My muse overslept.

No blog for you this morning.

You come back later.

"England, ma'am. It's where Great Britain used to be."

Can you imagine what would have happened if some wide spot in the road had kidnapped a boat full of 'Er Majesty's tars back in the days of Pax Britannia?

HMS Thunderer would have dropped anchor in the harbor of whatever pathetic hamlet they were being held captive. Royal Marines would have been disembarked. Crowds of Wogs would have been mowed down by Gatlings and run through with Martini bayonets. The local rajah would have forked over his prisoners, or he would have found his house burned to the ground and Tommy Atkins pissing on the ashes.

This is what used to be called a casus belli.

Now it's just called a human interest story.

How are the mighty fallen!

Baseball: Can't hardly wait...

84 hours to go.

Blog Stuff: It's 1AM...

...The Cranberries are on iTunes, and some poor angel is without a voice until Dolores O'Riordan is done singing.

Just so you know.

Politics: CNN scooped by Silence.

CNN is groggily noting that there seems to be an increasing infatuation with Fred Thompson. They're only a month or so behind Michael Silence in picking up on that vibe.

I like Thompson. Mind you, he's not the guy I'll vote for, but at least I can understand him. He reminds me of the GOP of my youth, not the mutant hybrid big tent elephant of today that reeks of nothing more than hawkish Great Society fans that have attended a tent revival. Sometimes I think Dubya couldn't spell laissez faire, much less pronounce it, and someone needs to let the current GOP stars know that tax credits, incentives, and vouchers are all, as Florence King put it, "the welfare state in single file."

Blog Stuff: Help a brother out.

TD at The Unforgiving Minute is testing some new anti-spam gizmo. If you are an actual human and not some malevolent spambot, go leave him a comment here.

Slow fuse burning.

It no longer seems radical to say this: There's a crash coming. All manner of behavior is getting excused by the widening political schism in our fair land, and most of it goes without any official censure.

When I first learned to drive, I was terrified of freeways. One of the very first times I attempted to merge into traffic, the driver to my left wouldn't give way. I still remember the crunch of gravel under the tires as my lane gave out and I rolled onto the shoulder, guardrail looming ahead as I got on the brakes. This is the real reason I've always driven fast cars since then; not because I'm some cool speed demon, but because I was never going to get trapped like that again.

It may happen to some kid today because she has the wrong bumper sticker.

Christian Trejbal of the Roanoke Times, whose best-known gaffe thus far was comparing me to a convicted sex offender, has now surpassed himself. In a recent editorial he confessed to a laundry list of mental disorders: passive-aggressive behavior, projection, and serious anger issues among them. You see, that teenage girl grinding to a halt in a spray of gravel on the shoulder of a Virginia highway today may be doing so because the hilariously misnomered "Christian" didn't like her choice of bumperstickers,

If a vehicle sports one of those ironically misguided fish-eating-the-fish-with-feet, forget it.

or maybe he doesn't like the Explorer her parents bought her for graduation because they thought their daughter might be safer in a larger vehicle,

I treat them just like the gas-guzzling, road-hogging sport utility vehicles I find equally morally bankrupt: I don't yield to them.

When a grown man can, in public, describe his snits of politically-motivated road rage and remain not only employed, but insured, then the crack in the body politic is past the fix-it-with-Krazy-Glue stage. The best part is where he states "I assume people of all political persuasions follow similar driving maxims, even if subconsciously." No, Christian, only crazy people do that. Crazy Democrats, crazy Republicans, crazy Greens, crazy Libertarians: If you're out there taking out your political frustrations by playing tag with total strangers in two tons of high-speed steel your sanity is, to put it bluntly, highly questionable.

At least there's one silver lining in this dark cloud: Just remember, Mr. Trejbal, during your next joust with some "morally-bankrupt" SUV, the following bit of doggerel I learned in driver's ed. Maybe they never taught it to you. It goes like this,

"Here lies the body of old John J.
Who died maintaining his right of way.
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong."

(H/T to Ravenwood.)

Blog Stuff: Ah, Spring in the South...

Time to run outside and make pollen angels and get in pollenball fights, while the children sing "Dusty the Pollenman".

I'm dreaming of a yellow Easter...

Boomsticks: One gun a month.

But not the way the scaredy-cats usually mean it.

