Post something nice about Russia.

[DFW]

93. One daughter, one son (for the record).

She was beautiful, alright! His son was a great guy as well. He had the lousy luck to get a glioblastoma, the same kind kind of always-fatal brain cancer that felled John McCain, Teddy Kennedy, a cousin and aunt of mine, and now has selected Cecile Richards as a soon-to-be victim. Luckily, his father never lived to learn of that. It was his granddaughters that my FIL hoped never to have to see military service. In West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, military service was compulsory for males unless you could prove convincingly you were a religious conscientious objector, or physically unfit. The day before his physical, my wife's brother doped himself up seriously, drank himself half blind and did who-knows-what to himself to avoid being declared fit for military service. All very much with his conservative father's approval! It worked, too. He was declared unfit for military service. He was also declared unfit to serve in any government bureaucratic job, most of which guarantee employment for life in Germany (if you want it/can stand it). He couldn't care less. Like the rest of us, he never liked bureaucrats, and so was perfectly happy to be declared unfit to be something he never wanted to be in the first place.