Swamp Logger

Sunday afternoon. Just left of the standing cottonwood is a busy canal entrance to West Okoboji. The storm dropped another tree directly across the canal, bringing boat traffic to a halt.

Two neighborhood guys took a look and talked it over. They concluded that it would be a nice libertarian thing to do to cut it up and haul it out, saving days or weeks of bureaucratic wrangling about whose responsibility it was.

Assembling a chain saw,  a small  I/O runabout, and a length of  3/4-inch nylon, they  turned to.

Two or three hours later the tree was as you see it in the top photo (dragged out by hand over the canal sea wall ) and bottom shot -- towed trough the canal to a place where the pair could get a line on it from the pickup to drag the big stem out.

Some tourist folks were helpful from one side of the canal. On the other an  apparently healthy middle-age fellow followed the action sporadically from the patio of his impressive lake home (which had become less impressive due to the tree in his adjacent waters.)  His assistance consisted of occasionally turning from his newspaper to frown importantly and make small gestures of disapproval when some move of the two men in the water struck him as unwise. This is a fellow who should pray nightly that he never needs the help of his neighbors.

After the last of the cottonwood was high and dry, one of the perps allowed as how even without alligators, this wasn't  something he'd care to do for a living.

Playtoy Down

This isn't the worst damage that can be shown, but it is representative of what the Saturday Night Storm did on West Okoboji. Here in Terrace Park, boat, dock, and hoist claims will be in the seven figures.

Angry Gaia

One heck of a storm whacked my area about 10:30 last  evening. The general opinion is no tornado, just sustained straight-line winds approaching 100 miles per hour.

I lucked out with very minor damage, though the cleanup will  occupy the next two or three days.

Not more than a mile away, however, there is enough tree, boat, dock, and dwelling damage to keep a couple  of platoons of insurance adjusters and a regiment of carpenters, mechanics, landscape guys, and chain saw artists busy for a long time.

Which in my book proves God is better at creating your basic economic stimulus program than His Obamaness, and Chucky Schumer put together.

Incitatus for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?

1. His Obamaness  is making his cook a food czar.

2. Joel has the beans on the development.

3.I am sitting here wondering  why this  is making make me think of Caligula's horse.
.

The Tactical Elastical

Okay, so I have a little weakness for  cheese cake, but there's a journalistic reason for inviting your attention to this because,  a while back, someone was jerking gunchick chains about  tactical undies --presumably mythical --  for concealed carry.

What you lewdies are looking for is toward the end of the pictures, but on the way you'll find some funny  tactical concepts.

H/T  to Tam.

The Funny Papers

Hey, wanna read the funnies with me and Roberta X? 

The Indianapolis Star may or may not  have been a  "great" newspaper, but a little more than a generation back Eugene C.Pulliam made it a  highly respected one, a professional journal controlled by professional editors.

Pulliam is spinning in his grave.  He considered his opinion and editorial pages centerpieces of the great national debates among literate people interested in public policy.  His commentary was cheerfully  nonpartisan, attached to but not in bed with the kind of conservatism represented by men like Barry Goldwater.

Roberta keys on the primary sadness here. The media have only the lowest  opinion of your intelligence and mine. Gannett controllers seem convinced you and I have never read a book cover-to-cover. Or perhaps they concede we may be part of the small, strange cult of word readers but  understand that the big money is made in pandering to the comic-book class.

Gunsmithing Simplified; More Colt Gun Pron

In quest of  greater accuracy, I have successfully completed installation of  a trigger shoe on that Colt I couldn't shoot yesterday.   Yes, it,  too,  was in the junk box. Yes, the hardest part was finding a hex wrench small enough. No, I won't bet much that it will, by itself, substantially improve my groups, but I do like shoes.

(You can't  see it, but the shoe is stamped "Herter's," so you know I am not trying to mislead you with hokum.)

Mr. Jimmy regrets he's unable to shoot you today...*

Impromptu range trip this morning, and I am glad no one else was there to witness my humiliation writ large in .45 ACP.  Alibis galore are available and are  mostly true,  but nothing excuses  three magazines --- 21 rounds -- spread out over 11 or 12 inches at 50 yards.  The ammo was miscellaneous junk, but that accounts for only a little.

