The Gentleman Bounty Hunter Stops Only For a Broken Heart

Jennifer Love Hewitt

We are thirteen nautical miles off Nevis, moving to the Southeast at a slow seven knots and we are waiting to see what the issue with the electrical system amounts to. The Admiral Hassenpfeffer has had intermittent power failures all morning. Mr. Peej has been all throughout the engine room, and, in careful consultation with the engine room crew, his official explanation is "gremlins." I have accepted that, but, when we get to Nevis, we will call on board someone who might have a better grasp of the issue. Let's hope we can find someone who knows how Father had the system re-worked in 1976. Remember now, this is either a French or Italian corvette, with a keel laid down in the 1930s, and she was taken by the Germans, overhauled, and turned into a fleet raiding surface vessel that ended up abandoned in North Africa in 1943. She has been through a great deal.

But, as it stands, not as much as poor Jennifer Love Hewitt:

After a year-long romance, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Jamie Kennedy have broken up, a rep has confirmed exclusively to PEOPLE.

No further details were available.

Though some in the blogosphere called them an unlikely couple, Kennedy and Hewitt regularly gushed over each other.

When Kennedy first confirmed the romance in March 2009, he told Ryan Seacrestduring a radio interview, "I'm in love!" Describing his costar on Ghost Whisperer, Kennedy said: "It's like, 'Wow, you are hot. You can sing, you can dance, you're like, so smart and, wow, you can cook pasta fagioli, too.' "

I ordered the ship to come to a halt, and we shut down all of the electrical systems and recycled all of the power after a two hour cool down period. I have no scientific reasons for doing this; I just wanted to bring everyone and everything under my control to a halt. I forbade speaking, and I had everyone go to their bunks and reflect on the sadness that is the love life of an American treasure. A few members of the crew from St. Thomas burst into tears because they thought Jessica Simpson had died. When we finally explained what had really happened, they felt better, but they still wanted me to power up the vessel and call out on all radio channels and confirm that Jessica was still alive, and so we did and it took a half an hour before a Coast Guard cutter out of Miami confirmed for us that Jessica was fine.

I get a little tired of that whole "this channel is for emergencies only" lecture. Well, what constitutes and emergency in your little navy world, sir? Do you know when saying "yadda, yadda, yadda" is appropriate? When a man wearing lieutenant-commander rank starts lecturing you on a radio network that rarely provides any useful information to you anyway, that's when.

In my life, an emergency is when a young lady's love life and well being is the subject of national media attention. It's when a broken heart and a tender heart are torn apart by the loss of a boyfriend over the weekend before St. Patrick's Day and the start of March Madness. Even Miranda would fit into that category, were she to actually start trying to attract a decent man. One thing you can count on when it comes to Jennifer or Jessica--they shave their armpits and legs. Miranda? Who knows? I refuse to ask her when she's moody. As much as I would like to write about her love life, she still has enough passwords to thwart me.

I bought a desk on St. Kitts

White House Bay, St. Kitts, March 2010

This Gentleman Bounty Hunter reminds you to pay attention to the wayward members of your family.

I've just spent the better part of two days here on the island of St. Kitts, walking around, poking my nose into the shops, buying things I do not need, and looking for a young lady who left her mother and aunt high and dry with a few unpaid bills. It's the simplest thing in the world to find someone who is broke and has partied their ass off for a few months. You go to the Marriott, you ask about any new waitresses that aren't quite working out, and voila. You have a formerly rich young lady who can't wait tables to save her life shacked up in the overflow rooms on the end of the property, three to a room, of course, trying to scrape together a few hundred dollars in order to get off the island. It's one thing to be the wealthy person down here who can send back some Mahi-mahi if the vanilla creme sauce isn't up to snuff; it's another thing to be the wealthy person who has to wait on that individual. It tends to open the eyes a bit to the world.

