Month: August 2023

One quick note up front today –

For those of you who read my travelogue posts from England and Scotland, I’ve found some videos featuring the Scottish shepherd who showed us his amazing border collies rounding up sheep.  If you search by “Neil Ross Scottish shepherd” you’ll find half a dozen videos of him and his almost-as-smart-as-Cassie-the-Wonder-Dog collies.

(And you’ll wish that our country could be governed by a handful of Scots shepherds and a kennel-ful of border collies, somehow.)

You’re welcome.

Now, because you people are my sounding board for troubling thoughts on politics (not to mention the wind beneath my wings), I’ve got to share two grim thoughts that have been creeping me out lately.

First, the latest illegitimate charges against Trump out of Georgia are filling me with an anger that is not healthy, even though it’s justified.  Corrupt DA Fani (she got the homonym right, but not the spelling) Willis has done something I wouldn’t have thought possible: make sleazy Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s idiotic indictments look only mostly corrupt and merit-less.

Trying to apply RICO laws to people who did nothing worse than challenge a hinky-looking election is beyond idiotic.  Especially since half of the national Democrat party did the same or worse after every election a Republican has won since 2000.  Including Ass Willis herself! 

Sorry, that’s “Fanny.”  Er, “Fani.”

Second, even as I’m furious about the Dems’ shameless and outrageous behavior in bringing all of these indictments, I’m getting an increasingly sinking feeling that the more immoral Machiavellians amongst them are using our righteous anger against us.  Through their grotesque weaponizing of the justice system, they’ve just about ensured Trump’s nomination, by causing most of us to instinctively rally to his defense (which we absolutely should), and to support his candidacy (which I’m not so sure about).

I’m most worried that we might be falling prey to the Pauline Kael Syndrome. 

Kael was a leftist film critic for the New Yorker who is famously quoted as saying, after Nixon’s landslide presidential victory in 1972, “I can’t believe Nixon won.  I don’t know anybody who voted for him.”  (Her actual quote was a little different, but in a way that revealed her condescending provincialism even more blatantly.)

That’s a near-perfect example of the bubble mindset that most of us naturally have: because we are surrounded mostly by like-minded people, we assume that most people in the country agree with us.  So when we see how utterly terrible Biden is, we assume that everyone sees it.  (They largely do: around 70% of all Americans polled say they don’t want him to run!)

And when we see how phony and baseless the cases filed against Trump are (the only one with any merit at all – though it’s still unjustified – is the confidential docs case in Florida, and then only because Trump foolishly said on camera that he didn’t declassify them!), we assume that everyone else does too.

But the same polls that claim that around 70% of Americans don’t want Biden to run also claim that around the same percentage don’t want Trump to run.  I’m not inclined to trust polls completely (to say the least!), but I’m also aware of the danger of dismissing any poll whose results we don’t like. 

And it’s not just one or two polls from the usual-suspect leftist outlets.  The Real Clear Politics average of several dozen recent polls show Trump and Biden tied, or Biden with a small lead of 1-2% of the popular vote.  Battleground state polls are slightly worse, as Trump appears to be trailing in the key states that will decide the electoral college totals.  

If Trump’s right, and the 2020 election was rigged and/or stolen (I’m sure of the former, and uncertain but leaning toward the latter), we know that since the Dems got away with it, they’ll try the same thing again.  So why haven’t we heard of any concrete steps that the RNC or Trump campaign are taking now to ensure that ’24 won’t be just as rigged as ’20 was?   

To top that off, no polls that I’m aware of are showing Trump with the 4-5% lead that he’d need to overcome Dem dirty tricks.  And that’s after nearly three years of the worst presidency in our history, when he’s running against the clearly corrupt — and physically and mentally decomposing – Joey Gaffes!  

We don’t want to believe that.  In my heart, I can’t really believe it!  Biden is so terrible, and his administration such a dumpster fire.  The economy is so damaged, our voluntarily open borders are a national wound that will weaken us for many decades, etc. and etc.

But deep down, I’m dreading waking up on the morning after the election in Pauline Kael’s position: “I can’t believe that Biden won.  Nobody I know voted for him.”   

I don’t think it’s a done deal, and things could change.  And anytime you’re running against a candidate as awful as Brandon – assuming he’s the candidate next year – you’ve always got a chance. 

But man, I have never wanted to be wrong about something so badly in my life!

Enough of that – let’s focus on the positive:

We’ve almost arrived at my favorite season of the year, which is marked by the beginning of football.  (I can’t say autumn, because September and most of October here in Florida is really “Summer 2: The Humidity Scourge Continues.”)

I’ve enjoyed playing and watching all kinds of sports throughout my life, including baseball, basketball, tennis and football, along with a few others.

Not soccer, obviously.  Because I was raised properly, and understand the world. 

God gave us the amazing gift of hands, with the concomitant blessing of opposable thumbs (Suck it, sloths and most other creatures!), and they are good for almost anything. 

Carpentry.  Punching bullies.  Releasing the snap on a young woman’s bra (though I’ve only deployed that tactic on one woman since I met the love of my life, and all other women became invisible to me.) Typing hilarious political and cultural columns. 

Flipping off Joe Biden if you ever come across his path.

So when some dimwit invents a game that involves us spitting in our Creator’s eye and eschewing the use of our providentially provided hands – not to mention giving ourselves concussions by intentionally hitting a ball with our noggin, rather than from squaring up and driving through a ball carrier head-first, as said Creator intended – we’re supposed to participate?

Bah.  BAH, I say!

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed many games throughout my life, but the only one that has stuck is football.  And even though my Chicago Bears (you’ve probably heard that they thrilled the nation with their “T” formation) promise to be mediocre again this year, and my Gators are not likely to threaten for the SEC east, my spirits always lift as the first kickoff approaches.

I know that some members of the fairer sex (spoiler alert: there are only two) can experience some spousal neglect when God’s favorite sport begins, as reflected in an old joke:

Guy 1: Well, my wife has divorced me.

Guy 2: Really? Why?

Guy 1:  She claims I pay more attention to football than to her.

Guy 2:  That’s tough.  How long were you married?

Guy 1: Ten seasons.  

But if any of the fine ladies in CO nation start to resent their football-obsessed husbands, remember that it could be much worse.  Your hubby might ignore you for parts of each fall weekend, and he might get a little too loud when he’s speculating as to whether some referee can distinguish between his arse and a hole in the ground.

But at least you are safe in the knowledge that he’ll never dramatically announce his pronouns, or that he’d like to be called “Zoe,” and that he’s begun hormone therapy as a first step to becoming his essential self as a woman.  Or – even more disturbing… a soccer fan.

So you’ve got that going for you.  

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Fani “What you talkin’ bout?” Willis, 2024!

The state of the 2024 race is so depressing that I’m not going to go into this weekend dwelling on it.  Instead, I’ve looked for other, more uplifting stories to write about:

My first good-news story comes from, of all places, Portland!  Four years ago, a violent leftist mob of (mostly peaceful) antifa scumbags – in the middle of several years of attacks and destruction – attacked Andy Ngo.  (He is a small Vietnamese-American gay journalist with the heart of a lion.) They threw projectiles at him, beat him with wooden signs and their fists, and threw noxious liquids on him, causing him severe injuries, including a brain injury. 