Yes, two-handed. Yes,  seated at shooting table.

This lad is resolved to shoot more.

---

--I do like the gun, the SS Colt Series 70 built after the company decided to tell the panicky lawyers to get lost. The action is still stiff and the recoil spring feels too heavy, but it handled everything I fed it, from some light semi-wadcutter target loads up to the muscle  stuff I loaded recently. I will do a little trigger work.

--The muscle stuff is a 230-grain lead round nose over 6.3 grains of Unique, and I am going to back off a bit for everyday shooting. It's under the recommended maximum but noticeably zippier than the military load and not a lot of fun for casual shooting.

--The jury is  still out on whether I keep the barrel collet. I had intended to go back to John Browning's (PBUH) bushing system, but, as I said,  this lashup gave me no trouble. We'll see after a few hundred more rounds.

---
*H/T Cole Porter

Colt Gun Pron

Breda doesn't even know I owe her a favor. She needed a few rounds of semi-oddball ammunition. I pawed through one of my junk boxes to see if I could help (couldn't, really)  and stumbled across a set of as-new walnut  "target" grips for the recently acquired Colt Huntsman.  They're the kind of quality guys like Gil Hebard used to sell.

I didn't know I had them, and if I had not been mining  .38 SW rounds it might have been months or years before I tripped over the grips.

They look and feel right, so I'll leave them on for shooting. The  plastic originals get cached  against the unlikely chance I'll want to sell or swap her to a Colt collector. Those guys are daffy for ponies.

.

Weekend Blog Bleg (3)

Another offering from the Camp J box of  gun-freak treasures  for which I have no use.

What have you for the grand old American sport of swapping?

This  gizmo is a new Lee Ram Primer. It lets you seat primers on the upstroke of your press. The good folks at Lee make all sorts of promises for  it,  stopping, however, somewhat shy of a pledge that it will take you to victory at Camp Perry.  For Lee presses only.

The rules  (simple as Hell) and earlier offerings are  here and here.
.

Grumbles for the John

I was a good green guy when the elected and appointed nincompoops decided all U.S. toilets should operate on one-point-three thimblesful per cycle.  I wrote nothing and said barely  a word. That may have been due less to  concern for Mother Earth than to the fact that I have an older house with pre-Gore crappers.

But now that one of the old girls has a complete overhaul, I protest. Replace the valves, filler tube, flapper, and float in a good ol' American toilet from the Eisenhower regime and you're back to a thimble and a third. The predictable residual turd floats obnoxiously and the retry slips your mind until you happen to think of it just as the new girl friend heads for your bathroom for the first time.

Two-flushers in the loo and four-flushers in Congress.

Carrying a weapon is fine for adults who understand what they're doing. Carrying both a weapon and a chip on shoulder is not fine. One or two people will know why I feel compelled to note this now, and they won't say anything about it.

Bloggery question for geeks

My links to other bloggers' individual posts don't show on those posts, and I can't find out why in the Blogger instructions,explanations etc. Anyone able to help me?

Harry Reid and his buddies of the NRA

I wonder how much Joel is holding back here:

Translation: Yes we know Harry Reid is a corrupt, scum-sucking bastard who belongs under the capitol building instead of ruling it.

But we're going to endorse him anyway, because:... (RTWT or you'll be missing the most  entertaining treatment to date  of the Reid saga.)


Joel says he generally avoids politics because of such slimy decisions.  I'm of another opinion, though I do concede that trying to be an effective political fighter for good things is a lot like trying to be an honest cop in Chicago. 
.

Proving the case for shall-issue laws:

In a county near me the sheriff just loved a citizen named Paul Dorr  as long as Paul was spending his idle time protesting abortion clinics. In those days, Sheriff Douglas Weber gave Mr. Dorr his CCW every year. No problem.

But then  Mr. Dorr joined a group questioning  county spending and suddenly Weber decided  Mr. Door  had lost all of those qualities of intelligence, judgment, discretion, etc. that made him such a good CCW risk in the past,


Enter  U.S. District Court Judge Mark Bennett. He smelled a rat and ordered it --no, wait --  ordered the Osceola County sheriff to issue the permit.


