Sirocco

Only colder.

Maybe it will simplify my life.  This part of the world is dry. There's been virtually no rain since July. A burning ban was decreed in  September, just as the leaves began to fall. There are 70-some trees on the post itself, hundreds more in the surrounding tactical operations zone.  So they pile up to a troublesome degree.

It isn't  just the aesthetics. You lose things in them. Like the loppers I've been looking for for weeks. Like the wood from the  dead oak I took down and bucked Thursday. And I'd have sworn there was an old girl friend around here somewhere.

But the wind is off the lake today, blowing across this installation and toward the woods to the north. It's working it way up to something like 40 mph, meaning I think I can put the rejuvenated Toro to work stirring them up so Mother Nature can waft them away.

Then I can find and resume splitting the fuel.

Then maybe I'll have enough energy left to reduce the chaos in the guest cabin for the comfort of my well-armed kids and friends coming next week  to shoot at pheasants and fondle one another's bird dogs.

I'd rather finish Hoyt's novel about Custer  (The Last Stand), but I think I  already know how it's going to come out, so maybe not.  That leaves least at least one other slothful temptation. Again, though, I already know what makes a Winchester 88 go bang, so maybe I can leave the new one in the rack until after sundown.

Everything is this report is literally true. Except maybe I lied a little about an old girl  friend hiding in the leaves.

Speaking of Greek politicians

It is pleasant to look upon the last Greek citizen known  to work a full six-day week.

Ingratitude

You and I and all our neighbors have, at huge expense, dispatched our president to "The South of France"  for purposes of advising Europe on its debt problems. It's his second day there, and we have yet to receive one token of thanks from the Old World -- not a wedge of brie, nary a Black Forest cuckoo clock nor a jug of olive oil.

I believe I speak on behalf of the entire nation in expressing shock at this slight.

It is no comfort to side with the sorehead who remarks that having Barack Obama as a financial advisor is much like having Lindsay Lohan as your substance abuse counsellor.

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Note to the editors of America: Do you really believe referring to it as "The South of France" make you seem all cosmopolitan and jet-setty?  Okay, then the next time His Obamaness flies into Ardmore, we want to hear you report that he arrived in the South of Oklahoma.

Yeah, he probably groped 'em

In a society governing itself in mature ways, the political response would be, "So what?"

My belief, based on nothing by way of fact other than what everyone has seen, is that he had a lech on for the office help and did a little probing in hopes of getting lucky. That makes him tacky, distasteful, boorish, socially inept.

It does not insert him into another minority group. The generation of executives from whom he chose his mentors was rife with bosses who believed it best if the girls in the typing pool could type, but, if they couldn't, might be retained for other positions.   Call it wrong, but recognize that it was the culture and it took an unusually strong man to resist.

A morning review of Politico shows nine fat stories on office groping in the 90s by the man would would be president.  Probably that many more are being run through spell czeck. The underlying theme is that a man guilty of a furtive slap and tickle is unqualified to administer the federal government; a  man such as William Jefferson Clinton.

There are good reasons to oppose this guy, to see him as a  buffoon. China on the verge of nuclear capability. The 999 plan (crafted solely to seem simple to the dullest voter).  His love relationship with fiat currency and high-speed presses over at  Printing and Engraving.

Inviting Whazzername to his apartment is not one of those reasons. If it were, the nation would be forced by logic to cancel the halo of one John F. Kennedy.

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The real damage is to the quality of the national dialog. There for a while we thought it could go no lower.