Newsletter -- Today America!

TODAY AMERICA, TOMORROW THE WORLD! -- Well, friends, I've finally done it, swept across America with my blog. It's been a long time coming, but like everything worth having, it was worth the wait. I remember a few years back when they said it couldn't be done, I took my famous vow of chastity until it happened, and now, thanks to you, it's time to let it go.

OK, I'm back.

And the real amazing thing -- among many amazing things -- about this is, I'm just one local guy. But in America, guess what, that's all it takes. One measly guy, one nobody, one big fat goose-egg zip like me, if truth be told the lowest of the low, not amounting to spit, and worthy, truly, to be ground to powder under the scrawniest weakling's feet, but now look at me. I'm the same guy, but this is America!

I remember hearing how even Abraham Lincoln started out like me. In fact he had it worse in some ways. He had to read by the light of a fireplace, I had a flashlight. He got up everyday and split rails, the worst I had were split ends. He was so dumb a little girl had to tell him to grow a beard. My face has a perpetual stubble no one likes to see, and these days you don't get letters from little girls; he was lucky to be elected, given the scandal. But he did get elected, and now it's my turn.

I've been holding off on the big word till it was complete. If you look at the map above, you can see the dots now cover the entire country, the lower 48. (The results of Alaska aren't in, because it's so vast, and I'm not trying very hard for Hawaii, because there's barely enough room for dots.) Each of those dots means at least one person -- "at least" means they could represent thousands -- is not only reading my blog but perhaps loving it. I'm guessing on that.

Just wait till they get word that there's a newsletter in the works -- with subscriptions about to be available -- and I'll be so popular I'll probably end up with my own podcast. Which will be very awesome, but I'll probably have to hire staff to do it for me. Being a nobody, my voice isn't that great for radio, kind of a scratchy, raspy, croaking noise, plus I've got a cough that very quickly becomes a nasty hacking.

I've kept my American stats quiet, as I said, but I've mentioned my foreign stats a few times. Interestingly enough, the countries I'm most popular in are kind of weird, Russia and the Ukraine. Which makes me nervous, because I have a hard time picturing them identifying with me. To tell the truth, I think they're using my site for some kind of [shenanigans]. I have my suspicions and fear for my life.

Among the other countries, I seem to be the King of France, since that's one of my biggest countries. I hope that's true, because I'd hate to see the French go down the same path as the Russians and the Ukes. France is big for me, and a few years ago I had a hit from Mauritius. Is that what it's called? That was 2010. I don't know what happened but I haven't noticed them since.

Anyway, thank you, world. And a big huge thank you, America. You did me right. I stood by you, now you're standing by me. I said the Pledge of Allegiance all those years ago, and since then I've taken part in other patriotic exercises, namely, listening to the Star Spangled Banner on sports broadcasts. I've heard a few good versions and a bunch of bad ones. That's a pet peeve. What's so damned hard about standing there, arms at your side, and singing a modest, respectful version of the Anthem? All this caterwauling and substituting different notes for the right notes -- I'm a liberal, but I'm aghast...

Speaking of 2010, a few of my long time supporters will remember when my success started, when I won the Gorton Fisherman Award for Writing Excellence for 2010. Something as modest as that got the ball rolling! A few here, then a few there, sat up and took notice. And I kept eating Gorton frozen fish, which is good brain food, and running with every silly idea I could think of to blog about, and as things went along, I started seeing much bigger success. And ever since I've had much bigger fish to fry.

Stand with me! USA! USA! USA! With a shout out to Mauritius, call me. And France. And the other countries, the Ukes, whoever they may be and whatever no good they may be up to, along with the Ruskies, which seems just weird. Stand with me! And you know, with "Bob" Dobbs as my witness, I'll stand by you. Until global warming, climate change, and the rising tides overtake our great land, which, God willing, we'll recognize before it's too late. Even if the jig's up, at least they'll still be able to play the blame game as their last gambit -- "Those damned liberals, why'd they have to send out Al Gore as their messenger; we would've listened to anyone but him, we really would've..." Hollow, folks.