But the tastiest morsel in the judge's order tells the sherf he must take a college level class on the U.S. Constitution.


This suggests some personnel actions. Sherf Weber should be reassigned as a school crossing guard. Judge Bennett would look handsome in the robs of a Supreme Court justice,  way better than wazzername.


The AP gave Weber a chance to tell his side of the tale, but he decided to keep still. I think I would too.






EDIT AND UPDATE:  This case has wider implications than we thought. A more complete report makes it clear the federal judge raked Sheriff Weber for depriving Mr. Dorr of his Second Amendment rights because he objected to Dorr exercising his First Amendment rights. And for being considered "weird" by some members sof the community.  Maybe this one will become famous as the Great Iowa Right to be Weird Decision. 

Gee, the recovery was fun, eh?

This is for those of you just now returning to Earth on a flight out of Uranus or somewhere. The jobs recovery occurred because hundreds of thousands of persons were hired by the feds to make a nuisance of themselves on your doorstep. What color are ya'? Where else do y'all sleep? You owe money on your house?

Most of them are laid off by now, and the jobs numbers are back to the dismality we've come to expect.

Boolits

That's how the serious casting cats spell it on the internet, and now your humble scribe has 168,000 grains of a lead-like boolit material cast into little Lyman ingots and shelved. Not allowing for waste, that's seven hundred and thirty -- 230 grainers for the 1911s with a few ounces left over for crappie jigs.

Before long I'll have a report on the casting, loading, and shooting qualities we can get from modern wheel weights fired as cast with either no lube or a light hand lube. I am not hot to get into the sizing and lubing game. If the as-cast stuff will hit the barn door and not lead the bores too badly, I won't.

The men of the family spent one of the Independence weekend afternoons at Cabela's in the Twin Cities, and I finally just tossed frugality to the winds and bought the Lyman kit with the little "Big Dipper" 10-pound pot. High quality it is not, but it should make all the boolits I care to shoot, swap, or give away.

(If you're out at my local DNR range some weekday afternoon and see a crazy dude raking lead from the berms, don't shoot. That's me.)

EDIT: Heading off an argument, perhaps: By "modern" wheel weights I mean the ones still based on lead. In the 80s when I was last casting, we considered wheel weights to be about 90-95 per cent lead with the balance more or less evenly split between tin and antimony. Serious, or just anal, casters added enough tin to bring it closer to Lyman's No. 2 formula of 90 - 5 - 5 (lead, tin,antimony). I have read that most WW makers have by now cut the tin content to nearly nothing.

Others made the good point that citing precise contents of any home-brew alloy was somewhat silly because we had no idea of what was actually in the lead, the tin, or the antimony we used. And who the heck had a Brinnel tester in his shop? We considered anything that cast smoothly and was hard enough to resist fingernail denting good enough to use.

El Presidente Obama

The Mexican politicians have issued an official statement praising His Obamaness for suing Arizona.  Wouldn't they just.

Obama openly avows his purposes include handcuffing other  states who want to succeed (where Obama has failed) in controlling illegal immigrants. Thus it is fair to say that Barack Obama, in the 18th month of his presidency, celebrated United States Independence Week by suing the citizens of his own Republic, thus earning the approval  of foreign thugs.

Back. Going to rest a bit if I can quit thinkig about the sign in the yard of a group home on Second Street in St Cloud, Minnesota:

"Openings for Geriatric Seniors."
.

Idle hands

Serial Number 2. This one is of silver maple with a more aggressive scimitar look to the arms than the earlier model.

Holy Loophole, Batman

Run over to Turk's place for an articulate version -- from a surprising source --  of what we all know. There is no gun show loophole.

Weekend Blog Bleg -- Direct Barter (2 )... Remington 742 mags

More personal superfluity, two .30-06  factory magazines for Remingon 740/742. They look  pretty good and should work.

See the rules.

(We're a little early this week, but the herd soon begins arriving and  the  weekend is likely to  have distractions.)

EDIT: Turns out I have three of these damned things, not two.

.

The Lonely Sliver Rain

'Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people.'' 


--Travis McGee

Well, I ain't no virgin,

but I'm kinda chaste  with score of 95 on the libertarian purity test. The test maker tells me:


You have entered the heady realm of hard-core libertarianism. Now doesn't that make you feel worse that you didn't get a perfect score?


