A local bulletin board is polluted this week with one of those beneath-stupid arguments about coaching football -- for third-graders. (I'd be pleased to post the url if I thought this corner of the Blogopolis SMSA held anyone dull enough to care about parents' opinion on whether the "win!" or "let-em-all-play" philosophy should prevail in coaching pre-pubes.)

However, it occurs to me that in about 20 years a good many alumni of this third-grade football mania will be shocked to discover that the world economy has too few insurance-selling jobs to accommodate all the disappointed young men who planned a lush living in the NFL . The brighter among them would gladly trade a working knowledge of Chinese or Arabic for all memories of the ass-pats they earned by not falling down too much.

If you can teach a kid the off-tackle slant when he's nine you can sure as Hell get him started on something likely to be useful.

Full disclosure: I personally played third-grade football if one of us could find the needle to blow up David Stouffer's leaky football and if the mean big kids weren't using the vacant lot and if it really seemed like more fun than walking down to the river with a cane pole. What a waste. If my community had had an organized youth football league and a few dozen daddies who were, themselves, frustrated athletes, why, heck, me and Joe Namath would have been team mates and drinking buddies. I guarantee it, and just writing about it deeply saddens me about my deprived childhood.

The Natural Perversity of Inantimate Objects

Today's little trip is a seven-mile run to the Ford dealership to determine if the F150 clutch transplant is completed. Then I can obey Horace Greeley. I shouldn't be here in Smugleye-on-Lake today. I should be approaching Three Forks. Yeah, maybe I should have seen it coming, but before I loaded the camper there wasn't the slightest hint of slipping.

Meanwhile, I submit that you don't read Reason magazine often enough. Me either, but I resolve to go there more often for things like this explanation of why the trouble with America is an excess 0f civility.

See You Later Allig ... (ZAP)

I'm sure Corb is a nice kid, a credit to rock and rollers everywhere, and fully deserving of his new scholarship. But I wish he'd explained the conundrum to the doowhackadoo photographer and editor. Solid body guitars need to be plugged in. Plugging them in while seated seaward of the waterline could result in a very short set.

L'etat, c'est WTF?

Read this and wonder how President Barack Obama could make this guy a czar of anything, much less of the regulatory function of the United States government -- even after we make allowance for the source, World Net Daily.

Cass Sunstein either means it or he doesn't when he writes: "There is no reason to believe that in the face of statutory ambiguity, the meaning of federal law should be settled by the inclinations and predispositions of federal judges. The outcome should instead depend on the commitments and beliefs of the President and those who operate under him."

Imagine how smoothly everything would work if President Obama and Regulatory Czar Sunstein sat down over a beer and decided how the Commerce Clause and the "general welfare" language of the Preamble should be interpreted.

For one thing it would save all that expense of the judicial branch of government. And maybe the legislative. If this nincompoop thinks Obama ought to be permitted to interpret the law, he might as well let the new Sun King make it in the first place.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the active governing class: This is why you scare us shitless, off our writing chairs and into the shops where ballistics in the lingua franca.

To put it as plainly as possible, Cass, we have a Constitution for the express purpose of keeping humans such as yourself where you belong, in a dim attic, unwashed, contemplating your navel, shunned in the full Mennonite manner by all to whom liberty is an idea not yet dead and monarchy is not the ideal to be desired.

(H/t to John of the GMA)