This day your humble scribe was required and desired to khaki back up and head down to the former, for to get poked and prodded for the final time. Which, hizzoner the Force Surgeon being a former shipmate and gentleman of long acquaintance (and the both of us being gnarled and crusty beasts of marked superannuation), was not so bad as such things go, what with all the youngsters topping it the respectful and ourselves permitted a shred of dignity to go with the closed door and our knit cotton boxers.
Not much later, for reasons beyond the scope of this text, he found hisself trapped inside the confines of the 11th Juvenile Court (Traffic Division) of the City of San Diego, having presented his charge a full 15 minutes early.
Now this was your correspondent’s first visit within the juvenile justice system in just about 30 years, so he did not know – as so many of his more experienced confr?
This person of whom you speak… won’t be a member of your immediate family, by any chance?
Majority is required to carry a lighter? Only in California…
Are your Boy Scouts allowed matches?
Amazing…wasted time and resources for smoking under 18. Glad these enlightened laws were not on the books when I was under 18, because I would have spent all my Weekends in classrooms.
Biz idea for you Lex. Set up an automatic class for those so ticketed, whereas they can plead guilty in absentia and attend said class that you provide. Thus, the state will be spared the time and effort (as much as it is) being spent by the gov’t employees. Similar to Florida where if you receive a traffic ticket, you can plead guilty automatically by paying a fine, but attending a class will ease your points/penalties.
Constantly being amazed by our inefficiencies and bureacracy.
Claudio
Now if’n she lit up a veggie by another name, in the State of CA, wuddit have been ok?
Just amayzing.
If the class doesn’t work out, there’s always Gitmo…
~Ens Tim
Boy Scouts and MATCHES?
Prolly not any more.
Which is one reason all my kids know how to start a fire with flint and steel. Really.
Sort of. They thought it was a pretty slick trick.
Lex – it is posts like this that keep me coming back to your site day after day. Thanks for the thoughtful prose with the numrous chuckles thrown in.
And Claudio’s idea about setting up the class has merit – they have that driving school in FL and NC, too. I know – I’ve attended both in my distant past due to a permanent lead-foot condition. Which just yesterday did yet again get me in trouble with a small-town Iowa officer of the peace.
You have met the Nanny State, in direct action, and lost (actually we all lost) just like the silly pols that craft such a crappy system intended and on purpose. Submission as complete as any Islamist would approve. Sheeple Law vice Sharia of course….
Condolences. Watch. Next it’ll be fat people who consume fast food. Madness.
Did I ever tell you about how California and San Diego used to be when Reagan was governor and more enlightened thought rued the day there? I’m sure I have- Paradise Lost.
b2
Heh. I read the comments hoping that others would also say this post was beyond their ken. I am sorely disappointed to see they have not.
Lex, I’m sure it’s a wonderful post. Blame my incomprehension on a long and tiring day…
This is weird. . .before when you mentioned being “much like an ensign” I thought it was nice little jab. The remark seems eerily prescient, now. My day: wear khakis (for the first time in 4 months) attend to business inside the fence, hours in line at the DMV (“I’m sorry, sir, you need to go back and fill out form XXX, since you fit in category C, subsection XVII. Then you can get back in line and I can help you.” “Would you like me to put a new cover page on my TPS report too?” “Excuse me, sir?” “Nvm.”), then done. No real worky for me until July-ish, or so they say. I think I’ll take up surfing in the interim.
Lighter carrying teens? Next thing you know, they’ll be smugglin’ bombs in the heels of their shoes on the school buses.
As for the Boy Scouts here in California, I can only speak for our Troop. Our boys are led by a SWAT Officer for Stockton PD, which seems to have attracted quite a few boys from other Law types. To date, we have about 8 ASM’s that are full time pistol packin’ deputy types. The boys all carry lighters in their packs, as well as knives, in a more or less concealed fashion… under the full guideance of the aforementioned police officers. So, what gives? Since when is it illegal for a minor to have in their possession a lighter?
Brings back memories of a day thus spent with a member of the family awarded a traffic ticket.
Thoroughly unpleasant and time consuming experience. It did have an upside…………no more traffic tickets won by said family member.
There seems to be a message in the justice system. Some take longer to get it than others. Like the worthy who opted for the whole enchilada of a trial.
Ah Lex, I see that which lies beneath the surface………I damned well should after spending 3 and a half hours today with NAVSEA at SPAWAR in OTC today but I digress. Raising daughters in San Diego has bubbled to the surface from time to time. I’ve got one of those but she’s only 5 so this post just adds to the pile of yours that I’ve printed over the years describing what they get up in the process of changing the color of our hair and adding wrinkles and new vocabulary.
Nevertheless~! for you! there is still the open road and a visit to your nephew and whatnot! Seize the Day and get out of town and leave it all to the Hobbit and you will find great peace of mind and of course, the divorce papers upon your return.
