Here's a Llama

     A tiny one, at that:

The dollar bill is for scale.  I'm tempted to name this gun "Sting."

     The Spanish .380 showed up at our local gun store (Indy Arms Co.) for a song.  Intrigued, I sang.  Except for the external extractor, it's more a miniature 1911 than any I have seen, right down to the grip safety and sliding trigger.

     Yes, it's a Llama, and the finish shows it.  However, the safeties work, the sights are pretty well lined up and it's been running fine.

Two Things

     First thing: the Prednisone (and not very much of it) has turned out to have had a nasty side-effect or two on me, the worst of which is that my verbal censor is down and I have had to be very careful to keep my body language muted, or I'm gesturing like a clumsy puppet.  This is far from unknown and should fade away over time.  For now, it sucks out loud.  And it sucks worse to know what's going on and still get blindsided by it.  It's one thing to say stuff as you think it; finding yourself saying it while the thought is still forming is frightening.  (On top of it all, I am still having chest pain and coughing.)

     Second thing: came across an article in Wired about cash-strapped civic governments unpaving roads to save money, gravel being a lot cheaper than asphalt. (I'd put in a link but Wired and I are having a little disagreement about my using an adblocker to read their increasinly ill-written content.) This is straight out of the eerie post-industrial heartland of Atlas Shrugged -- and is no real surprise.  In the real world, there's no John Galt; we can take some comfort that the villains are nowhere near Rand-scale, but not very much comfort.

     I'm having a little trouble with the optimism this morning.

And The Sun Rises On A New Day

     Lord help me, I looked at the debate.

     Oh, not much, furtive glances over supper, really, while I tried desperately to find something, anything worth watching that was under an hour long.

     For me, the debate was like a car wreck: you drive by, drawn but not wanting to look, certainly not so long a look that you begin see enough to sort body parts from automotive wreckage.  Yet traffic slows to a crawl, stops, and you look, look away, look again--

     If you have a major-party candidate you like or at least can vote for without agonizing mental gymnastics, I'm happy for you.  How wonderful to not feel despair!  For me, well, I didn't think much of either one of them going into the debate and what I saw did nothing to change that.  Afterwards, Mr. Trump's supporters and Ms. Clinton's supporters both declared victory and posted hasty memes to that effect on social media.

     The capper for me came this morning, when I stumbled over a hand-wringing piece on Vox (somewhere to the Left of the Left) annoyingly written in the present tense by a fellow who'd abstained from the 1968 Presidential election because at the time, he didn't see any difference between Richard M. Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey.  He proceeds to recount the traditional litany of horrors of the Nixon Presidency, including a number of items Nixon had nothing to do with, musing all the while that it would have been better under Humphrey.  --I doubt that; he offers nothing in support of his notion past an axiomatic acceptance that Nixon was, in fact, the Devil. In 1968, things were screwed up, delicately balanced, and any touch was going to have disproportionate effects.  Humphrey probably would have made a different mess but he would have made a mess.  Bigger, smaller?  I don't know; I don't know in 2016, either.

     Go vote, you can't make matters any worse all by yourself and your neighbors are probably going to be voting at you.  Make your choice.  Refuse to regret it.  There is one person you can decide for, one person for whom you can speak, one person whose moral character is under your control: yourself.  That's all you've got.

I'm Betting The Canary Lives

     So, the various pundits, saladins, paladins, celebrities and Great Minds are all calling for Mr. Trump's head, including no few in what had been starting to look like His Very Own Party.

     Me, I'm reminded of the story about the venomous critter that wants to cross a river, and assures its host there's no possible way it's going to do harm while being carried --"After all, we'd both drown!"  Of course, over the very deepest part, the critter strikes and as they go under, the hapless host wails, "But you promised," only to be reminded, "Hey, I am venomous."

     The GOP has been snakebit.

     Lose control of tens of thousands of classified e-mails -- offstage, awhile back, abstractly?  The public yawns.  Show up on lovely color tape with hi-fi sound, talking the way men talk when the wimmens aren't around?[1] The public sits up.  Clickbait is around because it works -- and it works the same way blood sports worked for Rome.  Is it a hatchet job?  Yeah -- but Mr. Trump left the hatchet laying out and it's a way shinier one than any of the ones Ms. Clinton's got scattered about. 

