And a Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everybody.  It’s the one day of the year where everyone is at least a little bit Irish.

Today will be my annual corned beef cooking event.  Getting good briskets of corned beef is pretty much limited to this month of the year and the prices of them are lowest now with the stores putting them on sale.  So what I do is buy about four of them and cook them all up at once.  After corned beef is cooked, you see, it can be frozen.  So I’ll hold out enough for tonight’s dinner and leftovers tomorrow, then I’ll cut the rest into smaller chunks and freeze them.  Later in the year I can just pull one out now and then for some goooood corned beef sandwiches.

Speaking of corned beef sandwiches, my favorite is the Reuben sandwich.  Now that I think about it, I should save some out of today’s batch so that I can make Reubens later this week.  When I make them, I’ll share the instructions (can’t really call it a “recipe”) with you.  I’ve got it simplified without losing the quality of the sandwich.

It was great to learn yesterday about the appointment of Glenn Gaines to Deputy Assistant Administrator of the USFA.  And a surprise, too, that he will immediately become the Acting U. S. Fire Administrator.   I can assure you that there is nobody with more ability or integrity capable of handling that task.

It was my good fortune to have worked with Glenn throughout my entire career and when I retired he was the Fire Chief by then.  One thing that you will hear from anybody who knows him is that he is the “real stuff” and is noted for his always doing things the way you would like to see them done.  Or as some might put it, “A fireman’s fireman.”

I don’t know what the plans are for filling the top spot at USFA.  Perhaps Chief Gaines is being given the chance to see how he fits into it.  But so often those way-up-top positions are handed out to political favorites as a kind of reward for previous political activities.  Glenn has always worked very well with politicians (thus his success), but he has never been a politician.  It’ll be interesting.

Now let’s get this equipment checked out.  I’ll go start up the Irish Coffee.  (heh, heh.  You can do that when you’re retired.)

I get the impression that a lot of people in a lot of places are getting anxious for some genuine Spring weather.  When I was out yesterday I noticed that the flowering pear trees are starting to blossom, so they’ll be opening up pretty quickly.  It won’t be long now.

If you were away from the computer over the weekend, make sure that you scroll onto the previous page during your reading and see FossilMedic’s introduction to the resurgence of the Advanced Practice Paramedics program.  Wake County, North Carolina, seems to have put a lot of preparation into the program and are a good case study for the effectiveness of it.  Keep scrolling down or just click HERE to read it.

While the name Jimmy Boyd might not mean anything to you, anyone over the age of 50 can sure remember what he was best known for.  Back in 1952 he was 13 years old and had already made a mark as a precocious child country music singer when a Christmas-themed recording of his was released and brought him instant national fame.  Even you youngsters know about “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

AP

Three weeks after its release the song was number 1 on Billboard and it sold 2 million copies in just over two months.  That signature song gave Boyd the boost to go on to a fairly successful singing and acting career that finished up with a number of television appearances and traveling musical acts.  He also had a flash of notoriety by being married to actress Yvonne Craig who later played the role of Batgirl in the original Batman tv series.

Jimmy Boyd died on Saturday at age 70 from cancer in Santa Monica, California.  The Los Angeles Times has a nice obituary entry HERE.

We’d better get this equipment checked out now.  I have to get some more coffee going.

Yvonne Craig and Jimmy Boyd  (AP)

Sunday mornings are always so pleasantly quiet.  If you’re driving to or from work, the roads are empty and the trip is stress-free.  I haven’t looked yet to see what happened, if anything, overnight.  But I did read that a total of four firefighters died in that high-rise fire in Bangladesh.  They were all members of the building’s private fire brigade, not a part of the city FD that you saw standing outside spraying water into the air (HERE).  I’ll check that out and report on it later this morning.

This would be a good time for my periodic reminder about Comments that are sometimes delayed in being posted.  We are getting new readers all the time, so I like to explain what happens when you post a Comment to one of the articles.

We have an “open comment” policy here that allows anybody to leave one without having to register first.  It’s worked out fine so far, and as long as you follow the guidelines that we’ve posted, everything  goes well.  We have a fine group of serious readers and everyone behaves themselves.  But still we have to contend with that horrid spam stuff.  Like most websites, we are innundated daily with literally hundreds of spamming messages aimed at our Comments board.

In order to keep them out we have two spam filters along with a couple of internal controls in our publishing program that together make it possible to maintain the open comments feature.  But one of the controls has to do with links embedded in the comments themselves.  If you have two or more links added within your comment, the filter will set it aside and wait for us to “approve” it before it shows up in the posting.  Every once in a while the filter will grab one that has only one link in it, so it may be delayed also.

And that is why sometimes your comment will not show up for a couple of hours, so don’t worry about it.  We scan the incoming several times a day to watch for that.  But before you write your next one, let’s get this equipment checked out.  I’ll see how Cook’s coming along with Sunday breakfast and then start a fresh pot of coffee.

Saturday + 14th = St. Patrick’s Day parade season is under way.  All the pipe bands will be busy for the next ten days, marching down the street and then hitting the pubs on the way back to the parking lot.  Ahhhh, the fun begins!

The fun has already begun in Cincinnati, though.  Once again, for the umpteenth time, a group of firefighters has embarrassed the entire department with their behavior.  While we have been documenting the continuing criminal misdeeds of some of the FF’s (HERE, for example), it turns out that a few of them have been using FD equipment and firehouses to make amateur videos with a childishly sexual slant and then posting them online for the world to see.  STATter911 tracked down a couple of them yesterday and posted the links to them HERE.

As a result, Cincinnati’s inept city manager has had to go on tv and repeat a revised version of the same speech that he’s given at least four times in the last six months, promising an investigation and the intention on getting to the bottom of this, and how embarrassing, etc., etc., etc.

You’ve got to wonder just what’s going on over there.  They’re averaging a felony arrest every 3.5 weeks and now this silly romp.  The overall irresponsibility is staggering.  With so much continuing trouble there, I have to believe that the major problem lies right at the top.  Many years ago I knew a man who was a retired batt. chief from Cincinnati and at that time it was a premier fire department, one of the oldest paid FD’s in the country with a reputation admired by everybody.  It takes a lot longer to build that reputation back up than it does to tear it down.  It’s sad.

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In case you were wondering, since we were following that costly building collapse in Cologne, the last victim was finally located and retrieved on Thursday.  The college student was found beneath the rubble 20 feet below the road surface.

We’d better get the equipment checked out now.  It’s Saturday and that means auto crashes for starters.  I’ll go make the coffee.