Compelling her to return home and see to her affairs wasn't difficult. Her "family friend" was an old perv trying to set something up on the side. I've seen that a million times. Now, I'm certainly an old perv myself, but you don't see me going around using someone else's twentysomething kid as my kept fling in the Caribbean, now do you?

Getting her on the plane was easy. Babs Worthington can talk anyone onto a plane; you should see her at work. Babs has talked more people onto planes than an airborne Jumpmaster.

No, the problem was figuring out how to get this wonderful antique desk back onto the Admiral Hassenpfeffer. Eight drawers, three and a half feet deep, legs like something out of Harvard Law. It reminded me, actually, of the desks they had at Princeton back in the day when I was a student. I love desks that are flat, wide, and deep with wonderful wooden drawers. I covet them. They are pre-computer desks that computers will now work on.

You see, when computers came with big, heavy, ridiculously oversized monitors, desks that were designed for typewriters or basic ledger work no longer made sense, so people discarded them and went for cubicles and corner pieces and triangles specifically designed to accomodate the computers and their monitors. They designed those all-but-forgotten "articulating keyboards" that would rattle and warp and come apart with too much use. What junk. They featured ledges under the desk, extra places for whatever else could be thrown in there, and some desks even had specially notched surfaces where dot matrix printers could feed paper up onto the surface from below.

Times have changed. Monitors are all but small and narrow in their desktop footprint. The old desks everyone got rid of are now fantastic for these things. They really are.

We had to use the crane of course, but getting it below decks and into the state rooms took a vat of butter and some creative lifting and jockeying. Peej and I approached it as a science project; Miranda approached it as a case of greedy nonsense. I paid a lot of money for that desk. I was not to be denied.

The thing that solved our problem for us was the removal of all drawers and the hinges on the doors. Once we had removed those, and buttered up the walls, the thing slid down the rear stairwell as if on rails and then it was two pivots, a lift, and an end over end move to get it into what will now be the computer room. I shall be up all night removing butter from the thing; I am a dedicated man. I shall have my comfort and my antique desk. A little butter never hurt anyone. This stuff comes in big tubs. It's not half bad when you're hungry. Get it under your fingernails and it stings because of all the salt that's in it. Thank God we didn't go with our first instinct and use motor oil.

Getting Out of Maryland Seems to Have Made Perfect Sense

Once Byron is able to safely transport the last of the mink habitat inhabitants down here to St. Thomas, we will no longer have a presence in the State of Maryland. When I made the decision to pull up stakes and leave, there was forty inches of snow on the ground and the Howard County Snow plow driver was throwing bottles of urine at us as he pushed snow into our cul de sac, blocking us in. I shall probably live in New Hampshire once again, but the middling part of the Mid-Atlantic is no where I shall ever live again.

Go straight to hell, Mid-Atlantic. You are uninhabitable for decent people. You are a butt sandwich I'm not going to accept anymore.

That's why I smirked when I read this:

A major nor'easter is expected to bring blizzard conditions to interior New England and heavy rain and near-hurricane-force wind gusts to Northeastern coastal areas Wednesday through Friday.

Little, if any, snow will fall in Boston, Massachusetts, while Washington, New York and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could see as much as 5 inches of snow with locally higher amounts, CNN meteorologist Sean Morris said.

Record snowfall totals of 30 inches or more will be possible across upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, Morris said. Very strong winds will combine with the heavy snow to produce dangerous white-out conditions and widespread power outages.

You can do thirty or forty inches of snow in New Hampshire; they have plows there. They have a snow removal system there. You cannot do that same amount of snow in states like Maryland, which have spent all of their money on schools that don't teach and government programs that ensure that the poor are always poor and cannot read and write. You cannot do that in a state where the people who own snow removal equipment can jack up their prices and collect blood money from the Federal government while you and yours sit snowbound in a development run by an incompetent homeowner's association that forgot to bribe the equipment-starved county to plow them out first.

