Cowboy fantasies

It's the summer gun, a Browning for the plains days when a tee shirt, scabby jeans,  and tennies are your basic tactical outfit.

The  July sun glints from the can some slob dropped. Your pleasure is in making the glint jump, 15 times without reloading if you're perfect with your long rifles, 22 times with shorts, a fire power haiku .

The BL22 comes from Japan, precisely made to occidental specifications and as smooth a lever gun can be. It hangs on the living room wall, in deep winter a constant reminder that the world will awaken again.

The real cowboys would have loved its action, quiet for the breed and speedier than anything they knew with its 33-degree lever throw. 

In my 1960s hippie-dippie garb I would never be mistaken for a cowboy. That is a problem only for others.  The Browning in hand, I am Rory Calhoun, and the womenfolk back in camp tend the dutch oven in perfect safety.

Haiti Cheri

The teevee pundits are all over themselves wondering why Baby Doc came home.  The dunderheads. Two simple explanations cover it.

1. He's run through what he stole prior to 1986 and needs to replenish the numbered accounts.

2. Not even the French could stand him anymore.

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And isn't it weird to think that if the cheering throngs who greeted him at Port au Prince put him back in power, it might represent an improvement on what those poor bastards have suffered in past  quarter century?

I don't know how I feel about the California future, the coast cracking off and sliding down the continental slope when San Andreas burps again, brush fires taking out everything up to 4,000 feet.

Or the latest revenge of the Cosmos, the central valley flooded by Noah V. 2. (No kidding, the geologist mentions 40 days.)

On the surface, ridding ourselves of the California SSR menace seems like a fine idea.   But  the silly place has long attracted otherwise perfectly sensible Midwesterners*, and a fellow hates to think of them so badly inconvenienced. Life is full of moral quandaries.

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*It is long suspected that these transplanted flyover-country folks -- along with the swarthy illegals -- perform whatever useful work gets done out there.

Tan me hide when I've died, Clyde

Nothing like good chuckle to lighten an arctic morning.

The kangaroo stomp, at Brigid's place. 

(Besides, it is about the correct length for an internet video -- 12 seconds.)