Thursday morning thumbnails

I'm working my way up to some major rants. But on this nice winter day TMR is in a preview mode. So here are the trailers::

--1. We already fell off the fiscal cliff. Pedants will insist on knowing just when we tripped. I'm still working it out. The earliest reasonable date in January 20, 1961, when the poseur John F. Kennedy promised the world that the United States of America would be pleased to bankrupt itself to put a Weber grill and a gaggle of Harvard lawyers in every back yard from Vietnam to Kaphukistan. (bear any burden, pay any price et al. oratorical nonsense).  The latest likely date is around the time Bill boffed Monica to celebrate passage of the revised  Community Reinvestment  Act, requiring banks to lend to people who could not  possibly repay and probably wouldn't if they could.

(The fall was often pleasant in in its early years  --  floaty, you might say, something like riding a very good hang glider, rising in vagrant thermals which mask the sure triumph of gravity.  Updrafts are rarer lately, and the descent accelerates, much like Poe's increasingly frantic prose as the Red Death approaches the ballroom door.)

--2.  We become broker by the day because we continue to do incredibly stupid things, large and small. One of the small ones is roiling my psyche lately because I drive by it daily -- a million-plus worth of "trail." It skirts the edge of my village , relatively harmlessly in the highway ditch for a while, then through a patch of wild land purchased by private citizens a decade ago and turned over to the Iowa DNR in order to save it from a housing development. The federal DOT, Iowa DOT, and local taxpayers are now financing a noticeable rape of that land. Some of the greenery will grow back, of course, but not on the paved strip which, by the way, is built to a standard just shy of that required to support Peterbilts. We wouldn't want a road bed failure to endanger the the strolling mom and her perambulator.  The significant point, however, is that hardly anyone actually uses these things.

--3. Kwee 4. The first one moved me to counsel  accumulating copper pennies; the second to acquiring large stocks of ammunition; the third to laying in pints of whiskey for barter. This latest QE persuades me we might as well just drink the whiskey.

Cory Booker's $33

Here's how you do it next week, Cory:

Ten pounds of rice and beans at a buck a pound. Seven cans of vegetable/meat soup at a buck each. A gallon of milk for four dollars. A one-dollar head of cabbage. Seven apples at fifty cents each.

Bingo. You didn't starve, and you have seven dollars and fifty cents left over for Twinkies, Rollos, and Perrier. If you were a decent human being, however, you would reserve part of that surplus for a thank-you note to the poor freeken  schmuck who paid for it.

Thus endeth our morbid text

Two straight posts on death or near-death?  C'mon, Jim, the TMR worldview  isn't that dependent on inspiration by Edgar Allen Poe. Joy is still to be found, and for some of us, pretty ladies help ease the burden of existence.

Even if you find them in movies like (let the morbidity continue)  Anatomy of a Murder.

Ha! You lechers thought I was going to put up a shot of  Lee Remick's skin falling out of very little, didn't ya? I decided on Our Miss Brooks instead. Me and Hollywood loved her as a semi-frumpy comic and a supremely competent character actress, but she also had her come-hither moments.  

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What's that? The voices of the lowest of the low ring out in anger? O.K., but I warn that Rick Santorum is quite displeased with you.

Cold Sweats in the Night

I don't know if it is every father's nightmare, but it's mine. I am out shooting  with my children or grandchildren. Something goes wrong, and I  shoot one of them.  No consolation is possible, not from friends, not from the total of the world's priests, preachers, philosophers, and grief counsellors. And it probably wouldn't have helped for a DNR cop to announce to the world what a lucky SOB I am.

It happened a couple of hours south of me Saturday. 

The 18-year-old son is badly hurt but expected to survive what is reported as a partial load of pheasant shot in the back of his head.  Conservation cops don't know what happened but speculate the father "may’ve lost his footing going through cover and in the act of tripping, the gun misfired or fired ...".

Misfired? Come on, Officer. The result of a "misfire" on a pheasant hunt is a frustrating "click," nothing worse.

The same game cop then moves to a safety homily, displaying all the human sensitivity of Genseric turned loose among the daughters of Rome:

" ...the shooting likely would have been fatal if the pair had been deer hunting and he had been hit by a deer slug."

Thank you, officer. Us stupid civilians would never have thought of that, and who gives a damn about adding a little bit to a father's feelings of horrified guilt.