I need to feed the parking meter ... in the middle of a gunfight.

Some background,about the North Hollywood bank robbery and shootout that took place, February 28, 1997, 16 years ago today.
"HEY, GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE, YOU'RE GOING TO GET HIT IF YOU STAY OUT HERE!" said the Officer, (over DEAFENING gunfire)

At least twenty minutes after several hundred rounds have flown from the muzzles of two crazed and drugged eastern European bank robbers, LAPD officers actually had to chase people away from parking meters in the middle of the gun fight. Actual conversations went on like this!

 Citizen HUA (Head Up Ass) "But ... I only have two minutes left, I need to put a quarter in, or else I'll get a citation... (fishes for change in his or her pocket)"

Officer, (can't fucking believe what he just heard) If that officer hadn't been experiencing extreme stress and what Lt Col Dave Grossman has pointed out is the shutting down of unnecessary brain function - like coming up with witty and sarcastic replies - he would have probably said, "Hey, we're in the middle of the biggest gun battle in North American history. I sincerely doubt a) Parking Enforcement is within two miles of this place and b) will be here any time soon. GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!!"

If this shit were in a movie, it wouldn't make it past a single focus group - they'd all say, "Oh come on WHO WOULD DO THAT!?" Los Angelinos, that's who. If I hadn't witnessed much of this complete irrational nonsense firsthand, I wouldn't believe it either. Many of us want desperately to believe things are normal, and in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not we will continue to act as though things are normal. I didn't know what that this phenomenon had a name. After watching Glenn Beck I now know it's called the normalcy bias.  On 9/11, some people caught in the World Trade Center after the attack halted their exodus to turn off their computers. A jumbo jet full of fuel just crashed into a building, it's burning and what's important is ... turning off your computer before you leave the room.

On the Titanic this showed itself when as the ship was sinking, live music continued to be played as the water crept up on the sinking ship.

I've heard of it firsthand with respect to police work, specifically the LAPD during the most violent bank robbery in North American history. There was an alright movie about the whole thing, 44 minutes made about it. If you watch that you'll see how gritty, professional, squared away and brave everyone working that day behaved in bringing the gunfight to an end. The only people killed were the two bank robbers.

I tweeted Charlie Sheen

@charliesheen in 90s I delivered flowers 2 u in Malibu Lakes u tipped me $40 a small fortune in 90s to a teenager thxbit.ly/YwYN2l

— Francisco Murphy(@bluesidetales) February 26, 2013

I tweeted this 17 hours ago, and already I've gotten two emails from people asking me why I'm such a douche bag. Funny no one said anything when I sent tweets to other people ... Chad Ochocinco & Ashton Kutcher are two.

First off, for those of you who speak real English, I'll tell the story in real english and not twitterspeak.

YEARS ago when I was still in college and well before I was a police officer I delivered flowers. One day, Charlie Sheen ordered SEVEN arrangements for his mom to be delivered to his house where he was hosting her birthday. Or something. This was a colossal pain in the ass because seven arrangements takes forever to load, and the drive from the florist to his Malibu Lakes bachelor pad very windy and steep at the top of a hill.

I begin unloading the arrangements and one of his friends helps me and shows me where to put them in the dining room. When I'm all done, I hear, "Hey, wait a sec!" and it's Charlie Sheen. He was wearing a San Francisco Giants long sleeved warm up shirt, he smiles, says, "Thank you so much!" and puts two $20s in my hand. The biggest tip I ever got before this was $10 from some poor bastard who needed me to drop everything and send a $150 flower arrangement immediately to his wife within thirty minutes. $40 is a small fortune NOW to a  flower deliverer.

So I figured I'd tweet this story to him, and then link to this site? Why?

Because I'm not helpless. But I need to make more money. Network marketing doesn't work for me. I have no money to invest in real estate or a franchise or anything.

For several years now we have not been getting paid cash for the overtime that we work. This averaged out to $500-1000 a paycheck. Even on the low end that adds up to a huge chunk of change. You try and live with $13,000 less. My wife works part time, she now gets paid half of what she used to. I work 3-4 days a week (all of the weekends and a day or two during the week) so we're able to juggle it pretty well so our two kids do not have to be in child care ever. They're always with us or a family member (God Bless both sets of grandparents!). The car that I drive to work now needs a valve job to run properly and that'll cost $2,200 minimum. We've had a few more financial disasters that I won't get into and bore you with but you get the idea. Our income has gone down, while our expenses are staying the same.

