--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

for the bystanders anyway! Regular honeybees? Africanized honeybees? Those Africanized ones are tenacious!

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

got stung 6 times on the right arm .... this is 5 of the 6 ...

swelling has gone down quite a bit from last night. Does not hurt. It itches. The stings did not bother my sleep.

Bee sting is supposed to be good for arthritis. I should be immune soon!

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

The right honorable Edgar Parker was what they called a "triple dipper". Four years in uncle harry's boy scouts (u.s. army) then two decades as a d.o.d. civil servant greasing tank & a.p.c. tracks at the ordnance depot. Then he retired and rolled that over for 2/3ds. years of service into the state's retirement scheme as a municipal firefighter. He timed the tenure/vestment requirements just right and in time for s.s./medicare age. Now all he had to do was tend his garden and keep his bees but 1980 was an election year. From sea to shining sea horizontally speaking and from the little muddy down in the desert to the frigid north in the vertical orientation, folk chose the hokey actor with the rouged cheeks over the wide-mouthed, thick-lipped goober farmer.....and, in patona city, they chose Edgar Parker over Greedy Gyp Garnett for mayor.

Mister Parker served three terms as mayor and did a tolerable job at it and would still be doing it if that governor's ethics committee delegation from down in montgomery hadn't intervened. So the right honorable Edgar Parker was finally retired for good. Old habits die hard though. Banned from the city barn (public works) & utilities service center and city hall and the police & fire stations, he had to make-do just listening to the city's radio bands on his scanner.

So one morning as Indian summer was just transitioning to autumn Mister Parker packed a thumb spraining bowl of fruity shagg into his pipe and, with a steaming cup of joe, he chilled on/in his carport and heard some traffic on the scanner that got his attention.

Pugsy Vanderhoot and Orville Livingstone had found a wild bee hive in a water meter box over on the harbourville cutoff and requested James Dudley and Razor Hooey fetch a pump sprayer full of diesel with which to slay said bees.

Now mister Parker had his vegetable garden and a few thriving hives in the backyard of his domicile but he also had some ailing hives on a truck patch of several individual derelict vacant lots in the disreputable, defunct industrial area near the utilities barn. What those ailing hives needed was an importation some black bee stock. If he could just stave-off the imminent bee slaughter long enough to catch that wild queen who reigned in that meter box.

A phone call to the utilities barn and a few heated and pointed impreciations of a most personal nature intimidated Woodrow Scoggins into radioing the would-be bee killers and ordering a pause, if not outright cessation of the toxic spraying.

In a little more than a quarter hour, mister Parker showed up on-site duded in a complete beekeeping protective livery. The plan was simple. James Dudley would manipulate the bellows of the smoke puffer whilst Razor kept the hopper of the puffer fueled with pine straw. The theory being, according to the man in the space suit, was that the smoke would have a soporific affect on the bees and keep them civil. Mayor Parker would use a garden trowel and try to herd the queen and her protective court into the lidded box that he had provided for their transportation. Pugsy and Orville would stand by with the diesel sprayer just in case the operation got out of hand.

So Dudley began puffing smoke with Razor feeding fuel whilst the beekeeper began digging about in the meter box. The first problem was that there was not enough space for all three to do their respective tasks. The former mayor's bonnet and netting was nigh-on as wide as his shoulders. Dudley was puffing smoke over and under and around the former mayor and Razor was having difficulty in reaching the opening of the straw hopper to keep the contraption emitting smoke. All the time the former mayor was yelling for more smoke.

In less than the time it took me to type this, all three were covered with buzzing and crawling bees. Suddenly there was no smoke and the former mayor was alone with the angry bees. He deftly slid the box lid closed on what he hoped was the queen amongst the writhing mass and jumped into his truck and accelerated to enough velocity to outrun the main swarm as he headed back to town still costumed in the protective suit.

Later, Dudley and Razor were called a up on the carpet at the debriefing in Woodrow Scoggins office. When accused of dereliction of duty and abandoning their posts, Dudley began cussing in his precise and scientific manner words that I promised mom never to repeat or put into print. When the eyes of the court-martial turned onto Razor, he calmly and succinctly testified in his own defense.....

"When them creepy crawlers gots into my ears and under my collar, I'ze just couldn't keeps my feets still no matter how hard I tried !"