Tragically, none of them were beaten and imprisoned for many years.  But this week, in a Portland court-room (!), Ngo won a settlement from one of his attackers, and a judgment of $300K against three others.

His lawyer is conservative hoss Harmeet Dhillon (we could have had her as our RNC head, instead of RINO Ronna Romney-McDaniel!), and they both admit that they’ll have a hard time collecting the $300K, given the thugs’ “history of evasion.”

Not to mention their utter unemployability!  Look at a pic of one of the three, a pathetic dude named Joseph Evans who wears blue eye shadow and lipstick, and now identifies himself as a woman named “Sammich Overkill Schott-Deputy.”  (And no one has ever hollered at this delusional goon, “Make me a sammich!”) 

Right now his only chance to get hired anywhere is with the Biden administration’s nuke department, which has an opening since the bald, lipstick-wearing luggage-thief Sam Brinton is in the can.    

The next story proves that protesters in big Dem-run hell-hole cities like NYC CAN be arrested… but only if they are protesting their corrupt local government forcing illegal migrants into their neighborhoods. 

Several hundred citizens protested Democrats’ latest plan to create a 1000-bed tent facility on the grounds of what had been a nursing home (for elderly American citizens) in Queens.  Some protestors said inflammatory and outrageous things such as, “I don’t mind people coming here, but they’re coming here illegally, and then we have to support them.”

A dozen people practicing civil disobedience were arrested.  And this comes just a few months after the city agreed to pay $21,500 each to 320 leftist George Floyd protestors who had been “arrested, detained or subjected to force” by cops.  Great job!

Hey New Yorker taxpayers, aren’t you glad you get to pay off leftist protestors, and pay for the arrest of non-violent non-leftist protestors, and pay for many thousands of illegals who are costing you millions and further degrading your already diminished quality of life?

How’s that century-plus of voting Democrat working out for you?

But even NY Dems could have it worse.  They could be formerly living person Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group leader who clashed with Putin in the summer, and then coincidentally died this week in a totally coincidental plane crash.  

At this point the Putin News Network is about as trustworthy as CNN, MSNBC or the rest of our MSM.  So I have a few doubts about the veracity of Moscow’s account of Prigozhin’s death.  

Exhibit A: Prigozhin supposedly died along with 9 other people who were on a plane with him.  But that can’t be right, because you couldn’t find 9 people in Russia who would recognize that they were getting on a plane with the guy who screwed with Putin without all 9 of them doing whatever it took to get off that plane before it took off.

They’d be tumbling down that mobile airplane staircase like Biden tumbling up one!

Exhibit B:  This transcript of an interview between a Pravda Hack (let’s call him Jake Tappervich) and a dead-eyed Putin apparatchik that was leaked to me personally by one of my Kremlin insider sources:

Tappervich:  So you’re saying that Prigozhin died in a plane crash?

Putin Apparatchik (PA): Exactly.

Tappervich: Can we see the body?

PA: No.  Is very messy. When firing squad gets done with someone, you don’t want to show that on tv.

Tappervich:  Firing squad?  I thought you said it was a plane crash?

PA: Da, da.  Plane crash.

Tappervich: But you said, “firing squad.”

PA: Da.  Is Russian slang phrase for plane crash.  You know, like on 9/11, all the Russians were saying, “Can you believe both of those firing squads in NYC?” or “That Captain Sully, he successfully managed that firing squad in the Hudson River after hitting those geese.”

Tappervich: I speak Russian, and I’ve never heard that phrase before.

PA (squinting menacingly at Tappervich): Are you saying that President Putin is not fluent in Russian slang phrases?

Tappervich: No, no, of course not.  (nervously tugging at his necktie) So… has an official cause of death been announced.

PA: Da.  Many bullet wounds.

Tappervich (swallowing hard): Did you say, “bullet wounds?”

PA: Da.  As in, “when plane hits ground, it results in many bullet wounds.”

Tappervich:  So… that’s another Russian slang phrase?

PA. Da.  Like when we say, “President Putin’s last 8 rivals died after ‘falling out of high window.’”  Which of course is Russian phrase meaning “heart attack.”

And… scene.

Finally, let’s go to the“F— around and Find Out” file, to read the story of recidivist criminal and ineducable bonehead Cordelius Anthony Martin, who recently entered a convenience store in Cassopolis, Michigan, pulled a mask over his face, and announced a robbery. 

Sidebar: “Cassopolis” is a fantastic name for a small town. It’s got the great Greek ending of “polis” (meaning “city”), and the great first syllable of “Cass,” which is short for Cassie, who (as all well-informed people know) is my Wonder Dog. 

So Cassopolis, properly translated, is “Cassie City.”

As you might guess, Cassie City is one of those types of small towns referenced in the recent Jason Aldean song, “Try That in a Small Town.” 

And just as in that song, the lowlife Biden voter in this story did just that.  So feel free to pause here, pull up the video of that song, and play it softly in the background as you read the following account.  I’ll wait…

Okay, Cordelius – I’m assuming that if he had any friends (which I’m assuming he doesn’t), they’d call him “Cordy” – had armed himself with a box cutter.

Unfortunately for the Cord-ster, he was met not by a box – which would have been perfect for a crook carrying a boxcutter! – but by a clerk and a customer.  Judging by the clerk’s headgear, I think he was a Sikh.  And you know what that often means:

Stick fight! 

Usually in a stick vs. knife fight, the odds are pretty even.  The stick gives you longer reach and a chance to stay out of knife range and pummel the bad guy, if you are nimble, and have been well trained in the ancient Sikh arts of Stick Fu and Jui-stick-su.

On the other hand, a stick can’t easily open a carotid artery and wash the store in arterial spray.  So the knife guy has that going for him.

Unfortunately, the Sikh in question didn’t produce a stick.  Instead, he started to give up the cash to Cordelius.  (And at his home dojo, his Sikh sensei face-palmed himself in disgust.) 

Fortunately, all heroes don’t wear capes.  Sometimes they carry six-packs of light beer.  And that’s what the customer that night was carrying. 

But he was also carrying.  Because he had a concealed carry permit, and a pistol to go with it.   So it turns out that Cord-o had brought a boxcutter to a gunfight. 

Guess how that went?

Spoiler alert:  blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, blam, BLAM!

That’s right, the customer fired 7 shots.  And as I watched the store video, I heard the late Howard Cosell’s voice in my head: “Down goes Cordy!  Down goes Cordy!”

Tragically, one innocent liquor bottle was hit by one of the shots.  But three of the shots struck home, hitting Cordelius in the arm, back and face.  He dropped to the floor and tried to crawl away – as one does after being shot three times – but the gunman held him there until the police arrived.

The greatest detail in this story?  The armed citizen – whose name has not been released – never put down the beer! 

Most Americans in this situation would be expected to say something like, “Hold my beer, and watch me shoot this criminal.”  But not this man.  This amazing, admirable, anonymous man.  He said to himself, “I’m going to hold my own beer, and STILL shoot this criminal.”

Now some persnickety types might point out that firearms trainers would teach you to adopt a comfortable and stable shooting stance, use your dominant eye to aim while keeping the front and back sights of your pistol aligned, and hold the gun in both hands.  

But if they’re so smart, why don’t they advise you to shift your six pack from your dominant, shooting hand to your non-dominant hand before you draw and shoot a criminal? 

