The trip starts when you begin stocking the book locker with appropriate reading and research matter. So. for everyone who has been in my house in the past two years: Where are the rest of my Rocky Mountain fur trade books? I warn you that I can be a mean SOB when aroused.

Cash for Clunkers reckoning

This is about the time the first or second car payments are due from the citizens who bit on the cash for clunkers deal. Listen sharply for the first whinings that the gummint ought to step in and restructure the auto loans.

Well, Hildy Johnson would have understood

Someone on a military radio net says "bang, bang, bang" and CNN/Fox News defecate all over themselves trying to scoop the world on a "shots fired on the Potomac" drama.

Virtually every elevision " journalist " involved in this fubarathon holds a college degree in journalism. Among people with even the slightest sense of what reporting and editing should be, such a degree has come to command the same level of respect as a certificate of attendance at an Arkansas institute of cosmetology.

There are enough projects going on around here to challenge my mind all I care to, so the current reading is light. I pulled Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies from the shelf and rediscovered how much fun that C.S. Forester series is. Also, it's a painless way to to refresh your memory on the Napoleanic Wars and assorted other European tomfoolery at the cusp of of the 18/19th centuries.