Call this a sequel to She’s “Girl, Just Keep Your Legs Together, And All Will Be Well!” She just turned 70. When I turned 50, I thought nothing of it. I didn’t feel old, and actually, I still don’t. All the years between 50 and 60, I never thought much about retirement, being old, or what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Back in the middle of May, I had a cake with more candles than midnight Mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral. BOOM! It’s time to be responsible and start thinking about retirement. I know. I’m a procrastinator. I’m getting around to fixing that.

I started watching Holy Schmidt on YouTube. He is a financial guy with the perfect amount of dorkiness. Great guy with a lot of good advice. I came up with a financial plan that works for me. I won’t be driving a new Teletubby Jaguar but I’ll be fine. I hear they have TRANSmission problems anyway. I’ll get by but I’m looking for another line of work that has nothing to do with programming or managing people. I’ve had enough of both. Except for people I actually want to talk to, and using my computer to send invoices will be okay, too.

I’d like to provide an alternative to Dr. Bastiat’s recent post Leftism is based on individualism. Conservatism is not.

The good doctor observes the behavior of “the modern left,” searches for an underlying ideological consistency, gets frustrated, and eventually settles on the title. Which, I’m sorry to say, doesn’t make any sense.

Back in September, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked if the President had any plans to pardon his son Hunter. She answered with an emphatic, “No.” Tonight, he did just that.

The younger Biden was scheduled to be sentenced December 12th on a federal gun charge and December 16th on tax evasion charges. The pardon is expected to cover all charges.

Trump has nominated Kash Patel for FBI director. Wait a sec, isn’t Christopher Wray still FBI director? He hasn’t resigned or been fired yet, but it’s now clear Wray should have his desk packed up by the close of business on January 19. Wray treated Trump, the man who appointed him, with utter contempt; now Trump is paying him back in spades, and I’m loving it. Wray has earned every bit of this treatment.

In positive signs for Patel’s tenure, Morning Joe called him the “personification of MAGA rage.” Even more important, the disgraced Andrew McCabe called him “profoundly unqualified,” and Tom Nichols, a staff writer for the Atlantic magazine, slammed him as “as dangerous as it gets.”

What are Patel’s real qualifications or lack thereof? First, he understands the problem. He has called for the FBI headquarters to be closed and its 7000 staff located there to be sent out to be real cops. He has said that the FBI is too frickin’ big. (Above quotes are from a FoxNews article.)

Kamala at a Pride Festival. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Our esteemed Western Chauvinist recently brought my attention to a brilliant article, which I can’t stop thinking about.  If you haven’t read it, you really should:  “Leftism is a Death Cult” by CA Skeet.  His purpose in writing the article is to explain why Democrats must support abortion, and he succeeds, in my view.  But in so doing, he does a masterful job of explaining what a modern leftist is.  He understands leftists very well, which I appreciate, because I do not.

In an effort to connect with the core demographic that has been supporting their sales for decades, Bud Light launched a national ad campaign led by famous trans-sexual Bud Light aficionado Dylan Somebody or other.  Surprisingly, this ambitious plan was not entirely successful.  As it turns out, there are some Bud Light drinkers out there who are not trans-sexual.  This obviously came as a shock to the Bud Light marketing department, all of whom are apparently narcissistic fools who have been completely sheltered from American society, or recent college graduates.

Budweiser lost over $1.4 billion in sales and half of its market share.  They’re still trying to salvage what’s left of their company.

Inspired by this resounding success, Jaguar has launched an ad campaign in an effort to connect with the core demographic that has been supporting their sales for decades:  trans-sexuals.  Observers are waiting with bated breath to see how this might turn out.  Is it possible that some Jaguar buyers might take the same view that Kid Rock did to the Bud Light trans-sexual beer campaign?  Hard to say, I suppose.

Apologies to Ray Bradbury but I think that phrase may be used a lot in the coming weeks and year. Mrs. Pessimist and I, staunch anti-contrarians as we are, go to the movies more now than we have in many years. So we saw the first preview for Wicked, The Movie, close to a year ago, and I told everyone that that looked like the worst movie ever made. Recently we watched the more recent preview, and although it attempted to provide more backstory, it still looked like the worst movie ever made. At dinner the other night, as I tried to describe how awful it looked, my friend, Ed, who is a retired school teacher, went through the history of updating the original Wizard of Oz into the Broadway play and the back story of the witches which my wife and I enjoyed when we saw it on Broadway. Ed’s analysis of the story was that the wicked witch of the West was actually a transgendered lesbian and we all should relish that reinterpretation. He stated this with a very straight face. He asked me if I had ever had to confront transgender lesbianism when I was a pediatrician and, dumbfounded, I had to admit I had not.

When I was a pediatrician in the 1980s, transgender lesbianism was nowhere to be found in any syllabus.

Two months later, the town of Aiken and the surrounding area still have a long way to go cleaning up after Helene.  Piles of tree trunks and branches still cover much of the roadside.  For example, this is a picture of my next-door neighbor’s pile:

Good advice for any female, at any stage in her life, although the context may change as she ages.

As I recently entered my eighth decade on this earth (for those of you in Rio Linda, that means I just turned 70 a couple of months ago), the context these days relates mostly to my life on the farm, because that’s where I spend the very great majority of my time.

Every evening, I trot (well, maybe I don’t trot anymore; maybe I just “totter,” or  “stagger,” or perhaps I “wander in a desultory fashion”) down to the barn with a small bucket of grain, to call the sheep in for the night.  I didn’t used to do this, but a few years ago I had a couple of ugly coyote incidents which ended badly, and I decided I didn’t want to live through those again, so I try to keep the troops safe by bringing them back to base camp in the evening.  Generally, they’re very up for this, and anxious to get to their nightly feast.