A man with a shelf of books and a curious mind is never bored. Except maybe sometimes, rarely, he might be something like bored.
I blame it on the re-vortexing of the polarity. Zero, below zero, big wind, very big wind for the impending week.
SAD? No, I don't accept SAD except as an excuse for the drug companies to sell more happy pills.
Cabin fever? No. The vehicles are running fine. The lane is clear enough. There's cash in the wallet and places where I would find a welcome.
No interest, So I'll just go ahead and use the dork word. Enervated. I may be enervated.
Possibly New Dog Libby is too. She always comes around for a comprehensive ear-scratch every hour or so. Lately it's more like every ten minutes, and I actually caught her staring out at our stray cat without emitting her death-threat growl between 70-decibel barks.
Just now she waddled over to the computer chair, stuck her head firmly on my lap, and made intense eye contact. You either understand that lab-eyes look or you don't. I do, so I made a special fuss. The ears, of course, then back and belly, then a collar check while I wiped off that tiny dab of eye drool.
She's put on some winter bulk. I decided the strap could use a little more slack.
Fumble with the adjusting slide. Drop your hands in disgust because you just heard yourself going,
"bah-dah bamba just a silly millimeter longer."
At least that led to enervation attenuation because it yielded a Big Thought, a Universal Truth: Exposure to television at a young age makes you weird forever.
Feb 26, 2014
Feb 25, 2014
Loophole AAR
I don't get to this one often enough, especially considering it is my natal city, a couple of hours southeast. But it was time. I had my buddy's balls* in a can, and he wanted them. The show his club runs was a good excuse to make the delivery.
I didn't run across anything making me giddy enough to toss large denomination Federal Reserve Cartoons around, but it is tasteless to leave a loophole empty-handed, ergo:
For $25 it justifies itself as a high-class paperweight, and who knows when I'll stumble across a box of parts for five bucks at a garage sale.They would need to fit a High-Standard Model A or B from 1934, the year A. HItler flew to Essen for a gigglefest as he watched his former friends bleed out. And speaking of long knives:
Boy Scout, official, USA-made but otherwise unmarked so I can pretend it's a Marble. The condition isn't too bad, but Tenderfoot Teddy couldn't resist using his sharp edge to trim up the sheath. What a creep, but at least his old man didn't own a three-horsepower Baldor running a 60-grit wheel at 3450 rpms.
This Remington RH 51 came from a Baldor-equipped home in a sheath style I've never seen before, stamped "Remington" and "DuPont." That dates it to 1933 or later and probably pre-1941.
I don't actually get upset at battered knives if they're cheap enough. The patinae, gouges, and grinds just loosen their metaphorical tongues so they can tell me how things were back then, or might have been.
---
*soft lead, .504
I didn't run across anything making me giddy enough to toss large denomination Federal Reserve Cartoons around, but it is tasteless to leave a loophole empty-handed, ergo:
For $25 it justifies itself as a high-class paperweight, and who knows when I'll stumble across a box of parts for five bucks at a garage sale.They would need to fit a High-Standard Model A or B from 1934, the year A. HItler flew to Essen for a gigglefest as he watched his former friends bleed out. And speaking of long knives:
Boy Scout, official, USA-made but otherwise unmarked so I can pretend it's a Marble. The condition isn't too bad, but Tenderfoot Teddy couldn't resist using his sharp edge to trim up the sheath. What a creep, but at least his old man didn't own a three-horsepower Baldor running a 60-grit wheel at 3450 rpms.
This Remington RH 51 came from a Baldor-equipped home in a sheath style I've never seen before, stamped "Remington" and "DuPont." That dates it to 1933 or later and probably pre-1941.
I don't actually get upset at battered knives if they're cheap enough. The patinae, gouges, and grinds just loosen their metaphorical tongues so they can tell me how things were back then, or might have been.
---
*soft lead, .504
Feb 24, 2014
Terminal ballistics, hamburger heaven, and a load of bull
I learn from my friend that a 9 mm hardball round at point- blank range fom a big bovine forehead just "makes him mad." It took another in the same area and a third a little higher to finish the job. Still, it was quick due to flawless functioning of the Browning M1935 semi-automatic, another reason to praise John M. Browning, PBUH.
The old boy was down from rear-end mechanical failure due to high milage ...
...and to being butted and tormented by younger bulls. That gives us guys approaching our mature years something to think about.
My just-delivered allotment of el toro is 50 count 'em 50 pounds, nicely ground and wrapped by one of the few custom butchers still operating, and I want to tell you there's a world of difference between Safeway floor sweepings and a burger ground from the entire animal -- t-bone, rib-eye and all.
I feel a cookout coming on.
The old boy was down from rear-end mechanical failure due to high milage ...
...and to being butted and tormented by younger bulls. That gives us guys approaching our mature years something to think about.
My just-delivered allotment of el toro is 50 count 'em 50 pounds, nicely ground and wrapped by one of the few custom butchers still operating, and I want to tell you there's a world of difference between Safeway floor sweepings and a burger ground from the entire animal -- t-bone, rib-eye and all.
I feel a cookout coming on.
Feb 23, 2014
Scatter shots; Indian Country
Somebody loved those four shot-dead Paiutes up in the high desert of backwater California, 200 miles or more from the nearest Starbucks. The accused, a bully, probably also had her admirers, perhaps even as many friends as tattoos.
