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... Time and the weather have worked against us and the coming month promises to be a busy one apart from whatever winter might throw at us…

Travel has been a mess lately even apart from le affaire de lingerie explosif. We could have told you if only you had asked because, really, no one has any business leaving the house unless you absolutely have to. Flying has become a sado-masochistic act of the highest order and if you don’t believe us, remember they had to pass a law, a law, making the airlines let you go to the bathroom if they keep you on a grounded plane more than two hours. And still the airlines protested being forced to accommodate the bladders of paying customers. Everybody should just stay home until they start treating people, well, like humans. The problem is, we’ve raised a generation or more of people who believe they can live in the backside of East Overshoe in the middle of the great state of Nowhere and still deserve to get to Paris in four hours on a moment’s notice. More on expectations later.

... We were only going to summarize Paul Krugman’s column, echoed by a later Washington Post article, about what an economic disaster the last decade has been. Truly, they were the Zeros for most of us, or maybe the Have Naughts. If you want the statistics, we can add a few if you provide a self-addressed, stamped envelope, but suffice it to say that the rising tide of the Bush Decade and Republican economic ideas managed to leave most folks stuck in the tidal mud flats and still, somehow today’s Republicans call for even more deregulation and more tax cuts. How’s that definition of insanity go? Engaging in the same behavior again and again expecting different results?

And don’t you love Dick Cheney? When he was Vice President you couldn’t say so much as “Huh?” about the Bush policies without being branded a traitor and a terrorist. Now it’s clear he and other Radical Republicans were just waitin’ and hopin’ for another attack so they could blame the Obama administration. Such rank hypocrisy should matter more than it apparently does. Clearly they care more about their personal power than about the country.

And finally, Stoopid America. Did they all really think that nothing bad was ever again going to happen on an airplane or in an airport? The aghast-ness, the shocked, just shocked reaction to this whole underpants bomb incident is supremely asinine. Terrorists are going to keep trying and sometimes succeeding no matter what we do. This doesn’t mean we don’t learn from this latest screw-up and keep trying harder but no counter-measure will ever work perfectly all the time. Maybe not enough of these people live in New England in the winter. You buy the shovels, you pay the plow guy, you clean up the storm, and two days later, it happens all over again. Even in May, when you put all that stuff away, it’s still going to snow again next October or November. Unfortunately, truth be told, even here we have citizens of Stoopid America who, in spite of reality, seem to think, fir instance, that they should be able to ride a bike to work 365 days a year and a smaller subset who actually try to and then sue someone when they slide under the wheels of an truck, so we suppose we should expect it. But so much hot air is wasted on the “how dare they” or the “I thought we were safe” or the “evil president” crap that we never actually get the body scanners into the airports. We’d need to experience an attack on the scale of September 11th every month for a year before we’d begin to approach the number of deaths in auto accidents yet no one gets the vapors about getting into a car to drive to Yellowstone on a vacation. And, when that car drives off a cliff, no one blames our Muslim, foreign-born, terrorist-coddling, fascist, communist president, either. So let’s get some perspective, okay? Sheesh!