Captain Michael Morse of Rescuing Providence is shamelessly pandering to his female readers in an effort to win votes in the Black Diamond EMS Blog of the Year contest.

And really, that’s just silly. I mean, have we sunk so low that we will cater to our baser desires in an effort to curry favor and win votes?

Um… yeah, that sounds like a good idea to me.

But for those of you female readers inclined to vote for Rescuing Providence, I do have a beefcake photo of Captain Morse at his department’s last Halloween party:

Sure, vote for that guy if you’re into moose knuckles. I can’t stop you.

Or… you could vote for me!

I’m still in the lead, but Rescuing Providence is slowly gaining ground in the Black Diamond EMS Blog of the Year balloting.

So go vote for me, my faithful minions readers! I promise that once I complete my quest for world domination, all of my readers will be on the protected rolls!

Vote now, and vote again in six hours! We don’t just need a victory, we need a friggin’ Roman triumph!

And once you’ve braved the winter cold to vote for me, I’ll have something hot and nourishing back here waiting for you!

**********

Ambulance Driver’s White Chili Chili-Like Substance*

INGREDIENTS:

32 oz cooked navy beans
4 Tbsp olive oil
4 cloves minced garlic
1 cup chopped onion
4 lb ground turkey
4 lb cubed chicken
8 cups chicken stock
1 tsp black pepper
2 tsp oregano
2 Tbsp cumin
1/2 tsp cayenne
4 cup Monterey Jack
12 oz sour cream

DIRECTIONS:

Saute chicken with garlic, olive oil, and chopped onions until done. Add in browned ground turkey. Mix in “Gumbo Pot” with chicken stock, beans, black pepper, oregano, cumin, and cayenne. Cook for 30 minutes. Stir in Monterey Jack cheese and sour cream. Top with salsa.

Serve it with hot cornbread, or with tortilla chips. Take your pick.

Feeds anywhere from six to twenty. Readers who voted more than once will get extra helpings.

And after you’ve voted, Daddy will let you gather around the fireplace, make S’mores, and watch Blazing Saddles! I promise!

Go vote!

*Recipe named changed to avoid alienating my Texas readers.

… I urge you, vote your conscience.

If that means you vote for someone other than myself, so be it.

But first, allow me to say a few words about Lieutenant Michael Morse and Rescuing Providence, my nearest competitor in the balloting.

Michael is one of the most talented, if not the most talented EMS writers out there. He writes with depth, and feeling, and an authentic sense of EMS on the streets. His blog is as real as it gets.

He’s also an award-winning EMS essayist.

His storytelling is so vivid and emotionally evocative, it leaves his readers feeling as if they had experienced the call themselves.

In fact, he’s so gosh-darned earnest and heartfelt, I can’t believe he’s a real firefighter/EMT. A real EMT or firefighter would drop an F bomb now and then, or do something to earn our disapproval.  In fact, I have it on pretty good authority that his blog is actually ghostwritten by Deepak Chopra.

Plus, he sports the most shameful excuse for a moustache to be found on any firefighter, anywhere. Heck, it’s worse than mine, and that’s saying something. The only pics I can find of him on the web are of such low resolution that I can’t positively verify the presence of any follicular growth, so what I’m seeing may be nothing more than a chocolate milk moustache from breakfast.

And that’s just shameful.

I mean sure, Lt. Morse is sensitive and caring, and that’s what we all want in an EMT, but do you really want to vote for the guy whose medic school classmates voted “most likely to start singing ‘Feelings’ in the middle of a resuscitation?”

I’m not sayin’… I’m just sayin’.

Vote your conscience.

(P.S. I’ve got cookies for my voters!)

… hopefully you know me well enough to know that it is highly unlikely for me to be begging all my friends for 1500 British pounds to pay my hotel bill after I was mugged at gunpoint.

Far more likely would be me emailing you for a) bail money because I managed to get the mugger’s gun and shoot him with it, or b) crossword puzzles and copies of Guns and Ammo and Concealed Carry magazines to read while I’m in the hospital, because Plan A failed miserably.

Somebody hacked my AOL address book, folks. If you got one of those emails, delete it immediately.

To make matters worse, AOHell seems to have screwed things up royally, because some time in the last 24 hours, they were doing “routine maintenance” and managed to lose  the contents of a bunch of their customers’ email folders, archives and address books.

Funny how the phishing attack almost directly coincides with their routine maintenance and loss of their customers’ data, innit?

If you have pending correspondence with me at that email addy, send it to me again, please. I place little faith in their being able to recover all my stuff.

For EMS Blog of the Year, that is.

Go by Fire Critic’s blog and vote for your favorite fire and EMS bloggers. You can vote once every 12 6 hours until February 1.

If you choose to vote for another EMS blog than mine, I’ll certainly understand.

No really, I will.

It’s perfectly okay.

No hard feelings.

Seriously.

Really, I mean it.

Are you buying any of this?

TOTWTYTR experiences just a bit of frustration with his craptastic user-friendly AHA Instructor update:

The software also seems to have erased all record of me sitting through your fifth grade level course as well. I mean, how many freaking times are you going to tell me that there isn’t a lot of evidence to support something but that we should do it anyway? I get it, really I do. Your fantastic medical review committees are grasping around for evidence that anything other than chest compressions and electricity lead to survival much as a blind squirrel hunts around for acorns. I don’t need 100 slides to tell me that, one or two will suffice. At least it’s simple enough that I can blog, read my email, and watch TV while your slides and audio run in the back ground.

