Wheel of Fortune is in Arkansas and Willy thinks he needs to go down and audition. Well Willy went by the Possum Grit Grill and Cantina to see what Juanita thought about it. She was all for it.

In fact Juanita had her own game of Wheel of Fortune going on there at the Cantina.

Juanita had bottles of beverage sitting up on the bar and each one was covered in front by a letter turned over backwards. She was giving the two regulars to the Cantina a chance to win a beverage.

Well, Sammy Bob over in the back just kept holding up his brew and hollering "Big Money" - "Big Money" Juanita kept asking him to give her a letter and Sammy Bob hollered out " I would like to buy a bowel."

Well if you knew Sammy Bob like Willy knows Sammy Bob you would know that he has one bowel to many now.

Juanita - says no Sammy Bob. You have to spin the wheel. Well Sammy Bob took hold of the spokes on the car wheel set up on the table and gave it a spin. The pointer stopped on "bankrupt". No problem for Sammy Bob - he declared that a long time ago.

Next up was Billy Mack. - He hollered big money gave the wheel a spin - it came up on bottle of budwiser. Billy Mack immediately hollered "give me a bud light"

Juanita thought he was solving the puzzle and declared him the winner.

As a Winner she declared that he got $5, a chance to drive her daddy's four wheeler and a date with Juanita. Bill Mack immediately refused the prize unless he could eliminate the date part of it.

Guess he has no taste for fine women like Juanita. Or maybe he thinks the little wife back at the shack wouldn't like him going out with Juanita.

Well enough of that - Willy better hurry if he is going to get to those Wheel of Fortune auditions -- Better yet - Willy might just go to the deer Woods.

10-4 Willy

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that a tree service company dumped a pine tree on my parents' house.

Here are a few pictures showing the damage done. I won't add commentary as the photos speak for themselves.

ARTIST - FEIST
SONG - MY MOON MY MAN

So could you do this? I've decided that The Editor is gonna have to take me to an airport where they have one of these things. I've gotta try it.

That's right. Cliff Lee, a local boy, won the American League Cy Young Award today.

Yes, we're proud of Lee here in Benton, Ark. He played for the Benton Panthers (we've got a great baseball program here) and the Arkansas Razorbacks. He pitches for the Cleveland Indians now and is coming off a 22-3 season and a 2.54 ERA last season, and that was coming back to Major League Baseball after a season in the minor leagues.

Lee still calls Benton home, thus proving yet again that he's a quality individual.

If you want to read an excellent story about Lee, click right here and read this one that ran last week in the Saline County Voice.

As always, click right here to see some more of ill-conceived rambling.

Dustin Smith and his first-grade class at Woodrow Cummins Elementary School in Conway Arkansas is one of the finalists to win a $25,000 technology makeover through an eInstruction Video Competition.

Their entry titled "Click It" is based on the 1980's tune "Whip It"

This is a great video and if everyone will log in and vote they can win this contest.

Check it out by clicking here on eimakeover.com

Willy has voted - you should too!

10-4 Willy

Folks, I'm good and mad tonight.

Why? Because there's a pine tree lodged in my parents' house, that's why.

"What? A pine tree? What the hell?"

Yes, it seems a bunch here in Saline County, Ark., known as A to Z Tree Service went and dumped a damned tree on my parents' house today. My childhood home, then, may have to be torn down because of the extensive damage to it.

My parents are stunned, I'm mad and I'm looking down the barrel of 31 years of memories being tossed out the window. They bought that home here in Benton back in 1977, got it paid off about 10 years ago (give or take) and are now looking at the prospect of having to rebuild.

Well, there's a chance the home can be saved, but damn! The back half of the place is an absolute disaster. Thank God the saw-wielding maniacs that managed to hit my parents home with a tree are insured.

This A to Z bunch cut down down some pine trees at Casa de Hawg earlier this week. Oh, I was upset that they took a black walnut tree, a tree that my kids liked to climb and most of our bushes out in the process, but I suppose I was lucky. After all, my home wasn't crushed by a tree.

After mangling my yard, A to Z headed on over to mom and dad's place. My parents, see, were a bit wary of the huge pine trees in their yard because a storm dumped a branch on the house earlier this year and they had to have the roof replaced.

So, they figured a reliable tree service was what they needed. Now, A to Z claims they are skilled at removing dangerous and difficult trees. I suppose that claim is correct, so long as you don't mind a damn tree falling through your roof.

My parents are staying in a hotel tonight and I suppose they'll get down to the business of figuring out the extent of the damage in the morning. They'll probably be in that hotel for quite awhile, in fact. I'll post some pictures when I calm down and think to head over there with a camera.

A to Z, for some reason, still has a truck parked in my yard for some reason. I've resisted the urge to slash the tires.

