Where life is better

It's Dakota/Lakota country, where the Sioux forged a pact with the pony and created a culture. Where  Jinglebob still works broken land, one foot in  the 21st Century and one in the  the 19th.

Bell, California and my Ditch Digger

The hands are wringing and the tears flowing.

How, oh how, could a pipsqueak city  of 36,000 let things get so far out of hand? An $800,000 mayor. A $457,000 police chief. A $376,000 assistant city manager. Five city council members at $100,000 each.

The guy who digs my ditches knew years ago, even though he, like the rest of us, never heard of Bell before the Los Angeles Times made it a poster child for avaricious politicians and bureaucrats run amok. He's  a thoughtful guy who likes to read and to discuss "why things are so f----d up."  His answer one cold morning over  post-excavation coffee: "Because we need better people." Not better politicians; he and you and I know that is a fool's dream.

No little group of elected and appointed thieves steals $5.5  million  from a small city unless the population is composed of docile apes,  too dumb or lazy or complacent to give a damn.

That kind  of theft can't be hidden. Any junior-college trained  bookkeeper with a four-buck pocket calculator can identify it.  Any reporter good enough to hold down a job with an  Arkansas weekly can make it an issue.

Where in perdition was the Bell  electorate on Nov. 29, 2005,  when the thugs pushed through a charter municipal government system with a total turnout of 400, including, according to Wiki, 200 dubious absentee ballots? Where has that same electorate been in the five ensuing years.

To Hell with Bell and its inhabitants.  You deserved no better, and unless you're willing to begin acting like United States citizens, you will get no better. You'll go back to Dancing with the Stars and the latest from Fox on Lindsey Lohan, and two years from today the carnivorous monkeys will be back, eating what ever is left of your  undead faces.

Rule 1 of making a republic work is, "Pay attention."  Fail and you deserve every thing you get.

A pier, haiku version

Maybe the impulse to post the spike knife came naturally from yesterday's  nautical labor. For strictly bureaucratic reasons, I had to lengthen  my new dock before October 15. Otherwise I would never, ever, be permitted to expand it beyond the 16 feet I now want to the legal maximum of 32 feet which I may someday want. I settled for one more eight-foot section.

Technically, it is not a dock, but a pier. I've been away from living on salt water so long I fall into corn-field usage.

It will make a convenient place to tie -- chain, actually --  the canoe, and a comfortable perch for fishing.   It's on a point about 50 yards from the canal outlet to the big lake,  and the water is good for walleyes in the spring and fall.

Installing a dock is one part brute labor, another part finicky adjustment of supporting poles, a third part  lesson in not dropping tools, and a fourth laboratory work on the differing physics of moving about in chest deep water as opposed to air.

The marlinspike knife

Posting pictures is fussy and iffy  around here. The reasons are simple. I am inept. I work from a disorganized computer. Still, it's sometimes easier and more fun than trying to create a few dozen words of coherent thought, hence the knife photo.

I've had others, but Davie Jones snatched them because I neglected  a first principle of seamanship: Any knife you use at sea  (or, in one case, on the Kawishiwishi River in the far north woods)  should be tied to your body.

It is a marlinspike knife, or a bos'n's  knife, or a rigger's knife, among other names.  The sheepfoot blade reduces surprise punctures in your sails. The  spike is for marling, from "marlin," a nicely aromatic  tarred twine. To marl is to wrap marlin around another line, for appearance, chafe protection, better gripping.

The spike helps Jack separate strands of the marlin and to wind and tighten it around the larger line.  It sees just as much use in splicing and complicated knotting. It punches holes in leather,  canvas, and annoying ship mates.

In one case,  a Buck version also intimidated a young lady security attendant at Washington National. This was pre-TSA, in the era when carrying a pocket knife into the Friendly Skies was not , ipso facto, a terrorist act. She summoned a mature cop who shrugged it off and waved me to the boarding area.

Geeking it out:  A marlinspike may also stand alone, a simple tapered metal thing. A wood version is a fid. You are now prepared to go to sea.

This one is marked "Spencer 1976."  The white paint number suggests it may have been issued to a cadet some where.  Damned midshipmen kids are always losing stuff.