Giant Underground Sucking Sound

     The shade* of H. Ross Perot snickers as the struggling homegrown American meth industry withers under competition from cheaper Mexican-cooked meth.

     You could not make this stuff up and be believed, period.
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* (Yes, he is still alive.  That doesn't mean his shade can't snicker.  And a literary construct is way less likely to sue.)

A Zen-Like Moment Of Cognitive Dissonance

     Here's a neat little series of facts:

     Photography is, in fact, not a crime; as a general rule, you can take a picture of anything you can see.  (This is why the posted borders of Area 51 kept getting pushed farther and farther out.)  It's a First Amendment issue and you'll find outfits like the American Civil Liberties Union foursquare on the side of the guy making pictures.

     Policemen who overstep the bounds are a civil-liberties issue, too -- and it's something that intersects with cameras more and more often.   So much so that there's an increasing movement to stick cameras on police.  It's an idea I heartily support, especially for uniformed officers, who oughtn't be up to anything that can't stand daylight.

     The reliably libertarian/Leftish Photography Is Not A Crime walks every millimeter of that beat and does a darned fine job of it.

     Now, my Left-leaning friends reliably inform me that The Koch Brothers are, in fact, The Devil, some kind of crypto-fascists of the direst stripe.  They also tell me the Cato Institute, founded and partially funded by at least one Koch, is up to the The Devil's Work.

     So imagine my surprise this morning when PINAC cited Cato's Quartly Report from the National Police Misconduct Reporting Project!  (I believe this is an effort begun by ex-Hoosier Radley Balko and handed off when he moved on.)

     Yep, when a cop beats up a guy?  Cato is there, probably peeking over Henry (Tom Joad) Fonda's wrathfully-grape shoulders.  When an OWS hippie gets rousted or a muckraking photojournalist gets arrested on trumped-up charges?  Cato spreads the news and raises the alarm!

     Turns out that civil liberties as a thing has got itself a variegated army of rough allies -- and they can get along well enough to push back, at least a little. --Stuff that in your sharply-delineated red/blue pipe and smoke it, why don'cha?

    (A nod to this article, which put it all in one place.)

My Post-Election Rant

     I've been putting it off.  Maybe, I thought, we can have one damn election where people breathe a sigh of relief and get back to the real world....

     Wrong!  From cartoons like this on the left to zany musings on the right that the incoming GOPpers might be too compromisory or too intransigent, from chiding warnings about the "dangers of supermajorities" to warning chides about the "perils of getting along with the Administration," I'm surround by the de-damnededest collection of sore losers and sore winners alike and even more sore-losers-by-proxy and sore-winners-by-proxy, and what they all have in common is soreness, a species of aggrieved, self-important butthurt that is about as useful a great big wart on the pad of your thumb and way less attractive.

     First all, politicians?  Get this: most citizens (and many non-) think government, especially Federal government, does too damn much.  They may not agree on what you should be doing, there are significant amounts of non-overlap about what you shouldn't be doing, but we'd all like you to do a little less, and to accomplish it with less childish tattletailing and games of gotcha, fewer dead innocent people, fewer travels that are just disguised vacations and/or campaigning; we want you to use clearer language and less B-S- flagwaving, in-group winks and dogwhistles. Getchyer fine-suited little selves into the office and get to work, preferably on whatever the devil it was you promised the people who voted you in.  (I don't care if you're to the left of Bernie Sanders and you told 'em you were gonna introduce legislation to communize everything: if you said you'd do it, go do it.  Likewise if y'promised to work on enabling citizen's militias and hand out M-16s to all comers?  Start draftin' legislation.  Whatever.  Just do your damn job, okay?)

