1. The Village of Smuglye-on-Lake is angry with the federal government. Washington census snoopers report a 2010 population of less than 350 compared to the 2000 figure of more than 450. This will result in a massive loss of federal dollars which we might be able to use, for instance, to help enforce the new cat law. This statute makes it a criminal act to feed any cat for which the SOL resident cannot prove ownership.
(I am working on a suggested ordinance to require common-sense registration and and regulation of cats, feral and domestic. It's for the children.)
2. Our largest newspaper mourns the possibility of reduced federal block grant programs. For one thing, cuts would defund rehabilitation slush pots for a neighborhood in Des Moines where "In 2001, 45 percent of the houses in the neighborhood had conditions rated "below normal" or worse...:
Nine years and $2.7 million later, the neighborhood boasts "... the proportion of properties in "below normal" or worse condition is down to 24 percent.
Some kind of a Garrison Keillor moment exists here. My reading of Pascal, Pythagoras, Obama, and other great number thinkers suggests that normal is that mathematical point on a continuum at which about half of whateverthefreak you are counting lies above and half below.
I was pretty lame in arithmetic class, so I may be wrong. But if I happen to nail it here, it seems to me that federal grant money disrupts the entire mathematical underpinning of our universe, and we are about to face a drastically altered reality.
Why, in such a parallelish universe we might even have a left-wing American leader -- elected on an anti-war, anti-intervention platform -- lobbing cruise missiles at starving camel drivers and keeping the Gitmo jail open and okaying military tribunals for former starving camel drivers.
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