If Vanita Nair proposes to me,

I'm afraid I shall have to decline. Too bad. She's a beautiful woman and makes a good buck.

Furthermore, if I should by chance feel an urge to ogle this South Asian knockout raised in Texas, I shall do so with the sound muted and captioning off.

On her CBS morning news gig today, she listened intently to a guy predicting the death of the American shopping mall and said:

"That breaks my heart. When I moved to Manhattan I really missed the "mall experience'."

Suggesting that any delights she might offer would be more than offset by conversational limitations.

The most wonderful Wednesday ever

Four days and a wakeup.

Then it's the Wednesday of the Three Blessings. Two of them are sure things, as sure as any temporal thing can be, anyway. The other is a well-hedged promise.

1. On that day, because I continue to be such a dedicated and competent retiree, President Obama will deliver my monthly stipend which he financed by extorting money from you. Sorry about that, Chief.

2. Simultaneously, my thimble full of that little leveraged-bond ETF I keep mentioning goes "x,"  adding one more piece of pittance to the money I'm trying to put aside for my old age. (I hope, even in that distant future, to be prepared to whip out cash for a clean GI issue 1911 some guy is tired of. Never mind that I might need to hire a kid to rack the slide when I want to shoot it.)

3.  Some time on that day of Woden the air temperature here at Camp Jiggleview, of which I am commandant, will at last exceed 20 degrees above zero. This is another Obama pledge. Of course it is channeled through his National Weather Service, but we know where the buck stops, don't we?

(Subsequently, His Ineptness promises no, repeat no, temperatures seriously below zero for weeks on end. Hope you're right, Buck-O.)

---

Returning to the present, the 12-below present, I awoke to a too-cool room, moving me to switch on the propane for about about 10 minutes. (Damn, another $138.22 shot to the devil.) 

The fireplace embers were glowing nicely, and plenty of firewood lay near the burner, but only the normally preferable big oak rounds, close to a foot in diameter and therefore not too good for quickly broiling my frostbitten backside.   So I dressed (before coffee {!}) and trudged to the outer pile  for a load of squaw wood, small and soft, which is now blazing. The aforementioned backside is acquiring a nice sear, and I am content.

    

I'm going home to Mother and I am taking the teevee!

Sanborn is an inoffensive little country town about 45 miles down the road. Folks get along. The economy is pretty good.  Hardly enough crime to shake a stick at, and the wives have pretty much stopped bringing shredded carrots in lime Jello to the church-basement potlucks.

It's just the kind of target bigger government looks for.  We'll teach those Neanderthal bastards!

Sanborn has a three-member public utilities board. All three were men. One's term expired, and a woman applied. So did the incumbent. The town council re-appointed him, making her mad and generating a complaint to Higher.

Iowa has a law vaguely requiring "gender balance" on city boards and commissions. Who ever got the Sanborn beef  lateraled it to our state ombudswoman.

Apparently a few reams of correspondence ensued, ending with her sheaf of "recommendations for corrective actions." The council promised to keep them on file and maybe get back to her. It seems the legislators (a) passed the law in order   to mollify gender-balance voters and (b) failed to prescribe any punishment  for violations in order to comfort male chauvinist pigs.

And this made her stomp her official ombudsfoot:

"According to a letter Ombudsman (sic) Ruth Cooperrider sent to the Sanborn mayor and city council members this week, the town did not take any of her suggested corrective actions. She expressed frustration, but said this would be her final communication."

---

Please stop throwing china at me. Gender balance is a good idea. And foot-stomping is not solely a female trait; see a rerun of any Obama press conference after congress declined to give him exactly what he wanted.

It doesn't make a Hell of a lot of difference whether an official chair is warmed by bureaucratic butt sheathed in silken step-ins or a hairy one sporting camo boxers. If the job is administrative all that's required is a competent administrator. If it is policy-making, it needs only a human with a sense of sane policy-making.

For instance, I fear nothing from Janet Yellen that I wouldn't have feared from Larry Summers. Toilet seat up or toilet seat down makes no never mind to the actual issue of how much funny money to print up so His Ineptness and the congress can keep right on buying your vote.

...And, By The Way and FWIW, The NRA Gives Him an "F"

I woke up a few minutes ago with that acute depression that overcomes a journalist when he suddenly realizes he missed the lede. Glance back at the previous post making fun of retiring congressslug Bob Andrews who went zero-for-646 over 23 years.

Now, 23 years is 8,395 days. Bob's proposed 646 new laws over that span represents an ambition to create one new federal law every 12.995 days. Cut the guy some slack, figure he took a Sunday or two off to get together with his homies to watch the ponies run at Meadowlands, and round that up to 14 days.

The meaning is that every other Monday morning you would need to check the Congressional Record carefully for a new Bob-dictate detailing what you must do, or not do, on pain of federal civil or criminal prosecution.

Suppose  he had been successful. Imagine how the Washington Post would have  praised him; the most "effective"  legislator in the nation's history.

And the other 534 would be green with envy, racing like Man-O-War to catch up.