Been on the road for the last two days. Thanks for all thoughts and messages regarding the death of my father. I knew it was soon, but was taken a bit back from the suddenness. At the moment, I am in the sourthern California area, and have been playing with "illegal aliens" with flouters of the CaCa Law. My kind of people. As soon as I arrived, Batty Patty accused me of only coming out for the chicks, so took me out to her chicken coop. She has several cow-tipping "feral" ferts of an obvious blood-thirsty nature, which can be told by the amount of serious chin licking I recieved. Tomorrow I head for LaLa CaCa, and a visit with those nuts. I'm not sure of the exact time I will be there, but since my dad's services are next weekend, I'll probably be gone before then. BTW, lighten up Arkansas; I used to work at a paper in Little Rock, and that's where I heard the joke. All in fun, right after I joke about Texas, CaCa, and points in between. Not counting the MO jokes. Just in fun, have a beer, and think of me chewing out the CaCa Fish and Gesapto. BTW, what is the difference between JPL and the Fish and Gesapto? One uses their brains to explore black holes, and the other has a black hole for a brain. (See, I refused to joke about Uranus). Did you know the ferrets in CaCa have longer fangs than anywhere else? Meaner too. Big enough to tip cows with a single paw. Able to leap tall poultry with a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! Its a bird! Its a plane! Its a California Feral ferret!! Later, I will relate more myths and legends. Here's one for you CaCa residents. Ask your local Fish and Gestapo if they have ever heard of a brindle weasel. Longtail weasels from about Baskersfield south, and east towards Arizona have masks. You won't find the reference in modern zoological stuff; look back to the 1900-1940s for the references using the name and describing the pattern. A great drawing of a masked longtail weasel is in the 1924/7 version of "A Handbook to North American Mammals." Bob C on the road sans ferrets with Batty Patty deep in CaCa [Posted in FML issue 1942]