One of the more colorful characters to be seen at TRF is the Fairy GodFather.

He wanders around the grounds in his pink tutu and rainbow-striped tights, smoking his cigar, enchanting folks with his magic wand, all the while speaking in a thick Italian accent. He's a walking photo op, and popular with the patrons.

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...really I do - I try so hard to bite my tongue when people that I otherwise like and respect run off at the mouth about stuff about which they are so clueless that they have no idea what unadulterated idiots the prove themselves.

Carter's recent Nobel Peace Award would be a case in point. What eggzackly did he do to win this award?

Did he bring peace to the Middle East?

Did he liberate the folks living under the tyranny of the Warsaw Pact?

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he boycotted the 1980 Olympics. That really left a mark.

Ronnie RayGun spent the USSR into bankruptcy, stood on the Berlin Wall, and demanded that Gorby tear the sumbitch down. Doing so, he put into motion forces that made the communist nations stand down, which liberated millions of folks, all now willing, no, begging, to suck any appendage we wanna unzip to join our oppressive capitalist worker's dystopia.

Carter seems to have won the award for brokering a nuclear non-proliferation deal with N. Korea that the Ultimate Leader proceeded to promptly ignore, all the while enjoying the economic benefits of the agreement he flagrantly violated.

Since there were no effective inspection or enforcement aspects to the deal Carter negotiated under the auspices of the Clinton administration, the only way we found out that Kim Il Dung was violating the treaty was when Bush43 scared the shit outta the rest of the planet with his statements regarding such activities as sending WMD technology to rogue nations, and vowing to hold such regimes responsible.

Surprise, surprise, the Koreans wet their pants falling all over themselves to come clean, lest we come and Saddamize them too.

I actually like Carter as a man. He means and meant well.I volunteered in his campaign for President. Too bad he was an idealistic, utopian, useless, idiot.

Today, I listen to many folks try and blame the US for all the world's ills. Our colonialist, imperialistic tendencies have been the root cause of our present conflicts.

I wonder where, or if, even, they went to school, and if said school made them take a history class.

Virtually all, certainly most, of the planet's current most intrangible conflicts are the result of Europe's colonialist adventures, and they have left us to sanitize the messes they left behind when they cut and ran to leave their former colonies to their fates.

Case in point: Afghanistan.

This nation came into it's miserable situation as the result of the Brits and the Russians fighting over access to a possible warm water port in SW Asia.

Case in point: All of Africa.

The various Euro powers carved out swaths of this continent ignoring reasonable geographic or tribal boundaries, putting into motion the intense fraticidal warfare that survives today. The entire continent is a charnel house. The US had nothing to do with turning it into such, unless you would fault us for not invading it, and imposing imperial rule on the Sub-Saharan continent about a century ago.

Case in point - The entire Middle East

A Compleat Clusterfuck, left when the Brits and other Euros cut and ran after they decided they couldn't afford to administer the lands they had conquered by the end of WWII.

India and SW Asia - see above. The precipitous abandonment of India by the Brits in the post WWII era gave immediate rise to the India-Pakistan wars, (over Kashimir) which remain troubling, as both nations are considered to have nukes.

Those, my friends, are the roots of the those conflicts, not US Imperialism, Big Oil, the military/industrial complex, McDonald's, the right-wing radio talk shows, SUV's, or our supposed lack of an ability to understand the cycle of violence, root causes, yatta-yatta-yatta.

I hereby throw down the gauntlet to the whole damn world of the blogosphere - prove that any of those statements concerning the roots of those wars are wrong.

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So, late this afternoon I'm about seventeen feet up up a ladder.

Why?

Well, in general, familial obligations required that I help pull some Xmas decorations down. In particular, there was this one little piece of velcro sticking to the top of a second story window that I was told just had to go.

I don't mind ladders. I look at them like guns; used properly, obeying all the rules, they can be used safely for a legit purpose. I've used them a lot, without any serious consequences.

Getting that piece of velcro, though, required that I extend that ladder out to it's very tippy-tip. Said window was under a flower bed, one, moreover, that had been freshly mulched. When I tried to lean the ladder up, it ws evident it could not reach unless I:

a) Put the base of the ladder in the mulched bed,

b) set the ladder at a more vertical angle than is my normal practice, and

c) climbed almost to the very end.

I looked around for some one to brace the ladder, but everyone was busy elsewhere. No prob - I just checked the base of the ladder to see that it was firmly set in the ground there, (I was worried about it slipping) and started up.

You can already see where this is going, right?

About the time I putting my foot on the penultimate step, and reaching for that pesky square of velcro tape, I feel the ladder start to go over sideways right as the soft mulched bed gave way.

My first thought was "Oh boy, this is going to be fun."

I honestly can't say if the ladder fell slowly, or if time changed pace or what, but it seemed like it took a long time to get to the ground. I started dancing down the ladder, trying to stay vertical as the ladder fell. My mind inventoried the likely impact area, recalling nothing much but some bushes. I concluded this was gonna hurt, but I'd prolly live.

Aaah, but there where those flagstones next to the house.

Time to abandon ship.

I could hear one of the onlookers in the yard, notified of this circus by the noise of the aluminum ladder skittering down the side of the house, scream " Oh my God!"

I didn't want to get my feet caught up in the rungs. About halfway down, I kicked out backwards, and did my best to roll into the fall, in best paratrooper fashion.

Slambangouch.

I hit on my feet, but moving backwards and sideways so hard that there was no way to stand on them. I toppled and landed hard on my shoulder, so hard the my sunglasses flew off and landed about fifteen feet away. It felt like taking a good lick in football.

I lay there a moment, inventorying.

"Marcus, are you OK?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You sure?"

I started laughing uncontrollably, mostly from relief.

"Goddamit, where are the video cameras when you need them? This woulda made me a boodle on one a' those funniest video shows."

Somehow, amazingly, thank (insert $DEITY$ of your choice), I am completely unhurt, not even a bruise. Nobody that witnessed it (about a half-dozen folks) thought it could be true.

Only the good die young, I suppose. :-)

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