Tuesday, October 3, 2006

BALLSEYE - WHAT IS IN A NAME?


It's certainly a title that probably can be very deceiving to some who may think it has to do with pornography or something like that. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything that dirty minds have on their minds, well maybe something, but not what they would expect. Allow me to explain the moniker to you. Many years ago, not all that long after I was married (maybe less than a year, pretty certain it was less than two years) I decided to start getting some exercise because I was gaining a bit of weight. Good home cooking I suppose! I figured, what better way to do this than to go for nice, long, good paced, but relaxing walks. One night I went one way, the next time out I went another, the next time I turned this way, the next time that way, then I wound up going the wrong way. 
 
No, I did not do anything wrong, except maybe decide to go in the direction I headed one cold winter’s night in Queens, NY (one of the counties in NYC). As I was walking along, minding my own business, a car pulled up close to the curb in front of me, but not close enough to park. I kept walking, and as curiosity and training would have me do, I checked out the occupants. As I approached, from the back of the car on the passenger side, I noted two guys in the front seat. Both seemed unusually stiff, then I saw the passenger slowly turning his head, just enough to see me, and as he did so I could see him trembling. 
 
It did not take a rocket scientist or tactical expert to realize something was wrong. Maybe many people very well may not have realized anything was amiss - but I had been trained about things not being quite right thanks to my LEO training. In another step or two, without realizing I had done so, I had removed the glove from my right hand and I had placed my hand on the grip of my 9MM Beretta 92SB pistol that was riding in a thumb-snap holster on my right hip. I kept walking forward, passed the car, because I did not want to give them my back, but I also got as much distance between me and the car as I could on the sidewalk.
 
As I got even with the passenger door, it opened and a swarthy young adult male got out of the car. He stood but remained bent over somewhat, and I saw he was holding a sweater over his hands. He looked up at me, pulled the sweater back with his left hand with his right hand still underneath it. It was then I saw what looked like a threaded , white metal, .30 caliber fluted rifle barrel staring at my midsection. At that moment things kicked into high gear for me, and the world seemed to slow down, just as this guy was saying "Don't move motherfucker" to me. I did not do what he said, screw him, I kept moving.
 
As I moved toward the only cover I could see, a small tree and a no parking sign pole, I also moved my hands. I drew my pistol, started to aim, and heard myself vocally yell "Police - Federal Agent, don't move". I also heard me mentally yelling at myself “don't aim - don't aim - just point and shoot”. Somewhere in the split second this all took, yes it was extremely quick but I was aware of an awful lot that happened in that short actual split second of time, I thought the rifle barrel turned into a plastic soda bottle (wishful thinking I guess), and I again heard my inner voice screaming frantically at myself inside my head, this time as loud as an internal voice can be without fracturing your own skull: "It’s a gun - shoot him - it’s a gun”.
 
I shot, from about at the hip, and continued to bring the pistol up toward my eye level for either a point shooting shot or if need be an aimed in shot. As I did so I noticed many things. The recoil felt odd, it had not been normal. I checked the gun visually and started to slam the mag for tap and rack, but did not get to rack as I realized my glove, the one I had taken off was between my shooting hand and the pistol grip, that’s why it felt funny. I also saw that almost instantly, the guy had raised up on his toes, his face looked shocked, his eyes widened, and two ripples of flesh emanated from both eyes outward, until meeting and forming a larger ripple inside of which the skin around his eyes turned from a olive swarthy look to milky white and he doubled over. I immediately looked to the car, saw the other guy with a revolver in his hand about to get out. I fired another shot, it hit the windshield at head level of the driver. Then the guy afoot tried to get back into the car but two things prevented him, the door closed as he bumped into it, and the car left. The car sped off backwards, the guy who had been holding the rifle took off running after the car and me after him. I was commanding him to stop - silly me. The car stopped, its engine revving, and I realized the danger of the situation. I ducked behind a parked car lest the driver try to run me over. The guy who had the rifle hopped into the car, and the car and 2 bad guys sped off.
 
 
Neighborhood folks heard me calling out, asking, begging, for someone to call 911 and give them the location and to tell the 911 operator 10-13 and shots fired. That code, 10-13 is the New York City Police Department's code for officer needs assistance. I knew, that with 'shots fired' added, it would get a lightning quick response. It did! The boys in blue arrived, en ,masse, quicker than I have ever seen them respond.. After some interviewing of me and of witnesses, a detective walks over to me with a pen in his hand. On the end of the pen is perched a white metal, fluted pipe, with about a .30 caliber hole in it. He asked if that was the gun I had seen. I said "It’s definitely....eh, err, eh - NOT". 
 
As it turned out, that had been “the rifle” that I had thought the guy was holding. He was found at a hospital some miles away a couple of days later. He said a crazy white guy walked up to him, while he was with his cousin and some friends on a street corner in Brooklyn, and suddenly the white guy just went crazy and started shooting. Strange thing though, how the cousin and the friends all had a different story that they gave to the police. They could not get their facts to agree.  Also strange how he refused to allow doctors to remove the bullet; especially after police told him they could trace it to the gun that had shot him, and they believed that said gun belonged to a federal agent. Then he did something I thought even stranger but for which I am forever grateful. He confessed. Said he and his cousin were out trying to get money to buy crack. His cousin saw me and told him something like: "Do this guy.” He said, something like: "I held the bicycle pipe like a gun but I didn't mean to hurt nobody". He was arrested, so was his cousin; they went to jail for at least a few years each. The rifle turned out to have been a pipe.
 
