Man against nature

It is in the nature of man to wish to be at a small show about an hour east of here this morning. It is typically a hotbed of loopholes. This is the one where, last year, yours truly loopholed an excellent .30-06 and a pocket full of other shooty trinkets.

Unfortunately, Nature's nature is to subvert such lofty motives, just to keep us humble I suppose.  A sliver of warm front is passing, and with the following clipper, that means all kinds of potential road misery. Light freezing mist and fog are with us now. It's 50-50 whether it will let up or get worse.

My decision is to gather the troops and give it a try. After all, there's a substantial little city about half way. It boasts good ambulance service and a well-equipped emergency room. Yes, it's something like "Here. Hold my beer and watch this," but cabin fever and the prospect of  five days of unbroken Hell-freezing is a powerful motivator.  

We solicit your magic vibes, not only for an uneventful drive, but for several loopholes we can't refuse.

The Peasants Speak

No, I am not being a copper bore again. I'm being a silver bore, merely noting in passing that copper has cracked the $4.50 barrier and that your pre-82 Lincolns are now worth just a curly under three cents.

The more dramatic expression of inflationary alarmism lies in the mint's sale of Silver Eagles last month,  about 6.4 million of them, a record.

Wonder if Ben and Terry and Barack will have anything to say about this plebiscite on the green paper which they jokingly refer to as money.

There are votes and then there are votes, and it's hard to imagine a more sincere ballot than wholesale trading of paper promises for a pretty metal which rings nicely when you drop it on a  counter top.

I'll stop at the WalMart today, hoping Sam's kids haven't received the word yet and are still peddling Federal 550 packs at $18.97

Michelle Bachman -- getting serious about it

She's off to woo the  Republicans in South Carolina who hold one of the South's  earliest presidential primaries. If they should give her the nod, the shelling of Fort Sumter will regress to merely the second unhappiest event in that good state's history.

Maybe the worst thing about existing on the northern plains is the noticeable decline of one's brain power. For instance, I can't remember if the current arctic high pressure system is the fourth or fifth of the season.  Or whether Al Gore invented global warming and Al Sharpton the internet or the other way around.

There are small compensations. As the neurons freeze, it takes less to amuse myself. I just ran a sunrise errand without carefully brushing all the new snow from the hood. "It will blow off on the highway, and that's very pretty."

The  best thing is reading my friends down in the malarial zones.  For instance,  a Texas lady I know is writing that it may snow on the Rio Grande and using a full year's allocation of exclamation points, and that's almost as amusing as scratching designs on my frosted windows.