“So I Shot HIm . . . “
In Pensacola, people talk all the time about “carrying.” People have lots of weapons; even my tiniest little friend has a small revolver in her handbag when she goes out.
This old guy makes life a lot easier for the rest of us. Sometimes young guys get bad ideas, and these guys evidently thought they would hit and rob the old people. Guess they got quite a surprise. Guess they will think twice before doing another home invasion – once they get out of prison, which will probably be quite a while from now.
Resident shoots 2 teens in home invasion
Resident, 72, fends off 3 attackers; 1 suspect in hospital, 2 in jail
Two teenagers were shot Saturday night by a 72-year-old man they allegedly beat with a baseball bat during a home-invasion robbery in Ferry Pass.
About 8:45 p.m., three teenage males knocked on the door of a home in the 3300 block of Raines Street, Pensacola Police Department officials said.
When resident Jack Crawford, 72, answered the door, one of the teens hit him in the head with an aluminum bat and tried to force his way into the home.
“I opened it up, and he hit me right off. … Wham! Split my head open,” Crawford said.
“So I shot him and another guy,” Crawford said, chuckling as he told the story to a News Journal reporter Sunday evening. “I could have shot the third one, but I would have had to shoot him in the back as he ran away.”
The attackers fled the scene on foot, and Crawford’s 70-year-old sister, who also lives at the home, called the police, he said.
Earl Benard, 15, Nathaniel Nichols, 17, and Curtis Crenshaw, 18, all of Pensacola, have been charged with home-invasion robbery and aggravated battery in connection with the case, police said.
Crenshaw and Nichols were arrested at a local hospital after being dropped off for treatment with gunshot wounds to their torsos. Benard later was arrested at a nearby rental home.
Nichols remained hospitalized Sunday afternoon, police said. Crenshaw was treated and released and was being held Sunday evening at Escambia County Jail on $300,000 bond.
State Attorney Bill Eddins said he plans to try all three suspects as adults.
Crawford said he grabbed his handgun as a precaution and was holding it at his side when he opened the door Saturday night.
“At 9 o’clock at night, I never take any chances,” Crawford said.
The three teens had “hoods on and scarves around their faces,” Crawford said, and they hit him with the bat before anyone had a chance to speak.
Crawford stumbled back a step from the blow but didn’t fall, and he started shooting as the first attacker was coming through the door, he said.
“I didn’t go down, and I think it shocked him,” Crawford said.
Following the attack, Crawford was transported by ambulance to West Florida Hospital for treatment of injuries to his head. He said doctors stapled his scalp back together, and he was back at home and feeling fine Sunday evening.
“Yeah I’m fine. I’ve got a hard head,” Crawford said.
Police did not release any information Sunday about possible connections between Crawford and the teens. Crawford said he’s lived in the neighborhood about 12 years, and he suspects the attackers were acquaintances with a neighborhood boy who used to do odd jobs around his home.
Crawford said he wasn’t too rattled by the attack, and he still felt comfortable staying in the home.
He said he’s had a rough-and-tumble past that’s left him with a cool head in similar situations.
“I’m not that big of a boy, but I had a reputation,” Crawford said.
I live next door to a cop. His car isn’t marked, but it is a big dark Crown Vic with that cage thing that separates the front from the back seats. Not that criminals are very smart, but you would have to be REALLY stupid to invade my house.
This story is from today’s Pensacola News Journal.
Today in Kuwait
Oh! I am green with envy! I would love to be at these events!
Imagine what the release of falcons is going to look like!
Al Jazeera (English) Covers Egypt
If you are in the USA, the best coverage I have been able to find has been on Al Jazeera live. They have English language coverage. Unlike Egypt, which has closed down all access to the internet, you can stream Al Jazeera live by clicking on the blue type below.
Their coverage is – from what I can tell – fair and balanced.
It’s in the mid 70’s Fahrenheit, in Cairo in the daytime, getting down to the 50’s – 60’s at night – perfect weather for a protest. Looks like Paris in the late 60’s.
