Those bastards at Comcast are still letting me down, Gentle Readers, but I found an open for-pay network in the building and I am sort of on and sort of off.

It is irritating to have to pay a daily access charge, I have to say, and between trying to generate a story that is engaging and insightful, and has no spleen about the great issues of the day, I am about at the end of my rope on the commentary front.

Plus, the Victoria and her Maid Brigade are coming this morning, and that means Victoria and her sisters are going to be all over the unit like white on rice.

You know what that means- the clean-before-the-clean, the monthly re-set of all the crap laying around that never got put away properly. It is a useful thing, like admitted women to Augusta National’s membership rolls, though not enough to offset the astonishing stupidity that is going on out on the campaign trail.

I had to puzzle over that remark yesterday by Senate hopeful Toss Aiken from Missouri- what is a “legitimate” rape, I wondered?

How does it differ from an illegitimate one? I have to go with the President on this one, as I do occasionally, and feel a little sorry for the Mittster having lunatics upstage him. I truly wish there was someone running for office that shared my fiscal concerns, scientific belief system, and a passion for personal liberty.

I was drinking with Old Jim at Julio’s last night. He is one of the legion who finds my recent regurgitation of the dawn of the Islamic Revolution in Iran to be a little too much like Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, only lacking thematic and dramatic tension and decent writing.

“It was a long time ago,” I said defensively. “And it seemed like a way to not talk about anything that is going on now.”

“You have to live where you are living and not run off into the past,” He said. I was still marveling at Jim’s shaved head.

“Whatever possessed you to shave your head?” I asked him.

“My wife Mary said I was starting to look like an old hippy. I just told the barber to shave it all off.”

I toasted him with an insouciant glass of Pino Grigio, not a bad alternative to the Willow’s Happy hour White. I was a little unsettled, since we were not at Willow, but next door at Uncle Julio’s. Jim is continuing a principled boycott of the Amen Corner for a variety of perfectly understandable reasons. But I was a little disturbed by the caricature of a jolly Mexican featured prominently on the menus- presided over an cavernous bar and restaurant area that echoed the ambient sound and made it hard to understand anything.

Well, make that harder to understand. There is a lot going on I do not get. Plus, as I noted, Vicky and her Brigade were going to show up the next morning and I had a lot of cleaning to do to get ready.

Jim and I solved several problems and left several more alone.

“So, if Romney is ahead in October, the Israelis won’t attack Iran, right?”
Jim shook his bulldog head. “That is not what I said. The US election is the key issue in Israeli politics, and they are not going to screw that up before they have an idea of what the complete consequences.”

“I heard they might just lob a nuke high over Iran and detonate it and let the Electromagnetic Pulse- EMP- take out every electronic device in the country.”

Jim snorted. “You think once the genie is out of the bottle there won’t be nukes flying everywhere? Who is the most vulnerable nation in the world to that sort of nonsense.”

“Nonsense is right,” I said. “So, if the President is trailing Romney in October, what are the chances he is going to launch his own attack?”

“The idea is absurd,” growled Jim.

I swallowed the end of my third glass of Pinot Grigio, and signaled Tam-the-bartender for a last one, and the check. “I just wish there was a way to have Super Vicky come in every couple years with her brigade and clean out the government. We would get ready for her arrival, of course, and try to keep things tidy in between.”

“Nobody is doing that these days,” said Jim and we both sighed.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com