And do they even take into account how freaking cool you look, holding a six-pack in one hand and perforating a criminal with the other?

Admittedly, Cordelius survived the shooting, and sure, only three shots hit him.  But again: a lot of blood was spilled, but not one drop of beer.

So let’s focus on the big picture: No beer harmed.  The armed hero citizen is not being charged.  And since Cordelius was already a thrice-convicted felon, he’s now eligible for life in prison.  We call that a win-win-win. 

If only our national political life were going as well as things in Cassie City!

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Sammich Overkill Biden-Voter, 2024!

Well it seems that Hillary is in the news again.

And I don’t just mean Tropical Storm Hillary (and God bless all of those in that storm’s path), which I first saw in a headline that I assumed was a snarky attack on the Pant-Suited One.

No, I’m talking about the interview she gave to cute little guy Rachel Maddow talking about the bogus Georgia indictments of Trump.  That interview was a master class in sleaze, dishonesty and projection. 

Hillary started out by laughing uproariously about the latest indictment.   She tried to put on a serious face later – which was about as convincing as Liz Warren’s red face (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – and say that she did not “feel any satisfaction” from the impending show trials.  

She went so far as to insist that she felt “great profound sadness,” even as she struggled to keep a straight face.  (For the record, Ellen Degeneres, Martina Navratilova and Elton John all have way more convincing straight faces than the former First Enabler.)  

Maddow started the interview by complaining about how terrible it is for people to question the legitimacy of elections.  I swear that the following words actually came out of her mouth:

“If bad actors tell us falsely that every election was stolen, and that the only way an election is trustworthy is if they come out on top of it… it maybe wounds us as a democracy, and in a way that is hard to repair.  What do you think about how we get better, after the wounds that have been inflicted on us through this process?”

Now if Hillary had a shred of self-awareness at all, at this point she would have been sweating like Que Mala in church.  But no!  She had the gall to begin her response with this observation – and again, as God is my witness, I’m not making this up: “Well I think, you know, the truth matters.”   

She went on to lament the damage that has been done to, among other things, “our institutions” and “the rule of law.”  And she wasn’t talking about the damage done by her, or Stacey Abrams or Al Gore or Lurch Kerry or everybody at CNN and MSNBC, or any other filthy election deniers!

As regular readers may know, I’m not generally one to question the justness of God’s judgments – no matter how much this election cycle is making me feel like Job. 

But for that hideous woman to say that, and yet not be immediately turned into a pillar of salt (or alternatively, a pillar of fecal matter – which I think we all agree would be more appropriate, and which would require a lot smaller change in her chemical makeup), or at least having her pantsuit spontaneously burst into flames?

I’m just wondering if He might not owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology, is what I’m saying.    

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Trump’s best accomplishment in office was appointing 3 mostly solid originalists to SCOTUS.  But only slightly trailing that one was preventing a Hillary Clinton presidency, and the boils, locusts, rivers of blood, and the many other plagues that would surely have descended upon us with the inauguration of the Cankled Colossus.

No matter how angry Trump has made me in the last several years, and how much I’m hoping that we don’t nominate him and lose next year, I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

Moving from the nefarious to the ineducable, let’s check in on how well the mayoralty of Brandon Johnson is going in Chicago.

What’s that?  You’re in Chicago, and you can’t concentrate on my truthful and wildly entertaining column because of all of the gunfire, and watching your life pass before your eyes? 

Ok.  Grab your laptop and drop to the floor, then crawl serpentine into your bathroom, and slither up and into your tub.  Now you’re in the most bulletproof part of your residence. 

So take a few deep, calming breaths.  Remind yourself that if one of those bullets has your name on it, you’ll at least have died doing what you loved: reading the Cautious Optimism site.

Besides, the problem is practically solved, now that the Democrat brain-trust running your city has come up with a new plan they call, “The People’s Ordinance.” 

I know: usually when you put “The People’s” in front of something – as in “The People’s Republic of Wherever” – it usually turns out to be a Schiff-show.  But this plan is different.  It’s grounded in—

Oh no, wait.  It’s pretty much the same.

This plan is being pushed by Alderperson Maria Hadden (of guess which party), and it calls for all of the heavily armed Biden-voting youngsters who have been turning the Miracle Mile into the OK Corral to agree to a ceasefire.

I know (again): Why didn’t we think of that?  Just ask the criminals to stop committing crimes!  Brilliant!

For those of you who may sarcastically mock such a plan as hopelessly naïve – not to mention dumb as a bag of AOCs – you’re missing the best part.  It’s not a call for a total ceasefire, because that’s just not realistic.

It’s a call for a ceasefire just from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. each day. 

Which makes perfect sense.  After being raised in fatherless homes and going to sub-par and dangerous public schools for years (run by guess which party?), these people are basically addicted to shooting people.  And you wouldn’t ask a chain smoker to just quit cold turkey, would you?

No.  You’d try to get him to gradually cut down from two packs a day, to a pack and a half, and then to a pack, and so on.

This is just like that.  If the addict you’re dealing with is a three-clip-a-day man, you don’t just say, “Murder is wrong, so don’t shoot at anyone for an entire day.” 

Instead, you listen to your wise alderman (from guess which party?) and say, “I know you usually go through three clips a day, but how about tomorrow, you try doing one less drive-by, and get by with firing four or five fewer bullets?”

Before you know it, they’ll be passing four elderly people a day, and three mothers with toddlers, and not busting a cap in more than one or two of their arses.

I wish I were making this up.  But listen to Tatiana Atkins (guess which party), explaining the plan: “Our goal is to approach our city’s gun violence problem strategically and not all at once. Things didn’t begin this way overnight, and change won’t happen overnight.”

Well no, not if you’re ceding the nighttime hours to the criminals! 

The only thing that’s going to be happening overnight is that law-abiding citizens will be putting on their Kevlar vests and Kevlar shin guards and Kevlar jockstraps – or maybe their chainmail dresses if they’re females, or Dylan Mulvaney types – and topping it off with a helmet from a suit of armor.

Then they’ll crawl into their bathtubs and try to read the Cautious Optimism site through the slats in their helmet visors as they reconsider their life choices.

I can’t believe that anybody in 2023 Chicago is still listening to these knuckleheads.  The people behind “The People’s Ordinance” are asking for the thugs to thug only after 9:00 p.m to reduce risks for Chicagoans who are “not involved in high risk activities.”

Sweetheart, the vast majority of Chicagoans have been voting for Democrat candidates and policies for the last 100 years, and that is the very definition of a “high risk activity!”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a pic of a wooden fence, brightly hand-painted with this message: “Don’t Shoot!  I want to grow up.” 

Yes, and people in hell want ice water, too.  But if they keep voting for Dems and pro-criminal policies, they end up in hell.

With no ice water. 

And that’s why, today and every day, we must say…

Biden delenda est!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Alderman Maria “Please don’t shoot, it’s only 8:30!” Hadden, 2024!

Today I’ll start with some of the usual political foolishness, but I’m going to end with a personally scary story about something that happened to my daughter at Oxford after we left there.

First, after lavishing the Scots with praise during my columns on our recent trip to England and Scotland, I now have to criticize them, at least to the extent of acknowledging that their woke academics are as pathetic as our own. 