Maybe a day or two after they found this guy in the hospital, one of the NYPD detectives called me and told me to pick up a copy of the Ridgewood Times, a small local weekly newspaper. In the paper was this line (or something extremely close to it), that I foolishly read as I was driving down the street: "According to police, doctors said the subject was barely holding his own". I almost crashed my car because I started to convulse with laughter. I guess you see where this is going, and are beginning to see how I got my nickname. The detectives told me my first shot had hit the bad guy in his right thigh - remember I kept moving and had only pointed it at him from about hip level when I fired the pistol. The bullet traveled from the center front of the thigh, to the inner front of the thigh. It then exited the thigh and it entered his scrotum passing into the right testicle. It passed through his testicle into the other one, and exited the left side of the scrotum. Then it entered the left thigh on the inner thigh and traveled down toward his knee, where it came to rest just a micron or so away from his femoral artery. One bullet, five bullet holes. Some days, or a week or so later, while my co-workers talked this over in the office, one of them told me I had a new nickname - Bull's-Eye Bartley. One of the other agents in our group had been diligently writing a report and seemingly not paying attention. Suddenly, he snapped his head upright, said something like: "No - no - not Bull's-Eye, it should be Ballseye"; and a legend was born - even if only in my own mind.
 
There was a little more to the story, like my identifying the car once the police found it, it had a bullet hole right in front of where the driver's head had been. Too bad windshields often deflect the first shot or two, then again, I do not know how I would have coped had I actually killed another human even if a dirtbag. Oh well, the other guy was unscathed except maybe for yellow stains, and skid marks, in his pants. Another note, the mugger duo had also robbed another guy that same night. Of course, it had been earlier than their unsuccessful attempt on me but they were successful with the other robbery. The police received a call, about that mugging, about 30 minutes after my incident. The guy they robbed was an older guy, who took 45 minutes, or so, to walk home after being mugged (not a lot of cell phones if any back then). Then he took a break and then called the police. I was in the stationhouse by then being interviewed again and again. My story was always the same. As I was being interrogated, every cop in the precinct house ran out and as one passed me by he said: “I guess you missed them, they just robbed someone else”. Well, they interviewed that victim and he said the driver had had a revolver in which he, the victim, had actually seen the bullets in the cylinder because the driver held it right up in front of his face. I guess I had been lucky it had not been him to point at me. Oh well. Then the police realized that this other mugging actually had happened before the one in which I had been targeted. One thing led to another and they found the guy in the hospital as I said above.
  
They never removed the bullet from the bad guy whom I shot. As far as I know, he still carries my memento today. Me, I still carry something from that day too, some bad dreams now and again about shooting wherein my gun fails me. They used to be terrible nightmares, I guess there was a certain amount of guilt in my having shot someone, even someone as deserving as was the criminal whom I shot. Thankfully though, I don’t wake up panicking anymore, now they are just mild dreams and always turn out okay. Of course, I also brought something else with me, through my life, because of that day. I wear the title of Ballseye. In fact, I wear it with some small amount of pride and that is what is in this moniker.
 
So you see - nothing pornographic at all - but yes "balls" did refer to that which those of you with dirty minds had thought, just not the way you thought it did!
 
All the best,
Glenn B
 
PS:
 Gil P, if you ever read this, thanks for that title.





Whoopee - look at the Dow Jones close...

...and you may think it looks to be pretty impressive as it closed at its all time high closing today.

"Nevertheless, the index held onto enough of the day's gains to finish in record territory at 11,727.34, up 56.99 points."
from FoxNews.com @ http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,217361,00.html

I am a bit impressed myself, even though I know painfully little about the market, mostly because I have no to little money to invest. I have about 24 grand in a retirement plan, that is split between a safe government option, and some iffy stock things, and that is about all I know. Yet despite knowing very little about the market, I am about to make a prediction based upon it.

My prediction is a straightforward one, and fairly simple. If oil drops a bit more, slowly but steadily over the next month, better yet if it drops another 15 to 20% over the next month, then the market will continue to be upbeat and maybe even continue to soar, so long as there are no major catastrophes like a terrorist attack on our soil. It has been a pretty conservative market from what I understand, not one built on the phony hopes of the dot.com companies of the 90's, so it may be able to maintain itself even if oil does not go down and the interest rates stay where they are. I doubt that oil will stay where it is, and I doubt that interest levels will rise, they may even fall a bit. So I am pretty certain that the market will do better. If the market does much better, with oil dropping quite a bit, and interest staying the same or dropping more, THEN THE REPUBLICANS REMAIN IN CONTROL AFTER THE NOVEMBER ELECTIONS.