Breakfast Delight
One of the best things about breakfast is that we have all kinds of visitors at our backyard feeders. I love all the tiny little birds, but oh! the flashy splendor of the male cardinal!
‘Lost Boy’ Casts Vote for Independence
I found this today on NPR News and it delights me for a number of reasons. For one thing, I didn’t know David Eggars (you remember him from Zeitoun) had helped with the writing of ‘What Is The What?’. Second, who knew that any of these kids would survive? Survive, write a book, thrive, go back to the Sudan, give to the country – and vote. Every now and then in this sad world you hear a good story. This is one.
January 10, 2011
During Sudan’s civil war, in which some 2 million people died, Valentino Achak Deng fled to Ethiopia on foot. Separated from his family for 17 years, Deng is one of Sudan’s so-called Lost Boys, children who were orphaned or separated from their families during the brutal war.
Now, voting is under way in Southern Sudan in a referendum that is expected to split Africa’s largest country. Among those voting this week are the Lost Boys, including Deng, whose life became a best-selling novel in America and who has returned to his homeland to build a school.
After a peace agreement between north and south, Deng returned to Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, in 2006. He says when he got there, the place was still a wreck.
“On some of these roads, you could see old war tanks. On some of these roads, in some neighborhoods you could see the bones and skulls of dead people,” he recalls now, driving around Juba.
Now, as Southern Sudan appears headed for independence, Deng is optimistic — and Juba looks a lot better. Paved roads, now lined with hotels and restaurants, arrived for the first time in 2007.
Juba is a booming city, one of incredible contrast: Barefoot women selling piles of gravel by the side of the road sit next to a Toyota dealership.
Peace is spurring investment and consumer demand. Juba’s growth is driven by Southern Sudan’s oil revenue as well aid from foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations.
Deng grew up in a tiny village called Marial Bai. In the 1980s, northern bombers and Arab militias came.
“They bombed Marial Bai, destroyed it, killed everything, burned crops and livestock,” he says.
Deng was there when the fighting came. He says he “ran away with the rest.” He was 9 years old.
Deng joined thousands of Lost Boys, who spent months trekking across Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia. His experience is captured in What Is the What, a novel by Dave Eggers, which reads like a modern-day story of Job.
The boys, some naked, march across an unforgiving landscape, facing Arab horsemen, bombing raids, lions and crocodiles.
Deng eventually resettled in the U.S., where he attended college and was mentored and sponsored by ordinary Americans.
In 2007, he returned to start a high school in Marial Bai, where there was none.
“We have 250 students. Our annual budget now stands at about $200,000 because the school is free,” he says.
The school is funded by Deng’s private foundation. He says most donations come from Americans touched by his story and the plight of Southern Sudan.
Deng, now 32, has just cast his vote for independence. He says that for a Sudanese child of war, his life’s journey is almost inconceivable.
“I never imagined I would be the person I am right now,” he says.
Somalia’s al-Shabab bans mixed-sex handshakes
From BBC News
Somalia’s al-Shabab bans mixed-sex handshakes
SOMALIA – FAILED STATE
Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab.
Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public.
It is the first time such social restrictions have been introduced.
The al-Shabab administration said those who disobeyed the new rules would be punished according to Sharia law.
The BBC’s Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty would probably be a public flogging.
The militant group has already banned music in areas that it controls, which include most of central and southern Somalia.
Somalia has not had a stable government since 1991.
The UN-backed government only controls parts of Mogadishu and a few other areas.
Shopping Styles: Predatory, Social or Desperation?
As AdventureMan once said, I am not entirely sure I agree with what I am about to say. Feel free to jump in.