     Like him or not, Mr. Trump shot himself in the foot, years in advance.  He didn't go alone.  A rising young celebrity reporter known as Billy Bush[2] was chortling right along with him  On Saturday, NBC's political analyst Chuck Todd declared the election was over.  Oh, the outrage!  We have a canary in that coal mine: On Monday, we shall see if Mr. Bush is back at his most recent post, co-anchoring a later hour of NBC's Today Show.

•   If he's gone for good (he won't be), you'll know that the network is a fine, upstanding supporter of Genuine American Moral Character.  Double points if they apologize officially!
•   If he's "on assignment" or otherwise shoved into the background, they're hedging their bets.  Maybe the flap will blow over.  And what if (cue dramatic organ) Mr. Trump wins?  They'd be in the deep doodoo if they'd given Billy the ax!
•   If he's there, business as usual, maybe another pro forma "I was young and foolish and with bad companions," then forget it; it's just more cynical crap from an industry that has perfected and concentrated cynical crap into a form so toxic that just to stand near it is contaminating.

     I know which way I'll bet.  (Update: he's off the show, "pending investigation." Because the very same behavior that in inexcusable on the part of one man might be okay fine by another, if he's a TV host with a winning smile? Or will we go with "youth and bad influences?"  It's a hedged bet, is all.)

     Gary Johnson still gets my vote for President, same as he had since before the conventions.  He's got serious flaws.  He's probably a crude-ass, too, but he's more careful about live mics and cameras.  If you can't stop being Junior High School barbarians (and in my darker moments, I think no human ever can[3]), you can at least learn to fake being civilized, right alongside everyone else trying to remember which fork to use and what not to stare at no matter how enticing.  I think Gary could manage that, if he got the chance.

     This election?  There really aren't words strong enough.  I miss Nixon and Humphrey.  I miss George McGovern.  I'm starting to miss John McCain, even at his crankiest.  Herbert Hoover or Harry Truman would be a real relief about now.
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1. Boys, you can fool your mothers, you can fool your wives or girlfriends, maybe you can even fool your sisters, but you can't fool me.  I'm working so quietly at the bench in the back of the room, or up on a ladder overhead, or behind the equipment racks that you forget I'm there -- and in your heart of hearts, engineers don't have boobs anyhow, so I'm under the radar even if it pings a little.  How you do talk when you think the chicks are away! Many of you are pigs, kept civilized by social pressure; many of you are primarily outraged at Mr. Trump from envy that he might indeed have been getting away with "Russian hands and Roman fingers" all over pretty young things and you rush to condemn him lest anyone suspect you might ever think or say what you have thought and said many times over.  (And by the way, sometimes we look at the best of you with lust in our hearts, too.  Don't take it as carte blanche to be crude.)

2. That would be young Mr. William Hall Bush, of those Bushes.  NBC loves having a tame Bush on staff, much as the Persian Emperor had ex-Roman Emperor Valerian kept around as a stepstool.
 
3. What, me catty, gossipy and superficial, tending to form cliques and so on and on?  Yeah, some.  If boys get "crude," we get a social environment that can make dinner with the Borgia's look tame.  And if you duck it, you're the one being gossiped about.

Elite Frenemies?

     Maybe they were frenemies; it was the impression I had received, the only time I ever saw Gore Vidal[1] and William F. Buckley, Jr. share a TV screen, late in their lives and careers.  They lit up, clearly pleased to not have to pull any punches: they knew they were well-matched.  Oh, the blades were concealed; no blood was shed.  But the daggers were there, keen, pointed and deftly wielded.

     Possibly too they were too well-matched.  Possibly each man saw in the other a kind of terribly-distorted reflection of himself.  Both elites, though from families only a generation or three in from the rough, they viewed the American government with a proprietorial air.  A crueler eye might suppose they were both concerned that the poor and under-represented were about ready to start eating the rich, and Buckley and Vidal only disagreed over the best way to prevent the process.  But I think it ran deeper; I think they both worried the very soul of the country was in danger of being lost.

