Everybody knows this crap, right?

So I ran across a Facebook post that referenced Orwell’s Newspeak. I made a mildly snarky comment about my pleasure that millennials were hearing about 1984 and wondered if they had yet started learning Animal Farm. Then this happened.

Started equably enough. (CLICK FOR BIG ENOUGH TO READ.)

The pot went straight to a boil after that.

The shutdown you get with women going for Hillary regardless. Know any of those? CLICK FOR READING SIZE IF YOU’RE AN OLD MAN OR AN OLD WOMAN.

The coup de grace.

Thinking. What an odd idea. You can even do it with a vagina. CLIT FOR BIGGER.

You just get tired. People who insist they are smart, logical, competent, responsible, and thoughtful. Only they vote with their genitals. In what universe does that make any sense? So I took Hillary down. She’s unspeakably drab, an old woman with nothing left in her body but the reflexive desire for power. Do we need that? Do women need that? No. Nobody needs that.

Cassie basking under the cat god.

Hard to know what to say about this girl. She’s as big as a minute, lived for years in the rafters of the garage, and suddenly descended to spend her sunset time with us. She’s not afraid of the dogs. She’s innately afraid of humans, like all of her feral kind. But she bravely overcomes it on a regular if not predictable basis. Sometimes she allows herself to be scooped up and petted. But the picture above is the more usual perspective we have of her. The girl you can’t ever quite possess the way you’d like, no matter how much you love her.

We can see that she’s getting truly aged now. We’ve already lost her sister Penny and her brother Mickey, both beloved in our household despite their feral quirks.

Of course, my wife thinks I’m a sentimentalist, and I am. It was Fitzgerald who defined the difference between a sentimentalist and a romantic: “The sentimentalist hopes love never ends, and the romantic knows it has to.”

I don’t want Cassie to end. When I see her, I keep hearing this, the most sentimental of all songs.

Griselda.

What an old poop am I.

The Incomparable Psmith

What? What? I Say.

Psmith is gone. For several years, Raebert has been a momma’s boy. Maybe three to four times smarter than Psmith. Smarter, actually, than any dog either of us has had. Scary problem solver, intuitive, even telepathic, as if he understands every word you say, unless he doesn’t want to hear. Don’t question it. If you haven’t lived it, you have no idea what it’s like. (Between us we’ve had maybe 40 dogs, many of them geniuses on the dog scale.) The whole time, though, Raebert’s been an idiot-savant, a baby who always connived to get his own way. But suddenly he’s showing the right stuff, assuming the position of pack leader. A glamorous but not homogeneous pack consisting of a Scotty, a pug, a new greyhound, a feral cat, and a brawling orange cat. From their first introduction to the household, they have all loved and catered to him and he paid them no mind. At all. Not since the greyhound Molly died.

Now, finally, he’s getting it. Last night, for the first time ever, he asked to descend to the dog room and hold court over his minions. Saw him in the dark, looking regal on the couch, and I cursed myself for not having anything more than my iAbstractaPhone. But at least I had the flash on.

Psmith was a lord. Raebert’s something else. But they all love him.

We’re as pleased as punch.

The man to make the others man up.

Guess I have to explain its meaning since no one else can or will.

National Review has been fulminating en masse. How dare he? He’s a joke. He drags us all down.

Well, yeah. Off your high and mighty perch. You, like the rest of the Republicans, have your delicate debates with one another about immigration and same sex marriage and political correctness and all the other ways the left is totally carjacking and home invading the American way of life in directions it never thought of and doesn’t want. But actually being rude or (OMG) coarse would be a blasphemy to the ghost of WFB. This nation is in the grip of a kind of Stockholm syndrome. A hard won republican majority is so supine as to be emblematic of the old axiom, “If you’re going to be raped, you may as well relax and enjoy it.” (More fodder for the War on Woman meme, I expect.) Aliens have taken control, under the aegis of the president, an impotent and bought and paid for congress, and a corrupt, totally derelict Supreme Court, and no one knows what to think anymore.