I mostly checked out of the navy at BBNMC with plenty of stops at NASNI clinic just 2 months ago, come to think of it. No old shipmates there for me to do the medical thing unless we count the senior chief with the torn rotator cuff but he wasn’t so much on the staff as he was on a first name basis with them all.
Please don’t share with us the results of the FOG speech which must have been delivered. I can’t take learning that it is impossible to actually inject the Fear of God into a California teen and my thoughts will naturally turn to electricity and thumb screws and my poor little darling doesn’t deserve that.
I followed the link to your 2003 post on flight physicals. Love the spam.
“Right then. Off you go.”
And off they did, fuming.
Which was probably illegal, too.
Meanwhile, we can’t man the borders.
What a country.
Dave, you need to read more. Boy Scouts? In California? Why, that’s a fascist, sexist, everything-ist organization that promotes negative values that the formerly wonderful State of California, now known as The Democrat People’s Republic of Kalifornia, cannot support or promote. In fact, wash your mouth out, too.
More than a Captain, Sir. Captain Courageous!
Love the pulsing prose, Lex. Thanks for sharing.
Ah, how the outer world does not know of the literary treatment they are soon to be taken to task with, now that Lex has become a land locked (except for the occasional fishing expedition hosted by others in a craft about the size of the now departed Captain’s Gigs) person!
And we thought he wove such excellent tales of the air and sea?
STEVEC – rather than direct you to read my earlier comment, I’ll say this instead: There are quite a lot of conservative good folks here in the unincorporated and less-than-urban parts of the Golden State (i.e. – not LA, SF, or Berkely) that would take umbrage at your comments. But, since you’ve beat us all down and shoehorned every last one of us into your own myopically misguided definition, I guess I’ll just leave you to your own sad pathetic existence, and whatever rock for which beneath you hang your home sweet home sign. I’m trying hard to embrace the fourth, fifth, and sixth of the Scouts Laws. A set of Laws you apparently have no clue of…
Brings me back to my days in high school. Students actually had their own smoking areas and could use them during school lunch times and study halls, so long as parental permission was indicated on their school ID.
Yes, parental permission at the age of 14. How times have changed.
I’m an ASM myself. Here in Illinois there seem to be no laws against minors carrying lighters. The problems we have are a) the Scouts finding things like “strike anywhere” matches so novel that they’ll run through a box of 500 in a couple of days and b) moms who are so worried that their kids are going to inflict injury on themselves with such things that they don’t want them anywhere near fires, axes, knives, etc., which is why the kids find “strike anywhere” matches so novel that … well, you get the picture.
I must say, though, that we took the Troop out this weekend rock climbing at Devils Lake in Wisconsin. Some of the fathers of the new Scouts showed up and watched us hook their kids into ropes and have them climb up or rapel down 40 and 70 foot cliffs. They’ve seemed doubtful up to this point but now I think we’ve hooked them in.
Lex,
As one who earns his living helping those who stand before the “be-robed gentlemen”, I am curious as to determine if you stood next to the individual with whom you have “glancing familarity” while suitably attired in said kaki with the full panorama of color while the interrogatory was taking place.
If you were, I would be surprised that the member of the bar didn’t make any citation about it to the youngster during adjudication.
Of course, it is the Traffic Division, which means assembly line justice and probably didn’t have time to assimilate that information.
Funny, I don’t sense a lot of outrage over the whole issue in here…..
Is smoking that bad? Since when has something thats legal, though unhealthy, a warrant for taking away the parental responsibilities of someone like Lex?
Everyone of you who could even think this is a good system because they villify smoking because it’s unhealthy, or I would never do it, so screw those that do, are simply sheeple IMO.
The big 3 teaching aspects of a public school “education”are:
- Nazis are bad (no sh^t sherlock)
- Racism is bad (ditto)
- smoking is bad (unhealthy maybe ?)
Underlying theme of all this education strategy is that Republicans, conservatives and white men from Appalachia (or any rural area-even CA) who own guns and believe in God are most likely all three…..
Hence, the Nanny State! For all our good. Right?
Advice- beware any proposal that uses the word in order to “modify behavior”…..
Sorry Lee, I know there are good, common-sense folks in California opposed to this Alduous Huxley scenario but you are hopelessly outnumbered, as I am here in MD. You ain’t alone. Don’t take it personal.
b2
I can give you ‘outrage’, B2.
How about a law which prohibits smoking by anyone in a vehicle if there is a ‘child’ under the age of 19 present? Now that’s what I call really ridiculous, outrageous even. Just think, it could always be worse!
We had a smoking area at my high school (back in the dark ages) and we didn’t need parental permission. The teachers took up nearly all our smoking area. Although I’m a smoker and don’t advocate it for anyone, whatever happened to personal freedom? We’re free to abort babies, have all kinds of sex with all kinds of people (as long as it’s SAFE), punch holes in most any part of our bodies for decoration, draw pictures on our skin with needles for the same reason, but it’s against the law to carry a lighter or to smoke? Something is upside down here! Sorry – rant over!
