Ah. its November! It's nice to step outside and watch the tiny white flakes floating down... can Christmas, oops sorry, I used the 'C' word, Winter Break be far away? Of course these white flakes aren't exactly the same as the ones you might be experiencing in Denver or Cleveland; they come from the communities upwind who are being incinerated by giant brush fires which are enhanced by bone-dry sixty mile-an-hour winds blowing off the desert like the wind from a giant bellows.

Those of you who cant afford a California vacation are in luck. All you need is a trash can full of hay or dried yard clippings and two electric fans. Crank the old furnace up to 95 degrees, put some lighter fluid in the trash can, ignite it, use your dimmer switch to turn your lights down to about half-power and replace a couple of the white bulbs with red ones and turn the fans on full blast and you can pretend you're in Beverly Hills. If the smoke is thick enough you can pretend your wife is Naomi Watts. This ultra-hot winter weather is sometimes described by the natives as 'earthquake weather' so you might want to hire a giant truck filled with cement to drive by your house a few times so you can really groove on the Cali experience as it shakes ominously. An illegal alien with a leaf blower outside your window at seven AM could enhance the realism.

Black soot is everywhere. Even with the windows shut it leaks in and creates little piles in the windowsills and around the doors. the cats come in from the hillside reeking of smoke as though they had just had lunch with kitty-cat Satan. For some reason the last few nights have been punctuated with coyote howls. Its like listening to a barbershop quartet that likes to eat raw cats and possums. The traveling band of coyotes that live on this hillside are back in our area so we round the cats up and shut them in early on these dim evenings. Its so dry that a half-hour after the sprinklers went off I stepped out into the back yard and it was so dry that I checked to see if they had malfunctioned by running another cycle...fifteen minutes after I did that it was bone-dry again.

A sure sign of impending doom is when the phone rings and my mother-in-law in London is on the other end asking if we're all right. That means that in the UK TV news is showing pictures of burning houses and people being evacuated. We've had fires a lot closer, one where we could see the tongues of flame leaping up over the ridge-line but the smoke from this latest batch is the worst we've ever had. So I'm sitting in my house with the windows shut and the AC on in mid-November.

Luckily our esteemed Mayor Viva-la-raza (Viaragosa) has had to stop performing gay marriages in his office temporarily and is ready to take action. Fortunately the large majority of this season's brushfires are outside the city limits as this particular mayor has screwed up everything he's touched and his active participation in the management of this emergency would easily cause half the city to be engulfed in flames. The clouds of smoke and soot have also put the kybosh on the angry anti-Prop 8 demonstrations. Yes the Neanderthals managed to pass a California Constitutional Amendment against gay marriage but before you guys start getting too upset you should remember that we are in the district of the Ninth Circus Court of Appeals which is about to be topped up by Obama and the sixty-dem Senate with an even more lawless and looney crowd of jurists who will be happy to show their contempt for the Morman and Born-Again scum that managed to convince the voters to pass this ballot measure. All conservative ballot propositions are always unconstitutional so stop mailing the fake-anthrax terrorist letters to the Mormon Temple and calm down. I voted against Prop 8, by the way, just in the interest of full disclosure. All the commercials were trying to scare me by saying that the schools will be forced to teach lids about homosexualty. If kids in California schools learn their Gay Studies lessons as well as their math and reading lessons this will be the butchest state in the union in no time. Now if there was a ballot measure that was against teaching these little geniuses that carbon emissions affect the climate, a really destructive lie, then I would vote for that.

A lot of things have been hidden under the cloud of smoke. Cali's deeping budget mess and the huge layoffs of Public Employees and giant tax increases are working their way forward silently and uncovered by the media who love a good car chase or a hillside full of celebrity mansions aflame but hate anything to do with budgets or appropriations. The Governator flies his private carbon-blasting jet from fire to fire, handing out emergency funds borrowed using California's DDD-junk bond credit status from the Red Chinese Army using the citizens of San Diego as collateral. It the state defaults everybody from La Jolla south to the border has to go live in China and work in smoke-belching factories adulterating wheat glutens and toothpaste with industrial chemicals 18 hrs a day for a dollar...or a Yuan, the dollar will soon be completely worthless. At least they'll have jobs.

I looked for a historical parallel for the New Age Of Obama and I decided that the reign of Charles The Silly in France was probably the most appropriate. The Black Death stalked the land as did the Black Prince and his army of thugs and murderers. Trade and commerce were at a standstill and the king's consort, the lovely Odette, threw huge banquets for the licentous crowd of barons who actually ran the kingdom. Banquets where the king sat on the floor with the household hunting dogs howling for them to toss him a bone to gnaw. Just like Obama will be with the New Age Senate. This is it America, its Chuck Schumer's way or the highway, with no gas and cameras that give you an automatic ticket every time you pass.