Me? Milsurp rifles and old Smith wheelguns are going to have to go on hold for a while: The next six to eight months are going to be all about the suppressors and SBR's. I'll be giving the 9mm AR the short-barrel treatment and getting a can for it. I'll also be picking up a .30-cal can for the two Whispers, as well as a 5.56 can for Project Housegun and a Gemtech Outback II because... well... everybody needs a .22 suppressor.

San Francisco to ban convenience.

The plastic grocery sack (aka "t-shirt bag") is one of the most fantastically useful gizmos to have been invented by the human race. Thanks to the magic of its loopy handles, I can drape several over each wrist and schlep a week's worth of groceries up the stairs, yet still have a hand free to operate the knob at the top. But getting the groceries through the front door is only the start of their usefulness.

I have one of the bags hanging on the wall near the kitchen, stuffed full of other bags awaiting all their future tasks. For instance, I keep one by my computer desk to use as a receptacle for soft drink cans, kleenex, and suchlike. When it fills, I take it to the main trash receptacle and replace it with a fresh one. There's a double-bagged pair atop the fridge, serving as a cache for things I don't want to put in the regular trash can, lest they wind up serving as cat bait, such as empty chili cans and whatnot. They let me take books to work in the rain without fear of getting them wet, even bungeed on the back of a bike. They serve as containers for the contents of my coin jar on its monthly emptying. They make great impromptu rain hats. They're effectively free, disposable, fantastically wonderful little items; triumphs of human ingenuity. If they made better bookmarks and were edible, they'd be perfect.

For all these reasons and more, some folks just hate 'em. The hair shirt crowd, those who are convinced that anything fun or useful must be unhealthy or cause global warming, have now succeeded in getting them banned in San Francisco. Supposedly you can replace them with a canvas bag (and how often am I going to have that with me when I spontaneously decide to stop at the grocery store on the way home from work? And will it hold a week's worth of groceries?) or recyclable paper (everyone who's ever heard that sickening tearing sound followed by the clank and thud of beer and Ben & Jerry's hitting the linoleum, raise your hand).

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to smuggle some plastic grocery sacks.

Democrats listen to their hearts, Republicans listen to Limbaugh...

...and I should have listened to Florence King.

From '91 through about '97, every place I worked had someone who dragged in their copies of National Review. I've never subscribed, being more of a Reason gal myself, but there was always an interesting tidbit or two, plus the magazine's main attraction, which was Miss King's column. When I went to work at the airport, it meant going cold turkey on "The Misanthrope's Corner," save for the occasional newsstand read.

In my current reading of STET, Damnit!, I'm now up into the material I've never read before; specifically, I'm deep into her coverage of the 2000 election. Do you know what Miss King was calling Dubya as far back as August of '00? "Lyndon Baines Bush". How very prescient.

I also empathized with her commentary on Fiasco '96, when Dole went so far out of his way to prove that Bob Dole can be as vaguely nice as Bill Clinton: "I... no longer count myself among Republicans. They're pussyfooting, henpecked invertebrates - all mouth and no gonads - and I'm through with them."

I know I sound like a broken record, but this is good stuff. You should buy a copy.

Now that's just creepy.

93 pounds of underthings. Ninety-three pounds.

Wrap your head around that for a moment. When I schlep two weeks worth of laundry to the wash-'n'-fold, straining at its giant Hefty bag, and they throw it on the scale, it comes out to somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds, blue jeans and SIGTac cargo pants included. And it doesn't include underthings, thankyouverymuch. I'd rather wash those by hand in the sink than force some poor stranger to handle my unmentionables.

Apparently, though, there are some folks who really enjoy handling stranger's unmentionables; enough so that they run around stealing them from apartment laundromats.

Police found enough underwear in his bedroom to fill five garbage bags, Tennant said.

"He said he had a problem," Tennant said.

No kidding he had a problem.

The thing that creeps me out about it is its very alienness. I mean why...? What...? Just... eewww! All manner of bizarre scenarios pop unbidden into the head. "It puts the Woolite in the sink, and then it puts it in the basket." When someone clipped my favorite Nine Inch Nails tour tee shirt from the laundromat I was simply pissed, but I understood why: It was a cool tee shirt, and some amoral scumbag wanted to wear it. Had it been underthings, though... well, ick.

The underwear will be held as evidence until the case is resolved, after which their disposition is uncertain, Tennant said.

"Would you really want them back?" he asked. "I would say not."

Uh, no thanks. You can keep 'em. Vickie's Secret is always having a sale, so I'll just go get some, er,... untainted ones, 'kay?