     Last night I watched and enjoyed the documentary Best Of Enemies, which has the Buckley-Vidal ABC-TV debates from the 1968 Republican and Democrat conventions at its core.  Long story short, in '68, ABC was an also-ran network, in third place nationally only because there was no lower spot. Literate and charming in their individual ways, Vidal and Buckley loathed one another, loved the United States (also each in their own very different way) and the network figured they'd make for good television.

     It was compelling TV, anyway; face-to-face, Buckley called Vidal "feline" and was in turn painted as a war-monger -- no, make that a nuclear warmonger.  In their better moments, the sparring was marvelous; at their lowest ebb--

     I had thought it was during their first debate.  I had thought it was in 1964.  I thought civil relations between the two had improved.  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  In the next-to-last debate, the urbane gentlemen worked themselves down to barroom argument.  In the midst of a rising dispute about not only freedom of speech but how one ought to react to persons who pushed the boundaries of it, Vidal -- perhaps a bit too comfy with himself from a habit of rehearsing debate zingers to appreciative newsmen -- called Buckley "the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of...," far more serious fighting words between men who had both served during WW II than we might grasp today.  Buckley rose to the bait, calling Vidal out with "...you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered."  Live, on network television, in 1968.  Howard K, Smith, the abruptly-onscreen face of ABC's news coverage, looked as if he had swallowed a spider. 

     Nor did the feud end there.  The two sparred and escalated in the pages of Esquire, which led to a matched set of lawsuits that went for years, right down to the wire until the magazine (also named in the suits) settled their part and left the men a way out.

     But there's a note of sadness.  In later life, Buckley expressed regret over his word choice[2].  In later life, Vidal kept a series of framed photographs of the two men debating -- on the wall over the bathtub in his Italian home.  Outliving his opponent, Vidal's poison-pen thumbnail Buckley eulogy to a reporter held this wistful gem: "...hell is bound to be a livelier place..."

    With both of them gone, the world is a less-lively place.  Neither was entirely comfortable with directions American party politics has taken; Vidal the flaming liberal went so far as to observe, "...essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."  Mind you, he thought them both too right-wing, too concerned with "property," in the sense of what those who controlled the parties already owned: most of the country. He had a point.

     Moderns will find much to disagree with in the expressed views of both over time; but so did they, growing and changing with the times.  The two men were snobs, they were elites, they were, in many senses, effete.  But they loved this country.  They loved language, and accusing one another of maltreating it. They were, when on their best behavior, delightful to watch clashing swords.  They were never going to be friends.

     Best of Enemies offers an insightful glimpse of both men, in the kind of documentary that has become all too scarce: a lot of material straight from the original sources and speculation only on the part of interviewees.  If you want to see history while it's still settling, this film is for you.
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1.  Almost Eugene Louis Gore Vidal, Jr., by the way, and aren't we all fortunate to have been spared that? You can thank him, as it was changed by his own choice.
 
2. Of course, he went on to say Gore Vidal was "an evangelist for bisexuality," which is indeed accurate.  Harsh, perhaps, but fair; and there's William F. Buckley, Jr. for you in a nutshell.

More Reading

     I posted in great haste yesterday and in the process, left off one of the better books I'm reading -- yes, I have several going at any one time, usually one on the Kindle and one on paper, with occasional overage.

     The present paperbound "overage" is an excess of delight and practicality, typewriter collector Richard Polt's The Typewriter Revolution, covering history, use, maintenance, philosophy and esthetics of, yes, the typewriter.  It's got everything from tool-selection guidance to polemics and (partially tongue-in-cheek) propaganda, clearly written, lavishly and nicely illustrated, all in a lovely buckram binding with a bound-in bookmark in the form of red-and-black typewriter ribbon.  It's A Compleat Thing, an artifact at once practical and pleasant.  If you like typewriters, you should have this book.