You would think all of this snow would have saved a company like Hummer; alas, it did not:

General Motors' deal to sell its Hummer brand to a Chinese automaker fell through Wednesday and the company said it now plans to shut down the brand.

GM did not give any details about why the agreement to sell Hummer to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machines Co. Ltd. could not be completed, saying only that it was disappointed it was unable to close the deal.

One of the things that I did notice about the snowstorms we received in Maryland earlier this month was that they revealed that the Hummer did fairly well in the snow; hospitals were forced to use them to get sick people into emergency rooms. The military version of the Humvee is preferable; that thing they call a Hummer is a fraud, but it did look like a pretty good runner in the snow. The military version went through the snow like shit through a skinny goose. I dumped the Suburban because, well, why not? I'd rather get a Mercedes and leave it at that.

On the site where Scuddy's Bar stands, we will construct a mink habitat for Byron and extend our property holdings out and down the narrow lane that brings a single car up to the property. If you were to ask me about hurricanes, I would say that, at least when a hurricane comes and destroys everything, you don't have to wait for a snowplow to come and save you.

If you have a chance, fuss over my blog. It's had the sniffles lately...

Posted via web from An American Lion is on Posterous

The Gentleman Bounty Hunter is Active

Babs stopped by this morning and we greeted her like a long lost companion; at one point, her whooping and pacing around caused a flappitystack of golf magazines to go into the water, right off the deck chair on the Admiral Hassenpfeffer. I suppose we should have filched all of them out of the water, but the current snatched them away and churned them out. At least the Captain Morgan stopped rolling long enough for us to pick it up. Her exuberance would light a city full of dark streets.

Babs is sending us on to St. Kitts. In the early morning of Thursday, the 25th, we will raise up the anchor and sail as quickly as possible from St. Thomas to St. Kitts. Once there, I will go ashore and look for a young lady who left her mother in the lurch over some credit card bills. It totaled around $400,000 I guess. Really, that's trust fund money. Shift some funds, my dear. This is a family that doesn't use trust funds, I am told. Ah, that old saw. Give them a generation and they certainly will.

The young lady has shacked up on St. Kitts and some family friend is, apparently, supporting her. Illicit sexual favors are being exchanged, according to the gossip that passed into the hands of the capable Babs. Old men, young ladies, sex, and boredom. It's the Caribbean. It's like having fish for dinner; it's what you do down here.

Miranda has crewed the Admiral Hassenpfeffer. Twenty new crewmembers have moved aboard and will report to her for assignments. They look weird. I think some of them are either American or Dutch; they have a lot of piercings and whatnot. No way are they Canadian. I gloated about the U.S. beating Canada at dinner and they thought I meant in snowboarding.

Are you watching these Olympics? They're tepid, but that's only because the Russians are awful so far. At least, that's my take.

I have on my Gentleman Bounty Hunter clothes, and my duck pants are looser than they were last spring. My blue dress shirts smelled of mold when we pulled them out of my quarters. Washing them twice with Dreft make them tumble-dry soft. My nunchucks are feeling good. I did forty minutes on the deck, moving from iteration to iteration, and I feel frost. Peej says I can pass for a badass. This has always been the case with me, sir.

St. Thomas Welcomes Us

Out in the harbor, I can see the Admiral Hassenpfeffer because Peej has illuminated the rear deck with the outdoor floodlights. He has decided to paint a large logo on the flat deck, visible from the air. The logo is the old Rogers Defence Industries logo, which was a fist painted on a bread truck, running people over. It was monstrous, and it only lasted until the U.S. government could force Father to change it to something more benign.

Father's decision to create the logo, which I would reproduce if I could, was born of necessity. He did not want to become successful at all; he just wanted to sell things, make money, buy a massive home, and destroy his various enemies. The business world meant little or nothing to him and the society of businessmen at large wasn't one he was comfortable or familiar with.

He liked oversized characters like himself. He was friends with many of the various Secretaries of War and Defense Secretaries throughout the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Everyone else he just sort of ignored. He still claims that Robert McNamara owed him money. For what, we have no idea.