Tim,
I was wondering the same thing. In the netherworld that can be the Old South, judges in military towns (I mean those with actual bases in them) who have children of senior officers or NCO’s before them often comment on the shame said youngster has caused the family (tho’ too often that was the point of getting in trouble in the first instance).
I’m sure the minor with whom Lex has passing familiarity got enough of the “silent treatment” on the ride back to HB that FOG was the least of said minor’s fears. (At least that was the way the adults who accompanied me to such events responded (not that there were THAT many)).
Respects
OAM
Ah in my old hometown of San Diego a Boy Scout troop will soon or would now require the assistance of several armed Assistant Scout Masters to enjoy their camp site in Balboa Park–which they had enjoyed for many decades. Just as in San Francisco, the forces of political correctness have deemed it inappropriate for Boy Scouts to use publicly owned facilities because of the organization’s stance against gay Scoutmasters.
There is much goofiness abroad in the land. If you can send a kid under 18 to a 2 hour class on Saturday afternoon (after having first dragged him or her through a juvenile court session)–then in a year or so you’ll be able to send the same kid to a 2 hour class for having consumed a Hostess Twinkie in public.
Michelle,
I agree. That’s a bad one too. Nanny State North!
Let’s face it. Sitting in a smoke filled car is horrible if you don’t smoke, but creating a friggin law as a remedy and unenforceable at best, is stupid.
Laws are common; common-sense laws ain’t.
b2
Michelle ~ you’re right. It could be worse. You could live in in Hawaii where they are seriously considering banning smoking in condos and apartments.
I am not kidding.
I’m kind of curious about what happens to the kid who pleaded “not guilty”. Everybody seems to be missing the point here. Lex, if you don’t consider this question an intrusion on your personal privacy, how much do the anti-tobacco class and the court costs come to? If it is anything like Pennsylvania, it is all about the money.
The remark about daughters in San Diego sent all manner of high voltages thru me, it was in the top five why I retired when mine was going to be in the Mira Mesa Junior High the next year! Color me gone!
Sadly, it doesn’t surprise me, HFS. I figure that kind of thing has to be next here ,too. It’s only logical … once you accept the first totally illogical law, that is.
In the words of good old T. S. Eliot, “This is the way the world ends. not with a bang but a whimper.” In this case, this is the way personal freedom ends, with a lot of niggling little ordnances which nibble away at our freedoms and our privacy. As someone above said, it’s Lex’s job and privilege to teach the young beauties living in his house what they should and should not do. California seems to be suffering from creeping SanFrancisco-itis. The arrogance of today’s “enlightened” liberals never fails to appall me. We should start a political party named the “Mind Your Own Dam Business Party.” Bet there’d be a lot of joiners. In Texas, anyway.
Marianne
Big Oops here. The aged editor made a boo-boo above. Ordnance is, of course, guns and ammunition. Ordinance is a, in this case silly, regulation about public behavior. Sorry folks. My bad. 20 lashes with a wet noodle.
Marianne
Two hours of “mind wipe” and “re-education” for carrying a lighter? Damn!
You can drive and you can be a soldier, but no lighters!
In my youth, (a long time ago), there would be a coffee cup in there with my name on it.
For further insanity farther north, check out: http://americandigest.org/ and look down for a file name under “Tin Foil Brigade” where in there is an article on new sin taxes coming to SFO.
Indeed, California is digging a hole for itself that has no bottem.
An afterthought on the “Left-Coast Insanity:
————————————————————-
Lazarus Long (remember him?)
A character in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein. From Page 47 in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.
————————————————————-
Political tags–such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, conservative, and so forth–are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.
LOL, Marianne! I know a lot of folks who’d join that party in a heartbeat… and they ain’t all from TX.
“The milieu was claustrophobic, some among the neighbors bordering on feral, …”
(snork, splurt coffee, lol)
All I can say is “Welcome to enlisted berthing Cap’n.”
Matches, lighters, lockblade knives, machetes, axes, Coleman stove fuel. Even a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights( if you want something really dangerous). We salute the flag, say group grace before meals, and strive to live out the Oath and Law as best we can. With a Troop SM that served in the Army in 2 wars and 3 ASMs with service time in the Marines.
Pretty good Troop. And now you know what my posting name means.
As bad as Cali is, things could be worse: this from Jolly Olde England today, as seen on the FoxColorado website (while trying to figure out from Iraq whether my house survived the tornadoes): “Officers are using powers under Section 60 of the Public Order Act which allow them to search people for knives and guns without reasonable suspicion they may be carrying a weapon.” The headline read thusly “Knife Crime Measures Like Stop And Search Could ‘Antagnoise’ Young People.” You just can’t make this stuff up, who’d believe it?