Bastards.

Here's OMD with their big, fat hit, "Enola Gay." Enjoy!

Make sure to visit the other participants (or post something of your own) by clicking right here.

Also, make sure to click right here to help some kids in Conway, Ark., win a "high tech makeover" of their classroom. Watch the video, register and vote. They're winning with their Devo-inspired video now, so help put them over the top!

Folks, I got an e-mail earlier today from Chrissie Hsu.

She said that her client, the Smithsonian Channel, is working on a series called Aerial America. That series will air next year in high definition and will feature aerial views of every state in the Union.

What's the first state that will be covered in that series? Why, it's the beloved Natural State! Congratulations to the fine folks at the Smithsonian Channel for picking the amazingly scenic Arkansas as the first place to visit for the Aerial America series.

Evidently, people will notice if you howl about how much you love Arkansas. Yep, do that long enough and you'll get some attention.

At any rate, Ms. Hsu asked your friend, The Hawg, to take a look at the Arkansas blog for the series. Want to have a look, too? Click right here and head on over there. Let them know what you think, huh?

You can find out about the Aerial America series by clicking right here.

Ms. Hsu said she'd let me know when the show will be aired and have some clips available in the future. I'll post all of that right here at the All Arkie Army when I get it.

Cool stuff, indeed!

Obama Undertakes Presidential Internship To Ease Concerns About His Lack Of Experience

Oh, yes. The time has come once again to name some honorary captains of the All Arkie Army!

Honorary captains, of course, are just some bloggers that we like. We like them so much, in fact, that we at the All Arkie Army want to send them a dandy award.

Now, here's one of the best things about this award -- we don't ask the recipients to do anything but take their awards and enjoy them. That's right. We're not asking anyone to pass these things on to a dozen people or anything like that. This is a no-strings award and we do hope the recipients appreciate getting it.

So, who are these recipients? Why, Pam over at pamibe and Dadthedude over at, err, Dad - thedude.

Congratulations to them both! We hope y'all keep doing what y'all do and make sure to visit over here often.

The Army is always recruiting

If you're an Arkansan or have ties to the Natural State, why not join this Arkansas-centric blog? Post what you like, promote your own blog and work and hang out with some Arkies. Interested? Hit the "contact" link at the top of the page to send me an e-mail and request admission.

A reminder or two...

We're going to nominate honorary captains once a month and we hope all All Arkie Army members will help us out with that. Just look for a post from me opening nominations and submit some bloggers you like in the comments section.

Also, feel free to submit links to your blog here when you post an article. That will help boost your Alexa rating and Google rank. Link baiting from Army members is encouraged, see?

Oh, and click right here if you want to read my latest heart-wrenching tale of the failings of the Arkansas Razorbacks and the Benton Panthers.

Six weeks into his tour in Iraq, an Arkansas National Guardsman called his wife at home while he hunkered down for cover during his turn at watch. He wanted to check to see if his wife got the flowers he sent her.

Instead, his wife's frantic voice told him that their home was burning, and 6 hours later, it burned to the ground. This photo is all that remains of that home - dirt and a concrete sidewalk - and what the soldier saw when he arrived back in McRae four days later for an 8 day emergency leave.

The fire happened in April, and the soldier's wife and four boys moved into the new double-wide mobile home she finally managed to have delivered and set up two weeks ago. She ran into more than a few roadblocks while buying the home, and solved every problem she ran into - alone. Everything the family now has was donated to them, and though the new house is pretty barren, the soldier's wife is making it into a home. It's the home the soldier will return to in December or January.

With so much taking up our attention - the sinking economy, the election, the speculation about what will happen now, gas prices, food prices, job losses - it's easy to forget about our soldiers still in Iraq and Afghanistan still risking their lives for their country, and for you and I.

To every mother, wife, father, brother or sister of a soldier, I thank you for your sacrifice, and give my thanks to your soldier when you talk to him or her again.

Read more of my thanks to our soldiers at A Bumpy Path.

Yes, that's right -- we'll be naming another set of honorary Captains of the All Arkie Army sometime tomorrow.

November 5 is the opening day of modern gun deer season here in Arkansas.
Many a hunting widow in the northwest part of the state are now enjoying the peace and quiet that they have been longing for for months, as eager boyfriends, husbands and sons head to the deer woods and join their buddies at deer camp.
There will be an estimated 300,000 hunters roaming around out there looking for a chance to bag a nice deer, and a lot of employers who will be wondering how so many got so sick and called in all at the same time.

The local doctors here haven't a clue.

I'm a transplant from the north and have lived here for over 20 years and every year it's the same, all these men out there exercising their 2nd amendment right to own firearms and hunt. A right that a lot of Americans are nervous about now that we've had a change of direction in the White House.