Don't feel sorry for me. I don't want a hand out or pity. What I do want is for you to shut the fuck up about me trying to better myself. I'm empowering myself to solve a very big problem. Charlie Sheen has NINE MILLION followers on Twitter. Christ if he were to retweet my tweet, all of those people would see my website and MAYBE if just 1% (90,000) were to click on the link, check this place out and tell their friends I could maybe pay some of these fucking bills. He was already personally generous to me, and he was generous to Lindsay Lohan paying off her income tax bill. I don't want anyone to give me alms, but a mention, a "wow, nice story" or anything would be more than welcome.

Gavin McInnes already has me writing stuff for www.streetcarnage.com (my latest).  God BLESS him for this opportunity. Gavin found me by Twitter. After I was tweeting about God Knows What, he apparently clicked on one of the links I put in a tweet, or clicked on my profile and then clicked on my blog. He loved what he read. The one he likes best is National Donut Day. If you haven't read it yet, you should. It's short and sweet.

A good friend of mine from high school who has made a sick amount of money off websites he runs  - www.mrhealthy.com being one - and continues to, advised me to have a regularly scheduled blog. Like weekly. Well after NOT doing that for two and a half years I am now.

Also, my Better Half got sick of all the pro-life, pro-gun and completely politically incorrect stuff I was putting out over Facebook. She agrees with those issues, BUT doesn't think I can gain anything by broadcasting it. She made the very valid point that it was foolish to take a strong stand on abortion, or any other divisive issue - when I work in an organization and want to be promoted within it. Promotions within my department come down to a THREE PERSON panel. Those three people decide whether you were the best candidate to interview for the spot. If they think you were, you get it. If not - sorry, thanks for applying try again! I trashed Obama regularly on my wall. What's to stop someone who loves Obama from remembering that I posted a NOBAMA link and then holding it against me? Looks like I don't get the job for a reason completely within my control and completely unrelated to competence.

I already had this blog that I write with a pen name. So I kicked it up a notch with tweeting. So until I don't need to make extra money, you haters can all get fucked.

I don't want to turn down opportunities though. If you have a better webhoster than godaddy, and if there's a better way to make money than this blog being on blogspot, etc., etc. I'm all ears and I'm very open to learning how to work smarter.

UPDATE: I'm also now on Reddit, doing all I can to drive traffic here and make an honest buck.

My Most & Least favorite Donuts

My latest is up over on Street Carnage where I write about my most and least favorite donuts. Huge thanks to Gavin McInness for giving me a great opportunity.

Moron Dorner

Very recently Jack Dunphy wrote an all too realistic piece about the stress and anxiety of being on a protection detail for any of Christopher Dorner’s stated targets. Jim Goad nailed his completely jacked up sense of morality. These are two of the smartest pieces on the whole Dorner issue I’ve seen written.

On the other hand you have pure trash. Dorner was called a superhero, exciting, “like watching ‘Django Unchained’” by an Ivy League professor. Not to be outdone,  Dorner’s apparently a “game changer”. So because someone is a black atheist, batshit crazy, violent and more than just a little left-of-center it’s exciting because now we get to have a conversation about all of the corruption and racism within the LAPD? Commit horrible murders and have your grievances aired? To paraphrase Dennis Prager, what murderer doesn’t have grievances!? Look, I’m not going to tell you there’s no racism within the LAPD. But to say the actions of a crazed, narcissistic mass-murderer are exciting because of the bullshit “national discussion” we get to have is moronic. He’s also not a game changer. He’s an evil, murdering bastard. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. This fat bastard was a terrorist. What we should do is look for red flags and “problems lying in wait” so we can prevent this from ever happening to the best of our ability. Given the overt and public actions that Chief Beck has taken, it is doubtful this will happen. What was his psychology exam like? What did his psychological interview turn up? What about his background investigation? What kind of recruit was he? What kind of probationary officer was he?