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

Brought to mind an old Pill and Dudley story.....

The Disappointment.....

It went viral ! That is to say, a video posted on social media had many hundreds of thousands of views in just a short while. In a matter of days, the hits were several millions. It (the video) was dim and grainy and surely seemed dramatized (fake) to me. It showed what was said to be a naked anthropomorphic cryptid beast, most certainly an extraterrestrial, lying on an autopsy table. The video was of strange hues.....something between black & white and sepia and infrared green like it had been treated to infer either great age (roswell era) or more modern but night-visioned hidden body-cam. The beast was all knotty and warty and lumpy and otherwise asymmetrically misshapened.....the unfortunate englisher joe merrick comes to mind.

I was killing time in one of those strip mall coffee shops, slash internet cafes, slash newstand joints while the old lady, er....beloved bride was off in other stores spending my hard earned coin. All I wanted to do was have an honest cup of joe and read the latest john taffin article. I had no trouble finding the latest john taffin article but finding an honest cup of plain black joe in a coffee joint ain't exactly easy. All that girly coffee with complicated, exotic names. I explained what I wanted to the butchy wench clerking the counter and got a triple unsweetened espresso pulled (thinned ?) with hot water for my troubles and four of washington's photographs.

I had just settled into mister taffin's superbly photographed primer on the histories of and differences between the american, russian, and remington special .44 cartridges.....waiting for the coffee to cool to just under tongue scalding when an impertinent fellow, quite uninvited, sat down to my table. 'Twas ok however. The interloper turned-out to be no other than my old friend euell _____, otherwise known as Pill. He had one of those newfangled "smartphones" and was watching a video on it. He replayed the video for my benefit and it was the morgue scene I described at the beginning of this tale.

"Taint no alien attall !", murmured Pill.... "It's a human and I've seen one just like it before but in that case, the fellow survived !"

Hows abouts we dispense with all of the confusing dialogue and quotation marks and just let me simply tell you what Pill said from his perspective but to the point, without his penchant for long-winded, convulated prattling.

You remember james dudley of course. Maybe what you don't know was his tendency to bring lawsuits. He got it quite honestly however. There have been plaintiffs in dudley's ancestry, at least every other generation nearly all the way back until one of noah's daughter-in-laws squeezed-out the first dudley. The modern, extant dudley had the phone numbers of all of the birmingham 1-800 ambulance chasers preprogrammed onto his speed dial and he was always diligently on the hunt for an opportunity to call them.

One of several examples.....Way back in the day, on a crappie and/or white bass expedition, he was trying to un-snag the treble hook of an inline spinner from a driftwood limb on the rip-rapped banks of the coosa river. He overextended his balance and fell and busted his left knee on either a rip or a rap....not sure which.....anyways, a jagged piece of feldspar larger than a cobble but not quite a boulder. Dudley keeps a stiff upper lip and tried not to limp too obviously and gimps into work at the tire company owned cord mill the following monday where he feigns an industrial injury with an inopportune trip over a portruding bolt. He settled for knee replacement and subsequent therapies and something north of $40,000 which netted him $17,500 after the ambulance chasers deducted their vigorish.

Of course the tire company was rightly obligated to let him go and the union was apathetic. That $17,500 did not last long and there he was with a sore, stiff leg and a documented pre-existing medical condition and no immediate job prospects. He was however, by virtue of his brief police career(s), tenured and vested in the municipal/state pension scheme so, knowing that he would never be able to don a badge again, he approached the Scroggins brothers for a billet as some form of municipal civil servant.

At the corner of sparks and sterling, Wino Hurd was operating the ancient rattletrap backhoe with the sluggish hydraulic system and much wear and play in the boom swivel. Patch Simpson was spotter.....on watch for sight of the sewer main in hopes that he could keep the backhoe's bucket's teeth from ripping into it. It was either Roscoe or unidentical twin Woodrow Scroggins who was supervising, Pill could not remember which who Dudley approached to ask for a job. Just as Roscoe or Woodrow, as the case may be was apologetically explaining that there were no current vacancies, Wino endeavored to shake mud from the bucket by energetically manipulating the boom and, what with all of the play and unresponsive controls, he manipulated the bucket right into the side of Dudley's fragile skull.