     Lines to love?  This fellow Richard Polt, with such a deep appreciation of an obsolete, clunky technology, could have signed himself Dr. Polt (he didn't); he's a Professor of Philosophy at Xavier and no slouch at it, either, if a quick web search is to be trusted.  Here he is on fixing your own typewriter, a few pages away from a photo of his neatly-organized workbench:

     "I was never the kind of kid who took apart alarm clocks, but I was able to teach myself typewriter repair as an adult with patience and logic."

     ...Which is how we learn anything, from Heidigger to harmony, the application of patience and logic; a knack alone rarely cuts it.  It shouldn't take a philosophy professor to point it out but I'm kind of glad it did.

     This is a good book; you'll read the parts that appeal to your take on the hobby and save the rest for when you need it.

Reading

     Things I am reading:

     The Washington Frickin' Post, or stories from the first couple of pages of each section, anyway.  Their app arrived installed on my Kindle Fire 7 and it makes for interesting reading, as their utter horror at Mr. Trump, glee over every stumble from Gov. Johnson and not-quite-concealed disdain for Secretary Clinton makes it clear that they, too (and by their own dim and twisted lights) are trying to put the best face they can on an election with less-appealing main contenders than a back-alley bumfight.*  Good luck with that.

     Crap about clowns: someone needs to start running a clowns-in-the-news aggregator, because it is becoming a regular item and not in a good way.  Seriously, WTF, over?  Juggalos run amoker?  Fans (ew, squick) of John Wayne Gacy?  Idiots?  A "news flap," largely self-sustaining, fueled by hoax and rumor?  --Logic favors the last two on the list.  We were better off with Bigfoot and flying saucers.  Remember when clowns were merely creepily cheerful and amused children?  No?  Me, neither.

     Bloody Acquisitions, Drew Hayes: the third book in a series about Fred, the Vampire Accountant.  A bit dry, perhaps, but Fred's a decent guy whose concentration on business -- even the undead have to keep financial records and file taxes -- blinds him from seeing just what an inadvertently brave and stand-up fellow he is.  Luckily his friends, a mixed bag of parahumans, do notice.  Scary hijinks ensue.  These are fun books, best read in order, and if you were wondering what the less-apocalyptic side of Larry Corriea's MHI universe might look like, this is it.  Well-written pulp, interesting characters, engrossing plots and, hey, accountancy.  What more do you want?

     Lionel Shriver, The Mandibles: A Family 2029 - 2047.  Speaking of the Apocalypse, or an apocalypse, near-future calamity novels faded away as the Cold War and The Bomb came to feel routine.  Shriver's brought the sub-genere back on a wave of bad debt rather than radiation, and it may be more frightening than Fail-Safe, Alas, Babylon or On The Beach.  This future is mostly-linear extrapolation and the prediction perhaps errs on the gentle side -- but it's no walk in the park.  I'm about a third of the way in.  Turk Turon sent me the book with a note, "I read it thinking you'd be fascinated."  So far, he's right: fascinated like a rabbit mesmerized by a snake, knowing the strike is inevitable and hoping it won't hurt too much.  Every time I fill up an old-fashioned paper bag at the grocer's for over $50, I think thoughts of the sort Shriver puts on paper elegantly and well.  I don't know how it ends, so don't spoil it.  But it can't end well and we'd be wise to heed that.
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* Look, if you are finding yourself favoring one of the Big Two candidates, I'm happy for you; just try to bear in mind that, rightly or wrongly, they are two of the least-liked people to ever run for President, and I'm including Richard Nixon in that tally.  The people who don't like them -- and there are a lot who don't -- really don't like them and we're all going to have to live with that.  Invest in an effigy factory and you can't go wrong.  Make sure they'll burn nicely!
    

Well, That's Better

     Managed to work only eight hours, actually made some progress, learned about 1950s elevator controls,* discovered we would not be using the tower elevator in the downward direction that day  -- "Kid, we don't carry parts that old on the truck," which I will take from someone who is both my senior and so obviously knows his trade -- got out roughly on time and made it to the drive-thru doc.

