Character Matters

 If I hear that song by the Troggs, A Girl Like You, one more time, I'm gonna go full-on Elvis and open fire on the television.  They're using it in a dog food commercial right now, and it's in heavy rotation.  It was lame in 1966, and it is even worse 60 years later.  

They only had one song, and that was, Wild Thing.  It was bad enough, but this other monstrosity, you've got to be high on nitrous oxide to think this is a viable tune.  

Trust me, I know.  

I'm sure the songwriter appreciates the royalties, but my senses are offended.  

This is the actual television Elvis blew up with a .357 because he was pissed off at Robert Goulet; it's on display at Graceland.  I'm not even that mad, and who can afford to buy a new television the night before the Super Bowl?  

On the other hand, I've been following the non-stop coverage of the Nancy Guthrie kidnapping.  What a terrible thing.  I know a little about people who kidnap folks for ransom, having almost been a victim of that psycho who married the woman who identifies as my sister.  

It didn't work out for him, and it's not gonna work out for these perpetrators.  

The other kidnapping case I have knowledge of was a drug dealer who escaped from my pod in the pen on my day off.  

He got away and went to Los Angeles, where he kidnapped a business owner's wife and daughter for ransom.  It ended in a shootout with the LAPD, and the escapee died along with both hostages.  It was brutal.  

I tried to black it out of my memory, even though I was on my day off.  I always felt like he waited for me to go on days off to escape because I'd have caught him and stomped his guts into the fucking pavement, and he knew it.  The guy he pulled the escape on was a total stooge, and he should have been fired at least, but I'm sure he went on to have a long and illustrious career as a prison guard; he's probably a warden by now.  

I coded off shortly thereafter because an illegal alien drug dealer escaped, and a couple of innocent people died as a result of a colleague's negligence. An informant told us the escapee had an INS hold that was going to deport him to his country of origin, but he wasn't who he said he was, and he was facing a murder beef back home.  

Somebody should have been shitcanned, but they promoted him instead.   I got promoted too, but politics shouldn't take precedent over principles, and that was it for me.  Character matters; good luck finding it inside one of those places.