Thompson was, indeed, a hilarious and mendacious scumbag. I only wish I could write as well as he did, but my system could not handle the chemical load.

People have finally getting around to reading the ongoing Caro biography?

"He grew more conservative" = "we no longer found we could support the natural outgrowth of our sympathies, and threw him under the wheels of the bus as we drove off to flirt with the Black Panthers & Maoism". Hubert Humphrey was the same anti-communist civil-rights liberal-progressive in 1968 that he was in 1948…

Sorta. I work Ag IT, and even today we have superstitious maniacs convinced of the value of "Continuous Corn" anti-rotation schemes. Corn and cotton are both really particularly hard on soil, and tobacco is legendarily so, even today with chemical fertilizers. They had rotation in the South, it's just that the lure…

It's been a while since I've read his actual writing on the subject, but if I remember correctly, it was the whole concept of credit, capitalization, and industrial organization that offended him, not the mechanization itself. He was a tech-head, he loved cool trinkets and devices and such. He just had a very…

More like down the Mississippi to the Spanish colonies. Ironically, he wasn't running from retribution for the famous duel, but rather from his attempt to set up a secessionary pocket kingdom/republic along the lower Mississippi.

It does sound like something Abigail might say.

The freakish thing is that the elderly, grandfatherly-looking Franklin was a massive sex god to the French, and left a string of bastards and broken hearts throughout the British Empire. In fact, his oldest bastard was the Loyalist Governor of New Jersey during the War.

Jefferson's definition of an agrarian economy was rather… loose. The man ran slave-labor manufactories on his plantations, as part of an attempt to exploit the labor he had on hand which wasn't going to pay off on his increasingly worn-out and washed-out tobacco-fields. Tobacco's a hell of a crop, like agrarian…

Nah, but Congress and the Constutional Convention had to have been blotto for a good fraction of the time they were sitting. The alcohol bills we have records of are simply legendary.

If Hamilton wrote anything drunk off his ass, it has to be that epic self-flagellating mea culpa he published about the Reynolds affair in order to spike the guns of a blackmailer. One doubts something that painfully naked could have been composed sober.

And that hoser was called smallpox. Actual local colonial participation in the repulse of the rebel invasion was no more impressive than the eventual loyalist militias raised in the southern thirteen colonies, and a number of revolutionary regiments were raised in the environs of Montreal, whose middle-class and…

Sometime during the coked-out Long Seventies, our heroes, the Secret Service, awaken hung-over from an epic bender to find that they and the Capitol Police have accidentally allowed all of their charges to be eaten by zombies. After putting down the infestation, they cover up by substituting Columbian whores and DC…

Like pretty much anything likely to happen in the presidential election. Hell, I'd characterize most of The Good Wife's run as "comedic political horror", thinly disguised as a lawyers show.

Today's Amish are Dutch Country wetbacks, they're everywhere, and they work construction, cheap.

More like embedded like a pit in a cherry, the borough surrounds the campus in almost every direction, and over time, they keep buying and renting properties inside the borough proper. The local high school is State College High, which has to be confusing on college applications, and there's a major state…

It's not the stadium, it's the much smaller ball field a couple hundred yards southeast of the stadium that can hold the entire population of Bumfuck County plus half the next county and guests. Seriously, Beaver Stadium is fucking enormous, and in twenty years living in the area, I've never set foot in it. This…

Just mention nuns in the right company and you'll see. Just be sure to keep a mop and bucket on hand to clean up the spittle and foam afterwards, and hope worse bodily fluids aren't in the offing.

I've lived here twenty years, I still have no idea what there is to Lubrano Park other than the baseball field, why the field is named separately, nor who either Medlar or Lubrano were, if they didn't just name them via random syllable assemblage via the Burroughs cut-up technique, in hopes of eventually selling off…

The one time I went to a Spikes game, it was like a combination of a vaudeville revue and low-impact audience-participation Japanese game show, punctuated occasionally by guys playing baseball, badly. I can't imagine how obnoxious you'd have to be to fall below their standards. Maybe refuse to wrap up your set & go…