Neanderpundit

is one of those comfort food things for us-it’s not great Chinese food but it’s OK, and we like it because we can eat little samples of a lot of different things.
What it does to my head, though, is just odd.

Last night I dreamed I was at a dinner with our parent company, which is very Japanese. They had a Taiko group in prior to serving dinner, and they were magnificent- if you haven’t heard and seen Daiko being played, I highly recommend it.

Anyway, the players, after the performance, came down and circulated among the diners, then chose seats and sat down beside them. One, the O-Daiko player, Michio, came and sat across from me, and we hit it of just fine. My Japanese is limited to thank you, good morning, where is the bathroom, and do you have any catfood, but his American was great (The Japanese are no longer teaching their kids to speak English but American, apparently) so we did well.

he took a shine to me, I think in the way hot girls surround theirselves with fat girls, I guess (I have at least four friends who have body fat in the 3% range, fitness nuts). Anyway, we hit it off right away, I was fascinated by his work and he mine, and we went downtown Chicago with a group on one of the company’s buses and wandered around the city for a while.

Michio and I walked along the river- he still wrapped up in his traditional garb, me typically the man in black. A mugger approached us and demanded our wallets. He was armed with some kind of a kitchen knife.

Michio reached in his happi and instead of a wallet pulled out his bachi, which are hardwood dowels about an inch in diameter at the small end and tapering up to about double that.

If you’ve never seen taiko, you have to understand, this borders on being a martial art. it is not only fascinating to watch and hear, but it is the devil itself to play. See a Daiko player with his shirt off (They often wear only loincloths in performance) and you see a guy carved out of walnut. I know a lot of pretty fit people and I never saw anyone with the muscle tone of a daiko player.

Anyway, Michio started beating on this guy like he was a drum and in just a few seconds the mugger was on his knees curled up in a fetal position covering his head with his hands. I could see that Michio was holding back, because the full force of his blows would have killed the moron outright. I picked a napkin off the ground, and picked up the kitchen knife where the mugger had dropped it and threw it over the guardrail into the river. Michio stopped and the mugger lie on the ground, keening.

“Will that kill him, do you think?” asked Michio.
“No, but this probably will” I grabbed the mugger by the scruff of his greasy denim jacket and his belt, and dwarf tossed him over the rail. The Chicago river, at this point, is not the kind of place you’d want to be trying to avoid drowning in.

Woke with a headache and now I’m trying to convince myself to either make some coffee or go get some because running the tractor with a splitting headache is not optimal.

is some kind of a fruit, which was thought to contain anti-obesity agents, but really fights obesity by destroying your liver and killing you. And so you will no longer be fat!!

The fruit, unfortunately, is small. So it won’t be too painful when I find the little motherfucker that’s been spamming my comments and JAM ONE IN HIM.

Though I suppose if I inserted it via his urethra it would get his attention.

“let’s just build a fence!”

if we put up a chain link fence it would be $32,000 a mile for the fence. Posts, rails, concertina would probably double that number. So $64k a mile. Even a nice round figure of $100,000 a mile would be reasonable to use for estimating purposes.

now, there’s 2000 miles of border- but of course a lot of it IS fenced, in towns and areas where there’s border crossings, so let’s assume 1500 miles. That’s $150 million to put up the fence. Do that three times, with ten feet between the fences, and you got $450 million. And wingnuthead is planning to spend two billion to basically do nothing, but look like he has accomplished something.

$450 million dollars seems like a lot of money, but it’s chump change to some. Teams of volunteers could do this- I bet ten guys could put up a mile of 12′ fence in a week. Two guys drilling holes, two guys setting posts, two guys capping and railing, two guys stretching chain, two guys hanging concertina. With the right power tools it’s a cakewalk. That’s 1500 miles times ten guys; I have no doubt there’s fifteen thousand men in this country that would like to see the borders more secure.

of course it would be declared vandalism and we would be arrested. We’d have to get some people that would be a huge embarrassment to the administration to arrest- some union members who want to keep their jobs, some celebrities (hello, mr Rowe?) some women and children. Anyone got ideas for sponsors? Anyone want to do this? This seems like the kind of thing that would bring publicity to the situation and make some headlines.