No, I'm not part of that number. I'm part of the good side, the side that says ... at this point, what can you say? We made our bed, now we have to lie in it. That's no lie. That's my biggest fear. Someday all those places that are now covered with dots, my readers, will be uninhabitable, and I'll be back to what I started out as, a guy in the beautiful Midwest, which by then will be overrun with refugees.

Nature's Most Perfect Food - 2014

In previous years, I have summarily pronounced Tabasco as "Nature's Most Perfect Food." This year, with the possibility of shaking things up, I'm putting it in a head to head competition with a couple other great contenders. We'll see how it fares.

According to Wikipedia, "Food is that stuff we eat." If that's true, and I believe it is, we have to reason that some of it's likely to be better. That's what we're wanting nail down today, not only which is better but so good it deserves the sterling appellation of "Nature's Most Perfect Food -- 2014."

This year, I have three finalists, which I will list in alphabetical order, double-checked for complete impartiality: Bacon, Milk, and Tabasco. The competition will be fair, but I must insist, my decision will be final, certainly through the rest of the year, and until such time, if ever, that my taste buds and/or the inscrutable criterion "Extreme Unction" change.

Milk is a weird one, the beverage of mammals, produced right straight from bodies of the female variety. I'm given to understand that milk was my first meal, and was what I subsisted on through much of my first couple years. That's awesome to me, that I was so stuck on one thing. All I wanted was more milk, apparently. I still love it.

Bacon is a food we hear a lot about these days. At the current time, there seems to be a huge bacon kick with the public. Of our three foods, bacon is the one that fluctuates the most wildly in price. Cows regularly put out milk and it goes to market, but hog farmers know they've got food-gold, like oil, so the prices are always up and down. And Tabasco is regular as rain -- regular as rain used to be, before global warming. We'll just say now it's regular as Antarctic ice calving.

I want to underscore one other thing about bacon, that my love for it has nothing to do with jumping on today's wild bacon bandwagon; I've always had it. I love opening a pack of bacon. It's in there like the pages of a book, and you know it's going to be a taste adventure. Plus, hogs have always been a personal favorite.

I've known lots of people who raised hogs, and they depended on people like me for their income. I've seen freshly slaughtered hogs, not a good sight. I've heard hogs being castrated, not a good sound. But I figure any animal that's willing to go through all that, I'm not going to turn away their meat. One of the weirdest hog sights I've ever seen was something like 1,000 baby pigs all together in one room. Just a writhing, seething, heaving, disgusting mass of pig. I remember saying, "Get me the hell out of here!"

Milk and bacon, coming from animals, don't sound immediately desirable. But I focus on the finished product, a big glass of cold milk and a plate of nicely cooked bacon. Milk poured well before its spoil date, and bacon not fried to death, but not undercooked. So chewy, so flavorful, so nutritious, so much enjoyable fat that you can't help loving it. Washed down with cold milk. I always loved getting the little milk cartons in school. They only gave us white back in those days, unlike the current more-pampered generation. 

Then there's my old friend Tabasco. I've made it well known over the years, in real life and on this blog, that I love Tabasco. I've slathered so much Tabasco on things over the years, they really should make me an honorary citizen of Avery Island, my own little cottage, etc. Once I sneezed and had Tabasco way up my sinuses, nearly burning out my system. At the time I thought I would die, but I lived to laugh about it later.

These days, though, I've had a harder time with Tabasco. So I'm using less. I seem to be getting more sensitive to it as my aging molecules wither and die. With my mind I love it the same, but my molecules counsel restraint. I don't know what to do. I've always bulldozed ahead with my mind, but it's foolish to cross molecules. If they say they're tearing, straining, and dying, I need to listen, don't I? Or I could simply deny that bad things can happen, like with global warming, and press on full speed ahead. Who's ever heard of negative consequences from anything?

The way I'll decide the contest this year is according to the principle of Extreme Unction. Which of the three foods puts the most (and best) unction in my extremities? Right away, it's a contest. Milk, being my earliest (and only) food, obviously kept my extremities nice and rosy. It had no competition and did it alone. But having no competition also suggests an unfair advantage. As far as serving up unction today, yes, I will say milk still does. However, the old advantage is gone. Milk supplements, it's not the main thing.