     And now the rest of us: Listen up and listen up good: if the party you like to vote for won big, or if the party that you love went down in flames,* that wasn't you.  Dancing around, chortling "We won, we won," sitting around crying resentfully in your beer muttering, "We wuz robbed," oh, crap.  That was some stuff happened to rich boys and girls that run for office.  You still have to get up and take the Oldsmobuick to the office or factory or amber waves of grain and do whatever is the horrible, rewarding, gut-wrenching, pointless, splendid thing you do every day in order to put food in your belly and diesel or gasoline or electricity into your ride, so you can get up and do it again tomorrow.  That's what you do and it's what the people on every side of you do, too.  Some of them innocently and sincerely hold political opinions directly opposed to your own, and yet they smile at you every day, buy from you, sell to you, stick used gum to the underside of the tables, overtip, shortchange, etc. etc.  They're just people, not The Debbil, and just like you, they go on TwitFaceBlogSpace and express their damfool opinions, as if they thought that crazy stuff made sense!  --Which they do.  Let them, and you do the same, and at least try to understand that the other fellow having his say is not, in fact, an attempt to suppress you and your screeds.

     And what if the "other fellow" is Rush Limbaugh or Andrea Dworkin or Hilliary Clinton or the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Newt Gingrich (who?) or George Soros?  --So?  Yeah, they have money/fame/backers/power and yeah, those things are amplifiers; always have been.  But you live in wondrous times: where once these folks would have worked in smoke-filled back rooms, leaned on editorial boards, bought media outlets and been either beneath the surface or above reproach, now you've got access to channels of bidirectional mass communications, to unfiltered (and, often, unvetted) information -- connected to most of the planet!  And yet folks still fume about various "they" and "them" and how the little guy is aced out, silenced, covered up--  Oh, sure he he is; but it's like Winston Churchill's line about democracy being "the worst system of government -- except for all the others."  You're not as loud as all those folks makin' heap big smoke but you've never had more information and a better chance of shouting back than right now!  --And yet you're still wallowing in butthurt, just like many of the politicians.

     'Cos butthurt is easy.  Butthurt is familiar.  Who doesn't root for the underdog?  So, who doesn't want to be the underdog, and get rooted for?  Thing is, here you are in the First World, and we're way short of underdogs; the Internet is even shorter of them (and they're reading this at the public library).  By the standards of a lot of the world, we're all overdogs -- some a bit more than the others.  You're not much underdoggy at all. Grow the hell up.  Stop whining.  Look your neighbor in the eye, even if he or she does vote like an idiot, and remember here's someone who's not evil, who mostly manages to keep their bills paid, lawn mowed, dog curbed and cops from bustin' down their door just about as well as you do -- and that you both have better things to do than mope around, thinkin' about politics and feelin' the butthurt.

     You got out and voted Tuesday, or you didn't.  You're adult-tall and it's time you stopped letting the noise distract you.  I'm not asking you to be nice, I'm telling you to get back to work.
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* And in that case let me, as a default-Libertarian voter, pour you some of this fine Failed-On-The-Ballot I get to enjoy Every. Single. Time.  Now, tell me how bad your Party's got it again?  I'm all ears. And all heart, just like most LP supporters.

Shut Up And Take My Money

     Okay, I admit it, I'm tracking the prices for a refurbished Windows Surface Pro -- unlike my regular Surface, it would run Scrivener and I like the size, screen and keyboard.  I can write with the Surface I have, I just can't run my favorite tools (Q10 to compose, Scrivener to plot, edit, revise and polish) on it.

     But the Hemingwrite offers a genuine mechanical-switch keyboard, a plain-jane black-on-white e-ink screen, and wi-fi without the distracting temptations of the World Wide Web -- and it looks good.  Turn it on and type!  Most of the advantages of a portable typewriter or a netbook/pad-thing with keyboard, with few of the drawbacks of either.  And have I mentioned how good it looks?

     Now the bad news: it's in development.  There's no word on price.  There's no word on when.

     Want, want, want. 