     I drew a physician's assistant, who didn't hear any crackling from my lungs (I did, in bed in the middle of last night, but I've got to be listening close and I had to experiment to make sure it wasn't my sinuses) but wasn't at all happy with the sore throat, cough etc.  Symptomatic treatment was the order of the day, some good strong cough syrup I can only take around bedtime and Prednisone as an anti-inflammatory: a "stop hurting, stop coughing and buy time" approach that makes sense to me; the Tincture of Time cures a lot of things if the symptoms don't drive the patient to distraction.  The corticosteroid isn't without its own set of possible effects but it's not for very long, in a hit hard and taper off regimen that ought to help.

     The Ancient Greek were probably right, though -- for serious doctoring, there should be some incense and a snake or two around, just so you can be impressed more.  There's a boatload of headology in regular-type medical practice: they're mainly arranging things so your body can do the work.  It doesn't hurt to breathe on the dice before you roll 'em.

     However she did it, I was able to get a decent night's sleep and my outlook this morning is considerably less dyspeptic than it had been.  This is a good thing, as I was about ready to sell a kidney, pay off the house, and retire.
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* From the 1920s onwards, unless it says "Otis" on the elevator controls and possibly even then, C. J. Anderson built it.  Sure, there's someone else's name tag on it, but those beautifully-wired slate or thick metal panels full of open-frame relays, with everything dressed neatly, flat roadmaps of wire held by soft-metal strips?  Odds are good C. J.Anderson built it up near Chicago, IL, and odds are they still have repair parts for it.  Don't try this at home; elevator repair is a job for experts, and that's who they sell to.

Who Am I, And Why Am I Here?

    It was a better line before the spin-doctors got hold of it.  Sadly, my present state is closer to how it was perceived afterwards.

     Worked nearly 16 hours yesterday and I'm doing a short turnaround today, into a day that may itself run long.  I'd like to say it's worth it, but increasingly, it is not.  I'm running with a persistent and intermittently productive cough, a nasty sore throat and occasional dizziness.  I'll probably go from work to the doc-in-a-a-box, who will give me some patent nostrum that won't do much.

To Add To The Fun

     Not only am I on the early shift, I'll be working a double or near-double shift today, too.  Okay, they pay me for it, but I'm still recovering from the pneumonia-or-whatever, with a nagging sore throat, sore chest and mostly-dry cough.

    Well, either I'll get through it or it'll knock me flat for another couple of days.  Or both.  Plenty of time to sleep when the docs won't let you do anything but, right?  And until then, the clock's ticking.

I'm Here

     Just didn't have much to say.  I'd like to tell you I slept in, but in fact, it's my lunch break.  Oh, the glamor!

Icebox-And-Pantry Omelet

     It's not wise to skip grocery-shopping when you know you're low on staples, but I was sleepy last night and needed to get home to feed the cats only a little later than normal because Tam (who usually gets their evening meal) was out of town for the day.

     But I had and there I was at 0500, hungry and wondering what I could come up with.  Eggs we had, but no breakfast meat.  Bread but I didn't want to just do toast...  Half an onion, some black olives, some hard-toasted French bread rounds (think giant croutons) left over from Midwestern "chili"* the other night and a little balsamic bellavitano cheese: clearly, the Fates wanted me to have an omelet!

     A couple of the rusks broken up and with some water over them sat and soaked while I chopped and cooked a little onion (with black pepper and paprika).  I beat two eggs into the bread and water with a pinch of sage and thyme, took the onion out and poured the eggs into the pan. Once the omelet was starting to set, I added most of the onion, diced  cheese and a few olives, folded the omelet and finished it: yum!

     That combination works well.  Sorry, I ate it as soon as it was plated rather than taking a photo.
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* The skeptical quotes are a compromise, as Tam and people in the southwestern U.S. look askance at what we call chili up here in soybean-and-corn country.  It's a flavorful stew with ground beef, canned tomatoes, red kidney beans, onion, a little chili powder and, typically, elbow macaroni.  I skipped the pasta and added a small can of mild green chilis, some hot Italian sausage with the beef, a single fresh tomato along with the canned, and good dark chili powder.  It's still nothing a Texan would call chili, so I put the word in quotes or name it by describing the contents, in order to avoid a long conversation on what does and does not constitute chili.  In truth, "chili" is whatever you call chili, usually a red stew with meat, much as "science fiction" is whatever science fiction readers read, usually about the future.