It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane.

An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence, authorities said.

The Dallas-bound flight was diverted to Nashville after several passengers reported smelling burning sulfur from the matches, said Lynne Lowrance, spokeswoman for the Nashville International Airport Authority. All 99 passengers and five crew members were taken off and screened while the plane was searched and luggage was screened.

The FBI questioned a passenger who admitted she struck the matches in an attempt to conceal a “body odor,” Lowrance said. She had an unspecified medical condition, authorities said.

“It’s humorous in a way but you feel sorry for the individual, as well,” she said. “It’s unusual that someone would go to those measures to cover it up.”

The flight took off again, but the woman was not allowed back on the plane. The woman, who was not identified, was not charged in the incident.

Copyright Associated Press

I’m in So. Car. for my neice’s wedding and the weather is BEAUTIFUL!!!  OMG it’s gorgeous.  Sitting on my sister’s back porch, looking over Hidden Lake at Isle of Palms is the best.  Right now, her whole resident family is off decorating for tonight’s reception, so I have her house to myself, in charge of three ( 3!!! ) identical grey cats and access to this computer.  It doesn’t get any better than this.

I left a foot of snow and freezing ass weather in Oklahoma, so this is the bomb.

The trip his was FUBAR.  Our layover in DFW airport stretched from an hour to four hours and we didn’t get to Charleston until 11 p.m. local time.  We flew on a smaller jet that bumped for three hours getting here.

As many of you know, I smoke.  Thus, since DFW is nonsmoking, I would strip as much as I could, go outside and smoke and then have to go back through the take your boots off or we shoot inspection.  FUBAR.  Eventually, I figured out that there was too much going on for them to catch me huffing a few quick hits off a butt in the bathroom.  (UHM. That didn’t sound like i wanted it to.  huffing a butt in a bathroom?  I would quickly have a portion of a cigaret in a stall is what I mean.)

Since we got into Charleston so late, the universe unfolded as it should and we waited another 10 minutes or so and greeted my daughter who flew in from Tucson.  She looks great and I was absolutely over the top delighted to once more be able to give her a hug.

At Mary’s, there were her two sons and her friend Robin.  We stayed up and talked and laughed past midnight until I just dropped in exhaustion.

I’ll try and do more blogging when I can, but I’ve got to get back to that porch.  It’s a drug.  I’m an addictive personality.  You do the math.

For all of my far flung, former Oklahoma friends and readers because you just know you HAVE to:

www.bcclarkjingle.com

I can’t seem to focus on anything lately.  Holidays, travel to S.C. to see my neice get wed, business, writing fiction, daily chores, it doesn’t seem to matter.  I get started and then lose focus and start something else and something else and something else and then find myself in the middle of what I’d started way back when and can’t remember where I left off and have to start at the beginning.

What was the point of that?  Not sure.  I was blogging and the phone rang and now I can’t remember where I was going with the above paragraph.

I happened to see the lovely Juliet and a friend of hers at N.H. Starbucks today and we talked briefly about astrology and such.  Just to prove that astrology (and such) is crap, I’m going to try to be a prophet and seer of the future with no talent and no experience at prophecy.

You will meet someone who is taller than you.  Likely a man, since tall, but perhaps a woman.  This person will tell you something you don’t want to hear.  It will annoy and irritate you.  You will be on the verge of anger and near a rage, but you will hold back.  After that, a series of events will seem to flow from that exchange as small and ordinary events that ordinarily would not bother you will annoy the hell out of you.  The traffic will irritate you, clerks merely doing their jobs will annoy you, just the everyday-ness of life will irritate you.  You will snap at someone who is completely innocent and only regret that sharp remark later, when it’s too late to apologize. 

 

There you go.  Instant prophecy.  Anyone who has this happen to them in the next REST OF YOUR LIFE be sure and write in to see if I have “the gift.”

 Uh OH.  Another prophecy.  I can feel the light. 

Someone you care about deeply, perhaps love, will disappoint you and cause a brief rift in the relationship.  You will be able to forgive, but you will not be able to forget about it.

 Oh MY!  Once this gets started, it doesn’t just stop.  Here’s another one:

An unexpected event will bring you great pleasure.

For a negotiated fee, I will also read your star chart, gaze deeply at your palms and/or read the bumps on your head.  In God we trust, all others pay cash.

Look for these events in your lives, my prettys.  These are predictions for just those who read this blog and NO OTHERS.

Welcome to suicide season! 

 This is the time of year when the most Americans take their own lives. 

Odd, what with all the loving family get togethers, what?

My sex and death obsessed friend DZaster is on the road this week, taking a left coast week.  I’ll bet she’s got facts and figures about suicide this time of year that would make our heads spin if we let her get going. 

I had a few friends over for Christmas Eve a couple years ago and we all told our horrible family Christmas story.  They were so pathetic that we couldn’t help but laugh, and laugh we did.  Until tears came to our eyes, our cheeks burned and our ribs ached we laughed.  Each story was worse than the last and completely true — which was the key.  The worse the story, the more we laughed.  That wasn’t enough.  We RETOLD each other’s story to even more hilarity.  A bunch of Scrooges indulging in “aren’t you glad we’re past that now”.  One of my very best holiday memories.  Sincerely, one of the very best.

Part of the party is the high expectations we all have in direct and SIMULTANEOUS contemplation of the reality we know and blow up into loathing and dread.