This past spring semester, the University of the Highlands and Islands gave a ridiculous trigger warning to their history and literature students who were assigned to read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.  The notice cautioned students that the book contains “graphic fishing scenes.” 

It’s been a long time since I read that – it wasn’t my favorite from Hemingway – but my first instinct was to wonder whether I could possibly have forgotten some gross scene that featured a human vs. fish sexual encounter! 

Because it’s 2023, and everything has gone insane. 

But nope.  The “graphic fishing scenes” are just scenes about… deep sea fishing. 

Just promise me that Disney doesn’t get hold of the copyright, because you know that if they remake a movie about that book, there’ll be some graphic fishing scenes, all right.  But they’ll be graphic because they tell the heartwarming tale of a trans-marlin who suddenly identifies as a turtle, and begins a torrid affair with a gay Cuban fisherman.  (Working title:  Broke Back Tortoise.)

Or better yet, the marlin doesn’t just realize that he’s a turtle, but that he’s a FEMALE turtle.  (Working tagline for the publicity campaign: “He puts the “gal” in Galapagos!”)

Seriously though, the proud Scots fought the ferocious Roman legions to a draw, and now they’re going to get their kilts over their heads over some fishing scenes?  They obviously haven’t been eating enough haggis!

In a surprisingly happy outcome to a California story, it turns out that the two Sikh store employees at a 7-11 who did God’s work by playing a little stick music on a career criminal who brazenly tried to steal a giant barrel full of cigarettes are NOT going to be charged with any crime.

While all normal people praised their performance (My review on Yelp, if I knew how to use Yelp: “Best percussion performance since I saw the Blue Man Group!  Two thumbs up!  Encore, please!”) we all feared that some Soros-ion DA would threaten the Sikhs with the death penalty or life in prison.

But the wave of public outcry over that possibility appears to have helped, and now the only one facing charges is the would-be thief, 42-year-old Tyrone Frazier.  

While reading a story about the case in the Business & Politics Review, I learned a few things I hadn’t known about Frazier.  His mug shot showed that his face is covered with bad prison ink.  (I’m shocked, I tells ya!)  At the time of his “let’s take my fists to a stick fight” encounter, he had multiple active warrants out for his arrest.  (Shocked!)  

And best of all, the cops came across him in the first place because HE had called THEM “complaining of pain from being struck by a stick.”   You’d have to have a heart of stone to not laugh at that.  Or at the wiseguy cops, who in their report noted drily that, “Frazier refused to provide further information on how he obtained his injuries.” 

I bet he did.  Because it wouldn’t help his street cred amongst the Biden-voting criminal community – “Now accepting MS13 gang bangers and criminals from all over the world!” – to admit that he ran head-on into a heat-Sikh-ing stick!  (Yes, that’s a bad dad joke, but a damn fine one.)

I paraphrase Uncle Jesus: “Sikh and you shall find… an arse whipping in a 7-11 if you try to rob it!”   (So let it be written.  So let it be done.) 

Turning to my scary personal story…

On Friday I posted the third and last part of my account of our trip to England and Scotland.   (And thank you for all of your kind responses.)  As you’ll recall, we spent the first two days of that trip at Oxford with my youngest daughter Emily, who was taking a summer study-abroad class there. 

We got back from our trip on July 27^th.  (The columns were so delayed because I was too busy soaking up the UK goodness during the trip to write more than anything but notes.)  Because Emily’s course lasted until this past week, she was still in Oxford when we got a call last Tuesday evening from two of her friends.

They were with her in the Radcliffe Hospital there. 

Her whole class had gone punting on the Thames that day, and there had been an accident.  A “punt” is a flat-bottomed boat propelled by a person in the back who uses a long metal pole to push off of the river bottom.  (We saw some Oxford students getting the punts out one morning; going punting is a popular activity for students to do themselves, and to do with tourists to earn extra money.)

Somehow the punter lost control of the pole, and it smacked Emily very hard in the forehead.  She was dazed, and the university chaperone got her to the hospital quickly.  By the time her friends called us, a doctor had been in to assess Emily, and scheduled a CT scan, which she was now waiting for. 

The girls told us that Em wasn’t bleeding and that she hadn’t lost consciousness or vomited.  But they told us that for a short time after getting hit, she wasn’t able to speak, and when the doctor asked what her birthday is, she couldn’t remember it.  She definitely had a concussion, and Karen and I naturally started freaking out.

And then Emily spoke.  “I- I- I’m o- o- I’m o- o- okay.”

And Karen burst into tears, and my heart leapt into my throat.  This kid is a very verbal, fast-talking and whip-smart astro-physics student, and she sounded like John freaking Fetterman! 

She tried to stutter out another sentence to calm us down, and I told her to stop trying to reassure us!

The phone connection was bad, and Karen asked her friends to call us again when the doctor came back.  As soon as she hung up, she got on the computer to check on flights from Orlando to London.  We’d only been home for 4 days, and were kicking ourselves that we hadn’t stayed longer. 

I don’t think the distance across the ocean has ever felt longer to anyone since Columbus set sail with three rickety ships. 

Three hours later we got another call from the girls.  The docs had come in and taken Emily for a CT scan, then came back and announced that the results were “good,” and had released her to go back to her dorm.  But they had been in and out so quickly that the girls hadn’t been able to call us in time for us to speak to them.    

While the CT results were good news, the best news was that Emily talked to us from the hospital room before being released, and she sounded a lot better than before.  She was putting complete sentences together, and even though she didn’t sound like her normal self – “I can’t think of words right.” – she was much improved.

Over the next two days, she made good progress, and we decided not to fly over.  We talked to our daughter the nurse and to the doctors we know, one of whom consulted with a doc who runs a cutting-edge concussion clinic (the advantage of living in a university town with a top-level SEC football program!), and Emily’s recovery was following what they’d laid out as a best-case scenario.

A day after saying “I can’t think of words right,” she told Karen, “I couldn’t process language correctly.”  She had three or four days of wicked headaches and recurring nausea, but her “fuzzy brain” feeling receded more and more. 

The day after the concussion, she skipped her first class but attended her second, even though we and her chaperone had told her to take at least 2 days off, and maybe more.  She swears she has no memory of that, and considering the other holes in her memory, that might be true.  But she’s also a driven and ambitious kid, and I can see her trying to get back to it too quickly.

Oddly enough, when her professor told the chaperone he was surprised to see her in class after he’d been informed about her concussion, he also said that she had made some of the most intelligent comments in class that day.  When we asked Emily about that – after yelling at her for going to class –she said that she’d said something in class, but she couldn’t remember what it was.

The moral of that story: even with a serious head injury, the average Simpson is still smarter than a Democrat Senator from Pennsylvania!

But right after going to that class, she had a headache, and sat on the floor beside her toilet for half an hour, feeling like she had to vomit.  After that, she took direction better.  She slept 15 hours the next day, and then slowly got back into the swing of things.  She still needs to write her two final papers, which her profs agreed to take late, even though the class ended on Friday.

Tonight we picked her up at the airport, and we’ve got her back under our roof, and we couldn’t be happier.  Our daughter is still herself, but with some occasional headaches that we are going to over-react to, even though the docs say they are normal.

For the first time in 10 days, Karen and I are going to sleep well tonight.  I haven’t been this relieved – and politics haven’t seemed less important – in a long, long time.