The polls are all over the place. They report that people massively approve the two most recent precedent-destroying SCOTUS decisions. Huh? They also report that 63 percent of people believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, and one in three Americans would consider leaving their country for somewhere else — if there were somewhere better to go. Many of these are the very kids who propelled Obama to power and reelected him. Huh? Ironically, most of those enlightened ones couldn’t find a country on a map, not even their own. Thank whoever for our great public schools.

The Democrats are running an aged, empty crone who has cheated and broken laws at every turn her whole life long without recording a single signal achievement except having a vagina her husband hasn’t desired for at least a quarter century.

The Republicans have acquired a crew of candidates who are so afraid of a predatory press that they can barely stop stammering when asked about their greens fees, Mexican gardeners, bald spots, and choices in music and cuisine. “Please don’t hurt us,” they cry, while Hillary sits (dead?) silently atop a mountain of scandal no one in the nation has the balls to call her on. Okay. That’s how it’s going to be.

Except that the great Republican hope is Jeb, who is a Lyndon Johnson Democrat fluent in Spanish. How cool is that? The strategists are having orgasms in their $3000 suits. “We can win this thing.” Except they haven’t for a long long deleterious time. They are so wired in, so smart, so attuned to the political process that they have failed to understand Jeb fails in every respect. He likes Hispanic immigrants more than Americans, he wants the federal government to control elementary and high school education, he has no real problem with Hillary, having given her some freedom medal or something, and he acts in every way just like — Hillary, a scion, an heir, whose time has come.

Enter The Donald. He comes on the scene like a bellowing bull, albeit with an odd combover, yet even that is a kind of becoming display. If anyone could afford the best efforts of the Hair Club for men, it’s Donald Trump. He’s his own defiant Lion King, a supreme alpha male the Republican Party has lacked for at least eight years.

No matter how angry the precious of National Review editors are about his candidacy, he is saying things the silent majority (yes, that old trope) wants to hear. Obama is destroying the country. It is the market which creates jobs, and Obama hates both markets and capitalism. Obama has made the U.S. a laughingstock on the world stage while the world seizes on our weakness and descends into chaos. An immigration policy which refuses to enforce our borders or deport the worst of illegal immigrants is ensuring a steady infusion of uneducated, unskilled, often violent opportunists, who at best are not part of any high tech, world competitive workforce and at worst are an economic and criminal assault on communities throughout the nation. And the spending, the spending, the debt and the debt.

The Trump appeal in a nutshell. Everyone with a grain of common sense knows what he says is so. And it’s Obama’s fault. And Hillary, more self-involved than Marie Antoinette and more low in morals than Catherine the Great, will only make things worse.

The media attack him because they are afraid. The political environment in this country is more volatile than they dare to admit. The prospect of the coronation of Hillary is oddly at odds with the deep mood of an electorate which has been fooled twice by an image built upon lie after lie after lie. Hillary is the antidote to eight years of blatant, arrogant, self-serving lies? The media are concerned. Time to take out The Donald. Immediately if not sooner. Hence all the sound and fury of the past week or so.

Not saying I expect Trump to win the nomination. But he does have a valuable role to play that could help the republicans win the White House.

What no pundit I’ve read or heard has yet said: A debate including Trump will increase the ratings for what might otherwise be a sorry parade of appeasing platitudes.

Yeah, the army of Republican strategists have their candidates well schooled. Don’t offend anybody. Be nice. When Matt Lauer or Katie Couric assaults you with a bit of misrepresented trivia, answer the question and make sure no one in the whole country misunderstands your sincerity and absolute virtue. Be nice, be outreachingful, be a Democrat but less so. And never lose your temper or demean your opponent the way he and the media will demean you. How McCain lost. How Romney lost. How most of the current 45 Republican candidates will lose.

The Trump opportunity in addition to increased ratings is that some one or two republican candidates will discover that they also possess a pair of balls. The ability to fight back. To say something honest and mean it. Having a pair of balls is the way to beat Hillary in 2016. If no one else does, I may have to side with Trump. Because however much she wants them, Hillary has no balls. Why she hides at Chappaqua and never Meets the Press.