Not really. As I wrote on the fly leaf of the hardback  "Atlas Shrugged" I gave my son when he graduated from high school, "Any idea can be applied reasonably or unreasonably."


Take the test.


H/T to Uncle

I've actually been missing the Rooshuns

This is wonderful. Invisible ink.  Secret codes, Dead drops. Attache cases stuffed with cash. A gorgeous Rose dripping poison.

After all these years of dealing with crazy religion freaks from the Sandbox, it's nice to be spied on by secret agents with a little class.

Where is Prohias.?

-...   -.--        .---   ..  --


.

The Tesla, zero to 60 in only $100,000

And for around $15 you can own a piece of the action, one share.  As your trusted investment advisor, I urge you to instead spend the $15 on magazines with Tesla advertisements.  Then, in a couple of generations,  if the American Pickers come around to your grandson's house...

Breakfast

May I invite your attention to bacon?  Particularly a very nice apple wood smoked bacon? At $1.389 per pound?

It is not the money savings. It is that the five-pound, $6.99,  box of  "ends and pieces"  has vastly more lean meat than any other bacon I can buy -- including even the excellent slab in the fresh meat case at my Fareway.  This judgement comes after using four boxes.

This stuff is excellent, and you can forget the usual  rationalization  that it's for salads and  crumbled pork recipes. Most  of it looks fine on a platter.

I don't know how widely it is distributed,  but if you are anywhere in the Midwest  look for a plain white cardboard box from Webster City Custom Meats, Inc. of Webster City, Iowa.

I am not a paid endorser, and,  no,  it is not available in a tactical container or  in bandoleer  battle packs.

Fear and Loathing in Chicago

The Chicago Tribune hasn't  yet been able to get Boss Daley's latest opinion on the mercy killing of his cherished  gun ban.*

But the Trib is on the streets with a fairly straightforward report of McDonald. Deliciously,  it reports Justice Alito's reference to legislative calls for the National Guard to be summoned to fight  Chicago criminals since Daley's mob  has obviously failed. The  paper also notes Alito's reference to the number of Chicago homicides this year which just happen to equal the number of American military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same period. Then:




"If (the) safety of . . . law abiding members of the community would be enhanced by the possession of handguns in the home for self-defense, then the Second Amendment right protects the rights of minorities and other residents of high-crime areas whose needs are not being met by elected public officials, (Alito wrote.) "


This is beginning to sound like a mirror image of Arizona and Fremont, Nebraska.
They took local action against crime  because the federal government couldn't or wouldn't do its job.   In McDonald,  the federal judiciary justified federal  action  -- however indirect -- against local crime because  Chicago politicians had buggered the job. I know the parallel is strained, but the irony makes it worthwhile.


---
*As a matter of reality, the ban applied exclusively to Daley's  law-abiding subjects.


   

McDonald -- got it

No surprises in the decision. Amendment Two applies to you where ever you are on American soil.

Just a passing note while we await the details. Mark Sherman of The Associated Press informs us:

"In doing so, the justices, by a narrow 5-4 margin, signaled that less severe restrictions could survive legal challenges. "


This saves us from the error of believing that it was a wide five-to-four decision, or a massive one, or a landslide.

It also reminds of of how many great minds still believe firearms should be reserved for the military, the cops, and the violent criminal class.

McDonald today?

The wires are reporting that McDonald will probably  come down from the Supreme Court his morning.  No surprise, of course.

Everyone and his horse predicts McDonald will rein in Chicago and all other state and local jurisdictions. It would formally extend the Heller principle  --  that the  Second Amendment   guarantees the individual right to armed self-defense -- to the entire nation. If it goes any other way we are well and truly augered.

One of the interesting speculations is whether the court will have taken note of D.C. attempts to  all but nullify Heller. Will the justices  offer some guidance on  where "reasonableness" ends as hoplophobic local governments try to maximize their power to  disarm the honest segment of the population?

Weekend Blog Bleg; Direct Barter

There must be other pack rats around here -- people who periodically look at a pile of their gun stuff and wonder, "What the Hell am I doing with this?" It a symptom of the acquisitive disease that manifests itself in too many gun shows, too many auctions and garage sales, too many moments when we lose control in gun shops.