Still…

Biden delenda est!

We left Edinburgh and drove back into England, stopping briefly in a rural area where we saw about 80 surviving yards of Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans around 120 to establish some border control and keep the Scots out. 

That particular section of the wall is not overly impressive – the nearby St Andrew’s Church was built in 650, largely of stones taken from the old Roman wall – but I enjoyed seeing it for several reasons, beyond my usual love of history.

First, because borders – and border walls – obviously work.  How did everybody know that 2000 years ago, but Brandon’s brain-trust doesn’t know that today?!

Second, because it reminds me of the cantankerous Scots, and their rebellious spirit that was passed down to my hillbilly ancestors in Appalachia.  I love the idea that the Roman legions – the most intimidating military force in the world at that time – could whip some Scots in some skirmishes and battles, but they never stayed whipped.

Until finally even the mighty Romans threw up their hands.  “Just when these highlander-billies seem like they’re beaten, they get all wound up on scotch and haggis, and they come back at us again.  Screw it, let’s just build a wall.  Our empire will stretch from Africa to right here, and beyond the wall it will be nothing but barbarians and bagpipes.”

And the Scots said, “Aye.  You may have catapults and legions and the Emperor Hadrian, but we’ve got ‘the chieftain of the pudding race’!  Haggis!!”

It’s funny to think that 1900 years ago, the Romans wouldn’t go into the highlands to mess with the Scots, and 100 years ago, the federal revenuers wouldn’t go into the hollers of Kentucky to mess with some of the same stubborn people.   Good on ‘em.

Our other main stop that day was in the great medieval (and earlier, Roman) town of York.  We spent half the day there, and it wasn’t enough.  We saw the original city walls, and the Shambles – Europe’s best preserved Medieval street – but we spent most of our time in the spectacular York Minster gothic cathedral. 

The size and beauty of the cathedral – it took 250 years to complete, and is one of the largest in Europe – is hard to describe.  It would take days to fully appreciate all of the statuary and carvings, stained glass windows, and tombs and painted wooden figures throughout.  We went down into a crypt area, and through a Plexiglas floor could see the remains of the original Roman fort walls, along with the first Norman church built there centuries later. 

During the next day, we spent a lot of time on the road, but our main stop was a highlight for me: Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of the greatest of the dead white males, Shakespeare.

(Not to be confused with the whitest of the live white females, who is far from great: Lizzie Warren.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The weather was beautiful, sunny and cool, and we did a drive through in the bus to orient us, and then were let out for about 2 hours.  We took a walk to the river and then down a street past Shakespeare’s daughter’s house and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, down into a lovely park running along the river.  We walked a shady path and watched a few rowers on the river, along with a swan. 

At the end of that park was the Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried at the altar.  (Unfortunately there was about to be a concert, so we couldn’t get up to the front to see Shakespeare’s grave up close.) 

We walked back to the center of the oldest part of town, past the grade school that Shakespeare attended, and the spot where the new house that he bought when he returned from London as a financial success once stood.  The dope who ended up owning it in the 1800s tore it down! 

A few blocks further we saw the Shakespaw Cat Cafe, a quaint little place boasting a room containing some mellow rescue cats and a traditional three-course afternoon tea.  My wife and daughter stayed there, while my brother-in-law and I walked on and took a tour of Shakespeare’s childhood home, which was as primitive and cool as you’d expect.  In the museum along with it, I got to see a Shakespeare 2nd folio, along with a lot of other great artifacts.

We made it back to London by around 4:00, and after dinner we took a last, long walk around town.  Our hotel was in Kensington, and a two-mile stroll down Kensington Road brought us to the Albert Memorial, an impressive tribute to Victoria’s husband, which sits on the edge of Kensington Gardens, across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. 

The central memorial – focused on a guilded statue of a seated Prince Albert – also features allegorical sculptures depicting industrial arts and sciences valued by the Victorians, including agriculture, commerce, engineering and manufacturing.  A frieze that circles the main structure contains images of famous sculptors, composers, painters, poets, architects and engineers.

The whole thing occupies a square, at the four corners of which are four more sculpted groupings of people and one large animal, each one symbolizing a part of the British empire.  The Americas grouping features a bison, the African one a camel, the Asian one an elephant, and the European one a bull.   (Google the memorial for views of the many sculptures.)

I had a great time on this trip, and packed a lot into 12 days.  In addition to spending time with my two top-shelf daughters, I got to see Oxford, Stratford, 2 early Shakespeare folios, 3 Roman towns, multiple castles, half a dozen great churches, and 5 amazing border collies at work.  I also ate haggis 3 times, and lived to tell the tale.

Plus, unlike during the CO and COW’s vacation (God bless them!), the country we were visiting didn’t burn down when we were there!

So we’ve got that going for us.

Since I’ve been home and had some time to reflect, three thoughts from this trip have been running through my mind.

First, I don’t think I’ve ever realized how small the UK is compared to America.  My home state of Florida (I wasn’t born here, but I got here as soon as I could) covers just under 70K square miles.  All of England is only 50K; Scotland is 30K, and Wales is only 8K.  As the crow flies, London (in southern England) is only 300 miles from the Scottish border, and less than 500 miles from the farthest we got up into the Scottish highlands.  (My north Florida home is 2500 miles from the Canadian border!) 

A corresponding realization is just how much England/UK has punched above its weight throughout history.  The idea that so many great writers, thinkers, builders and inventors lived here, and that so many great events of history took place here – all in a place not much bigger than my state – is mind boggling.   

My second thought is an appreciation of the civilizational confidence on display in the sights we saw, in both religious and secular contexts.   The Albert Memorial is perhaps the best distillation of the pride taken in a globe-straddling empire on which the sun never set, but the various palaces and castles also represented impressive accomplishments: Buckingham Palace and Windsor castle in England, Cardiff Castle in Wales, and Blair and Edinburgh Castles in Scotland all bespeak wealth, and military and engineering prowess.

The many churches we saw were also mesmerizing.  The soaring ones like St. Paul’s and York Minster over-awe visitors with their sheer size and grandiosity, but I found that smaller ones, such as St. John the Baptist near Windsor Castle, Christ Church and the many chapels of Oxford, and Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland also had their charms.

The church I found most aesthetically pleasing overall was St. Andrews Presbyterian church in the small town of Fort William, Scotland.  You can find a picture online of the interior of the church: stone walls containing deep-set gothic arches with stained glass, an elaborately decorated altar area up front, all beneath a gorgeous, steep wooden ceiling, supported by symmetrical arches of beautifully carved, dark-wood trusses and buttresses.      

Even if I were atheist or agnostic, these places would move me.  The amount of effort and dedication they took to create is hard to fathom.  At York Minster I read about the building of the cathedral, and put myself in the shoes of a stone mason in the year 1220.  He began working on the massive foundation of a cathedral that he knew he would never see completed. 

If he were lucky, he might live to see one of the transepts completed in 40 years or so.  But he knew that even if his children took his trade, his son would never see the building completed, and not his grandson, either.  As it happened, the structure was finally finished in 1470, 250 years and 12 generations later! 

My final thought is a melancholy one, involving the seemingly frivolous, unserious and less accomplished society of our time compared to theirs.  The sublime churches are mostly empty of worshippers; the faith that built them and inspired the greatest artists and thinkers of many generations has receded like a once-beautiful and life-giving lake after a long and devastating drought. 

