Dutch gun porn alert

If you're passing through northwest Iowa Sunday and have a few hours to spare, you can swing by Rembrandt for a largish gun auction.

I won't be there because I consider the auctioneer a jerk.  Besides, there's nothing on the bill that interests me. I note the event simply for the record.

The burg is, in fact, full of Dutch people, but it's not named for the painter. That honor belongs to the two Rembrandt brothers, early settlers who perfected the art of creating copper wire while fighting over a penny.

It's also quite a righteous place where preachers still rail against their  lascivious countryman.

Ben Bernanke and the Magic of WD40

Your morning lecture today comes courtesy of our old friend Ben Bernanke, the power of applied mythology, and a big broken belt on a John Deere 318 hydrostatic lawn tractor.

The belt broke in mid-mowing yesterday morning, leaving the Camp Jiggleview parade grounds half beautifully clipped and half ugly, looking like an overgrown weed field in which Mary Poppins lurks, ever ready to burst forth singing schmaltz. (It has been wet, and mowing opportunities are infrequent.)

The result was determination to scrap all other plans, immediately replace the belt, and finish the job.  Thirteen miles away, the nearest Deere outlet sadly  reported no belt in stock. Thirteen miles and three auto parts stores further away, I found one at a marginal farm store, not an OEM product but usable.

While there, I decided to pick up a can of WD40. It was available and on sale! at $6.99 for 12 ounces, at which point I decided not to pick up a can of WD40, even though I like the stuff because (a) the spray can is handy and (b) colorful enough not to get lost in my shop clutter. Those perceived advantages fade at $74 per gallon, even if it really does contain fish oil you spray on a worm to outwit a six-pound bass. Even if has magic molecules to make your date amorous.

The magical stuff is magic because television and the teacher unions have combined to created a population which believes in mysterious potions since chemistry is even harder than math.

WD40 is about half "Stoddard Solvent" which is a geeky way to say "paint thinner." About 15 per cent of it is mineral oil and the rest is inert stuff and CO2 to get it out of the can.

(The figures do not add up to 100 per cent because, just in case I've missed something, one needs to leave a little room for the possible magic molecule which, theoretically, could make fish bite and Julie Andrews hot for your body.)

So, for so long as the miracle elixer goes for eighteen times the price of gasoline, I'll be concocting my own. Fill a pump spray bottle about two-thirds full of diesel. Top it off with SAE 10. The results mimic the magic of the bright blue and yellow can, and the savings can be applied to gray-market .22 ammo.

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So what's Bernanke got to do with this? Think, Man, think. He's the witch doctor who creates a money-like  substance out of thin air, making sure enough of it floats around to persuade Americans that paying $6.99 for about 50 cents worth of goop is a perfectly reasonable transaction. It stimulates the economy.

Making the Underclass Rowdy

While I'm enduring the fourth straight day of rain, fog, and other symptoms of  a world that needs to change its underwear, I'm occupying my time with electronical media.

It's mostly the internet where a little luck on the broker's site will help recoup the cost of those two recent loopholes.  So far this morning, the realized Federal Reserve Cartoons compensate for just under 1 per cent of the Colt/Garand outlay, meaning about 120 straight days of such wild speculation will bring me back to even, FRC-wise, assuming Chairman Bernanke doesn't add  more afterburners over at the Bureauof Printing and Engraving.

But with the other eye I'm occasionally glancing at C-Span where Brooks Brothers   boxers are getting all knotted about the internet "radicalizing" (exclamation points and OMGs) people.

I am sure it does to one degree or another, just like every other mass-communication  enhancer  in history, going back to the papyrus megaphone.  One of the better examples is our own penny press, born in the middle 19th Century (and haven't things gone to Hell since then?).

The internet mimics every other endeavor which makes it easier and easier to prate to  more and more people. In other words, like television and public schools, it arms stupid people with information.*

Even Wiki agrees. The penny papers cost about one-fifth the price of the  established rags and, to boot, offered a powerful selling point:

Simple vocabulary and diction allowed for lower-class and less educated readers to easily understand.

Now, if this way of thinking appeals to the C-Span hand wringers this morning, the logical debate must consider which to outlaw first, the National Enguirer or the Travis McGee Reader and its ilk. Those lower classes are downright dangerous when they learn about stuff happening over in the next block.

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*Or words and pictures that seem like information. That's important, but it's a subject for another essay.

1,2,3,4 What are we fighitng for?

A little for Flag and Mom's apple pie, but mostly for the girl back home.  Ask Sgt. York.

Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel of Detroit.