Does the gunny corner of the internet offer hope? Maybe, and I want to try an experiment.  Every weekend or thereabouts I will post a  picture and short spiel on a sporty something that  someone else might want because I sure as Hell don't. The object is direct barter for anything that  might be less superfluous  to me.

Rules: Nothing that shoots. No money changes hands. Entertainment trumps the profit motive.  No sniveling.

This week, fanfare:

The  Carlson  Extended Turkey Choke in 12 gauge for Beretta and Benelli shotguns.  NIB(ubble),  it comes with a free choke wrench and my personal guarantee that it will make your shotgun longer. It's supposed to be a $30 item, but who cares? Offer to swap knives, M1 Carbine dies,  deer skins, rawhide,  USN relics valued at 50 cents to fifty bucks.  Whatever.


This could develop into good  fun if other writers would follow suit. In a short time it could become like everyone pawing around in everyone else's goodie box.

EDIT: I am ashamed of neglecting to add that the Clinton/Bush/Obama regimes have made it very worthwhile to polish our direct barter skills.

Paging Noah

I spoke a bit prematurely when I wrote "just some rain."  . I'm guessing about an inch in 10 minutes.  You are looking at flowing water,  and the  revised forecast calls for  for floating cows

(The odd lighting is explained by a habit of never discarding anything. It's pitch black here in back yard, and the illumination is from an old movie light I keep around to scare goblins.)

This is why they invented the word "ominous."

That was the  front of the bar about 8:15 p.m. CDT.  I'm near the back edge now, just some  rain and a bit of wind.

Surviving the Clinton/Bush/Obama economy

I am reminded this  morning that eternal vigilance is the price of avoiding poverty.

One of my knives needed a touch up, so I wet  down a hard Arkansas stone  with Buck Honing Oil  and did the job. (The high-grade oil showed up in a box of auction-sale junk. Trust me on this one, Sidney; I did not order it from Cabela's.)

The red oil from Buck works fine, At two bucks an ounce it should. Never mind that it looks like, smells like, and feels like plain automatic transmission fluid,  about two bucks a quart.

Now, saving a little on honing oil isn't going to make or break you, but there's a principle involved here. Illegitimati non screw u with salesmanship based on pure image. 

(Slaves to their own self-image can, of course, acquire an empty Buck Honing Oil bottle and fill it from their stock of transmission fluid. No one will be the wiser, even if knife sharpening is a social activity for you and your circle of friends.)

A disclaimer is necessary since everything I know about chemistry  comes from  The Anarchists Cook Book or Old Mr. Boston's Bartenders Guide. Maybe upscale honing oil in a cool bottle differs from ATF on a molecular level.

But then again, come to think of it, maybe neither is all that much better than spit.

Washington Post: Foul. Name taken.

Michael W. Savage of the  Washington Post offers a report on the diaper dew accumulating on Washington bottoms because our cute little state and local governments are doing what they can to cope with the costs of illegal immigration. He reports:

This week, the spotlight shifted to rural Fremont, which narrowly passed an ordinance that would outlaw hiring illegal immigrants or renting property to them.

Narrowly?

Mike, Ol' Buddy, y'all wouldn't be tryin' to pull one of them city-boy shim-shams on us flyover yokels now, would you?

Fremont citizens  voted 57-43 to pass their ordinance. You might wish to check through your pile editorial oversight and multiple layers of fact-checking . You may  find that most authorities call a 14-point spread a "landslide,"

Skin, Slapstick, even a Seltzer Bottle Assault

Folks, you gotta see this one, from 1968, "The Night They Raided Minsky's."  Britt Ecklund,  beautiful and not the world's worst actress. The under-rated  Jason Robards. A cast of dozens of unknown journeyman players enjoying their revival of vaudeville.

For those whose intellect and  sensibilities are too advanced to embrace mere entertainment, the film can be considered  a libertarian/objectivist  epic. Both Attila and the Witch Doctor are called to action by informers carrying the news that on one night in New York, many citizens  are guilty of open enjoyment.

---

Forgetting to turn off the stupid box and waking up to whatever is on Showtime at sunrise isn't always a cause for self-hatred. 

