Musing.

It's a little after midnight, and I'm wide awake. I had gone to sleep very early, which is my usual response to feeling put upon and much abused - its an extension of 'if you are under the sheets, the monster can't get you'; in this case, its 'if you are under the sheets, then when you come out again, the Bad Things will have gone away'. Usually, they haven't, but sleeping puts me in a better frame of mind. Usually. I still feel like a sucker for this dental thing. I know that's not completely logical, but when have I ever been?

It may come as a surprise to the few people who read this blog, but I was never particularly good at meeting girls. I could speculate on why, but I'm going to skip that and instead point to a nifty article I came upon here with this great title: The principles of nuclear weapon safety and meeting girls are remarkably similar. I suspect theres a lot to that. Warning protocols, strict procedures, the possibility of devastation -- yes, it sounds much like teen dating. That article is the only place where I've seen funny references to the Two Man Rule and Permissive Action Links.

Some years ago, I was reading a political novel -- I don't recall the name of it, but it had been highly praised for its style and use of language; I got through about a third of it before giving up, deciding that the author was very good at being arch and condescending, but that wasn't what I was looking for at the time. Actually, my view of what political novels should be has been cast in stone for some time: Advise and Consent, by Allen Drury, was the first one I ever read (I was about 13, I think), and I was fascinated to learn what politics and statesmen were really like behind the closed doors and in the smoke-filled rooms. It wasn't until much later that I found out how much Drury slanted attitudes and images, so that a blind man facing the other way uphill could still tell who he thought were the Good Guys and the Bad Guys. In any event -- that short-lived novel had a sequence wherein the solons (that was the kind of word the book would use; nobody in the real world except William F. Buckley would use it, but I was supposed to believe this was how the leaderships spoke casually) were discussing how to promote a cause so that there appeared to be a groundswell of support for it. One said that he'd get their pet columnists to write articles about it, from varying perspectives that nonetheless lead to the same conclusion. I thought of that when I came across the third article today about how whether the automakers get a bailout ought to be affected by how much they pay their workers: the more they pay, the less they're worthy of having one. Multiple people from different perspectives saying the same thing. Gee, I thought: solons at work?

I do get the sense of people bellying up to the trough, though.