Hello, Monday

Cheerily in front of a small fire on a 37-degree morning, I attended to Dr. Nancy Snyderman, she of the whip-me shoes and the MSNBC gig.

She praised Mayor Bloomberg for killing the Big Gulp. "That's what leaders do ... it's a matter of public health."   Yes. When Americans are fatter than a Somali goat boy the Republic is lost.

So do your part. Find some dude drinking a  Dr. Pepper and shoot him. Pour encourager les autres.

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Over on CNN the newsies offered an insipid campaign analysis. Who's "better" on gun control, Obama or Romney?  Not even CNN could root out a difference.  They both detest armed proles but, having counted us, find silence expedient. Of course if His Ineptness wins, he'll have a lot more flexibility.


The highlight turned out to be an allegation that Americans, collectively, possessed  guns at a rate of 88.8 per hundred. Okay, I'll scarf up that credibility enhancing "point-eight" and merely observe that makes us 11.2 guns-per-hundred shy of the optimum.

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The motivation to rant hatefully --  meaning usefully --is still low. I dislike being insipid, but, dagnabbit, it's just too hard to hate when you're feeling spiritually obese.

Lessee, among other things...

--K and D delivered a weighty home-grown watermelon  last night, and I offered a fine fat "Oktoberfest" Marzen in thanks.

--My oldest friend, resident of one of the large eastern communes for many decades, visited. We continued the political debate begun when we were in junior high, back in the Coolidge administration or thereabouts.  As the curtain fell we agreed that things are badly f*cked up. (N.B. He  isn't fat, but he's sturdier than a rural Ethopian, so I suppose the good MSNBC doctor could find something horrifying about his Body Mass Index.)

--I'm idling away some spare time with a great rarity -- a readable college text book. Can't remember where I picked up Kent Steckmesser's The Westward Movement ; A Short HIstory,  but I'm glad I did. The chapters on the Rocky Mountain fur trade are stunningly well written and exasperatingly free of the usual college-professor mistakes. He's even careful to lay out the evidence that John C. Fremont would be a "whodat?"  except for (a) having married the boss's daughter and thereby (b) acquired the money to hire Kit Carson and Tom Fitzpatrick to take his hand and lead him around the American West.