Today I was mopping the floors, washing the floors and vacuuming the carpets. This is not – way not – something I like to do, but something I do because long ago somewhere in my tiny little brain, a seed was planted that a dirty floor was a shameful thing. I remember once thinking “people could eat off my floor; there must be a whole meal here!” when I left it unwashed for a few days. In my last three incarnations, in Kuwait and in Qatar, I was blessed with wonderful women who came in and took care of my floors for me, also the dusting, and the laundry, and the windows, and all the things I now do. It takes a surprising chunk of time out of my day. 😦
Oh! Yes. The shopping.
I just wanted you to know that I am not cleaning my house willingly or joyfully, but dutifully. I have discovered, however, that mindless physical activity frees the mind, and you never know where a free mind will go.
I have a friend coming to visit, and this friend and I have had so much fun together, through the years, exchanging books, going out on double dates with our husbands to wonderful places in France and Germany, and . . . shopping.
Finding a person who shops the way you do is a real blessing. I say I am not much of a shopper, but we all have to shop sometimes. Mostly, I shop alone, I am a predator. I am looking for specific game, and I want the juiciest prey at the best price. Most of my friends are like me – we don’t hunt in packs, because when you shop in packs a group mentality surfaces, and you get home with things you never would have bought.
I do shop with other solitary predators from time to time; this is how you know them. You don’t shop together. You shop the same stores, sometimes just the same mall, meeting up to compare items and to go on to the next stop. Most of my predatory shoppers friends know their own style, know their own preferences, and few ask me what I think, nor do I ask them. We do exclaim gleefully over our purchases.
In the military, in Germay, there would be shopping tours to take you to places. Sometimes I took them, most times I didn’t. It depended on whether or not you had to stay together. I saw people buy some truly appalling things because it had a particular name or a particularly low price. The fact that it was obviously inferior did not even seem to strike their consciousness, once the herd shopping mentality kicked in. If the tour were going to a village, and people were on their own and then met up, I would do that. I went to Paris on such a trip; leaving
Germany at midnight, leaving the tour at six in the morning for croissants and coffee at La Duree at its original location on Rue Royale arranging to meet up with them later.
The Musee D’Orsay had just opened, and I was dying to see the exhibit. I spent the morning there, leaving as the hoardes started arriving, had a little lunch of Vietnamese salad rolls on the Left Bank, and strolled over the bridge to the shopping areas around Rue Royale. I found three great outfits at Galleries Lafayette, grabbed a salad from their gorgeous food court, and met up with my group at six to depart. I was home by midnight. 🙂 I would have liked a friend, but I didn’t know anyone, once again I was new, and Paris is so easy that just 12 hours there was a piece of cake.
Social shoppers find us solitary predators very strange. They live in a different world than we do. They consult. Their shopping goals are not so much the goods as the experience. They enjoy the company, and they like having someone to help them make their purchasing decisions. They often meet up for shopping and lunch, and some even shop to kill time. (What luxury! In my whole life, I have never had time to kill; I always have projects, and lists of things that need doing!)
I have been one other kind of shopper, though, and that is a desperation shopper. It was when I was a young mother. Shopping was for survival. I never knew when the baby would start to cry, need to be nursed, or need a change. When I had a babysitter, I was always aware of how little time I had and how much I had to get done. Once a month, I would go to the commissary, about twenty miles away, to buy a month’s worth of diapers, meat (we ate more meat then), canned goods and paper goods.
I see the same desperation in the elderly here in Florida; shopping takes energy and you never know when your energy will desert you. As you can see, I am still thinking about my experience at the Navy Commissary, and I now I can empathize. I might be grumpy and aggressive, too, when I reach a stage where I remember having energy, and now I don’t know where it has gone. I may even scowl at cheerful, energetic people because I wish I still were . . .
We’re all wired so differently. There may be some shopping styles to which I am oblivious. Can you think of any?
The Gauntlet
Today dawned clear and beautiful after a day of rain yesterday. It’s a good thing, today I ‘run the gauntlet,’ i.e. I make my run to the military facilities.
It’s across town. Across town in Pensacola is a piece of cake – it’s not like trying to get across Doha, or across Kuwait City; you’re not stuck forever on the ring roads with the arrogant and the rude and the inconsiderate-at-best or even worse – the oblivious.