The Rogers Defence Industries logo we ended up going with was a red "RDI" on a silver background, with ruffles along the bottom to signify people. I'm not sure if it ever won any awards, but I cannot find it either. Peej is painting the logo from memory in the hopes that Father will fly over and see it and either lose his mind with rage or see it as a talisman of good luck and good fortune. Peej has nothing else to do. We have to wait and draw a full complement of fuel and then crew the vessel before we can sail.

I have left that to Miranda. Babs has been talking about some people on St. Kitts that she wants me to go and locate and help "persuade" that they should return home to their loved ones. Does going to St. Kitts really appeal to me?

Let's see--I could be home in Maryland, up to my armpits in snow, screaming at the weather and housebound with my family members or I could be in the Caribbean, doing whatever I want. It's really not a difficult choice.

I am a well dressed bounty hunter

How lame do you want to be? Lame enough to wear Abercrombie & Fitch?

Abercrombie & Fitch, the one-time sales and fashion star of teen retailing, has yet to show signs of recovery, raising questions about its grip on teen style.

The New Albany, Ohio, company, seller of $40 T-shirts and $90 jeans, was among the worst performers during the holiday season, even with uncharacteristically high levels of discounting. The retailer posted a 19% decline in December sales at stores open at least a year, with its lowest-priced brand, Hollister, down 25% in December from a year earlier.

Retail analysts said Abercrombie's troubles go beyond pricing to its once unerring sense of style, a problem that could be trickier to fix. The logo T-shirt and torn jeans ensemble that Abercrombie made the unofficial school uniform a decade ago has played out, said Kimberly Greenberger, a retail analyst with Citigroup Inc. who tours malls every two weeks to assess trends. That misstep has created an opening for lower-priced competitors such as Aeropostale Inc. and American Eagle Outfitters Inc., which reported December sales gains of 10% and 7%, respectively.

"The look is stale," Ms. Greenberger said. "They need to figure out what the next hot trend is and push that, because that's the only way out of this downward spiral."

The way out is to market clothing to people like me. Hear me out on this, it's relevant. Or, perhaps not.

I'm 65, but I'm a stylish man. I wear boat shoes without socks (although, when it gets cold, I switch to my LL Bean slippers, the kind that cover my ankles because I cannot abide wearing socks). I wear a blue shirt, tan khakis or duck pants, and it looks great on my frame. I'm still under 190 pounds and I'm tall. The ladies have always liked my flair.

I used to wear this shirt:

Talk about being cut perfectly for my frame. This shirt made me look good. Alas, when we were in the Caribbean last year, I was chased by two men on St. Kitts and they roughed me up pretty good, tearing the pocket and the seam on the right side of the shirt. I went to get another one, but they didn't have my size.

Most of what Abercrombie & Fitch has to offer doesn't really work for me. Too preppy. I'm sensitive to being called a preppy. You call me a preppy, and we're going to rock and roll, sir. There's nothing between us but space and opportunity, and time is on my side. I am locked, cocked, and ready to rock.

Back in the day, I would wear the Abercrombie & Fitch along with everything else, and it was fine. Then, they started pushing their clothing towards people in their teens and twenties. Guess what, Poindexter? Those people don't have jobs anymore. They're broke. They can't afford this stuff anymore. And, more to the point, their parents are broke. The trust funds and investment portfolios took a righteous beating. This is all well documented. Back in the old, old day, such as it was, of course I wore husky boy pants. Yes, I went through a sensitive period where I was a tad bit overweight and not as tall as I am now. Those were days of rage, days of tears. I split the rear seat out of a number of pairs of pants, simply by being as frisky as I was known to be.

Don't listen to these old dingbats. They're so broke, McDonald's won't honor their layaway plan anymore. Snap!

It's not about what a shirt costs. It's about whether or not wearing it works for what I'm presenting on any given day. The presentation that is me doesn't go down the Abercrombie & Fitch path anymore. I have moved on, primarily because they abandoned me. They abandoned the only customers they once had who still have money.

