Travis McGee, futurist

" I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of a an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.

"I am, to put it as bitterly as possible, a romantic. I know a windmill when I see one, by God...".

The Quick Red Fox, p.96 of the early Fawcetts

...and another thing about Europe:

A European sorting his nuts and bolts and wrenches is engaging in only the most rudimentary forms of thought -- eight millimeters comes before nine millimeters so this goes here. (Places wrench appropriately.) Indeed, Diane Fossey's buddies could do as well.

An American engaged in rationalizing his workshop is a tour de force of complex calculation. Lessee, the 5/8 is here so I need a the 11/16 on the next peg, no, wait, i probably better save room for the 21/32 I use on the Kubota thurble bypass and....

Maybe that's why as kids we could always pick up a little change following Brit sports car down the road, collecting parts.

It's little wonder that dullard Europe is defined as that place which screws things up badly every generation or two and whistles for Uncle to come on across the Atlantic and pull its metric nuts out of the fire.

I am typing this with greasy fingers, by jingo.

"Kennedy to Lie in Repose in Boston..."

No, actually. Not in Boston. Not anywhere else. Nor, for that matter, in any bodily position.

(It's a current AP headline on a piece that draws on Lincolnesque imagery to further sanctify a Massachusetts politician who recently died.)

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."