God help me.

Now my wife has discovered landscape aspect photography. She’s watching the deerhound and greyhound playing together. Funny. Spontaneous. Just like this cut from Sticky Fingers. Made up in the studio.

Moonlight Mile.

The way I always do it. Unless I plan a little bit ahead.

The Moon is Up.

Like with my Glossary, which was only 15 years ahead of its time.

The road may be long but it isn’t always winding. [Click for bigger on all these pics.]

We talked about Doom and Gloom yesterday. Today I went to the custard stand to get a black and white milkshake for me, a black and white cone for my wife, and a vanilla cone for my racist deerhound. On the way back I saw clouds. Clouds are supposed to be ominous, unless they’re really portentous instead. My state of the art iPhone refused to photograph them. I sent my wife outside to do it for me. But she thinks all photographs are portraits.

I therefore hauled my decrepit bones outside myself, and I sat them down on the road out here in the wilds of South Jersey to have a moment with God and country. Take a look. Why I’m calling this entry Hope and Faith.

This pic’s interesting on two counts. The beauty of God’s sky. And the fields below it, which we call the Mekong Delta because we are racist Anti-Asian types who have no regard for the 24/7 labor of the coolie-hatted ones who plow, sow, tend, and reap a proliferation of crops 12 months a year. (Note Raebert cloud in upper left.)

This one’s like proof of location. That’s our mailbox there on the right.

And this one’s a picture of God not too happy, and also of our mailbox again. We’re sending Him a letter of apology. You have heard how he hates being photographed.

Just another Sunday in the country.

He’s done everything you never thought of and he’s still alive.

Oh yeah. The Doom and Gloom thing.

I know we’re all supposed to give up. Justice Roberts is a tool of the left. Check. Boehner is a tool of the left. Check. McConnell is a tool of the left. Check.

But we still have the complete works of P. G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane to console us. White men will rule forever. Do not ever doubt it.

The U.K. and France have caught the lefty American fever to erase unwelcome moments of their history. It is now important to eliminate all triggers that might cause pain to former victims of depredations past.

The man formerly known as Cromwell.

No. 10 Downing Street has announced plans to evict Oliver Cromwell from the Brit historical record. All statues of the evil fundamentalist Christian Usurper will be dynamited, all books and movies about him will be banned and burned. No trace of him is to remain. Meanwhile Northern Ireland is demanding similar treatment for all artifacts and records of the War of Brit Aggression against the I.R.A.

The monster formerly known as Napoleon.

France has announced even more ambitious plans to scoop from the national consciousness all reminders of the French Revolution, the Directorate, and the subsequent genocidal rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Tomb of Napoleon will be demolished and transformed into a Muslim park. Moreover, all books about or referring to any of these sorry events will be rounded up and destroyed, as well as such movies and novels that depict any part of these events. Kiss Marlon Brando as Napoleon goodbye. and forget you ever heard about War and Peace or the Count of Monte Cristo. They never existed.

It’s going to be great. And I suspect this is only the beginning.

No, the three dogs and two cats didn’t get me a card.

Got one of these? I do.

Like an old time TV set, eh?

Like, it can do this from our bay window.

And it can fisheye the Scotty.

She does what she does. Don’t you wish you could too?

Nothing new. Raebert did this too a couple years ago. NatGeo did a special about a Doberman who did something like this, only even more exotic. They’re conscious, people. The last people to figure it out are the genius animal behavioralists.

The wall. All paintings by family.

My grandfather’s mother. All he remembered of her was her finger. My dad painted her portrait from a photograph. We’re all unfeeling old Scottish bastards.

Gabriel liked painting cows. Also composing music, surgery, and, well, living in Ohio.

Gabriel Miesse was a great man. Who gets to be like that?l

Death everywhere.

When I was young, I was a libertarian. Read Rand when I was 15. Fell in love. Then I got something smarter. You know. Sixteen brings wisdom you don’t get when you’re just a keening Paul. Problem I always had. You can’t dial back time to Zero.