Some business plan, huh?

Hockey or Rich Deadbeats?

If it sounds like we're getting the band back together, it's true.

The insane, miserable cold of the East Coast has driven me to distraction. I woke up last night, scratching dry skin. Half asleep and wondering why I was so miserable, I found myself trying to find my way through the house barefoot. That's when I stumbled out into the garage in order to get some Lubriderm out of the center console of the Suburban. Cold concrete, bare feet, and one and a half minutes of misery later, yes.

It's time to leave and go to St. Thomas.

Will we return? Who the heck knows?

The only reason why we stayed this long was so we could watch hockey. The allure of chasing deadbeats has always pulled at me. Now, that pulling has gotten strong enough to make it actually happen.

You Can't Kill Me Because I Used to Be a Republican

That was one of my favorite lines.

People would rise up against me in chat forums and scream epithets at me. I could tell they were screaming--all CAPS means someone is raising their VOICE. I would be the recipient of endless amounts of abuse. I would deserve this, of course, because I used to love taunting liberals.

Invariably, some schmuck would threaten my life.

My reply?

"You can't kill me. I'm a Republican."

Well, I'm an Independent now, which means I don't roll with the Grand Old Party. They called me three times yesterday for money. I was asked to give that fellow in Massachucetts some money. No thank you, I said as I politely declined. I don't know if he will win. Should he win? It doesn't matter to me. I don't live there; hence, it really is not any of my business. Do I care, in general for the welfare of the Republican Party? Well, we do have a two-party system. It's broken. There's too much money in it to fix it. Oh well.

It's not that I don't care. It's just that I don't see myself identifying with the party of my youth anymore. I'm too open minded. I believe in science. I am of softer heart these days for the sick and the aged--hello, I'm old myself. That Iraq War? Wasn't that great of shakes, you know.

They say that the normal progression of political ideology is to be liberal in your teens and twenties, and then gradually move to the right as you get older and acquire money and property. Nothing has changed in that regard. I'm still as wealthy as I ever was. I am still receiving oodles of money from investments made decades ago. I still get to spend a great deal of Father's money, which is an extra special bonus for me.

I'm just not as enamored with being a Republican anymore. When William Buckley died, a lot of the appeal, intellectually, anyway, died with him.

How to be the Most Dangerous Person in Any Room

The inartful Gentleman Bounty Hunter will say that you should have guns or knives about your person. This is incorrect.

Have danger all about you, under a veneer of grace and charm. Always smile and look like you belong where you are standing. Certain types of people--weak-minded fools, bankers, people who think Seinfeld was funny--are unnerved by confident people who smile. That's why I'm always smiling. I have no idea who those people are until they say something stupid or revealing. And I never wait for my enemies to reveal themselves to me. I'm a businessman. Anyone with a nickel in their pocket is my enemy--until they give me that nickel and don't expect anything from me.

To control a room, never linger in the doorway. Always move into the room and speak loudly and touch as many people as you can, preferably women. If you have to touch another man, the double-tap of a "bro hug" is acceptable only when the man is your inferior. Shoulders are fine; hips? Never.

To bring violence to a room, spin. Stand on your feet, but rotate quickly and spin. Anyone who tries to touch you, slap their hand away. Anyone who puts a body on you becomes an enemy--use your knees and thighs to take them to the floor.



It is paramount that you never surrender control of a room until you are ready. Flee the room if things get really ugly. Do not stop being a gentleman and don't stop believing in your ability to make inanimate objects work on your side. I used to love wing-back chairs for one reason and one reason only: running up to a wingback chair and jumping onto it with one foot while you kick it over onto its back with the other is exactly the way to dominate a room and then leave it. It takes some practice. Go see if they have an old wingback chair at Goodwill, then put it in your rumpus room and practice jumping onto it and surfing it onto its back.