The Public Vagina

If we must talk about it, I suppose we have to call it something, and vagina is technically accurate. Furthermore it is more, errr,  value-neutral than the four-and-five-letter synonyms of the locker room. So vagina it is as we chart the American future.

Get used to its ubiquity.  It has already begun to take root as a base for grammatical compounding. Such as "vagina-gogue," an offering in the National Review (of all places) by Michelle Malkin. She's furious at  Code Pink for fielding members dressed up like vaginae.  While I can't work myself up to a Malkin level of shrieking neocon rage, I too find it distasteful.

On aesthetic grounds, the costumed Pinkers resemble the female part only in the sense that a Salvador Dali clock resembles a clock. Certainly Dali had a First-Amendment right to draw slack, droopy, off-colored timepieces.

The ladies -- and a man or two, I gather from the news photos -- are similarly protected. Just as Stanley Kubrick was in gluing misshapen codpieces to his young thugs in "A Clockwork Orange."  If we want freedom of speech we learn to accept occasional ugliness along with, as in this case, the stupidity of vagina-as-political-tool.

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The Pinkers and those who, like Malkin, take them seriously represent our failure persuade the masses and their political masters to raise their eyes about three feet -- from the national pelvis to the national brain.

I don't know if abortion is murder in the civil sense. I don't know if it is right or wrong to turn females into a financially protected or privileged class on the basis of their special health-care needs. (Or males for theirs.)  I do know that braying politicians are burdened with identical ignorance although they have struck electoral gold in pretending otherwise. Take a poll on "social issues." Count the votes. Plurality equals morality. Morality requires a law.

Mr. Obama, Mr. Romney, and all of your acolytes:  The world you aspire to rule is roiled by potential tragedy which might -- just might -- be tamped down by intelligent political effort. The problems are neither vaginal nor penile. They are economic, military, and organizational.

It is undoubtedly a futile dream that between now and November 6 you would elevate your focus, up from  the Y to the center of reasoning.

The fact that you won't makes some of us crotchety.

Softly, softly, cache monkey

The AP is carrying a rambling but interesting review of Asian monkeyshines. It concentrates on squabbles about which nations own which guano piles in the western Pacific.

It is refreshingly free of explanations that Hillary Rodham is there, on the job, and carrying solutions to Oriental angst such as the Korea-Japan spat over the Dokdo Islands. This strategic treasure in the Sea of Japan is about half-way between the disputants. It is made up of 46 acres of rock which, at last report, was home to a Korean octopus fisherman, his wife, and a handful of ROK cops.


"Korea and Japan have a bitter history  (says The Associated Press)   ...  Thumbing one's nose at Tokyo has long had substantial cache for millions of Koreans.

Uhh, look. A Rocky Mountain fur trapper hid his plews in a cache. A girl I knew in Yokosuka sometimes stuck a flower in her hair. That gave her a certain cachet.

I know. Spell-check is cheaper than an editor.

Shooting up the cow pasture

The new Remington 760 got its first workout as a Camp J resident yesterday.

As a matter of biology, I report that even a middlin' load of 125 grains at something like 2900 feet per second makes a guy wish for more padding than one layer of tee-shirt cotton; a .30-06 round from a seven and one-half-pound rifle is tolerable, but it gets your attention. (For comparison, a Garand weighs about ten pounds.)

We fired at 80 yards in K's pasture from an improvised shooting bench -- a log dressed with a Vietnam poncho liner and a horse blanket if you demand precise descriptions -- and produced groups just shy of respectable.  That is, a bit over two inches up to a lamentable four-plus.  Allow what you will for unfamiliarity and  a stiff and fluky crosswind.

Observations: The trigger is fair at best, gritty, creepy, and a bit heavy, even for a "hunting" rifle.  Working the action requires an authoritative attitude. If you wimp it, the extractor won't snap over the rim, and you'll lose your trophy terrorist because your rifle is out of battery. To be fair, it's a virtually new rifle, and more rounds might smooth things.

The early Redfield 3x9 reminds me of the difference between excellent optics and the mediocre Oriental crap on most of the scoped rifles around here. Suddenly, your right eye is 20 years old again. On the other hand, I wish it had click stops. I also wish the right-to-left adjustment actually moved the groups left.  Oh well, I'll view that as a challenge to my problem-solving skills.

Overall, it's an attractive woman of the kind you take to good restaurants. But you're reluctant to propose marriage.

I think I'll put it on the table at our small local show this weekend, just to see what it's worth as trading stock.The asking price will be exhorbitant as a sop to the  deeply held conviction that  it is always wrong to sell a gun.  

The bankers and politicians of Europe are as desperate as our own Ben Bernanke  and his assistant, Barrack Obama. The Germans, for instance,  just finished trying to sell  5 billion Euros in IOUs. Investors  left more than 1 billion worth  of them on the table.

(You'd think the Germans would be better at printing and peddling funny money, what with all their practice back in the good old Weimar frolic. But I digress.)

German money bosses say they'll try to sell the leftovers later, but it looks to me like the orphan Eurotoons could be destined for the "free"box at the garage sale.

Why not? They're like Bernanke bucks. Renewable biomass.