Waiting for the varnish to dry

Turning rough oak planks into an acceptable floor has its interesting challenges. They end about the time your patience with sanding exhausts itself -- or when you get tired of blowing through sanding belts at two bucks a crack. But the project  really loses all charm after the first coat of fake varnish ("polyurethane," which I believe is Latin for "the product of many urethrae").

The instructions are clear: Wait six hours, then recoat. Then wait six more hours and recoat, a step I ignored. Then wait 24 hours , at which point the floor is ready for "light use."   Try explaining "light use" to a frisky lab bitch. She won't get it, so get her out of town.

What I understand is these days called a "bio-break" became necessary en route.  We took it  down a long lane to nowhere, amidst the autumn brome, hard by the handsome grain which will soon -- by order of the commissars in Washington -- be distilled into motor fuel as a sound and healthy alternative to sour mash bourbon and prime beef.

En route where?

Ingham Lake, about 40 miles distant, a quiet little water said to harbor lunker northerns. You couldn't prove it by my catch, one runt bullhead, released. New Dog Libby seemed to enjoy things, however, specially steel-eyed, tail-up stalking.

The prey:

"I love it when my human spills cheese curls. Also when he understands that even spent pyrotechnics have their uses."

And that is how you spend 36 hours waiting for your varnish to dry.

A tough way to get flush

A reporter with even a few years in the racket thinks he's seen about everything. Wrong, Jim. You never even imagined the criminal mind that would conceive ...

--stuffing something non-flushable down a WalMart toilet

--arranging yourself on the commode

--hitting the lever

--enduring the chilly flow on your back side

--complaining to store management

--demanding and getting new clothes plus cash for the merchandise you were planning to return but couldn't because the  backup destroyed the receipt.

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It would be entertaining to be in court to hear Ms. Cannon explain this; even more fun to hear top-flight WalMart managers detail how she got away with it several times.

True, it would tempt a journalist to write it up with all the obvious, sophomoric puns. Of course I would resist any such non-professionalism.

Bidet as it may, it would still be fun.

Dancing with the Tsars

At the Obama-led grave dance, it was again determined that a self-willed gun killed a group of people. More precisely,  His Ineptness blamed "a bullet from a gun," demonstrating again his absolute mastery of turning a solemn occasion into a photo-op captioned with sound bites.

I assume it was merely an oversight that he neglected to mention that his -- and I mean his --  security services decided it was dandy to award a "secret" clearance and easy naval-base access to an admitted tinfoil hatter who heard voices and had a history of shooting off guns when ever he felt a little frustrated.

Perhaps his advisers will alert him to the omission, and he will shortly go back on the teevee to add that he has been commander-in-chief for some five years and hence might bear some buck-stops-here responsibility for a Three-Stooges  security performance.

Still, I'm reserving most of my scorn for a guy a little lower on the public pay scale, our old buddy duh mare.  

"Washington Mayor Vincent Gray also called for action, saying "our country is drowning in a sea of guns."

Look, you nincompoop, the nation is not drowning in a sea of anything except debt and devalued money. Otherwise it's actually in drought. We're bone dry of politicians capable of addressing the point at hand which, in this case, is a security bureaucracy with Curly in charge, advised by Moe and Larry.
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A Sunday Sermon; Obama as Socialist?

The context here is a life-long discussion with an old and cherished friend who has lately called me out for alleging that President Obama is a socialist and leader of the nation's current crop of socialists. My friend the professor insists he is something else, sometimes using the term "pragmatist," and seems to insist that socialism must assume the classic form theorized by Marx and Lenin, among others.

The latest chapter from my end of the internet:

Dear ----,


You are my oldest and dearest friend, so it is with affection and respect I say you're being a trifle obscure here. Unless, of course, you are replaying that old 33 1/3 LP we've spun before -- enough times that it is getting scratchy.

I am well aware that the classical definition of "socialism" is "state ownership of the means of production." Of course we're not there yet. Furthermore, however, you are the last person in the world who needs reminding that socialism, like all the ideologies I can think of,  creeps.

The socialist ideal is not "state ownership of the means of production." That is simply one of the mechanistic devices -- usually late in the theoretical revolutionary game -- to achieve the actual desired end. I summarize that aim as total control of individuals by a tiny cadre who combine four qualities: (1) a thirst for power; (2) a not necessarily accurate belief that they know better than the individual what is good for him; (3)  another sincere -- but accurate  -- belief that they know what is good for themselves; (4) the political astuteness -- demagogic and Machiavellian -- to achieve their ends.

It makes no difference to Barack Obama who holds the deed to General Motors. If he can control its products, income, wages, working conditions, and degree of competition, he has satisfied his political goals.

Neither he nor anyone else on what we call the "left" cares who owns the shares of my bank. So long as they control the interest I pay and receive, decisions about who shall and shall not be entitled to loans,  and the degree of privacy afforded my banking transactions, they have all the authority they desire.

In fact, I suspect sophisticated socialists rather fear actual ownership. It would burden them with responsibility for the results of their industry. With the softer sorts of statism, which this administration promotes daily, they are always, always, free to argue that the robber barons violated Title 10, Chapter 12,  Section 69, Paragraph 1238,  Subparagraph 13,  Lines 3 and 3c.

"... and that's why the People's boots fall apart in the rain and cost a month's wages. "

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The issue is not one of ownership. It is of who shall be permitted to make decisions. Just as a little thinking exercise, let's try to recall the cases in the past five years when Mr. Obama demanded that some decision-making authority be taken away from the state and returned to a private citizen

Jim