Some facts about Dorner that are not commonly known:

My friend, a veteran Naval officer was able to tell me that he was an unqualified flight attrite with no personal decorations and failed to make O-4 in the reserves. He ended his career as O-3. This is very difficult to do if you are at all adroit. I’m also told he was a ”1305 designator”. I’m told this means he failed either pilot school or flight officer school (think Goose from Top Gun). Those guys get kicked off active duty for uselessness, but they can stay in the Reserves and fill useless billets. As a black officer with apparently no black marks, he should have been handed Lieutenant Commander (O-4, but no higher). He must have had terrible fitness reports - as in, "fails body weight standards" which barely exists in the Reserve. Hard to imagine a 6’0” 280 lb frame would get low physical fitness reports! I’m taking a wild stab in the dark, but I’m going to speculate that he probably received sub par marks for effort and leadership, too. The units he was assigned to are dumping grounds for useless officers. In the police academy his time in the mile and a half run was 26 minutes. This is laughably embarrassing. That works out to just under an 18 minute mile. Just under four miles per hour! A Segway going uphill is faster! Christ almighty, I am not anywhere close to tip top shape, and I can crawl backwards and beat that time. He was delayed five months in the academy because, weapons expert that he was - he shot himself in the hand.

He was a liar in the academy and in his manifesto. The first lie he told numerous classmates was that he was Bernard Parks’ nephew. Bernard Parks is the most unpopular LA Chief of Police from recent memory. Darth Vader has gone on to a political career where his job seems to be to make the LAPD’s life as difficult as possible. This is not much different than what he did when he was chief, going so far as to foment and continue the Reign of Terror within the LAPD’s ranks. The Parks family quickly and strongly denied any relation to Dorner, blood or otherwise.

Another lie I’ll seize on in his piece is that recruits in the academy would taunt a Jewish recruit by singing Nazi Hitler Youth songs to him. I can’t believe this has basically gone unnoticed. No. Fuck no, in fact. This did not happen. I can say this with impunity for a number of reasons. No twenty-something police recruit who is in the LA Police academy knows of a single Nazi Hitler Youth song. Anyone who shows even the slightest bit of proclivity to truly malevolent prejudice – especially anti-Jewish prejudice – in the police academy is immediately dealt with. To believe Dorner, one would need to believe that more than one recruit hated Jews so much that they went to the trouble of dusting off sixty year old German-language Nazi propaganda, learned it and then sung it to the targeted recruit. I’m calling bullshit.

The last bit I’ll throw out is he only reported his training officer for excessive force a considerable time after she had given him an unsatisfactory probationary officer rating. So this crime committed by your training officer was so egregious that you reported it two weeks later and after she cut paper on you for being an unsatisfactory probationary officer. That's some unimpeachable integrity. You wait until you suffer negative consequences before you report your training officer for major misconduct. Wow, I can't possibly imagine why the department found his testimony less than believable.

The LAPD’s discipline system is not always fair, has flaws and could use some major tweaking. That being said, Dorner proposed no solutions – and even if he did the fact that he committed such unwarranted evil by murdering two innocent civilians, a Riverside Police officer and a San Bernardino Detective would negate anything constructive he may have had to offer.

Chief Parks, during the Reign of Terror was known for unfairly disciplining and firing officers. Ask any officer who lived under his reign (I was way too new to really suffer under his regime) and they’ll tell you he was an arbitrary, despotic and unpopular authoritarian. If we buy the justification and rationalization put forth by Dorner's apologists, one could certainly put forth a far more "just" excuse for someone assassinating Parks. Let me be clear, I hope and pray that Bernard Parks, and everyone who hasn't committed a capital crime live a long and happy life.

What possible rationale was there for taking out the daughter of the lawyer who defended Dorner and her fiancée? Taking out a Riverside copper in a truly cowardly ambush? And lastly taking out one of San Bernardino’s finest? Where’s the integrity in that? Where’s the honor to one's name in that?! How does this serve any discussion of race in this country? What game does this change?? This is quite possibly the stupidest revenge plot that has gotten this much attention.

My brother and sister officers and the families of all of the victims of this mass murdering narcissist would desperately like to put this behind us and get on with the grieving process. It’s a little bit difficult when every day the LA Times spits out a new story on this. The local nightly news stations are truly deplorable for their endless, sensationalistic and altogether insensitive coverage.

Reason and facts will show that Dorner is not worth any respect. I posit that he was a fat narcissist who had a completely broken moral compass. The only tribute befitting him is to either dance or urinate on his grave - then promptly forget this meaningless bag of bones ever walked God’s green earth.

End of Watch was great

So quite a lot has happened since my last blog post. I have another beautiful son. My Better Half is even more of a hot piece of ass than ever.

Oh, and here's my latest (and first there) on Street Carnage  (mad props to Gavin McInness!)