Hospitalized Hero Cop Gets Visit From K9 Friend;
Plus: Childhood Memories and Nostalgia Open Thread

By the way, this is the sort of post I put up at the close of business, but because nurse ratchet keeps asking for a fun thread, I'll put this up earlier than usual.

Don't worry, I'll put up more real posts after this.*

Dogs are best people.

One of the Auburn police officers wounded in a Sunday-night shooting that claimed the life of a fellow officer was visited in the hospital Wednesday by his K9 partner Leon.

Officer Webb Sistrunk remains hospitalized at Piedmont Columbus Regional Medical Center, three days after he took a bullet to the right shoulder. Police officials said Sistrunk’s health is improving and he had been upgraded from the Intensive Care Unit to critical care.

Video of the visit below, plus a couple of my own childhood memories.

So, for childhood memories and nostalgia, I'll start:

I think I've mentioned this before, but I had a fantastic idea when I was little. I found this old shitty piece of rope about 20' long and thought that if I tied a noose around my belly and threw the other side over the big limb of the neighbor's tree, I could pull myself up the rope, pulling down one side so that other side of the rope would pull me up by the belly, like an elevator.

So to give myself a leg up, I got up into the crook of the tree's two trunks, about five feet off the ground, cinched the rope around my waist, and threw the other side of the rope over the big limb projecting over the ground.

And jumped.

So: a few problems with this plan. If it were to have any chance of working, I would have needed to hook a pulley wheel up to the limb. Instead, I had rough, old rope rubbing against the rough bark of an old tree. The force of friction was high. There was no chance that I could pull the rope down over that branch, not with 80 or whatever pounds weighing it down.

Also, I was way too weak to even have a shot, pulley or no pulley.

But that would just be a failure. I could have just failed to maintain a hold on the rope and fallen five feet to the ground.

But it was worse than that, because the rope actually snagged on the stump of a secondary branch and locked on to the limb. And the noose-like loop of rope around my waist did what noose-like loops hanging from trees are supposed to do: It started throttling me. It cut into my diaphragm and restricted my breathing to a shallow rasping.

And I just dangled five feet off the ground, held by a noose around my waist, spinning around slowly like a fly webbed up by a spider, unable to pull my way up the rope and also unable to get any slack in the noose and let myself fall through it to the ground.

So I just hanged there for about half an hour, calling out for help with the reduced amount of breath I had.

Eventually the neighbor heard and charged out with a knife, cutting the rope and freeing me.

I immediately began turning red, not from embarrassment, but from oxygen getting back into my skin.

And then the neighbor made a great show of cutting the rope up with the knife like he was chopping up a venomous snake. I don't know if that was meant to be a teachable moment for me or he just really hated rope.

So I had another really stupid moment like that one winter when a heavy snow had fallen and then strong winds had blown the snow up into tall banks, maybe five feet high.

There was this nice big snowbank, about eight feet long at the base, and maybe almost six feet tall at the peak. I had another fantastic idea that I would just burrow through one side of the bank, down near the bottom, out through the other side.

I wasn't completely stupid so I did partly dig out the other side, where I expected to exit from.

Then I got to digging on the entry side, and began to worm my way through the hole.

Well, so: If you dig a hole that is barely larger than your personal circumference, you actually have no ability to move your legs or arms, and you just get completely trapped. In snow. In a six foot tall, eight-foot wide snowbank.

As I was an intelligent boy, I figured this out. Unfortunately, I figured this out when I was pretty much exactly halfway through the hole. My giant brain then figured out, "Ah, a hole must be large enough to allow free movement of legs and arms, and tall enough to allow all-fours movement...!"

But of course I had time to think about all that as I was now hopelessly stuck in the hole, my arms pinned to my side, and my legs only able to kick at the lower extremity, doing nothing at all.

Oh, and the ice was melting around me and dripping on me as thirty-three degree water.

So I was stuck there for another half hour, again crying helplessly and pathetically like a Cuck at The Bulwark asking his Stallion to please stop making sex with his wife so hard.

I yelled as loud as I could for help. But there was no one around to help, because these snow-drifts were actually on the beach, and no one was on the beach, because it was winter after a snowstorm.

I don't know how, but somehow my mom heard me from blocks away and came out to pull me out of the snow.

Hey, did I ever mention I was never good at sports?

Anyway, for the nostalgia part, here are some songs I thought were totally awesome when I was little:

I'm not proud of that, but I'm not really apologizing either.

Did I mention I'm kind of a huge nerd?

I really only ever learned what the cool things were when bigger boys explained it to me with punches and headlocks.

* In between serious spring cleaning -- excavating, really -- I've been banging out a sick number of posts so that I can take tomorrow and Monday off but still have posts to put up.

One thing about fasting: It really does up your energy after it gets going. My energy level is nearly manic.

posted by Ace of Spades at 05:10 PM

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