Moose

Along the Mississippi River, well upstream of the Twin Cities sprawl, a very nice dog, owned by a very nice couple, is quite ill. Recovery is something of a long shot, but maybe if enough good people send enough kind thoughts in that direction...

I've known her for most of her ten years, and may I say that I have never met a dog quite so ... well ... polite.

But not servile, as several woulds-be alphas learned when they finally crossed Moose's tolerance line.

Illiterate Redneck Gun Creeps

BookFinder.com is one of the net's good resources for out-of-print books, and once a year or so it publishes a report on the top 100 searches of its databases. The most recent one shows four of the top hundred to be dangerously subversive rants by armed Enemies of the State:

Keith, Elmer - Hell, I Was There

Rule, Roger C. - The Rifleman's Rifle: Winchester's Model 70, 1936-1963

Sharp, Philip - The Rifle in America

Howe, James Virgil - The Modern Gunsmith

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Nice first editions of the Sharp and Howe books are on the Camp J shelves, but I covet a copy of Keith's book. Also of Bill Jordan's No Second Place Winner.

Travis McGee, horologist

"Meyer, the longest 28 minutes in the world begin when you put the brownies in the oven."

We have already assumed the position?

I make a small hobby of reading survivalist and Armageddon novels. One of them I missed long ago and recently read is a 1971 work called Vandenberg by Oliver Lange.

It's a real stinker with one saving grace -- its premise that Americans have allowed themselves to be conditioned to accept any tyranny so long as they are permitted their accustomed creature comforts. This lets Lange get away with a vast plot simplification about the genesis of America slavery in the late decades of the 20th Century. The Russians destroy Washington, then promise the rest of us three hots and a cot, beer, and plenty of games. We shrug acceptance, even of the concentration camps for the serious non-conformists where the treatment is merely undignified rather than brutal.

After this many months of Obamanization, I do not find Lange's premise incredible.

EDIT: It didn't begin with Obama, of course. He's just the most recent messiah of c'mon c'mon and get happy....