Bacon has tons of unction. And my extremities find it satisfying in virtually every way. The one downside of bacon is that it often overloads my system with guilt. I'm always worrying, Have I cooked too much? Will I get fatter than I want? Should I eat it every meal? Is it bad for me? Still, just thinking of bacon there on the paper towel, the grease being quickly wicked away, leaving those lean strips in a seductive spread eagle pose, I'm always pleased and, even now, feel a tingling in my extremities.

Tabasco also carries a lot of unction, up the ying yang unction. Tabasco even makes me feel proud. I know Grandpa would love to see his boy eating a ton of Tabasco. He used to put it on my plate, a drop, and laugh himself to tears watching me trying to get it past my teeth. Then, after his passing, somehow his tolerance of it was transferred to me. So I'm no longer the boy but the man! Like Leonardo's man, my extremities are totally stretched out, and Tabasco hits them all, a bulls-eye every time. But Tabasco, fantastic as it is, is like milk in this one way, supplementary. Yes, occasionally I put it on a plate and lick it up, but not very often anymore. Because of age, the molecules, etc.

All three of the great foods have amazing unction, and each one's unction touches the extremities in ways hard to believe, or they wouldn't even be in the running. I tip my hat to all three. But the one food this year that puts the most Extreme Unction in my extremities, and therefore will hold the title forever of "Nature's Most Perfect Food -- 2014" is going to be  .... Bacon!

This Putin Thing Is Good News After All

I know everyone's up in arms about Putin invading the Crimea, then next, perhaps, Ukraine, and then the vorld! I am, too, since it's always been my belief that a guy ought to live a humble, peaceable life, for the greatest personal happiness and also for the good of the community. On this point, apparently I and the ex-KGB agent, for unknown reasons, disagree.

I actually sensed all along that the guy was bad news. There was his background, right away a red flag, so to speak. Then there was all that business of him having the actual control of the country even after they had elected a president. Then the macho pose he was striking for the last several years, killing bars with his bare hands like Daniel Boone, and shirtless to boot.

And when you get me going on this stuff -- stuff I'd much rather ignore -- it can be very unsettling. Because, being an old guy, I have clear memories of the old Soviet Union and the way they haunted my childhood. There was always talk of us being blown off the map, etc., which never happened, as it turns out, but as a child I didn't know it'd have a happy ending. I was also a child in Sunday School every week, so I went to bed each night with two terrors: a literal Hell and a literal Soviet Union. They vied for which might be worse. It wasn't till I was an adult that I realized they were people very much like us and not big raving monsters. And that was just Hell. As for the Soviets, the thought of Brezhnev's ugly blockhead and shadowy features still creeps me out.

Now, looking back over all that, except for my grief and that of millions of other kids, the key thing is it did have a happy ending. Despite Ronald Reagan's best efforts to keep the grief going, the Soviets finally crumbled on their own. And we thought we were home free.

Now all our enemies would be pipsqueaks we could swat like flies, our industrial might would transition to fulfill domestic and global peacetime plenty, and we would be free of Republican warmongering. Instead, we got brazen terrorism on the home front, industrialism shipped abroad, and Republicans up the ass, not only with warmongering but every other evil. This is not the world I signed up for when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were doing the right thing by committing national suicide.

So Putin's forays, gobbling up his neighbors and making feints at a larger global hegemony, might be good news after all. If it means we become more insular, nationally and industrially, we can have jobs and a better standard of living. If we're focused again on mutually assured destruction, hallelujah, because we know it's only a fiction. (And if it turns out not to be, at least we'll die heroically, not with a whimper as it'll be with global warming.) Speaking of global warming, troubles with the Russians is something the Republicans won't deny, so we'll be in it together. We can heal our divided nation, bringing reasonable people and these others, the crazies, back together.

I honestly think the best thing after this would be to give up the Internet to hackers, then at the height of their reverie, destroy the whole thing. Again, as counter-intuitive as it may sound, insularity and the fever of fearful nationalism is our only hope. And without computers and the Internet, we'll have an even better jobs outlook. Phone operators will be back, we'll be building filing cabinets once again, and getting to know our neighbors in a friendly way over coffee, not berating them in anonymous chat rooms and shocking them in endless sexting sessions.

Viva le Putin!