So. Never thought you could just repeal every federal department you didn’t like. Never thought you could dial the clock back to Calvin Coolidge. But the libertarians thought you could. Why? Because they’re kind of autistic. Been reading about it. Even the women.

Worse. They don’t like us anymore. Us people. The educated, the smart ones, the unbelievably educated ones.

Yeah. We be dead. Hanging off the shelves of no account nothing.

You likin’ this dude, you big booty morons? Course you do. Nothing in life as worthwhile and gigantically great as a woman with fake buttocks.

Women used to ask if their butts were too big. Now they can’t even sit down.

Know what? I don’t care anymore. If I’d wanted a black woman, I’d have gotten myself one. That’s not racist. I just wanted an Irish one.

Bad bad bad. A trailer from an awful movie full of triggers and microaggressions, don’t you know. Like about being Irish and not Islamic. Awful.

This is a greyhound named Skippy, usually identified by his Winnie the Pooh toy.

Think I’m kidding? All the neighbors know Skippy because he never goes anywhere without Pooh.

Life consists of what one can bear. And no more.

But there are times when Skippy confronts the world naked. Meaning, there are times when he forgets Pooh in the car. (Greyhounds occasionally lose focus.) and then, even in his own neighborhood, odd things begin to happen. From the blog journal of Skippy’s most interesting life:

Skippy on a walk in downtown Mt. Dora. Today someone asked if he was an Afghan hound??? One day we were asked if he was a Great Dane, another day, a Dalmation, then a German Shepherd, then whippet, the list just goes on. He is a red fawn brindle, 70 lbs., how can he be anything but a GREYHOUND???? smile emoticon

Well, I can understand some of this. We had a black greyhound who looked to us like a small Doberman — yeah she weighed 65 pounds but we had a 100 pound deerhound which kind of spoils the intimidation factor — and she would never have attacked you for anything but your custard cone. (Truthfully, we did give delivery men a glimpse of her from time to time, our approach to home security. They seemed impressed.) The rest of these wild guess canine observers are hard to figure, except that people know nothing whatever about dogs.

Or any other mammal apparently. We were no sooner done exclaiming over the post above when we came across another greyhound owner who claimed that someone in the park asked her why she was walking a… What?

I was walking my Sasha and some workers asked me “why are you walking a deer?” I am not kidding. My husband was walking behind me with our afghan.

A deer? A DEER? Where do people get such absurd ideas?

Our greyhound Rikki heard the deer rumor. He’s gullible. He actually went looking.

We kindly corrected his misapprehension. He’s new here. We don’t expect the same calculus from him we’ve come to expect from Raebert.

He was dubious. You know, he was intrigued. Raebert just scoffed.

There’s no substitute for experience. Raebert’s lived in the country long enough to know where the deer are. Rikki just got here from Brooklyn. No wonder he can’t stop looking. Call it a greyhound thing.

“I think I see one. I really think I do.”

So we gave him another stuffed toy and a cookie, and everything was fine again.

When Putin or Khameini is threatening nuclear war.

Not that I’m not aware of all the female contributions to generalship, philosophy, science, mathematics, and literature that we all benefit from. After all, some people still read the novels of Jane Austen, I’m told. And elsewhere, I hear, some women have accomplishments as numerous as Hillary Clinton’s. As long as you can count successfully up to zero.

But they do look pretty silly and vulnerable when they’re peeing.

You can be sure Khameini is going to impressed by the first female president’s redline.

Am I trying to be politically incorrect? No. I AM being politically incorrect. C’mon, C’mon, C’mon, the prez is a firefighter, not a scolding kindergarten teacher.

Pretty much no one can appreciate that anymore. Not even our wives. Most of them have become scolds who don’t actually think before they decide who’s at fault and what must be done.

If youz’re the exception, let us know. Ha.

If you’re under 40, don’t watch. Over 40? It’s medicine.

Seriously. Staring at big boobs makes men live five years longer. So says a new study. Who cares where it’s from? It’s a study. It says look at boobs 10 minutes a day. Hooray!

