Terror in the Heartland

I have no explanation for it other than that we are being infiltrated by semi-sentient vertebrates deemed too kooky for San Francisco.

You'll recall that a few months ago a minor panic made big Iowa news when someone reported a suspicious bomb-like device in the road. It turned out to be a roadkill muffler.

Now come the media to report that the cops went full anti-terror tactical when a man in uniform and carrying a rifle was seen running through a field a couple of days ago.

The massed forces of law and order converged and discovered he was a National Guardsman on a training run. The AP says the cops "determined the rifle he was carrying was a training model and loaded."

You go ahead and figure that out. A loaded rubber duck?

Policeman Kelly Fitzpatrick said the soldier, "didn't use the amount of moxie and common sense that should be expected in the present day." If so, I personally assign the blame less to the soldier and more to the "present day."

If the terrorists' objective was to turn us into an a diapered nation with 911 tattooed on the backs of our hands and all the courage of Uncle Wiggly, they're succeeding admirably.

...by the company they keep

"Hank (Johnson) is a true leader who represents the very best essence of a public servant."

(President Obama on Hank's campaign site.)

Spring Cleaning

The result of a hard day's puttering. Pride has a comparative element, and the place looks impressive only to those intimately involved in sweeping up and hauling out just under ten gallons of sawdust. That became landscaping material. Another two or three five-gallon pails, full of this and that, are on their way to the landfill.

Having certain acquisitive and retentive traits leads to clutter, but I applied Step 2 of my program, asking frequently: "What's the worst thing that can happen if I toss this box of crap?" Usually the answer was "A trip to town on the virtually non-existent chance you someday really need (a short piece of web cargo strap; a rusted Taiwanese center punch; a coffee can stuffed with audio cable and RCA plugs, etc.") The payoff is the ability to find things like my hammer and the drill press.

How to go to college

The pliers are by Crescent, although hard use and patina removal over the decades have obscured that fine old company's lettering.

They and some cousins rode the leather tool pouch at my hip from 12:30 p.m. until 5 p.m. five days a week for something over two years at Northern Iowa.

Mornings were devoted to the rhetoric of Edmund Burke, the impenetrable intrigue of Chinese and Japanese history, and Professor Erma Plaehn's unusual understanding of how government really works as opposed to the bull slung by my high school civics teacher.

And delighting in the only academic saint I ever met, Dr. M.B. Smith. He taught me about psychology and the strange behavior of crowds, although his courses were offered through the English department. Once in a while you could get him to reminisce about his days as an irregular in Bataan and Mindanao.

Evenings were sometime devoted to debauchery, sometimes to study, and depending on the state of my finances, sometimes to tending bar at the Circle in Cedar Falls or the Golden Garter in Waterloo.

But the pliers really define those years me, in part because they came with a WW2 Jeep, still in near-military attire. I ranged it topless far and wide across the campus, the tool pouch magically transformed to 1911 leather, filled with a service auto, cocked and locked. My assignment to add an outlet to the house mother's apartment in Campbell Hall became, for a few fantastic moments en route, an order to capture Rommel, alive if possible. The fate of Overlord depended on me.

Note the grips wrapped with friction tape, a wonderful product now harder to find and sometimes revoltingly called "hockey tape" because puck thumpers like to wrap their handles in it. The 3M version goes for nearly five bucks a small roll, about what we paid for a case of the stuff. What you see above, however ugly, has endured since at least the 70s. I am always alert for a box of auction sale junk containing a few rolls. It is to plastic tape what burled walnut is to synthetic stocks.

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You got dirty working for the excellent Eugene Eddy, foreman of the college electrical shop. You got frustrated. You got tired of working over your head in crawl spaces while breathing the mouse-crap laden dust of a century-old building. But you endured because you liked eating.

It's one way to go to college, and I hope a couple of lads I love don't have to do it like that. But remember, guys, if necessary and with enough balls, you can.