Dudley was down for the count and then some.....in fact he was airlifted to a famous Roman (ga. not ital.) trauma center. But apparently those ambulance chasing solicitors/barristers have a keen and sensitive telepathy of sorts and several days before Dudley regained consciousness, they had negotiated both a generous cash settlement and a meter reading job to boot.

In six weeks Dudley could sit-up and feed himself. In three months he had relearned to walk and was for the most part potty trained yet again. In six months he had by then quit seeing two of everything and the slurred speech and slobbery chin had abated substantially. In less than nine months from the time that Wino Hurd had nigh-on decapitated him with a backhoe, Dudley was a water and natural gas meter reader and chief of patona city's utilities truck #12.

He drove the truck and kept the route book....that is to say, he penciled-in the meter readings as either Sleepy Jackson or Pugsey Vanderhoot read the meters and called the results out to him. Not at all arduous but it never seemed to end and made for long days. Sometimes Dudley needed a break from sitting behind the wheel and he would exit the truck and stretch his legs a bit. With a background in law enforcement and a keen eye, he was always on the look for anything out of the ordinary. For some reason or another Dudley had a fascination with/of hornet's nests. Anytime he or his meter reading assistant would find a nest they would remember its location and return, at a convenient time with an aerosol can of wasp spray. After an interval of days or weeks they would fetch the now dead nest, tree limb and all, back to the city barn and hang it on the break room wall.

One blustering january midmorning on a walkabout break from meter reading, in a pine straw carpeted wood-lot between holes #7 and #8 at the local county-club Sleepy Jackson found a world record sized hornet's nest. Due to the cold temps and assuming the nest was dead they neglected the normal precautions of wasp spray and subsequent quarantine time to ensure its efficacy. The new giant trophy took its place of honor on the wall of Roscoe Scroggins' office.

Now Booby Moates, the certified lunatic amongst us was always larking and chafing Dudley. It was Booby's favourite pastime.....you know busting Dudley's balls every chance he got. While the boys were all admiring the size of the new hornet's nest, Booby kind of cautiously craw-fished up to it and cupped a hand over an ear in the posture of listening for any activity within. With a mischievous grin Booby waited until everyone had gone to lunch and Dudley had settled himself into Roscoe's comfy office chair for a nooner siesta. Booby made sure Dudley's eyes were closed and when his breathing evened into sombulence Booby applied a lit match to the base of the paper exterior of the hornet's nest.

The utilities crew returned from lunch to find the bomberos venting the smoke and hornets from Roscoe's office. Dudley, was being loaded into an ambulance, bare down to his skivvies, writhing in pain, all swollen and lumpy and misshapen with stings.....his face frozen in a silent scream of anaphylaxis and turning an ugly hue while Fatass Delores Heathcote was preparing an atropine/epinephrine injection.

And that was that. This was what he had meant at the beginning by saying that he had seen a similar subject to the one in the video. Certainly a lackluster ending and not up Pill's usual raconteurial efforts. I was quite let-down , expecting, if not an outright punchline, at least a thought-provoking twist of irony. I left my coffee, cold and unfinished on the table along with the glossy with the taffin article and went in search of my wife to ken just how much damage had been done to the credit card balance.

Why are you not published?

Or have I missed the announcement?

--
Ele era velho.
Ele era corajoso.
Ele era feio.

That always hurts.

I was mowing this morning and remembered my neighbor got into come ground hornets last year right by the corner post. Luckily they weren’t there today.

A long time ago in a galaxy far,far away, I was mowing highway right-of-way behind my crew leader. He ran over a bumblebee nest and out they came. He had gone past the nest and they didn't bother him, but when I came along a few seconds later the bees were in combat formation and ready to strike. The first one got me right on the eyebrow and literally knocked me backwards off the tractor, which of course just kept on going without me. Old Jim happened to look back about that time and was puzzled to see my tractor mowing serenely along without a driver (luckily it was level ground).

After getting loose from the bumblebees, I pursued my escaping tractor, ran up behind it and knocked the transmission out of gear (easy to do on an IH 140). After explaining why I had abandoned my post, I had to wait a while for Jim to stop laughing. He tore open a couple of cigarettes, made a paste with the tobacco, and slapped a wad on each of my stings. Within half an hour I could not tell where I had been stung. Made a believer out of me, and to this day I keep a little vial of tobacco in each of my tool kits.