As a Christian, that is a depressing thought, and an ominous one.  Once the West’s civilizational confidence lost its foundational Judeo-Christian worldview, it rested less steadily on purely civic and patriotic foundations.  As the decades have gone on, the left has chipped away and undermined those bulwarks.

Our greatest historical figures are denigrated as just a bunch of dead, white males.  Our past accomplishments are sneered at as colonialism and oppression, healthy patriotism derided as jingoism and prejudice, and our virtues and sacrifices dismissed as dishonest cover for the trendy sins of this age (racism, sexism, whiteness, etc.). 

I am praying for a return to an ordered and reasonable faith, but I can’t say that the prospects look good for that.  Without it, I can’t see how we can counter the ascendant religions of the day – not just explicit religions like an aggressive Islam, but the atheistic equivalents of proselytizing religions such as socialism, “neutral” multiculturalism, or nihilistic materialism.  

I don’t see any of those ideological systems yielding to the kind of desiccated, fractious, and insecure and self-flagellating secularism of our post-Christian societies. 

When I was growing up in farm country, I heard the saying, “You should never eat your seed corn.”  Today you live off of this year’s harvest, but you set aside what you need to plant for next year, which ensures your future.

I loved our trip, and I liked the people I met in England, Scotland and Wales.  They’ve got rich history, beautiful land, and an amazing patrimony – architecturally, artistically and intellectually.  I just hope that they are not living too much off of past glories.

But I’m afraid that they, as well as we in America, may be eating their seed corn, culturally speaking.   

On the other hand, every generation is another chance to turn things around.  And we are cautious optimists, after all. 

The first step to improving things is clear, at any rate:

Biden delenda est!    

Before I get on to the rest of our England and Scotland trip, I have to give a hat tip to some anonymous commenter who described our intrepid Prez and VP team absolutely perfectly.  He called them “Sh*ts and Giggles.”

After what seems like 37 years of the disastrous Biden-Que Mala term – with him pooping on the pope and her yammering on about Venn diagrams and electric schoolbuses – I salute you, anonymous wiseguy.

Our first week in England ended in Liverpool, and from there we drove up into the Lake District, where we hit the only vigorous rain of our trip, though we still took a scenic boat trip on Lake Windemere and had some good fish and chips at a very quaint 300-year-old pub/restaurant.  

From there we moved on into Scotland, where we spent four days.   We got to take in most of the green, hilly countryside under cloudy skies, but the brief interludes of full sun made us appreciate the scenery even more.   We took a boat ride on Loch Lomond, and saw a Commando Memorial – a 17-foot-tall bronze rendering of three impressive WWII soldiers near what had been a training base from which they shipped out to kill Nazis.

We had a scenery stop at Glencoe, where three craggy mountains are in close proximity, and mark the site of a famous 1692 massacre of the MacDonalds by the Campbells.  (The tales of fiercely independent, warlike people, with intermittent feuding and long memories, seemed oddly familiar, consider the Scots-Irish part of my dad’s bloodline.)

We spent a night at a beautiful rustic hotel in the highlands, and after supper we took an excursion to a sheep farm that was one of the highlights of the trip.  We met Neil, one of two remaining shepherds in the area, and he put his 5 impressive border collies through their paces.  We stood in an empty pasture near a ridgeline, and while facing us and with the dogs behind him, Neil demonstrated various whistles.

He’d say that this whistle told the dog to go left and sprint; then he’d give a fairly quiet whistle, and a gorgeous black-and-white collie tore off down the left side of the pasture.  Neil said that the next whistle meant stop, and the dog skidded to a halt like a cartoon character.

The next whistle had the dog walking comically slowly, like Wile E. Coyote trying to sneak up on somebody.  The next whistle meant walk normally, and the dog did.  Then Neil gave the sprint whistle again – all without looking toward the dog – and that good boy tore away like he’d just seen Liz Warren, and mistaken her for a ghost. 

(On account of how ghastly white she is.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The dog disappeared over the nearest small ridgeline.  And after a minute or two, a herd of maybe 90 sheep came thundering over that crest, with the dog racing back and forth behind them, his fur flying and his teeth bared and tongue lolling in what looked like the smile of a creature doing exactly what God made him for.

I’d count anyone lucky who has half a dozen moments in a given year when he’s as happy as that collie when he’d brought that herd of sheep back to Neil.

I asked Neil what dog breeds he thinks are most intelligent, and he said that he’s worked with several herding breeds over the years, but the border collie is the smartest, and it’s not close.   (Because he’s never met Cassie the Wonder Dog and therefore doesn’t know any better, I didn’t hold that against him.)

Neil also said that there’s no such thing as bad dogs, only bad owners, because any time he’s met an allegedly problem dog, the owner was the actual problem. 

Sidebar: When I got back home and read the stories about Joe Biden’s dog Commander, who has bitten half a dozen secret service agents and WH personnel, just like his previous dog Major, who did the same thing, that made perfect sense. 

In addition to being a lousy father and a terrible president, Brandon is a total failure as a dog owner.  And none of us are the least bit surprised. 

We spent two days in Edinburgh, and had a great time.  I’ve seen pictures of the old castle on the top of the cliff in the middle of town, but pictures don’t really do it justice.  We got a tour of the old town from a local guide, had a dinner with touristy entertainment provided by a bagpiper and a couple of Scottish dancers, and wandered the impressive old city, finding one cool “close” (a tiny, narrow alley between buildings) after another.

One close opened into a small courtyard, where my brother-in-law and I came across a Writer’s Museum, in a three-story built in the 1600s.  (Google it.) The building was gorgeous, with one floor dedicated to each of the big three Scottish writers: Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. 

Scott has an impressive statue in the middle of town, and Adam Smith (a hero of mine, as he is of all right-thinking economists) has a smaller one not far from the castle.  A bunch of kids were acting the fool around his statue, and I was barely able to restrain myself from knocking their hats off and telling them to show some respect. 

(I had the same instinct in many churches all over England and Scotland.)

I really liked Scotland and the Scots, for several reasons, including their proper appreciation of dogs.  In every small or medium sized town where we spent any time, many dogs accompanied their Scots owners – along with Welsh dogs in Wales, and English ones in the Lake District, too. 

(Walter Scott’s statue – and many paintings and sculptures of Burns – included a faithful dog at the great man’s side.)

I also like the Scots’ national self-confidence.  I ate haggis three times, and while the last was the best, it still wasn’t great.  But man, are the Scots proud of their national flower (the thistle), their writers, and their haggis!

That last meal was a dinner in a small town in the countryside, maybe 20 miles from Edinburgh, in a restaurant owned by the same family for many generations.  Two other tour groups were there with us, and I’m sure that the owner’s performance is partially a tourist-driven exercise.

But there was no mistaking their national pride, either.  The owner sang a melancholy song by Robert Burns in a very nice baritone, and then he announced the introduction of the haggis. 

A bagpiper in the back of the room belted out a tune – I like bagpipe music, though a little of it goes a long way – and as he slowly piped his way in a serpentine path among the tables, a waitress followed him, holding high a platter with the haggis.  As she passed each table, she lowered the dish so that the appreciative audience could see it.