Well before anybody gets carried away about gun control in Washington D.C. I think there are a few things they should consider.
One thing is all those hunting widows that get a few weeks off to themselves with no one around to have to cleanup after and cook for.
Without those guns there wouldn't be any reason for those guys to go to the woods, that will play real well when the congressional elections come up.....
Out of the way stores and restaurants get a big boost from all those hungry hunters providing jobs in rural areas and contributing to the tax base.
Then there is all these guys in the deer camps.......sons, fathers and grandfathers, sitting around campfires at night shooting the breeze and telling stories that will be told over and over and added to as each generation passes and new ones return for their chance to bag a deer.

I'm not a hunter myself, never having been raised hunting, but I can relate to what deer season means to people in this state, it has a connection that goes back generations.

Hope no one messes with it.

"I guess I'll have to go try and find a real job now."

A few posts ago Willy says that he is convicted to pray for our new leaders and would leave it there about Obama!

Well, that is all well and good. But with that aside - there are a couple of things about this whole thing that really ticks Willy off.. and this is not about Obama, it is about our country and the election in general.

Today's local paper has a regional columnist who states that the nation and world now have a perception that the areas in this country who voted predominately republican - the red states on the Map - are White Racists! -

Let me tell you about Willy's white racist blood! - I do not care what color Obama's skin is - by the way my understanding is that his blood is as much white as it is black. What I do care about is and what I voted and what most of the people in the red states voted for was against what they perceived to be a pacifistic, liberal, inexperienced person who wanted to run our country.

Why does that make me a white racist. If it does then it appears that the rest of the country - the blue states are black racists - isn't racism the same regardless of what color it is prejudice against.

The second thing that ticks me off is the fact that their are reports in the public schools that the black children seem to be encouraged and are exercising the idea to flaunt their "blackness" because of Obama's victory.

I am not talking about a pride in their skin color. I am talking about a new racist type of attitude that they are now better than the whites. Yes, it is an attitude that in the 50's, 60's and 70's could be said was an attitude of the "white kids".

So instead of Obama's election bringing a country together, and making it a country where race and gender are not distinguished as being unequal, it seems to be having a negative affect.

Yes, change is being seen already! Change which is stepping us back to a country where the races fear each other and there may be even more racial unrest in our public schools.

Willy thought that racism was in the past. Not sure where we go to from here.

10-4 Willy

Oddly enough, one of the things that annoyed me the most about this week's election was the fact my fellow Arkansans decided that having a lottery is a good idea.

Our lieutenant governor, Bill Halter, has run around for the past couple of years swearing that a lottery financing college scholarships is just what this state needs. Here in Arkansas, we're 49th in the nation when it comes to the number of adults holding at least a bachelor's degree.

Halter estimates the lottery will bring in about $100 million a year for scholarships. About two-thirds of the people who turned out in the Natural State to vote on Tuesday agreed with Halter.

I've been firmly against the lottery for at least three reasons, all of which I'll torment you good people with right now.

It won't work

Holding a lottery to boost the number of adults with college degrees in this state is a terrible idea. We're 49th now and will remain 49th regardless of how many scholarships are handed out to students. The idea, of course, is that thriving economies rely on highly-educated people getting high paying jobs, thereby increasing the tax revenue the state and local communities collect. Also, people with money buy things and that benefits the economy as a whole.

So, if you hand out more scholarships, that will result in more Arkansas kids heading to college and they'll help the state's economy, right? Wrong. Horribly wrong, in fact.

The problem, see, isn't that Arkansas kids aren't heading off to college. The problem is that they tend to leave the state after they get their degrees. Why? We don't have enough jobs to keep people in the state.

Take my little brother, for example. There's a kid with an education that was heavily subsidized by the state of Arkansas. He graduated from the public schools system in the state and went to the University of Arkansas on a full scholarship. Yes, the state of Arkansas picked up his room and board, tuition and even paid for his books.

He graduated first in his class in chemical engineering from the UA and then earned his optometry degree in Chicago. He'd love to live in Arkansas, but he's in North Carolina. Why? He made over $100,000 his first year in practice in North Carolina, but the best job he could find in the Natural State was around $28,000 (not including some vague promise of maybe-possibly-perhaps a bonus at, like, some point in the future).

You're not going to get a highly educated fellow like that to stick around and work for less than 25 percent of what he'll get elsewhere. Also, let's not forget that we've got one of the better engineering schools in the country at the University of Arkansas and a lot of kids from this state attend it.

They graduate and then head off to places like Texas that have a lot of high-paying jobs for engineers -- career opportunities that are comparatively rare here.