The trick is, can the market maintain itself. Is big business beholden enough to GWB and to the Republican Party to keep the market going, oil dropping and inflation down? You bet it probably is so long as nothing related to Mr. Murphy comes along to screw it up. It almost seems as if a plan is coming together. No this is not a conspiracy theory, just me thinking it almost seems as if there was a plan that was laid out, worked on, and now being fulfilled - not a bad plan at that if indeed it was a plan. Strange thing is economics - especially when looked at in the eerie light of politics. It almost makes the plan about revealing Foley's emails & IM's, when they were revealed to the public, look second rate amateurish.

Yes the Republicans may indeed know how to win an election. Time will tell.

All the best,
Glenn B

PS: Of course the plan could be to let it (the market) drop again, and then rally like crazy a week or two before the elections; but I think a steady pace on an upbeat note will do it better and I imagine so too do the strategists. Then again it could all flop. Maybe there is no plan. Yet, it is nice, at least for me, to think that the Democrats, at least most of them, may not stand a chance to take away Republican seats in the Congress, and maybe even lose some.

Before I lose Any More Sleep...

...I think I'll stop blogging for now and try to go back to catching some Z's. I have to be to work by 1000, and it is already 0400, tonight has been almost as tough as work was for me yesterday. I've got to get some sleep sometime - may as well be now - more blogging later.

Goodnight,
Glenn B

Major Moron Alert...

...and if you guessed I am about to write about a politician, well good for you!

Today I read this article Frist: Taliban Should Be Part of Afghan Government at FoxNews.com @ www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,217198,00.html


Yes folks the title gives you a good clue as to what the whole article is about, and as to how crazy, I believe, are some of our government officials. According to the article:

"Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan war against Taliban guerrillas can never be won militarily and urged support for efforts to bring "people who call themselves Taliban" and their allies into the government. "

Frist reportedly went on to say:

""You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished, we'll be successful.""

Now if you will just take a moment to think, you may recall that, after 9/11/2001 the United States government determined that the terrorist group known as al Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attacks on that infamous day. The U.S. government also realized that al Qaeda had their power base located in Afghanistan where the Taliban was their military arm that essentially enslaved the population of that nation making them follow the extremist Islamic beliefs of al Qaeda. Those were the same beliefs that guided al Qaeda to attack the USA on 9/11 and on other occasions.

In other words folks, the Taliban is the avowed enemy of the United States of America, they are an avowed enemy of Israel who is our ally, they are an avowed enemy of anyone who does not follow the extremist form of Islam as practiced by such vile scum as Osama bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda. They are the avowed allies of al Qaeda, al Qaeda being the worst enemy we have right now.

Suddenly, a rocket scientist (sarcasm alert big-time) in our senate wants to reinstate the Taliban into the government of Afghanistan. Not is he just a senator, he is the senate majority leader! This has got to be one of the most moronic ideas I have ever heard. It would be akin to asking the SS or Gestapo to take a major role in post WWII government of Germany. That is except for one thing, that thing being we are currently at war with the Taliban. At least we had defeated the Germans, so had we asked some Nazis to join the post WWII German government maybe they would have bowed to our wishes on how to run things with us as their masters. If we put the Taliban in a position of power now, we only legitimize them, make them stronger, and lose any ground we have gained in defeating them. They gain power because we showed weakness, and eventually they wind up back in full control and what did we accomplish - not a darned thing except to go to war in Afghanistan for absolutely nothing. Right now we are winning, we have a just cause to be there, why screw it up and undo it all.

I vote almost exclusively Republican, but I may have to find that third party soon, real soon as election day is almost upon us. I just cannot see voting for, whom I consider to be morons, those like Frist. Heavens forbid he runs for the presidency.

All the best,
Glenn B

Schoolhouse Cowards make me sick...

...so much so that I make them an offer. If any of you big brave (sarcasm alert) shooter types wants to shoot up little defenseless schoolgirls and execute them, or do so to other schoolkids, to prove your manhood (sarcasm alert) or whatever, why not get in touch with me first for a little get together (no sarcasm here at all). I would be more than glad to meet you to allow you to try and show your courage (sarcasm alert) against me instread of in the face of defenseless shcool children. I am sick of your kind, of your actions, of the puny, slimy, creeping, hideous brand of cowardice that makes you seek out defenseless kids to murder.

The executions of those helpless little girls in Amish Country today has got my blood boiling, and as Kim du Toit would say, a RCB (red curtain of blood) has fallen across my field of vision, this because when I think of the events that unfolded today I am figuratively just that angry as to see red. If you are unaware of what I speak, please go to
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,217170,00.html

My heartfelt thoughts and prayers go out to the families and loved ones of those who were killed or injured today by this monster who is, thanfully, no longer among us. He was, in my opinion, such a coward he was not even brave enough to allow the police the honor of dispatching him, he killed himself. My heartfelt thoughts and prayers even go out to his family and loved ones; I am sure he did them almost as big of an injustice as he did to the familes of those he shot.

With sadness,
Glenn B

A Tough Day at Work...

...had me missing any chance to rant yesterday. Right now it is about 0300, I just woke up, and figured I'd give it a few minutes right now.