“Fifth grade level course.”

Heh.

Actually, since all the American Heart Association has required of its instructors for the past 10 years is a functioning brainstem and an index finger to press the PLAY button*, I’d say fifth grade level courses are shooting a bit high.

* That’s for instructors only. Student requirements for successful course completion are a good deal less stringent.

… I’d like to share with you one of my favorite quotes. Six months before his assassination, Dr. King was speaking to a group of junior high school students about creating their life’s blueprint. In it, he said:

If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.

That’s as good a recipe for success as I’ve ever read. Whether you are an EMT or a first responder or a dispatcher or a critical care paramedic or the guy who washes and stocks the rigs who goes unnoticed by the crews on the rigs, there is honor in doing your job well.

It doesn’t matter if you are noticed or not. It doesn’t matter if your paramedic partner treats you like a pack mule and doesn’t utilize your skills. It doesn’t matter if the ER doctors and nurses treat you with disrespect. It doesn’t matter if your patients are unappreciative.

Be the best EMT you know how to be, and you will know.

Achieving excellence is its own reward.

… and the men brave enough to speak them.

Well said, Dr. Leap.

Hat tip to M.D.O.D.

I didn’t vote for you, doubt I’ll vote for you in 2012, and disagree with just about all of your policies.

I didn’t get to see all of your speech tonight in Tucson, but I saw clips of it, and I read the transcript.

Tonight, you were Presidential, sir. Good job.

Nominations are now open!

Check out Fire Critic’s blog for details.

there are separate categories for fire and EMS, so don’t forget to go by and nominate your favorite  **cough, cough – Ambulance Driver – cough, cough** for blog of the year!

… because this is likely the only time you will see the Huffington Post cited here, unless as an object of ridicule.

Adam Kissel writes:

First of all, there is so far no evidence that a “climate of demonization,” “mean-spririted xenophobia,” or “hateful speech” had anything to do with alleged killer Jared Loughner’s apparent decision to try to assassinate Giffords and kill or injure many others. The supposition that political expression created a climate that led Loughner to his choice is an idea that seems to have sprung from whole cloth out of the minds of people who likely were upset beforehand about “rhetoric” and “hateful” speech, including, apparently, Chancellor Birgeneau. Nevertheless, it has quickly become the driving force in the national discussion about the shooting.

RTWT, as they say.

Conciliatory, agreeable speech needs no protection. The reason we have a First Amendment is to protect unpopular, even hateful speech.

There is a big, bright line between “they ought to shut up” and “somebody ought to shut them up.” Mentally unstable people who cross it, like Jared Laughner, will be part of the price we pay for that freedom, but the government should never, ever cross it.

We cannot legislate away hate and discord, especially when the definition of hate speech for so many people is “anything that disagrees with my viewpoint.”

I had a particularly dissatisfying exchange on a friend’s Facebook page with one of his liberal friends, in which I was called a racist, xenophobic, gay-bashing white patriarchal asshole hatemonger, simply because I dared to question the validity of pinning Jared Laughner’s actions on the The Tea party, Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck. For such people, rational discussion is impossible, because they are as intolerant in their own way as the racist xenophobes they despise. They are simply incapable of seeing the world through anything but the prism of their own belief system.

Predictably, it didn’t elevate the level of discourse by responding that he was a presumptuous asshole who wouldn’t know a civil debate if it bit him on his hysterical leftist liberal ass. I let anger from an ad hominem attack get the better of me, but I  bowed out of any further exchanges, rather than dirty my friend’s Facebook page with the intellectual equivalent of a monkey shit fight at the zoo.

An end to political discord will never be realized, and that’s a good thing. Argument and debate is healthy. But if you want to restore some civility to the debate, the first step is trying to understand your opponent, and by extension, his anger.

Leftists are never going to understand the Tea Party and the right as long as they insist on seeing them as racist, xenophobic, gun-toting religious kooks. You’d do better to ask why they’re angry, leftists, and the intrusiveness of government into our everyday lives is at the very top of that list. The heavy-handedness of Nancy Pelosi and the 108th and 109th Congresses only fanned the flames.

And while we’re on the subject, Republicans, the rest of America isn’t afraid of gay cooties and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what other people do in their bedrooms, and you can’t legislate morality any more than the left can legislate economic equality. So please, stick to strong defense and fiscal restraint, mmmkay?

And by fiscal restraint, I do not mean screeching indignantly about entitlements out of one side of your mouth, while lobbying for pork for your district out of the other.

Major Dick Winters, commander of Easy Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division immortalized in “Band of Brothers,” died last week.

Winters died following a several-year battle with Parkinson’s disease, longtime family friend William Jackson said Monday.

An intensely private and humble man, Winters had asked that news of his death be withheld until after his funeral, Jackson said.

Many people believe America is on the decline. Perhaps that is so, but there once was a time when she produced men like Dick Winters and his comrades.

And something tells me, our military is full of similar such men even today. While there are, there is still hope.