By this time next week, daughter will be married, and the shindig will be in high gear. And I should be pretty well oiled. For now, it’s details, details, details, details. Oy!

Cousin Jack takes us back to a Good Friday years ago as events unfolded in his neighborhood in the Ironbound Section of Newark, better known to those from the area as “Down Neck.” This got me to thinking about a Good Friday many years ago and our grandmother, whom we always referred to as “Granny.” She was a wonderful lady, born around the turn of the century in New York City, who could always be counted on for a laugh, a large dose of encouragement, “medical” advice, or a cup of tea.

On one Good Friday, when I was in my teens, I remarked to Granny how awful the weather was on that cold, dark and rainy day. Without pausing one second, Granny replied, “It always rains on Good Friday, Sonny.”

In attempting to process Granny’s bold statement, my first reaction was to try recall past Good Fridays. In about two seconds, I came to my senses knowing that, even if by some strange statistical accident Northern New Jersey regularly got rain on Good Friday, surely it wasn’t raining everywhere on the planet. And, after all, for a twenty-four hour period, it was Good Friday everywhere on the planet. I resisted the temptation to ask Granny if she thought it was raining that day in the Sahara Desert. I did so out of love and respect, and, besides, I really didn’t want to tangle ass with Granny, particularly over matters religious.

On the religious front, Granny took no prisoners. While church attendance in my immediate family was hit or miss (we lived two towns away from the Down Neck fourplex where Jack, Granny and our other cousins lived), skipping church was not an option when Granny was around. Such was the case on those occasions when I stayed overnight at the fourplex on Saturdays. No matter how late we had been up on Saturday night, Sunday morning we would all be greeted by Granny’s command voice saying, “Get your asses out of bed and go to church” (or “choich” as Granny would pronounce it).

Granny never missed mass, but she also never missed a chance to tell a funny story, laugh hysterically at a joke, have a couple “highballs,” dispense her precious pearls of wisdom, and generally raise a little hell.

Granny passed away more than 25 years ago, but she still lives, for when family members get together, we all share our favorite Granny stories. The stories age as gracefully as Granny did. I miss her.

Oh, yeah. I’m looking out the window on this Good Friday, and you know what? It looks like rain.

OK. My archives have disappeared, and all the usual stuff is not bringing them back. Definitely time to call it a night.

Sorry, nothing tonight. I worked late, had to make a stop on the way home to pick up a formal shirt for the upcoming nuptials, and what little time was left before bleary eyes and brain fry set in was spent with Sgt. Steele. He sends his gott-damned regards and hopes to see you “friggin’ dim lights” soon.

Peppermint Patty shares an e-mail from an uncle who has lived in France for 40 years. He reports that the places normally frequented by Americans are “empty.”

Well, well.

This is the legacy of Abu Abbas, the mastermind of the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985. During the course of this crime, Leon Klinghoffer, a 69 year old American passenger who was confined to a wheelchair, was shot and thrown overboard in his wheelchair. All this was done in front of his wife.

Abu Abbas was arrested in Baghdad and is now in American custody. I cannot imagine punishment that would be too severe.

While the Garden State is often associated with the Sopranos and their real-life counterparts who somehow seem to evade prosecution, New Jersey does not tolerate lawyers who steal from their clients. Robert Burrick, an attorney who worked at one of New Jersey’s more prestigious law firms, was sentenced yesterday to eighteen months in federal prison for embezzling $120,000 from his former clients and from the local soccer club, where his children played, and which had elected Mr. Burrick as treasurer.

Burrick’s “distorted sense of entitlement and, to a large sense, his greed,” according to the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, drove Burrick’s actions. Burrick offered no explanation for his behavior other than to say that clinical depression might have played a role.

In addition to doing jail time, Mr. Burrick has lost the $400,000 per year income from his law firm, he has lost his reputation, and he will surely be disbarred, if that has not already happened. Lawyers are disbarred in New Jersey for a good deal less, and in cases of theft from clients’ trust accounts, disbarment is a virtual certainty.

I feel sorry for his children.

In New Jersey all licensed attorneys (with very few exceptions) are required to pay annually into a client security fund, the proceeds of which are used to help re-pay clients who are bilked by dishonest lawyers. I hope the fund is able to cover most, if not all, of the $30,000 that Mr. Burrick stole from the children’s soccer club…

Fortunately, Mr. Burrick is the exception. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it any less sad.