USA! USA!

Now that that my native land is a world soccer power, I suppose it behooves me to become an official fan.

So I'll practice drinking strong beer until I puke on the guy in the bleacher seat in front of me.  I'll learn to yell   "f++k"  a lot. And when my team does very well I'll run naked up and down Temple Lane after breaking things inside the Temple Bar. 

(These lessons were learned in Dublin when I met some English gentlemen in town  for a tournament,)

Anything else I should be working on?

Fremont and the Illegals -- (And The ACLU gets Unicorny)

It is now the law in Fremont, Nebraska that you must obtain a license to rent a place to live. Washington refuses to do the  job  right, so a fed-up small town is goaded into doing it wrong.

Lawyers from Fremont to K Street are starting their meters, and the ACLU is in the act. The Civil Liberties Union does some excellent work, but it is also capable of missing the the point like a Top Shot reject. On the Fremont decision:

"Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality," said Laurel Marsh, executive director of ACLU Nebraska.

Laurel,  "American values of fairness and equality" is a wobbly chair to stand on. Once upon a not so distant time, lynching black men for looking at white women was within American values of fairness and equality . 

Besides, we have heard so much pseudo -patriotic cant that we are immune.  The Fremont law is vulnerable on Constitutional grounds, and  that is enough for you to  say.

It's always nice to start a day smiling at a well-turned phrase.

Today's grin, about when worlds collude,  comes courtesy of Roberta, who, by the way,  is a dependably dab hand at the  art.

The post is about screwy flying things, and you science fiction fans will like it. Me? The Piper Cub, the DC3,  and the F-86. No other aircraft is required in reality or in fantasy.

.

Fremont, Nebraska: Why Not a License to Breathe?

This giant step to toward an  American SSR can be considered with only a little  attention to the snake ball of immigration politics.

Fremont, Nebraska, citizens are angry at and/or fearful of a parade of Hispanics coming to town to work for Hormel and Fremont beef. They're voting today on a law to require a license to rent a place to live.

In Fremont-on-Volga you will go to city hall and fill out a form. Commissars will check to see if you're a legal U.S. resident.  If they like your record, you give them a fee for the license and they give you a chit granting official permission  to live inside, out of the rain. Otherwise, hasta la vista, bambino.  Pitch a tent in the Sand Hills.

The wrongness of this is so appallingly clear I'm wondering how my friends and acquaintances in level-headed Nebraska came to lose their senses.  Perhaps only an unreasoning fear can explain it.

Among other things, I have seen numerous  comments that this will be a great way to  screen all would-be Fremont dwellers for various sins which might make them undesirable. Warrants.  Arrests. Convictions.  Slowly  paid bills. Firearms ownership. Even maybe one of those dastardly library cards.


Little Midwest towns -- like admirable southwest states -- don't do this sort of thing unless they have been badly screwed by a Higher Authority  which is so frightened of irritating one constituency or another that it has found a way to live for years pretending its head is a colonoscopy camera.

The Estwing Hatchet

The good people of Estwing still make this tool, and they make it in Illinois, which is the next best thing to making it in America.

It is a wonderful tool and you should buy one. I was reminded of this  as I sharpened my ancient example this morning and wondered if anything so good could still be on the market.

(It will break auto safety glass. I mean, just in case you go motoring with Massachusetts politicians.)

You be Peter; It's my Turn to be Paul

We're hearing from His Obamaness and the Unicorns  about the housing market  recovery. Which turns out to have been a non-recovery.

Instead it was another exercise  in extorting money from the frugal and productive and transferring it to the politically lucky.  Yep -- the "tax credits,"  federal handouts for people fortunate enough to be in the market during that brief period when the  government decided to deck the  GDP with boughs of folly.


A slice of the evidence is reported in an article on the "recovery" as it exists in Corn Country's Golden Circle.

Stimulus spending, credits spurs building

Seth Moulton, vice president of Classic Builders in Ankeny, said home building was strong the first four months of 2010, with federal tax credits driving sales. Then the tax credits ended in April and sales dropped off....

...Rick Tollakson, chief executive of Hubbell Homes, said the West Des Moines developer is waiting to see how the market rebounds after the tax-credit falloff. The market "hasn't just died," but it has slowed. 


