Monday, November 05, 2007

Grenier's Denier'

Does the name Robert Grenier mean anything to you?

Well, you COULD “Google” him, I guess....

He interests me because I was reading the Jerusalem Post (ye, THAT Jerusalem) simply because I wanted to know what the AP, Reuters, NYTimes, and the news networks were withholding ...and voila ! THERE it was !

This Grenier fellow was quoted as telling a group conference in Mexico City that those loveable Middle East philanthropists, Hamas and Hezbollah are organizing in Mexico at a firm rate.

Hamas, as you must know, is now filly in charge of Palestinian Gaza and working on the West Bank. Hamas is a Syrian based terrorist organization with the avowed (and demonstrated) desire to end the existence of Israel. Hamas INVENTED the suicide-bomb-as-political-statement concept, y’ know...

Hezbollah (Hizbolla) is an Iranian-subsidized movement, also active in Syria and inciter of the. Last Lebanon-Israel conflict, through use of assassination and kidnaping.

Grenier says the two outfits have long sought entry into the United States to apply tried and true bloody terror tactics up close and personal in U.S. citizens the way they are used in Israel and Iran and Jordan against their “enemies”.

Well, that figures. I must admit without humility that I had thought of that.

Grenier said that the flood of illegal immigrants and the free flow of illegal narcotics from Mexico to the U.S. is ripe to be exploited by these terrorists, and that Hamas and Hezbollah are very optimistic. Well, how the HAIL would he know...Who IS Grenier, anyway???

Why, he is the immediate former chief of te U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counter-terrorism task force. That’s who he is !

Stay Tuned.

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Foxfire: Eyes in the Night

One of my first grand memories of the mountains was the sound of a hissing and spitting cat and the sight of two slanted, glimmering eyes, green-yellow in the dark of a camp tent.

I was about twelve, and it was my first away-from-home experience with a battalion of boys bound for any prank, messy, squirmy or spooky.

This spinechulling experience was acted out by a boy from Mannassas, VA named Pat Bradley, with two fragments of luminescent rotting wood fungus: foxfire !

I hadn’t roamed the Appalachians so many miles, then, though I preferred everything about them—especially the trout fishing–to my foothills home on the clay-laden Chattahoochee River where Lake Lanier is situated today.

Many hours were spent by my sons and me in the mountain woods looking for foxfire. The most satisfying advent of the radiance was one evening in February when we had been tracking squirrels in eight inch snow, marveling at. The way they were able to go from the roots of a tree trunk in a beeline to their acorn cache without rummaging around mindlessly as we did for a pair of gloves or socks. How did they know EXACTLY where the larder was under seven or wight inches of ice and sleet?

As we were leaving the mountainside at the gap where the pickup awaited, Mike gripped my wrist and said: “Look, Daddy...FOXFIRE !” And, sure enough, in the gloom, there was barely visible, a remnant of rotted, fungus infected wood, just inside a log mouth.

T would have thought it was too cold. But there had been repeated thaws and snows for nearly two weeks.

In Rabun County, a veritable library of Mountain Craft and Legend was collected in the Foxfire books, unique in their encyclopedic sprawl of information.

It was very exciting, also, to find that there was a Foxfire, NC. But the hamlet is 300-plus miles from Hendersonville...close to the field trial grounds I used to frequent near Pinehurst and Hoffmann.

If you favorite pre adolescent has not had the treat, hunting for foxfire may be a family treat.