Travis McGee in Los Angeles

"...Other ridge areas, lower and brushier, were clotted thick with houses, According to demand, I could imagine each of those far houses was taking up at least a million dollars worth of of barren real estate. In a sane world it would be worth fifty cents an acre, but there it is, status symbol land, rock and brush, ridges and galleys, fires and mud all the way to Pacific Palisades. The highest houses get to see pizza signs and the night sea beyond. ... When San Andreas gives a good belch, they can start again at fifty cents an acre. "

"A Deadly Shade of Gold," P. 305 of the Fawcett Crest printing, a late one, c. 1995. Travis is observing the view from near Cal Tomberlin's mansion high in the western LA county hills.

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Enough fires like this week's and we won't have to wait for the tectonic burp. Assuming sentient beings really need to live in the tinder zone, I suggest they tell the green freaks to pee off, that they're going to clear the brush even at the cost of inconveniencing your occasional rattlesnake and degrading the habitat of whatever sand rat happens to be fashionable lately.

Quote of the Day

"I'm starting to think that Jefferson would look at the current state of affairs and say, "What are you waiting for?"

By reflectoscope over at Tam's place in reference to the government crackdown on an old Korean woman bent on undermining our society with undocumented kimchee.

A Franken-Gun

Miscegenation may produce the most beautiful human beings imaginable.* The same does not apply to firearms.

Its minor caliber notwithstanding, the purebred Mini-14 is a fine and sightly representative of the battle rifle as we understood it ca. 1939-1963. It stands tall in its Class As of walnutite and steel. It is a pleasure to shoot, an aesthetic adornment on any wall.

But mate it to the various Buck Rogers wet dreams, and it becomes ugly -- oily ugly, like the bald guy with the pencil mustache slipping out of the XXX theatre and stabbing you with an inviting leer.

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*Honolulu offers luscious examples, but you do not want to go there anyway unless you lust for cynical services at Tokyo prices.

Travis McGee, futurist

" I get this crazy feeling. Every once in a while I get it. I get the feeling that this is the last time in history when the offbeats like me will have a chance to live free in the nooks and crannies of the huge and rigid structure of a an increasingly codified society. Fifty years from now I would be hunted down in the street. They would drill little holes in my skull and make me sensible and reliable and adjusted.

"I am, to put it as bitterly as possible, a romantic. I know a windmill when I see one, by God...".

The Quick Red Fox, p.96 of the early Fawcetts