When they had both made their way to the stage, the piper and the owner dribbled the top of it with Scotch, as they recited alternating verses of a Robert Burns poem called – I’m not making this up – “Address to a Haggis.”    

They recited the poem – one in partly confusing Scots English, and the other in regular English, and it was amazing.  It started by addressing the haggis and praising it (“Good luck to you and your honest, plump face/ Great chieftain of the pudding race!”), and ended by attributing Scottish martial bad-assery to their terrible national meal:

“But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,

The trembling earth resounds his tread,

Clap in his ample fist a blade,

He’ll make it whistle;

And legs, and arms, and heads will cut off

Like the heads of thistles.

You powers, who make mankind your care,

And dish them out their bill of fare,

Old Scotland wants no watery stuff,

That splashes in small wooden dishes;

But if you wish her grateful prayer,

Give her [Scotland] a Haggis!”

Good lord!  I tried to imagine America – after these dispiriting recent years – having that kind of patriotic pride about a national dish, and it beggars the imagination.

Can you picture an American host singing the national anthem, then announcing the entrance of the hamburger?  A guitarist could weave through the room (probably playing a Johnny Cash song), followed by a pretty waitress displaying a giant burger on a silver tray to all of the foreign tourists in the place.

When they’d made their way to the stage, the host could dribble some Kentucky bourbon over the opened bun, while he and the guitarist recited an Ode to the Burger:

“You may be named for Hamburg drear,

but you have been perfected here.

And while foreigners about their foods prattle,

you are the finest gift from cattle.”

And a closing that ties American military prowess to the hamburger? 

“While pathetic vegans, weak and pale,

choke down their gruel and at life fail,

our armies triumph like conquering lords

with bellies full of Angus and Hereford!

We won at Bastogne and Peleliu,

but not by slurping beef-less faux stew.

So let your soy boys eat their swill,

we’ll feed on the bounty of the grill!”  

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m a little choked up, and in need of a few shots of Knob Creek 9. 

Next up: my third and final entry about our trip.  In the meantime, as always…

Biden delenda est!

As promised, I’m going to post a few columns about the highlights of our England and Scotland trip which ended last week.  If you’re not interested in my family vacation – and why should you be, really? – I’ll post my usual political snark-fests as scheduled.

Our trip ended up being 12 days long.  Karen’s brother Will came with us, and we got the chance to see both of our daughters.  We had a 10-day tour scheduled, but we flew over two days early to visit youngest daughter Emily, who is taking a couple of study-abroad classes at Oxford for 6 weeks. 

Because I am a huge fan of literature, history and architecture – and sure, pretty fond of my daughters, too – I was really looking forward to seeing Oxford.  And it did not disappoint!

We spent two days walking around the amazing university, surrounded by great stone buildings that ranged from – by American standards – old, to really old, to unthinkably old.  The university is the oldest in the English-speaking world, with its beginnings in 1096, and its first rapid growth phase took place in the 1100s.  (Rumors that Nancy Pelosi was in its first graduating class have been disproven, both because she has never been smart enough to get into Oxford, and because she was already in her late 1100s during THE 1100s.)     

On our first full day there we took a walking tour led by an Oxford student on summer break, and learned a lot about the gorgeous old colleges and some of the history associated with them.  Highlights were the circular Radford Camera Library, C.S. Lewis’ academic home of Magdalen College, and the natural history museum, which is housed in a beautiful, high-Victorian space filled with gothic arches made of elaborate wrought iron trusses, under a glass roof.

The ugliest building on the campus is the modern Weston Library, just a stone’s throw from the incredible Bodleian libraries.  But inside the Weston I saw a Shakespeare first folio, a first printing of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and a hand-drawn 1932 Christmas card that Tolkien made for his kids, among many other great old books. 

So the Weston has that going for it.

My daughter is staying in Exeter college, which features a gorgeous little chapel, and a dining hall that is too pretty to eat in.  We stayed in a small 17^th century hotel that had been built against the old city walls, just a block from the Bodleian.  (If you’ve ever wondered about the height of the average Brit in the 1600s, it was apparently pretty short, judging by the doorways that we were all constantly ducking to get through as we contorted ourselves up the super-narrow, winding staircase to our rooms.) 

Our last night there we attended an evensong service in the visually and acoustically impressive Christ Church.  Emily is having a great time there, and is already moaning about having to come back to Florida during the August steam-bath season.

We arrived back in London on Monday at midday, and our oldest daughter Katie was waiting for us at our hotel in Kensington.  (She flew in from her home in Denver to take the tour with us; because her husband only recently landed his zookeeper job there, he wasn’t able to take the time off to join us.) (And yes, he’s an actual zookeeper, and while Katie meandered around the Sceptered Isle with us, he was back at home, hip-deep in wallabies and tree kangaroos.)  We had Monday and Tuesday on our own in London. 

We took a train to Trafalgar Square after lunch, and then walked down past 10 Downing Street to Westminster and Big Ben, then over past the Churchill War Rooms and along St. James Park all the way down to Buckingham Palace.   Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower that holds Big Ben had been under repair and covered in scaffolding when we were there in 2019, but now it looks as good as new. 

We spent most of the second day riding around town in an open-topped tourist bus, reacquainting ourselves with city’s layout, and hearing about different areas of the city.  We toured the British Museum for a couple of hours, and got off and on the bus several more times, seeing all of the usual sites, then finished up with a boat ride on the Thames before returning to our hotel.

Our tour officially started the next day, and lasted for eight days, four of which we spent in England and Wales, and four in Scotland.  On our first day, we stopped initially at Windsor, where we saw the castle from the outside (apparently Kate and William were there, which meant that there were no tours), and the very pretty (if smallish, by the standards of the cathedrals in parts of the country) St. John the Baptist church. 

Our second stop was in Bath, the originally Roman city situated in very hilly and bucolic countryside on the Avon River.  It had tons of old churches and old houses, and we stopped for a quick photo op at the Royal Crescent, a curving line of impressive Bath stone that formed maybe 15 or 20 joined mansions, before walking around the town for a bit.  I wanted to see the Roman baths, but all of the tickets for the day were sold out, so we wandered around the city center and had a nice lunch.

By the end of the day, we ended up crossing into Wales, where we stayed the night in the capital, Cardiff.  Our hotel was only a few blocks from the impressive castle at the center of town, so after supper we walked around it.  The oldest part was built by the Romans, followed by additions by the Normans, and later the Brits and Welsh.    

The next day we crossed the border back into England, and ended up at another Roman walled city (which I hadn’t heard of) called Chester.  I regret that we didn’t have more time to spend there, because the center city was really interesting.  It contained a multi-block length of basically intact medieval buildings, which our tour guide walked us through, telling us some of the history of the town.  The area featured Tudor-style, heavy, wooden-timbered buildings, decorated with carved and painted wooden figures.  There was an impressive Gothic cathedral nearby, and also the remains of an impressive Roman amphitheatre.

Unfortunately, we had only an hour to walk around and get lunch before getting back on the bus and being driven back across into Wales, where a local Welsh guide took us through some gorgeous, hilly landscape where sheep outnumbered people by a good margin.  We walked around a picturesque little river town called Llangollen (because it’s the law in Wales that nothing can be easy to spell), before heading back to Chester.   

