An incident at Valdosta

My brother in law is a retired english professor and about as ultra liberal as they come. Working in concert with my childhood friend , a retired television journalist, they dish out about as much liberal poowaddle as I can take sometimes.

My brother in law mainly enjoys: being liberal, growing vegetables, reading bad poetry and making mayhaw jelly, fig preserves and sugar cane syrup. And the cane syrup he makes is the best you're going to find anywhere.

I can't tell you the name of it because it incorporates his last name. But "Professor's Gold"is a good substitute.

I sent him this a while back-when he declared, after too many glasses of Blackberry wine- that he was thinking about going to Iraq.

As a human shield..........

An Incident at Valdosta

The shattered remnants of the Valdosta Greyhound station were still smouldering in the steamy August dusk, hours after the explosion. Splintered benches, crushed storage lockers, one way tickets to Waycross were strewn like confetti over the heat warped vinyl floor.

Here and there a twisted Budweiser can, a baggage tag reading "Jacksonville or Bust", an imploded Heinz catsup cannister, a half eaten Payday, a shredded Cheetos wrapper.

"I just can't understand it", mused Theron Cromwiddle, Valdosta's fire chief.

"Of all the places in the world for a suicide bomber to try and set up his eternal meeting with 70 virgins. Hell, we hardly ever get 7 people in here at one time-let alone 70 virgins!

Just doesn't figure."

Who do I think did it? Well, we're not sure because what few body parts we could locate were covered in fig preserve residue and the only DNA we could identify traced back to a mayhaw tree on the Flint river.

But everything we see right now points to a local retired Valdosta State history professor.

Neighbors are telling us that this gentleman usually dressed in a croaker sack and covered his face with a Handi-Wipe, even when he was pulling crab grass in his back yard.

We also found several Yasser Arafat commemorative glasses in his wine cabinet and an autographed picture of Sean Penn hanging on his tractor windshield.

I'm not saying there's anything conclusive in that, of course. But his friends tell us he didn't show up for yesterday's blueberry mulching and we found several poems by WB Yeats that he apparently hadn't had time to read since they lacked his usual " You tell 'em WB!" scribbles on the margins.

Sad, really. Here's a man who spent his younger years in normal endeavors-grappling for catfish on the Chattahooche River, squirming through the Sunday sermon at Liberty Baptist Church , walking barefoot to the Royal Theater to see Tex Ritter, saving Capitola tokens for popcorn at The Bradley, bugging his grandma for extra helpings of collards and butter beans.

His relatives say he made good grades in school, never had a problem with things like saying the Pledge of Allegience with the words "under God" in it or singing "God Bless America", enlisted in the Marine Corps when the Korean War broke out and just all around made his folks real proud.

The local speculation is that he went and got himself all "educated".

Yep, most folks think he just decided that all the values he grew up with were the product of ignorant, old fashioned thinking by his parents, his grandparents, his teachers and classmates.

So the poor soul figured that the years he spent with all them books would be totally wasted if he didn't come out thinking a whole lot different than he went in.

And he sure as Ned managed that.

Anyhow, the old guy made a helluva cane syrup.

If you act right, I'll split this bottle I found in his car with you.....