Now hear this!

Beautiful rain -- enough to make a difference and enough to set me to small indoor chores. One of them was to replace batteries and clean up my work horse USN battle lantern, a mate to the one on the right.



It has become a semi-collectible, but mine is a user, most often employed for spotting New Dog Libby when she wanders a little too far on her midnight pee excursions. 

The left three are WW2 models, gross and complicated things designed by BuShips  in accord with its old motto: "Damn it, put in some more parts!"  These oldies had oddball batteries,  and maybe bulbs,  available only through the federal bureaucracy. They had a cable and mechanical relay system to switch them on when ship's power failed. Surprisingly, they sometimes worked, though if you needed to carry one around you had to perform a little dance of disconnecting the power cable and twisting it out of its bracket.

The models like mine came along after I'd retired my sea boots,  in the 60s. They're built of brutish plastic and use off-the-shelf lantern batteries (two 6-volters) and sealed-beam bulbs. Battery life is extraordinary. This replacement was the first one in years of intermittent use.

Excuse me. I'm getting a somewhat gushy here over a freekin' flashlight. That's probably because I just did a small Wikiwander on Navy battle lanterns and found that good men have all but dedicated their lives to the subject.





The entire project -- a should-read for retrogeeks -- is here.  Click the arrow for the slide show. 

Then maybe you'll want to go see the big picture -- where the refurbished lanterns go --  on damndest ship restoration project you ever saw. 

USS Slater was a DE, destroyer escort, newer than Queeg's Caine but still a toy boat on a real ocean.  And for one man's perspective on going to sea in one, consider:

My Gearing class destroyer hung around with cruisers and aircraft carriers, big ships. The crews would fraternize in Oriental dives on WestPac deployment. We always took the usual shots at one another's  ship assignments, bullshit stuff but good for easing tensions.

As, Them to Us: "How to you wind up the rubber band on your bath tub toy?" And Us to Them: "You clowns really get sea pay for living on that building?" Etc. Just very young men releasing testosterone at a low, banal, and friendly level. 

But, then, often enough, the SunTory (not bad, about like Jim Beam) would give us the comradely maudlins. Big ship guys would salute tin-can riders. They would, they avowed, desert to the Commies rather than face the risk of destroyer life.

Now that I've told you all about that, one point remains: My tiny little destroyer weighed about 2200 tons. The USS Slater, DE,  displaced about 1200 tons. And she sailed the same damned ocean though the same damned weather.

And that is why you see me facing Albany with a snappy salute to the guys restoring her -- and to the probably long-gone counterpart of yours truly who sailed her a generation earlier. Sir, by the numbers, you're about twice the man I am.

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Gee, that's a lot to excrete from putting new batteries in a flash light. But, as I said, it's raining. Nothing good on the electric teevee, either.

You mean "pull the pin?"

I'm not going to post the site, just the headline covering a Wall Street Journal video.

"Fed Could Pull the Trigger to Save Economy Wednesday."

There isn't enough Prozac to make me feel better about that. It means the Fed will admit  to upping it order for green ink and paper.

I'll post this one, though. Stock traders made long bets this afternoon when Ben told some congresscritters he "has the tools" to masturbate stimulate the banks, meaning he's probably getting ready to use them.

It gets a little worse when Bernanke and the  Gnomes of Everywhere get together again  in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The Eurognome is Mario Draghi  who bosses the European Central Bank. Mario wants to chat with Ben about:

...yield-band targets under a new bond-buying program to let it shield its strategy and avoid speculators trying to cash in, central bank sources told Reuters on Friday. 

And that means keeping interest rate plans secret from everyone except guys like Bank America, Chase, Wells Fargo, etc. They'll probably also let your legislators in on the gag, too. Just not guys like you and me -- y'know, speculators trying earn an obscene two or three per cent on their savings.

Sort of a Roy Bean with an M4gery?

They still elect "county judges" down in Texas, though I gather from Wiki they pass their time more in general-purpose bureaucracy than in judging. To this Yankee eye they seem something like a super-commissioner of a county with the added authority to marry folks up and declare war on the United Nations.

One of them in Lubbock County is awful worried about His Ineptness getting re-elected and handing America over to Ban-Ki-moon (a foreigner), so he nailed some air time on a local Fox teevee station to warn folks to vote Republican. But, if that doesn't work, to rest easy anyhow because Judge Tom Head and the sherf  will be at the ramparts.

As he* sees things,  it's either a Romney victory or:

I'm thinking the worst. Civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe. And we're not just talking a few riots here and demonstrations, we're talking Lexington, Concord, take up arms and get rid of the guy. Now what's going to happen if we do that, if the public decides to do that? He's going to send in U.N. troops.

Gee, there's a lot of Bilderburg there, and, by the way, you do know that the Illuminati abuse little boys in the Bohemian Grove, don't you?

 "I don't want 'em in Lubbock County. OK. So I'm going to stand in front of their armored personnel carrier and say 'you're not coming in here'."

I worry about that image, Judge. It sounds quite a bit like that fracas in Tienanmen Square back in '89. It may have slipped your mind that the guy who faced the tank was another one of them foreigners.

"And the sheriff, I've already asked him, I said 'you gonna back me' he said, 'yeah, I'll back you'. Well, I don't want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me."

And here we get to the proximate cause of Judge Head's high-temperature rhetoric. He wants a tax increase -- 1.7 per cent -- to hire  more "trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me." 

Judge Tom Head, the Audie Murphy of the Staked Plains.

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it is unpleasant to make fun of guys like this. I think they're underdeveloped souls, sometimes "well-meaning," but usually befuddled by the complexities of human organization and seeking clarity through conspiracy theories while burdened with personal fantasies of leading a heroic resistance.

The judge speaks small pieces of a certain truth. The Obama crowd probably does cherish sweet dreams of one world; all lesser life forms such as you and me carefully regulated by Platonic Men of Gold, themselves.

Who doubts that their dreams remain just that because they understand that we peons will forbid it, politically for as long as remotely possible, then and only then -- in extremis  -- and may it be delayed a thousand years ---directly. One trouble with armed insurrections is that they tend to blow up a lot of cute three-year-old kids.

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*This fellow is undoubtedly an aberrant. I've known quite a lot of Texans (nice people) and even Texas politicians. Taken as a whole, they're no crazier than anyone else, although they do seem to put zippitydoodahs in public office at a slightly higher-than-average rate. That Richardson woman. That Dick Perry. Or maybe not. Even here in an exemplary state we have to answer for the Tom-Toms. Harkin. Vilsack. Sorry.

I told you God hates Republicans

From the AP's  Ten things you should know today:"


5. TROPICAL STORM ISAAC HAS REPUBLICANS WORRIED
After hitting hurricane strength it could target Tampa, right when the GOP holds its convention there.

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History repeats. I was with a delegation to the '08 convention in St. Paul. About the first day a hurricane threatened some place on the Gulf, and as a matter of sincere moral concern  good PR we suspended  "business" for a day or so. *

A handful of my fellow delegates and I spent the off day capitalizing on the hospitality of lobbyists, and I think this was the time I managed to scarf up about two hundred bucks worth of sushi paid for by the teachers' union.  The sacrifices a guy makes for his country.

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*This is slightly misleading. Little if any business is done at national political conventions. It's more accurate to think of them as made-for-teevee movies. Any and all of them could be appropriately titled "Pandering with Pep."