Florida Thanksgiving

I know I am rubbing it in to my Northern Epics.  Sue me.  Seriously, I wish all of you the best and most thankful of holidays.  I wish we could make a habit of being this thankful every day of the year.

Fuzzy Photos From Great Bars

The upstairs bar at Buckhorn Exchange, Denver.  Those are real weapons over there.  Next to really good whisky.  Numerous kinds of wild game on the menu, including a rattlesnake appetizer. Not for the faint of heart.  Tremendous.

Armistice Day 98--A Memorial

Great literature is great because it speaks to everyone in some fashion. Across borders.  Across generations.  World War I ended at 11:11 a.m. today in 1918.  British poet Rupert Brook died in 1915 while in the army.  My favorite poem of his, "The Soldier", is understood by every soldier in every land who ever walked away from home toward some distant, horrific, place...

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 

Today, lets remember all who fell so we can walk,  All who served so we could live.  And if you would, please look back to the doughboys of the First World War.  Gone now, they had virtually no reason to go and fight "over there".  But they went anyhow. Like they always do. Because they loved us and because they wanted to help.  Some to die at 27 like Rupert Brooke. Some to die much younger. Some to live to help us remember.  God bless them all.