along with RFID signals from tags used by many retailers for inventory convenience.
Enough FFLs use such RFID technology that the National Shooting Sports Foundation published a “Best Practices” bulletin five years before Leonardo’s introduction. The trade organization’s advice is straightforward.
“Our position can be summarized simply as ‘Turn It Off, Take It Off at the Checkout Counter.’” Failure to do so today could mean that, at the very least, that gun you’re taking home from the store could be identified and included in your “digital fingerprint.” Consider inspecting the firearm and all packaging after making a purchase and before ever leaving the store to be sure you’ve removed all possible identifying information.
Information collected by SignalTrace is transmitted into the cloud. There it undergoes AI analysis, and a digital fingerprint is assigned to that vehicle for law-enforcement use. If a license plate or other identifying features are captured by Flock—including bumper and window stickers, according to Deflock.org—they are noted.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide claim the vehicle data collected by Flock cameras is deleted after a certain period—usually 30 days. The SignalTrace datasheet, on the other hand, plainly states, “All data collected may be uploaded to the EOC server and archived for future queries and analysis.”
Everyone wants law enforcement to catch criminals fast and, just as importantly, the justice system to issue appropriate sentences. The new technology, however, raises all new privacy concerns for gun owners.
There’s no doubt familiar brands in the gun industry are already eyeing this development and weighing the wisdom of offering products to address growing privacy concerns. The uproar online certainly indicates they’re going to be in demand—by those of us who exercise our Second Amendment rights, and anyone else concerned about Big Brother’s surveillance.
Certain products that can guard against privacy intrusion have been made available before, typically called “Faraday cages” or bags. In 2013, Blackhawk introduced its Under the Radar pouches and bag with Zero Trace signal-blocking technology. The company was ahead of their time, but despite the bag’s ability to thwart phone and computer surveillance, it was discontinued just a few years later.
New surveillance technology being marketed to law-enforcement agencies is now fueling a resurgence in interest in similar designs, and every gun owner needs to pay attention.
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Reading stuff like this just scares me silly & I like to think that I don’t scare easily. Seeing as that Privacy is effectively dead in this country and in a lot of the world too. I’m just glad that I am one of the last Generation that actually enjoyed having some. Grumpy
A Grandfather* was tossed 8 FEET into the Air by a Bison! Film at 11 !!!
Grumpy
- You would think that somebody who has lived that long to become a Grandfather. Would be old enough to know better!
Categories
Uh maybe ………
BOULDER, Colo. — Peering over his white picket fence, wearing a red flannel shirt, Stetson, and leather boots, retired Sgt. Maj. Michael Wilson, now a small business owner in Colorado, reports that life after the military has “shattered the very foundation” of what he “believed to be true about freedom in America.”
“When I was a new private, only seventeen, I remember my drill sergeant putting his boot on my head, pushing my face into the mud, and telling me that I had no rights, that I was his bitch, and that I had to earn my freedom,” Wilson said with a hint of nostalgia.
“For 35 years I believed freedom was earned, not given,” Wilson continued. “But then I retired and discovered the truth: freedom is free for everyone in America, and it’s fucking awesome.”
Wilson, who recently opened a marijuana smoke shop called “Float To Blaze Town,” spoke while stroking a wild, unkempt beard.
He says every night he lounges in his backyard, rips “dabs off his domeless titanium nail,” and tries to focus his bloodshot eyes on the Rocky Mountains.
“Man, I wish my family had cued me in on reality when I was seventeen,” Wilson said while tearing into a box of Honeybuns. “I’m Rocky Mountain high every night and no one cares. I can do anything. For the first time in my adult life I’m equal to everyone around me. It’s amazing.”
Eager to share his revelation with the world, Wilson insisted on demonstrating his newly acquired freedoms.
“Check this out,” he said, while taking a whiz on the public land behind his home. “Not enough? Well, what about this?” he goaded before shouting, “Fuck my old commander and his stupid training meeting!”
“See, nothing. I’m free.”
Lionel Madison, Wilson’s neighbor and frequent customer, reported that at night he often hears Wilson howling at the moon, smashing bottles, and firing his Desert Eagle .50 AE into the darkness, while screaming that the “MPs can come get me if they have the balls!”
“So what he gets a little wild? He’s a real hero, and I want him to know he’s welcome. Although, I’d really like him to mow his lawn,” Madison said.
“Mow my lawn? What’s babyface going to do? Order me to do it? I’d like to see him try,” Wilson said before lighting his blowtorch, ripping another dab, and then launching some darts at a picture of his old division commander.
18-year-old Marcus Williams was electrocuted while allegedly attempting to break into an ATM using a metal pry bar. According to reports, surveillance video showed Williams approaching the ATM late at night and trying to force it open. During the attempt, the metal bar reportedly contacted internal electrical components, causing a fatal electric shock.
His family later filed a $500,000 lawsuit against the bank, claiming it was responsible for his death. The court rejected the lawsuit, ruling that Williams’ death resulted from his own criminal actions and that the bank was not liable. The judge dismissed the case and ordered the family to reimburse the bank for the cost of repairing the damaged ATM.