We arrived in Liverpool that evening and took an abbreviated Beatles tour with a local guide.  As a Beatles fan (though not one so devoted as the Great and Powerful CO), it was very cool to see the school where John and Paul went, local spots where George and Paul had worked and bought their instruments, etc.  We had supper not too far from the Cavern Club, which was reconstructed several doors down from where the original succumbed to an infrastructure project several decades ago.

This weekend I’ll post the second half of our trip.  But in the meantime, don’t forget two important ideas:

Liz Warren is as authentically Sioux as I am a Welsh shepherd (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and

Biden delenda est!

I’m back after my trip to England and Scotland, and I missed you all.  I’m hoping that everyone survived the brutally Simpson-less fortnight, and to make up for my absence, I’m going to post several extra columns over the next week with some highlights from the trip. 

Today, though, I’ll just touch on a few mock-worthy political stories I’ve seen since I’ve gotten back.  But only after pointing out that one of the blessings of a good trip is to escape politics for a while.

In fact, only three very brief political things happened during the two weeks I was gone:

1. An Uber driver in London was a Middle-Eastern fellow, and when I asked where he was from, he said, “Jerusalem.”  And then, before I could say “Shalom,” he said more quietly, “Palestine.”

Needless to say, that particular “shalom” remained holstered.  I also managed to overcome my smart-arse instinct to say, “Oh, is that Jerusalem anywhere near the Jerusalem that has been the capital of Israel over these last several millenia, minus a few centuries?”

2. As we rode a bus around London during our first day there, we drove through the West End, and for 7 or 8 consecutive blocks, we drove beneath at least six hanging lines per block which were strung from a building top on one side of the road to the other.  And from each of those lines hung 5 identical flags.

If you thought that maybe those flags were Union Jacks, or the flags of many nations, you would be wrong. 

Each one of them – all 200-300 of them – was the ugliest new variation on the LGBTQ+ flag.  It’s the one with a purple circle on a yellow background added to the increasingly jumbled colors and shapes from previous iterations of the flag. 

By the way, I looked this up so that you don’t have to, (You’re welcome), and I found that the new circle represents intersex people, somehow.

As a properly raised Midwesterner, I find the impulse to advertise your sexual tastes in public to be super weird.  If you ever come to visit me at Stately Simpson Manor, you might find an American flag out front, and possibly a seasonal or holiday flag. 

But you will not find a flag touting heterosexual sex.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

You will also not find a yard sign saying that, “In this house we…” followed by a line-item sexual menu.  (e.g. “…enjoy cowgirl position” or “missionary” or “costumes and foreplay.”)

But equally as weird as hanging a sexual preference flag over your streets in the first place, is hanging literally hundreds of them!  All right, we get it: you’re not straight!  Can we please move on?

3. Our bus driver for the tour was a great Polish guy named Tomac, and I quickly learned that he had the kind of bracing, unedited transparency of many Eastern Europeans. 

When talking about the variety of tourists he has driven for, he mentioned a man from Iraq who was on his last tour. He said, “When I first learned he was from Iraq, I obviously thought, ‘Suicide bomber?’  But no! He was really nice guy!”

After three decades in a politically correct liberal arts department, I can only be grateful that I didn’t have a mouthful of coffee when he said that.  Because my resulting spit-take would have been disastrous.   

Anyway, more about my trip in a day or two.  But for now, I’ve been home for three days, and a quick skimming of the news provides ample evidence that our politics has not gotten any saner while I was away.

Consider the case of reliably dimwitted Dem congressman Steve Cohen, who was in a hearing on the subject of whether transgender “women” (i.e. dudes) should be allowed to use women’s locker rooms without the consent of actual women. 

Since the only logical, reasonable answer is “no,” Cohen was a hard “yes!” 

But even he had to acknowledge the problem his idiotic position would cause.  He admitted that,“Things should be dealt with in a different way,” and went as far as suggesting, “putting up some type of… barrier… in a women’s area of a locker room.”

I’m no architect, but I think that such a “barrier” might also be called a “wall.”  So Cohen just proposed using a wall to separate a transgender locker-room space from a female locker-room space. 

You know what you just described as a solution there, Steve-O?  Separate locker rooms for men and women.

Why didn’t we think of that?

Speaking of people who don’t understand basic human biology, you may have heard that one U.S. state has followed the lead of the Netherlands, by crowning the first-ever biological male winner of a beauty contest.

Surprise: it’s California!  There an Asian fella calling himself “Monroe Lace” won the “Miss San Francisco” contest.

Let’s just skip right past the fact that, “Do you know who the current Miss San Francisco is?” sounds like the set-up to a very bad joke, and land on the fact that in addition to not understanding how gender works, “Lace” also doesn’t understand how metaphors work.

Because after winning, he said, ““Every time I put on the sash, the weight of it reminds me of the weight of my job; of the responsibility I have to make a difference for young children.”

First, unless your sash is made out of leather – and in San Francisco, who knows? – it is practically weightless, a fact which makes implying that it is heavy a particularly inapt metaphor.

Second, can we PLEASE leave the young children out of this? Apparently not, as CBS reports that Lace spends most of his days visiting elementary schools. A video clip showed him reading a children’s book called “Sparkle Boy” — about a young boy who enjoys wearing women’s clothes — to a 4th grade class at Tenderloin Community School.

Or was that a book called “Tenderloin Boy,” read to 4th graders at Sparkle Community School?

Ugh.

Finally, you may have heard that Disney is producing a live-action movie version of Snow White, due in theaters next year. 

The good news is that after several years of woke films that bombed like the Enola Gay, a crumbling streaming subscriber base at Disney+, declining attendance at their grooming centers – er, parks – and a stock price that has been sliced in half, Disney brass has learned their lesson, and is aiming for a respectful, traditional update of the timeless classic.

HA! I kid!  Several years of critical and financial failures have taught them nothing, so they’re going to create a soul-deadeningly woke monstrosity that is guaranteed to fail even harder.

How woke is it?  Recent photos from the set and insider reports indicate that they’ve cast a Hispanic actress as Snow White, six of the dwarves are now normal-sized (but ethnically diverse) actors, and Prince Charming has been removed from the plot entirely.

I’m not making that up.  Only one of the seven dwarves is a dwarf!

And while actors of all ethnicities can play many, many characters on screen, there are limits to that kind of flexibility.For example, you shouldn’t cast Jim Gaffigan as Black Panther, or Dylan Mulvaney as Genghis Khan, or Whoopi Goldberg (with or without a fat suit) as Karen Carpenter. 

And you can’t cast a person of color as Snow freaking White!

This is not hard, Hollywood!  The character’s name contains both “Snow” and “White.” 

You need someone of pallor in that role.  (Might I suggest a certain Massachusetts senator?) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And you can’t cast Andre the Giant, Wilt Chamberlain and the starting lineup of the Chicago Bulls as the 7 dwarves! 

And without Prince Charming, who is going to wake Snow White up from her enchanted sleep? Gloria Allred?

If they had a shred of honesty left, the Disney execs could at least re-title the film, to prevent misleading any potential viewers.

Would “Mocha Brown, Six Diversity Hires and a Dwarf” fit on a movie marquee?

Maybe not.  But you know what would fit nicely on a bumper sticker?

“Biden delenda est!”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Monroe “or is that Marvin?” Lace, 2024!