Yesterday, Dana Blake, a bouncer in a Manhattan Night Club, was fatally stabbed as he sought to enforce New York City’s two-week old law that prohibits smoking in New York City’s saloons. The reason for the smoking ban, we are told, is that smoking is dangerous to others. It certainly did not work out well for Mr. Blake.

Now, I know that the no-smoking law did not kill Dana Blake; two punks, probably both well oiled by 2:30 a.m. did the killing. However, the incident has caused me to think a bit about the extent to which the health of others is really what drove this sledgehammer legislation. It seems to me that between smoking and booze (both of which I am fond of), booze is far and away the bigger societal problem. Consider these make-believe headlines:

Woman Found Badly Beaten
Police reported that after a night of binge smoking, the victim’s husband returned to the house in a smoking-induced rage and beat her savagely.

Bus Plunges From Bridge, Killing Dozens
The investigation into this horrible tragedy revealed that John So and So, the bus driver, had been smoking heavily before driving the bus.

Deadly Fight Breaks Out at House Party
Police responded to a loud brawl outside the home of Mr. and Mrs. So and So. The investigation revealed that several of the participants in the fight, including the victim, had been smoking heavily at the party.

Car Smashes into Pedestrians, Causing Numerous Injuries
Police reported that the driver of the car in question had been smoking just before the accident in question.

New Year Marked by Huge Vehicle Pileup Results in Multiple Fatalities
Fifteen automobiles were involved in a multiple car crash that brought traffic to a standstill for hours on Route 24. The preliminary results of the accident investigation revealed that virtually every one of the drivers involved in the accident had been smoking heavily at New Year’s Eve celebrations that were being held at various places in the state.

So, one might ask, perhaps instead of laws that ban smoking in saloons, we should have laws that ban drinking in saloons. Let me answer that intentionally silly rhetorical question for you. The only reason that booze has not been outlawed in saloons is because the beautiful people who decided that they don’t like smoke, do like cocktails. Simply put, they want to be able to drink in a smoke-free tavern, and the smokers in New York City will just have to deal with it.

To get there, the beautiful people and others who make a living from telling others how to live their lives, have taken away the ability of a bar-owner to decide, based on market forces, whether he might want to permit smoking in his establishment. If the market were to dictate that non-smoking bars were the moneymakers, they would naturally proliferate, and they would do so without the force of governmental regulation.

I know…..I know…..I know….. The purpose of the law is to protect the people who have to work in a place where people are smoking. This was a stroke of genius on the part of the beautiful people. You see, the anti-smoking law is not about them –the limousine liberals – it’s really about the poor workers. Sorry, Buffy, but I don’t buy it. I would hazard a guess that for every bartender who claims to have been bothered by smoking, one can find twenty who were not bothered – many of who are smokers themselves.

I am certain that there are many jobs that are much more dangerous or potentially hazardous to one’s health than being a bartender in a saloon where patrons are permitted to smoke. I also cannot help but wonder why, if smoke truly bothers a bartender, he/she chose that career path in the first place. Further, he/she could seek employment in one of the non-smoking bars that would spring up all over the place, if we are to believe that ridding saloons of smoke is vitally important to most people and not just another bit of social engineering on the part of those with the political clout and savvy to make it happen.

Finally, I understand that there is an exception in the New York law that permits cigar bars. That just proves that the beautiful people enjoy a good cigar with their cocktails.

This is just swell. Not only could I appear in a Nyquil commercial (hacking, wheezing, aches, the whole bit), but I also have conjunctivitis. For those of you who have never had the pleasure, it is “pink eye,” which comes fully equipped with itching and swollen eyelids. The best part is the nasty discharge from your eyes that turns into a sticky booger-like substance that keeps your eyes glued shut. It’s at the beginning stages, so I will be standing at attention in the doctor’s office first thing Monday morning. For now, reading the computer screen is a bit of a chore, so it’s horizontal land for Jimbo tonight.

It seems that some truly twisted pieces of human refuse, identifying themselves as representatives of the Red Cross, are calling spouses of Marines and informing them that their spouses serving in Iraq have been killed. The Marine Corps has advised military spouses that it does not use the Red Cross for such notifications.

I hope there is a special place in hell for people who would do such a thing.
Link via Res Ipsa Loquitur.