Tribute to Barbaloot's Dad

While Barbaloot's folks are staying with us, her Dad gets bored easily. When we mentioned that we wanted to wreck out the carpet in the dining room and replace it with laminate flooring, he offered his experience and his patience. He even brought some tools.

The floor went down in a day and a half, interrupted regularly with having to chase Toad back downstairs and keep Mlle Sklodovska from falling down the cold-air return register.

He is talented at "cutting in," be it paint, roofing, linoleum or tile. The plank at the kitchen door was tricky, but when he had it just as he wanted it, it slipped in like a Garand bolt. Angle it like so, twist it a bit this way, that end first, easy eeeeeeeeaaaasssssyyy, pop.

When my vacation was over and I returned to work, he kept going with the moulding to cover the expansion gap at the edges of the new floor. I tell him how I appreciate and respect his work, and he just looks at me.

Did I mention he knows how to thread blackpipe?

If a woman answers honestly, size does not matter

But horsepower and durability matter very much. Barbaloot mentioned in passing how she admires her sister's premium stand mixer, and how it accepts all manner of powered accessories. She would not go for a hand-operated pasta roller---gotta be Powered, man.

I took her at her word.

My God, this thing should not come with a plug, just white, black and green 12-gauge tails for its own circuit breaker.

At top, the big shield with the knob on its side is an accessory power takeoff worthy of John Deere. Hello, pasta roller.

Merry Christmas, Barbaloot.

Quote for the day

This phenomenon -- legal victory that leads to cultural and political defeat -- has a long history. In the 1850s, slaveholders collected some huge legal prizes: the Fugitive Slave Act, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision. Those victories produced an anti-slavery movement powerful enough to elect Lincoln and win the Civil War. Sixty years later, the temperance movement won its long battle for national Prohibition. Within a decade, the culture was turning against temperance; Repeal came soon after. In America's culture wars, the side with the law's weaponry often manages only to wound themselves.

Could we be seeing this phenomenon at play in Britain, with respect to gun control? Is it long in coming to America? Or are we already seeing it in motion, say, in state CCW laws and reciprocity agreements, and the sunset of the AWB?

William J. Stuntz at TechCentralStation, The Academic Left and the Christian Right, Part II.