The universe of this chaos is small, 35 members of a federally recognized tribe in and around Alturas and Cedarville, California. Together they own a 26-acre reservation, a "rancheria" in local lingo.
Ms. Cherie Lash Rhoades was chief of the tribe until it fired her as the FBI investigated missing tribal funds, about $50,000.
Money. If it isn't sex, it is money, isn't it? Cherchez la femme or her man; that petering out, cherchez l'argent.
L'argent here is $1.1 million in one year, 2012. At its source, the figure is much higher, allowing for normal government overhead. First you -- and I mean you -- must earn it; the IRS must extract it from you; the money must be trundled from Treasury to the Department of the Interior to its Bureau of Indian Affairs and finally to whom ever handles the net tribal take -- the $1.1 million -- for 35 souls. All along the twisty route beady little eyes dart about as greedy little fingers dip and dip and dip.
Of course you just fingered your little calculator and said "wow!" That amounts to $31,428.57 per Paiute. Assuming they family-up at roughly the national all-races average, you multiply by 3-plus for something like $95,000-plus per family. They could afford a Starbucks and professional aromatherapists.
---
This is not totally fair. The AP reports that about half the money goes for roads.
Or maybe it is. The little tribe also gets a few dollars from the Indian-casino industry, a federally protected activity. There's income from cheap (because untaxed) smokes. One assumes that Jerry Brown's California also contributes, assuaging its guilt for what we did en route to our Manifest Destiny.
---
Guilt is justified to one degree or another, but as time passes it should moderate.* We White Eyes murdered our last Redskins in job-lot quantities more than 124 years ago, on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. We killed about 150, many or most with Hotchkiss guns, a weapon notorious for non-discrimination among braves, little old grandmas, and babes-in-arms.
But over that five or six generations, amends have been made, or attempted, however misguided and inept. The results are mixed, at best, and on average probably well illustrated by the grief among the 31 surviving Paiutes of Alturas, a grief rooted in the outcome of condeming a race to permanent wardship.
I wonder what would happen if we decided to end it over next two generations with what once was fashionably called "tough love."
"Here is the school. It's free. It is your gateway to the pride of self-sufficiency. Don't fuck it up."
---
Humility requires a qualification of everything above. Maybe the killer was just crazy as Hell and would have run amok in any society in which she found herself.
And finally, it might be suggested that she would have created less tragedy had she been confronted with counterforce the second she displayed one of her two pistols. Unfortunately it happened in California where practical counterforce is reckoned to be calling the cleanup service, available through 911.
---
*If not, I am personally entitled to vast sums from Her Majesty's exchequer in recompense for my family's Annaly estates, stolen at gunpoint by English thugs c. 1400-1700.
The universe of this chaos is small, 35 members of a federally recognized tribe in and around Alturas and Cedarville, California. Together they own a 26-acre reservation, a "rancheria" in local lingo.
Ms. Cherie Lash Rhoades was chief of the tribe until it fired her as the FBI investigated missing tribal funds, about $50,000.
Money. If it isn't sex, it is money, isn't it? Cherchez la femme or her man; that petering out, cherchez l'argent.
L'argent here is $1.1 million in one year, 2012. At its source, the figure is much higher, allowing for normal government overhead. First you -- and I mean you -- must earn it; the IRS must extract it from you; the money must be trundled from Treasury to the Department of the Interior to its Bureau of Indian Affairs and finally to whom ever handles the net tribal take -- the $1.1 million -- for 35 souls. All along the twisty route beady little eyes dart about as greedy little fingers dip and dip and dip.
Of course you just fingered your little calculator and said "wow!" That amounts to $31,428.57 per Paiute. Assuming they family-up at roughly the national all-races average, you multiply by 3-plus for something like $95,000-plus per family. They could afford a Starbucks and professional aromatherapists.
---
This is not totally fair. The AP reports that about half the money goes for roads.
Or maybe it is. The little tribe also gets a few dollars from the Indian-casino industry, a federally protected activity. There's income from cheap (because untaxed) smokes. One assumes that Jerry Brown's California also contributes, assuaging its guilt for what we did en route to our Manifest Destiny.
---
Guilt is justified to one degree or another, but as time passes it should moderate.* We White Eyes murdered our last Redskins in job-lot quantities more than 124 years ago, on the banks of Wounded Knee Creek. We killed about 150, many or most with Hotchkiss guns, a weapon notorious for non-discrimination among braves, little old grandmas, and babes-in-arms.
But over that five or six generations, amends have been made, or attempted, however misguided and inept. The results are mixed, at best, and on average probably well illustrated by the grief among the 31 surviving Paiutes of Alturas, a grief rooted in the outcome of condeming a race to permanent wardship.
I wonder what would happen if we decided to end it over next two generations with what once was fashionably called "tough love."
"Here is the school. It's free. It is your gateway to the pride of self-sufficiency. Don't fuck it up."
---
Humility requires a qualification of everything above. Maybe the killer was just crazy as Hell and would have run amok in any society in which she found herself.
And finally, it might be suggested that she would have created less tragedy had she been confronted with counterforce the second she displayed one of her two pistols. Unfortunately it happened in California where practical counterforce is reckoned to be calling the cleanup service, available through 911.
---
*If not, I am personally entitled to vast sums from Her Majesty's exchequer in recompense for my family's Annaly estates, stolen at gunpoint by English thugs c. 1400-1700.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)