What kind of world is it when you have to guard your laundry to keep some perv from making off with your underwear?

Overheard on the porch...

Tam: "Am I easily amused?"

Gunsmith Bob: "Well, you did get awfully worked up over a spork."

Tam: "Yeah, but it was a folding titanium spork."

Gunsmith Bob: "It was still a spork."

Tam: "It's the folding titanium part that's important. Look, a Toyota Camry may be the most boring thing on the planet, but if you had a folding titanium Toyota Camry, that'd be something!"

Gunsmith Bob: "Well, at least it's not a shiny piece of glitter or a feather on a string, but you are pretty easily amused."

Spot the difference there?

Whereas Mrs. dos Santos took all that time to slave in the kitchen, Timothy Wayne Shepherd (being a guy) used the barbecue grill.

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- A 19-year-old Texas A&M University student was killed by her ex-boyfriend, who then dismembered and burned her body on a patio grill, authorities said Saturday.

Are there some mind-control rays going around that I'm just not receiving? What's going on here? Is it "Dismember Your Schmoopie In The Kitchen Week" or something?

Okay, that's a little over the top.

Brazilian housewife Rosanita dos Santos was convicted of drugging her husband in his sleep and stabbing him to death, which is all fairly routine and not especially newsworthy. It was what she did next that launched her into the headlines:

She then hacked Jose Raimundo Soares dos Santos' body into more than 100 pieces, which she boiled and fried before hiding in plastic bags beneath a staircase in her house,

If it had just been the drugging and stabbing, I'd guess that he left the seat up one night too many, but all that work in the kitchen? That was working off a pretty serious grudge. Maybe he snored.

Boomsticks: Marko hits another home run.

An eloquent read on "Why The Gun Is Civilization."

Yeah, what he said.

zomg! Great snack food discovery!

Picked up some Sunsweet dried blueberries at Kroger's.

I loves me some strawberries & cranberries, but blueberries are just the top of the berry heap. I would cheerfully murder people in their beds for blueberries, but no longer have to, since I can now get them at the grocery store year 'round in dried form.

MMmmmm. Blueberries.

Boomsticks: Cognitive dissonance.

I once had a friend who was trying to grow out her own fingernails and keep them neatly manicured. Problem was, they were (like mine) brittle, and constantly splintering against some impediment of daily life. This would trigger a rant on how product designers just didn't take people's manicures into account when designing all the knobs, switches, handles, and buttons we encounter in our modern technological lives. (Insert obligatory feminist statement that the whole Patriarchal point of long fingernails, an Oriental import, is that the lady who has them obviously doesn't need to do anything with her hands. Sort of the digital equivalent of bound feet.)

So anyway, today I'm futzing around with Project Whisper, checking for feeding issues from a full mag, and as I went to give the charging handle a brisk cycle, I felt that awful tearing sensation from my left index finger as the nail encountered the GG&G sling loop, letting me know that it was going to be time to look for a nail trimmer and a file. Before I could stop myself, my subconscious launched into "$#^%&# designers! Never taking long fingernails into account!"

I just now stopped laughing at myself long enough to type...

Taxonomy of Modern Dangers: We're screwed.

Apparently Angola has legions of ninjas. Without a countervailing force of pirates, we're screwed.

(Although I am given to understand that Zimbabwe is home to large numbers of face-eating monkeys. With luck, they might put a damper on the ninja menace.)

Blog Stuff: Untortured.

Overheard at Outback on Wednesday night:

Sgt. P.: "Yeah, she was a stripper."

Mr. P.: "Are you still going on about that? Anyhow, did you see th..."

Tam: "Wait! What's that song?"

Mr. P.: "What song? I can't hear anything over all the chatter in here."

Sgt. P.: "I know who that is! It's... it's..."

Tam: "Oh, fergawdssake! Don't torture me like this! Who is that? I need that song."

Waitron: "Can you sing a little bit of it?"

Mr. P.: *Plugs Ears*

Tam: "No."

Sgt. P.: "I know who that was..."

Tam: "Who?"

Sgt. P.: "I can't remember."

Tam: "Great. Now I'm totally f&*#ing tortured."

Mr. P.: "Just look it up on the internet."

Tam: "With what? I don't know the title or the artist!"



Postscript: Thanks to Google, some fruity lyrics site with lots of dancing balogna & spyware, and iTunes, I have uncoolly paid $0.99, and now "The World I Know" by Collective Soul is safely on my hard drive.