Oops. Forgot to nominate them. But I’m getting older now.

I’ve got rules here. Don’t like the rules, don’t play. Every show that subsists on cheap sexual innuendo is out of the running. Every show that uses a laugh track to make normal growing up seem hilarious is out of the running. Every show that is based on some outrageous, impossible gimmick is out of the running.

I’ll begin with five nominees. You can add your own and then we will quarrel bitterly about them. Sound fun? At the end we may assemble a ten best list of all time. So don’t lose heart.

The Honeymooners

Barney Miller

Taxi

WKRP in Cincinnati

Get Smart

All of these have scenes and characters everyone remembers, lines that are still funny all these years later. Think about this as you nominate rivals or additions. I know the Lucy fans will attack, but “Waaaaaah” is not exactly a line, is it?

Put your thinking caps on.

They were hell on wheels in the old days.

Then they got modern. You know. Superior for good and ever.

Same place, different jerks. Humdrum Congregationalist/Calvinist architecture. Yawn.

So I know these two guys. Both from Yale. Different ages but both superior to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They battle on Facebook all the time, but what’s surprising is how alike they are. One’s a righty, one’s a weird libertarian/lefty combo, but both are somehow disconnected from life itself. They do postures not poesy. You can almost see them imagining how they look when they patronize your inferior ideations. They don’t put any real ideas forward. They simply snicker at yours.

Been talking to these guys for a couple of months now. At no time has either of them articulated a coherent view of anything. They snipe, they deflect, they pose, they assume — all kinds of things but mostly their own distance from decision and consequence.

Funny. I always thought there wasn’t that much difference between Harvard and Yale. There is. Harvard has fire. Yale has snobs.

My wife wants me to name names, which I can, but do I have to? Uninteresting is a title earned by the poseurs.

Daniel Borchers

I have no proof. But I think he means to hurt Ann Coulter.

Look at his site. There’s more than one. Enter his name on Facebook. You’ll find one that describes him as a happily married Christian. You’ll also find one that is utterly obsessed with Ann Coulter.

He wants to destroy her. I have no desire to remove a man’s freedom of speech. But I also refuse to countenance a man’s desire to use Facebook as part of a plot to hurt a real human being.

Initially I sparred with him, noting that he was hitting on Coulter two, three times a day. Now I think he’s sick in the head. He doesn’t stop. Ever. Same drumbeat, day after day. If we don’t rise up against sickness, who will? Ever?

We’re afraid to wake him.

We had kind of a war here yesterday. I was practically supine with allergies but my wife decreed that my life was less important than Raebert’s and it was time to cut off his hair so he could breathe better than I can in the heat.

That’s not the war. I meekly surrendered to the inevitable and we trapped Raebert in the dog room with a set of electric horse clippers. Her job, as a lefty, was to cut off all his excess hair by pushing the clippers consistently in the wrong direction, and my job — as a righty on Zyklon-B or whatever that allergy med is which makes me into a Boris Karloff mummy — was to pin a terrified 110 pound deerhound in the corner and hold him still while his mommy made increasingly wild clipper passes at his privates and other body parts.

The good news. He never once flashed his famous teeth and threatened to tear our heads off. The bad news. When we’d finished, there was a compleat Mini-Raebert on the floor (shown above.)

I suggested sweeping him out into the dog yard. The missus scoffed at the idea and suggested we wait till he woke up and wandered out.

Does anybody out there need a deerhound the size of a cairn terrier? He looks a good deal spiffier than the deerhound we have left after the horse clipper adventure.

Had a picture but I’m not allowed to show it. Imagine a large beautiful dog suddenly beset by moths. Moths with tiny fingernail scissors. Lots of yelping and writhing and squirming later, a sorry dilapidated survivor emerges. That would be Raebert, hereafter designated as Maxi-Raebert to distinguish him from the tiny monster in the dog room.

We’re okay. Except it’s time for next anti-allergy Zyklon-B tablet. Are we good?