Nope

No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

Ramshackle!

It’s not the hats. You can tell the good guys because they spend their days teaching young’uns how to whittle and helping schoolmarms off stagecoaches. Bad guys, when they’re not kidnapping the daughters of ranchers whose spreads lie over rich veins of gold, tend to sit around in ramshackle hideouts playing cards and drinking whiskey. They lie and cheat and are not nice to their horses. It’s not like the two sides on a checkerboard. It’s asymmetric, like two different games. To win, the bad guys have to kill the good guy. Good guys win simply by remaining good guys.

Moot and rhetorical

Questions for this week: Are all the angry white men going to stop being angry now that they’ve run the table? Or is being angry the whole point? Will we finally get back all the guns that Obama took away back in 2008? Will the pace of global warming accelerate as a consequence of the tremendous friction of 38 dead presidents spinning madly in their graves? And finally, how could anybody imagine that a smart businessman would pay somebody in Moscow to piss on him when there are millions of Americans who would be happy to do it for free?

Also pants without sewing

You can dig in your heels all you want, but if like me you are a member of the Biggest Generation you’re on a steep slick slide to oblivion. The void looms ahead. For some of us, it feels like the bright promise of decades of fatalism is finally paying off. Whee! Meanwhile there’s a lot of loose talk about staying independent in our Golden Sunset Years, which is really crap if you think about it. Seriously, for your whole life you’ve had shelter without building, bread without baking, meat without slaughter. It’s been assisted living from the git go.

Stealth bummer

We’ve had ninjas all wrong. The real deal is they make themselves invisible in whatever environment they‘re in. For some theater production in the past, the director dressed his sneaky murderer as a sceneshifter, because audiences were used to seeing these figures in black lurking around the set and wouldn’t expect them to interact with the plot, much less kill somebody. So what we think of as a ninja costume is just a Japanese stagehand outfit. To be really ninja-like, you’d want to dress as someone truly invisible. Like a homeless veteran. On a busy corner. With a cardboard sign.