What we're already doing, then, is subsidizing the education for students for the benefit of other states. This lottery amendment will only increase those subsidies. Until we do something in Arkansas to increase the number of jobs for the heavily-educated people we want to stay here, we will always have problems keeping those people in the state.

Of course, no one seems to want to talk about that problem as it's a complex and difficult issue to tackle. Politically, then, passing a lottery is a much easier task to tackle -- Bill Halter can run around for the rest of his days declaring that he did something to improve education in Arkansas. That will look great on his resume, a fact of which a young man who obviously wants to build a long career in politics is aware.

He'll benefit from the lottery amendment, then, probably more than the state's economy will.

Arkansas already has a surplus. Why give the state more money?

I hate the idea of putting a new tax in place when the state is running at a surplus. And, yes, a lottery is a tax.

Right now, Arkansas has a $250 million budget surplus. Why not use some of that to pay for scholarships? In the alternative, why not offset the revenue the lottery will bring by cutting the state sales tax?

The sales tax here is ridiculous -- state and local taxes here in Benton come to 8.5 percent. Other cities are running a tax of as high as 10.5 percent. Why? A little thing called the Futrell Amendment which states that the state's income tax can only be raised by the approval of three-fourths of both houses of the legislature.

In other words, it's almost impossible to raise income taxes in Arkansas, so the state has had to resort to other measures. The most popular of those is to boost sales taxes.

That has hurt a lot of cities in this state. Take Texarkana, for example. As the name implies, that city is split between Texas and Arkansas. The Texas side is booming and wealthy, whereas the Arkansas side isn't. Why? Let's say you live in Texarkana and want to buy a lawnmower. Are you going to buy it on the Arkansas side of town and pay sales taxes or save some money and drive to the Texas side?

The answer to that question is obvious and it's the same whether you're talking about lawnmowers, cigarettes or just about everything else.

If you're going to have a lottery and the state routinely collects surpluses, why not cut the sales tax and help out merchants in this state? The answer to that is simply -- once the government puts a tax in place, it almost never eliminates it.

Fungibility (how lottery revenues indirectly boost general budgets)

Lottery revenue is largely fungible -- the money that is spent on education prior to the lottery is often moved to the general budget, while the lottery revenue is spent on education. In other words, we'll not increase our scholarship fund by $100 million even if the very optimistic goal of $100 million is raised annually through the lottery.

In the current fiscal year, the state has budgeted $47.3 million for college scholarships. If things play out like they do in other states, then, the $100 million projected by Halter will pay for scholarships and that $47.3 million that's set aside for scholarships now will be added in the general budget. That's a net gain of $52.7 million in scholarships, thanks to the lottery. Not bad.

But what if Halter's projections are wrong? Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families estimates the lottery will generate $61.5 million in annual revenue, resulting in a net gain of $14.2 million. The state Department of Finance and Administration estimates annual lottery revenue of $55 million and that results in a net gain of $7.7 million.

If the Department of Finance and Administration is right, then, we will have agreed to add $47.3 million to the general budget all for a net gain of $7.7 million in new scholarships. And, remember, we'll be adding that money to a state treasury that routinely yields a surplus. That's a great deal for the state government, but not such a good one for us taxpayers, is it?

Of course, Halter's projections may be right, but I tend to trust the ones from the Department of Finance and Administration. The Department is full of people who collect taxes and know the ins and outs of them in Arkansas. Halter worked in the Bill Clinton administration. You could trust Clinton about as far as you could throw him, and I suspect the same is true of his lackeys.

I won't get into the obvious morality issues and the fact that lotteries tend to soak up what little excess income the poor have. but I will say that we need to make sure that we resist any other forms of gambling in the state.

Yes, we've got a horse track (Oaklawn) in Hot Springs and dog races (Southland Greyhound Park) in the Delta, but those have been around for years. I sure as hell don't want to see people getting excited about casinos in Arkansas.

Ever been to Tunica, Miss.? You've got casinos all over the place and the area is just seedy, cheap and nasty. We don't need that kind of nonsense here in Arkansas.


Not bored yet? Click right here to read The Hawg's plan to fix the Republican Party!



Technorati Profile. Yes, getting listed on Technorati!

In Kenya, new born babies are now being given the name Barack Obama, after his historic win in the U.S. presidential race.

Dozens of baby boys have already been named Barack Obama, while girls are being named after the wife of Barack, Michelle.

We all know that Obama's father was born and grew up in a village near the city of Kisumu. The Kenyans regarded Obama as a hero.

These past few days, more than half of babies born in some hospitals were named after the Presidential elect U.S. leader.

The Kenyans declared a national holiday when Barack Obama won.

They want their babies to be named after the U.S. leader to inspire them to achieve graet things for their babies.