To the most part, my friends take their dysfunctions and use them in some socially acceptable way.  I, for example, have a big “knight in shining armor” thing going on and I try to use that people pleasing stuff as part of my profession.  That doesn’t work when you’re immersed in your dependent/co-dependent, neurotic, psychotic, actual human being family.  You have your flaws, they have theirs and some of the drama is very ancient and revered.  Family roles have a way of being replayed no matter how much sobriety and sanity you have on board in the rest of your day to day life.

One of the best things that has happened to me in my sobriety is to learn how fruitless it is of me to expect my family and friends to act the way I want them to and to feel and think as I do.  All I can do is change my attitude about them and their behaviors.   I can also change my own behavior and try to do the loving thing instead of the defensive thing or the offensive thing.  That is SO much easier to say than to do.

I won’t be perfect this holiday, my dear family, friends, loved ones and the ambushed.  I never have been and I’m not likely to get there this year.  I expect that I’ll come to a time when I’m frustrated by the music and the traffic and the bad weather and I’ll have some kind of breakdown in which I profanely bitch loud and long and pick apart people and ideas.  I’ll probably break down and quote Dickens another year: “If I could work my will, every idiot with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips would be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly in his heart.”  Glad to get that one over with.

I am doing my best to just surrender to the whole thing.  To just let happen whatever happens and go with it.  To make Christmas be about giving and loving and doing that on my own part and letting everybody else do whatever they want. 

This Christmas, I’m not going to particularly decorate, but I think I’ll try to keep a fire in the fireplace and maybe put a little something bright, cheery and seasonal out somewhere I’ll see it a lot.

I must confess I’ve not shopped even a little bit yet this year.  I’m leaving Friday to go to So. Car. to see my neice wed, maybe I’ll try to pick up a little something here and there while I’m being a tourist. 

since I’m on a cash only basis this Christmas, it’s likely to be a little spare compared to some years in the past, but I’ll do my best for the good old american economy and I won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart, so it’s a two-fer even if the holiday crowds make me very very very crazy. 

Can you believe they’re predicting snow for Thursday?  Damn. 

Not a word about politics.  Aren’t you proud of me?

Anyway, I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving and I’m looking forward to your mass produced letters and tube sock presents.

A plan to roll and smoke the world’s largest joint was cancelled at short notice in Amsterdam when the organizers realized they could be breaking the law.

“We have now read the small print and realize there could be problems,” Thijs Verheij, one of the organizers, was quoted as saying by ANP news agency after consulting Dutch drugs laws.   

The group had wanted to roll a five-foot-long pure-weed joint, stuffed with more than a pound of marijuana and containing no tobacco, and smoke it in a bar.

It had initially thought the attempt would be legal if 100 people each brought along the five grams of the drug tolerated by Dutch authorities for personal use.

“Unfortunately it looks like this will not be possible,” Verheij said. The attempt had been planned for Wednesday.

A police spokesman said: “We would definitely have investigated this. If you make a single joint with half a kilo of cannabis in it, it would cross the line.”

Verheij said the group had hoped to beat a record set with a joint containing 100 grams of marijuana.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.  

Dude!  Sez here this shit could be against the law.  Wow.  Bummer.  Let’s have a toke and think this one over for awhile.  Put on Led Zep II, will ya?  Someday I gotta get rid of this lame plaid couch, but not today.  We can play some frisbee with Scout later, right?  Pass that.  ‘Ere.  Don’t bogart that heeheehee  … hack … hack … shit always makes me cough when I try to laugh …

On Monday, the federal office that oversees the nation’s family-planning program got a new boss who doesn’t believe in birth control. Eric Keroack is a Massachusetts obstetrician-gynecologist who argues that abstinence until marriage is the only healthy choice for women. Until recently, he served as medical director of a pregnancy-counseling organization that runs down contraception and gives out scientifically false health information—for instance, that condoms “offer virtually no protection” against herpes or HPV. Keroack also promotes a wacky piece of pseudoscience: the claim that premarital sex disrupts brain chemistry so as to create a physiological barrier to happy marriage.

Here’s the whole story at Slate Magazine online:

http://www.slate.com/id/2154249/?nav=tap3

One of the reasons Iraq is so FUBAR today is that the Bush administration sent in a bunch of ideological neo-conservative true believers right after the fall of Saddam, rejecting people with actual experience and expertise in rebuilding war torn countries.  Second only to that, what this administration has done in the domestic arena, especially in the science areas of the EPA and FDA where ideology trumps logic and facts for the Bushies, is a staggering blight on our civic life.  I believe history will look back and judge “W” as one of the worst presidents America has ever suffered and this appointment is one piece of evidence supporting that view.

“W” has become a political Rodney Dangerfield.  He gets no respect.  I mean, one day you’re the virtual dictator of the most powerful empire on earth and you lose one lousy election out of six and they’re kickin’ dust in your face at the beach, like you’re some sissy boy.

Think I’m kiddin’?

On their way back from their Asia trip, the President stops in Hawaii.  The acting director of the White House Travel Office gets beaten senseless outside a Waikiki nightclub and his money, passport and satellite phone are stolen.

Meanwhile, the twins, Barbara and Jenna Bush, are vacationing in Buenas Aires.  Jenna’s purse and cellphone get snatched while she’s in a nightclub and the Secret Service agents don’t have a clue, didn’t see a thing.  Possibly they were worried about one of their colleagues, an agent who got clubbed and robbed on his day off while they were there for the girls’ 2 week vacation.

Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.

(© 2006 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)