Blame Lincoln.

I was talking to Ambrose on the phone last night, as he packed to leave for OCS (which he did at 0600 this a.m.), and he stopped in mid sentence to ask me something. "And answer honestly," he added.

"Is there a cotton shortage in the United States? Are the sheep dying of disease?"

I had no response, and so he pointed to possible causes for a textile problem, all stemming from the lack of slave labor around the world (except China, which doesn't reach entirely around the world and so does not count), specifically in the American south. Since there are no longer plantations humming along productively from the Gulf to the Potomac, a shortage of cotton is at hand. But I wanted to know why he was asking me such a question.

"These women," he said. "They aren't wearing anything."

Having spent three of the past ten days in crowded amusement parks, faced by thousands of pounds of obese American vacationers wearing little more than underwear and a smile, this made me laugh. Quite a lot.

"So, basically, Abraham Lincoln is to blame for the degredation of modern society," he finished. "I must call Sammie."

And that was the end of our discussion. Now, I must disabuse the Yankees out there of the notion that no cotton is grown anywhere any more--it sprouts by the acre all across the southern and midwest United States, as well as in South America, Africa, and even parts of Europe. Fine sheep graze on hillsides, giving up their own modesty once a year for the sake of hiking socks and plaid scarves. All across the Small Blue Planet (trademark) are sources of textile goods in all shapes and sizes. Ambraham Lincoln did not, in fact, cause a cotton deficit by emancipating the slaves. The problem is people, actually, and their attachment to good bodily ventilation.

Digression. This is part of my blog where I lose my inspiration, decide that I should have stopped at least a paragraph ago, and then ignore that realization and plow onward to a silly, meaningless, and uninspiring finish. End digression.

Fat people, it has been proven, love to show off their fat. Skinny people love to show off their skinny. Tattoed people love to show off their tatoos. The textile production market aids them in their daily quest to show as much fat, skinny, and tatoo, by providing them with as little material as possible which might obscure the fat, skinny, or tatoo. In the meantime, we save the environment by spending less energy on waching machines and dryers, and kill fewer turtles and penguins by keeping detergent chemicals out of the lakes and streams of Mother Earth (trademark).

Thank you for reading. I'm sorry I don't blog more often, nor finish my thoughts when I do, but I have a busy life and too few brain cells to make this an everyday event. This is the uninspiring finish.