The Mental Image Is Different When Ian Fleming Writes This

     "Part of the thong fell off my coffeemaker."  When I say it, it just means some of the leather shoelace that holds the wooden heat insulator at the narrow middle of my Chemex has become brittle, broken, and fallen away.  In a James Bond novel...  Well!

     OTOH, I think Bond did use a Chemex.  So there is that. 

Autumn Sky

     Lovely clouds.

     ...You thought I was gonna write about the election?  Don't you get enough of that elsewhere?

Election Day

     Yes, it's happy-voting time, when you get to help decide on some of the obnoxious nitwits who will be pushing you around!

     I shouldn't have to say this to readers of this blog, but for the record:

     1. Do your homework, judge candidates carefully.

     2. Vote your conscience 

     If you won't do #1, do the rest of us a favor and stay home.

The Bacon, Egg And Tomato Sandwich

     It's good.  And it will restore your faith in the goodness of life, too.

     Tam and I had a late lunch at Chipotle yesterday.  It's a chain fast-food place and for me, the visit was a three-in-one special: first, last and never again.  Taco wasn't anything to write home about, the "medium" sauce was all heat and no flavor, and I ended up with a painful, upset stomach.  It's like a bad copy of Qdoba by someone who has never had decent Mexican food -- or even a good norteamericano fake.

     So a decent breakfast this morning, 16 hours later, is a relief.  ...Y'know, I hate to sound like one of those small-is-beautiful types, but we really did lose something when franchises drove most of the little "greasy spoon" places out of existence.  Sure, some of them were dreadful and over half were merely average; but if you didn't like one, there was usually another one to try a few blocks away, with as many different possibilities as there were owners and cooks.    Now, "average" is about as much as you can hope for, and some chains are simply hopeless.

     I'm happier with my own cooking and if I'm too sleepy or too busy or too lazy to cook, I'll stick with the independents.

An Advertising Don't

     On my way to work every day, I drive by a billboard for a jeans company that -- bless 'em -- makes cute jeans for plus-sized women.  This is a real need in this nation of the cheap Big Gulp and the $700 bicycle, and it will be as long as most people refuse to use the stairs.  Better denim than Spandex!

     On the other hand, when you name your company and design your ad campaign, you should probably check to make sure it can't be undermined by a kid with a long-handled roller and a few bucks worth of paint -- or a blogger with graphics software.  The second "R" easily becomes a "P" and, well:

     Ahh, the satisfied expression you get, relaxing after eating a dozen burgers, a liter of soda, a whole box of chocolates and a Fuller Brush man who fell in while the machinery was running.

     (This has led to some interesting discussion, here at we're-not-skinny manor.  Is this post poking fun at fat people, or at a series of billboards that consistently show heavy models reclining?)

Speaking Of Idiots, Part III

     This idiot at Time.

     Hey, Jeffrey, feel free to freeze in the mud in the dark, but don't try pulling the rest of us down with you.

Speaking Of Idiots, Part II

     This guy at Wired.

     Tl;dr version: "Okay, the right kind of space travel is grudgingly okay, but it is bad and wrong and icky if it's for rich people."  --By his logic, we'd've never had private airplanes, celphones or personal computers -- or, come to think of it, Wired magazine.

     (Off topic, or maybe not: a creature of my generation, when I hear "one-percenter," I do not think "millionaire bigshot," I think, "dangerous biker."  OTOH, in either case the real deal has little to prove; it's the pretenders and wannabees you've got to be wary of.)  

It's Cold, I'm Sore, Breakfast Is My Only Hope...!

     So I slept in.  Breakfast is worth it: an omelet filled with buffalo jerky, a little pickled vegetables,* applewood-smoked Gruyere and BellaVitano cheeses, with a little paprika and chives, cooked in butter, sesame and chili oil.  This is a "what's in the pantry?" omelet and it turned out delicious!  A little peri-peri sauce didn't hurt, either.
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* A pepperoncini and bits of cauliflower, celery and red pepper, but after they've been swimming in the brine while, they're all on a first-name basis with one another.