No, it’s a mere fifteen minutes of sedate driving. I go to the hospital pharmacy, and IF they have the medication I have prescribed, they will fill it – for free. I fill my tank; gas is cheaper and there is no tax. I pop by the Navy Exchange to pick up my expensive hope-in-a-bottle, which is cheaper there. No tax. And now . . . sigh . . . it is time to go to the commissary.
I don’t go that often. While I can find most things there, it can be hit or miss. Prices are better, and there are no taxes, but it isn’t Publix. When you go to check out, everyone waits in one long snakey line, and one at a time, as a cashier becomes available, they check you out. It isn’t that bad. As a process, it goes fairly quickly.
Although the prices are pretty good and there is no tax, you are obligated to tip the bag people who bag and carry out your groceries, and there is a surcharge added onto your bill to cover commissary operation costs. I still think overall we save money.
No, the reason I dread the commissary is the other customers. These are military people and former military people, these are MY people! And they are rude! The aisles are crowded with scowling, aggressive people. The older they are, the worse they are! You think of older people being kindly and polite, but something is wrong with this picture at the commissary, where so many are pushy and rude and look at you like ‘get out of my way!’ I try to stay out of their way, but there are so many of them!
Actually, I try to stem the tide of ill-will by being particularly polite and cheerful. I’m not sure it does much good. Sometimes cheerfulness only seems to make cross and crabby people crosser and crabbier.
On the way to the car, I was chatting with the bagger, and he told me this year was fairly mellow, not like last year.
“What happened last year?” I had to ask.
“Oh, last year they put turkeys on sale,” he responded as he loaded the bags into the back of the car. “Even though you were only allowed to buy two, some people were cheating and buying more, and a couple fist-fights broke out.”
Fist fights? In the commissary? Over turkeys? And who has room in their freezers for more than one turkey?
I resolve not to make another trip to the commissary until I absolutely have to.
Things Get Done
As many of you who know me may know, I am mildly obsessive-compulsive. I like things to be in their designated space. I like a clean house, down to the baseboards and the hidden places. I suppose it gives me some mystical illusion of control in a world where there is little (I believe) that can be controlled.
I believe my faith is pragmatic; I have learned – at least in my life – that God is in control, and that his plans are far better than my plans, although when I am in the midst of chaos, I have problems clinging to that belief, LOL.
But he sends me messages. As I have ended the old year and started the new year in a frenzy of cleaning out and organizing, I have come across lists from nightmare times in my life, mostly getting ready to move or settling in to a new location. Lists and lists of things to be done, things to be checked on . . . and I am comforted to know that what – at the time – was overwhelming, the details sorted themselves out. Things got done. Little by little, we ate the elephant.
As I came across notes and lists this morning, for buying this house and getting settled in Pensacola, I was able to take a deep breath. We survived. We got it all done. Lists and lists of details, and we got it all done. All of a sudden, things assume their proper perspective, and I thank God for this view of what my life looked like a year ago compared to what it looks like today.
We are settled.
I have friends.
We can pay our bills.
We have a house to live in and cars to drive.
We are in good health, and we have a good doctor.
We have a place where the Qattari Cat can stay when we go out of town.
We are registered voters, and have driver’s licenses and pay our taxes on time (insh’allah.)
We have a strong and rewarding family life, and activities we enjoy.
Life is sweet.
Car Rental Fees
I’m making a short trip, and as a mildly obsessive-compulsive person, I make and double check my reservations.
How can it be that a car rental that is around $25/day for five days can come out to MORE THAN DOUBLE what you could estimate the total cost would be?
Last time, I learned that if I rented the car for a week, and turned it in early, I still got a way better break on price.
I might have to try that this time. Taxes and ‘fees’. Tourist fees. Tire recovery fees. (They are always so surprised I read the rental agreements, LOL) Environmental fees. Fees for picking the car up at the airport. Oh, AAARRGH.
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