Publicke Notice

The Planet Vleeptron will be closed for the next day or two while Bob travels to visit a 79-year-old guy who set an alarm and got up early to make sure he would be arrested and sent to federal prison for nine months. Vleeptron regrets the interruption in blog service and sausages.

He is my neighbor a few towns to the north of me. He wanted to protest and shut down The School of the Americas, at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA, which has for decades trained Latin American military officers in such skills and arts as repression, torture and murder. Don't get me started.

My prisoner pal, like moi, is a US Army Veteran himself. Both of us, during our service, served at Fort Benning.

The thanks of a grateful nation.

I promised to visit him while he was in the can, but if I don't go soon, his sentence will be over, and he'll be home again. Win-Win situation. But I wanna go.

The judge originally sentenced him to a special medical prison facility because he is a sick old man, but his health improved a little, so now he's on a sort of prison farm.

Don't get me started.

The rest of you Americans probably don't know any prisoners. The USA only has 2,131,180 women, children and men behind bars as of 2004. Well, I know an old geezer jerk who travelled about 1000 miles and set an alarm to be a prisoner, and the foo was stone sober, too. On the phone this afternoon when he called to tell me I had made it on his Approved Visitor List, he said he would rejoice to have me visit. I will rejoice to visit him.

We can't play postcard chess, because about eight years ago, most state and federal prison systems decided that chess notation was secret code, and the guards who read the mail can't understand the secret code. So no chess.

Don't get me started. I'll blog about it when I get home again. If I don't, it's because I am too bummed and furious about it.

Did I mention he's 79? Thank God this dangerous threat to society is behind bars.