The lesson is  that there's plenty of demand for houses by people who can get their neighbors to pay a hefty share of the cost. It isn't  as though the neighbors really want to, of course. It's that if they refuse,  His Obamaness will send the IRS around  to confiscate their houses.

---

If you have little else to do, you might care to spend a few minutes pondering  the headline. :)


Economy has life, but it waits for consumers.
.

You may or may not have noticed that I seldom, if ever,  predict, apologize for, justify, explain, or otherwise mention  whether my blogging will be light or heavy or whatever. I'm pretty sure no one gives a great damn. Not to mention that  it is a security violation  to announce plans.

I make an exception here.  Posting pinups  is a cheap and sightly  route to fresh content. The first one was more or less an accident,  a whim after I saw the shot on an internet wander. The others were quick  fillers when I took breaks as  I mowed and chopped and split and trimmed and planted and built.

What I mean to say is this damned place looks about as good as it ever does.

I might mount up again this evening and help y'all ridicule Obama, His Unicorns, and J. Edgar Hoplophobe. Then again, I might not. It depends  on whether  I get tired of sitting on the deck,  sipping, admiring the fruits of honest labor, and reminding myself of what a sterling character I possess.

An illustrated history of WW2

Okay, JInglebob. Only because you asked:

Women in unifrom, or nearly so.

This is +so+ much easier than developing meaningful little essays.

John Wants a Shot of Celery

Keep this up and I'll need to activate the adult content nanny.

Art Frahm was another of the good pinup creators in the innocent age of romantic and sexy  images -- before universal porn in your face. He had a celery fetish, and Lileks wrote a funny piece  about it.


.

What gun for polar bear?

Well I was googling, and...

.

Der vurst day

The Des Moines Register national staff takes note of an historic event today. His Obamaness's health  gauleiters  make it official.

"Vee haf ways of making you eat  pschitt, or at least stuff that tastes like it."


The new federal diet guidelines are out today, The headline ogres are cheese, pizza, and sausage.  Take that, Jimmy Dean, enemy of the state.

Already the giant food processors are stumbling over themselves to link arms with the broccoli brown shirts.

If it wasn't for my own good I would be irritated.

Teddy, Miss Kopechne, and the "National Lampoon"

Since we were on the subject,  I thought it would be fun to look at the Volkswagen ad again. Don't miss the line near the bottom, which competes for the title of history's greatest retraction.

President Ronald Wilson Dontmatter

"Kennedy docs show death threats as late as 1985"

That is the AP headline this morning over a story on newly released documents dealing with the life of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of the House of Hyannisport.

Now please read carefully from the second AP paragraph,   to which the headline refers:

"The documents showed that on May 23, 1985, the U.S. Capitol Police passed onto the FBI a copy of a letter sent to the Secret Service, ostensibly by a Warren, Mich., resident. The sender, whose name was redacted, declared: 'Brass tacks, I'm gonna kill Kennedy and (President Ronald) Reagan, and I really mean it'."

The crazy Michigan woman didn't kill anyone, but this morning an AP writer and at least one AP editor murdered a fair segment of the media's remaining credibility. 


Call it a stupid mistake by two so-called professionals who know full well that many, many readers never go further than the headline and that fewer still go beyond the first paragraph. The quoted paragraph follows  a lede also  mentioning  the threat to Teddy but not the president.

Or perhaps they were aware of the readership studies but somehow secured employment with the world's largest (and once great) wire service with news judgment which holds that a threat to assassinate a senator is highly significant while an identical threat against a sitting president is worth just a throwaway line. 


---

There's also some fresh documentation that we are quite correct in despising the youngest Kennedy for his cowardice and calculated lies and actions  while Mary Jo sucked in that last horrid lungful of  sea water.  But it is buried deep in the usually  unread sentences which, like as not, would be on the dead-tree jump page if not cut altogether.


For instance, the FBI helped Ted  buy time to get his story arranged for the fawning reporters who aspired,  above all,  to be favored Kennedy courtiers.

'smithing the 1911

Dirt Crashr has found a WW2 barrel for his 1911, and his photographs create an interesting look at approaches to reliable 1911 feeding.