The Mustang's Killing Us

Not to pick on the Ford Mustang, exactly... It's the representative car, that's all. That's killing us.

I've never had a Mustang, although certainly I wanted one, like every other brainwashed American male. In fact, I wanted one till just recently, until all this was presented to me about environmental destruction, the whole business. Still, even with all that, having one would be nice -- it's a very seductive car. It certainly was when we were young and foolish and unable to resist the slightest thing. Now I think more about the cost. The destruction of things.

Could we ever have foreseen at the time of the Industrial Revolution that it all meant Certain Death? I'm convinced that even I in my above average wisdom wouldn't have thought of it. I actually had cars for many years before it ever occurred to me. And even then I needed the talking heads of the mass media -- along with others who are respected, to repeat it every now and again before I realized it.

Had I been there in the Revolution, I'm sure I would have been one of the early adopters -- I'm honest enough to admit it. I would've said, "Three cheers for the Industrial Revolution," even though moths were changing colors and the whole bit. That should've been the 'canary in the mine,' warning us off, but naturally it didn't. We all know the ways of man, lose your head and rush headlong to your own destruction. Other animals basically don't do this, except we think of moths rushing to the flame.

Still, it took a while from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution till the time that we got cars. But what a predictable step it was! Motors, gears, lubrication, internal combustion, and ... exhaust. I hate exhaust. And I'm just as guilty of emitting it, driving as I do, virtually everyday. You can't see it coming out, usually, but there it is, everywhere, killing the world, every one of us. For the sake of a little bit of travel, we've accepted global suicide as a price worth paying.

That we should have left well enough alone and been content riding horses and camels and pulling wagons is now beyond dispute. Alas. Seriously, alas.

With all that in mind, you want to know something popular with the public that absolutely sickens me? Classic cars. What a mistake these are, but people are too blind to see it. They're old, they're still around, they're treasured, restored, and sold for big bucks. How smart! Our pride is placed in what should be seen as a testimony to our impending death! Death to classic cars! Most of them weren't good when they were new.

We know them from parades, driving by slowly, a beauty queen sitting in each convertible. They're old fashioned looking, and you could make the argument that some of them do look cool, like the '57 Chevy. My family had these at the time. I won't deny it. We've all had a part in the environmental destruction. I'd almost like to have a '57 Chevy today, just to make a statement by destroying it. It'd make a great protest that would make news: "Local Man Publicly Destroys Classic Car." I'd sledgehammer that piece of crap till it was nothing but scrap, seriously. Somebody buy me one and see if I don't.

I suppose I've said enough about it. But I have to tell you, I could go on. I also despise car museums. I went to one once and saw some of the very oldest rickety cars, the first ones, back when they had no good idea what a car should look like. They were open carriage and had a stick to steer with. The headlights were candles. For windshield wipers, they had--- Wait, they didn't have windshields. Then we advanced to the more mass produced models, ones we're more familiar with, ones you had to crank to start. You know where you stored the crank? In the crankcase. Crazy how we still use the term.

Today, cars have gone so far that some of them are made particularly with luxury in mind, for the rich. People throw away good money to have one of these idiot cars with all the bells and whistles. Conspicuous consumption. If you're that much a loser and feeling so insecure, get a damned penis pump already. At least you'll be working it in private and the rest of us won't be constantly psychoanalyzing you. Ticks me off.

But what can you do? Rage only gets you so far. It feels good at the moment, like now. My face is flushed, my pores a little more open with the sweat. But what's it worth? The same old world keeps spinning, and cars continue driving by. I can look up right now and see vehicles outside. Big metal cockroaches, and about as healthy.

It's vain -- it really is -- my rage. We're literally killing ourselves, but to speak truth to power is so often a thankless task. We're going to go on our merry way, that's for sure, until, finally, the whole thing breaks down. Then we'll call AAA -- I'm looking way ahead -- and no one's going to answer. Global asphyxiation. Global warming. Gases. Etc.

If we could only turn back time! If we could go back and be content to live more simply, to feed the horse, then stay home, that'd be better. Of course many of us wouldn't even be here, because some of us owe the mobility that came with the automobile to the fact that our parents even met. Or the backseat, where they first did it. Still, if we could make this major world fix, I know it'd be worth it.