Sen. Ted Kennedy, RIP

May we memorialize and inter Senator Kennedy with more dispatch and greater dignity than is usual when celebrities die. In due course, when the ceremonies are behind us, will come the time for objective evaluation of the man's actual accomplishments and sins. Meanwhile, we can do worse than try to observe Mark Twain's etiquette for funerals.

"Do not criticize the person in whose honor the entertainment is given...

"Listen, with as intense an expression of attention as you can command, to the official statement of the character and history of the person in whose honor the entertainment is given; and if these statistics should seem to fail to tally with the facts, in places, do not nudge your neighbor, or press your foot upon his toes, or manifest, by any other sign, your awareness that taffy is being distributed.

"If the official hopes expressed concerning the person in whose honor the entertainment is given are known by you to be oversized, let it pass -- do not interrupt...

"Do not bring your dog."

You mean I can't have the Kimber right this second?

I credit the peelegs over on one of the sillier Yahoo message boards for alerting us to this encouraging report on the tempering of instant gratification.

The word "layaway" is emerging from the linguistic graveyard, and those of us who've been around for a while can remember our parents in the pre-credit-card days putting things on "layaway." You fork over part of the cost and the store holds your item until you pay it off. This frustrates the infantile demand to get what you want when you want it, but it also yields the sublime grown-up satisfaction of owning things which are paid for before they get inside your house.

Course, the PAbs over at the ACG board find all this frightening. Credit, even if used stupidly a la Bush and Obama, increases the value of their investments which depends on easy credit and circulating pieces of paper which they can, for a time, pretend to be money.

Fa'a Samoa* -- Tales of the South Pacific

As my buddy John says, "Oh, this will end well." (John has been known to express himself sarcastically on rare occasions.)

The government of Samoa has decided to shift from U.S.-style driving to the abominably wrong-sided, wrong-headed, left-wing British system as also employed in New Zealand and Australia.

A Samoan citizen who just bought a new car with the steering wheel where it belongs opposes the switch and has formed a new political party to challenge the national government in Apia. (As a lawyer, wouldn't he just?)

It is, of course, vital that His Obamaness the President and Dame Hillary ("I Ain't Bill") the Secretary of State quickly map out a United States strategy on this crisis in the South Pacific. We cannot afford to wait. At a minimum the Pentagon should rev up the complex to again produce all those wonderful jungle-war toys we knew and loved in Nam.

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*A Samoan phrase trotted out ad nauseum to explain to Westerners that Samoa doesn't give a good goddam about what anyone else thinks.

Domestica

1. On the south shore of the big lake is an ancient restaurant called the Gingham Inn. We do not eat there often enough, and when we do I keep forgetting to order the right thing. Last night we fixed that, and I am again reminded that a proper chicken fried steak is undoubtedly what God has for dinner.

2. The Dog Days of summer are a sultry misery to all Midwesterners. Except this year. For the eighth or tenth time in the Premier Summer of the Obama, I am burning wood.

3. Hedge apples do, in fact, repel spiders. Science be damned.