I’m sure you’ve been wondering what my summer camping experience was like, when I recently went into the woods with my son and battled the elements. 

Let me tell you, the woods had no chance against us. We came with every tool known to man, plus a power cable that was about 250 miles long, which we fed out as we drove from home to the Moosehead Lake region of Maine so we could have access to electricity while out there in the wild. Because when you’re out there in the woods and it’s hot, it helps to have a small air conditioner for the tent. And incredibly, despite the human race’s ability to solve every thorny social ill known to man except how to prevent mass murders via military-style weapons, no one has yet figured out how to make a wireless a/c.

The extension cord also helped us charge up our electric knife, making it a breeze to carve up trout while out there in the field.  

When are the Russians finally going to acknowledge that Venezuela is not in their hemisphere? Do we have to provide them with maps showing that it’s our hemisphere? The earth can be halved into infinite distinct hemispheres, but none of them are going to include both Russia and Venezuela without serious hemispherian Gerrymandering.

On the other hand, even my naked eye can easily see how all South America belongs in the US Hemisphere. So does Canada and our southern neighbor Mexico, where people are determined to pay for our border wall if it’s the last thing they do. So does all of Europe. Throw in Turkey and Africa and you’ve got the complete US hemisphere.

The Russian hemisphere is basically Asia and the Middle East, and we threw in Australia and New Zealand, kind of as afterthoughts. Antarctica is split 50-50, but don’t touch our penguins! US children have come to love penguins and it would really be a shame for the greatest children in the greatest hemisphere to lose even a single penguin to forces external to our hemisphere.

Next thing you know the Russians are going to try to interfere in our elections. At least we know that hasn’t happened yet. 

Everyone has his or her own opinion about what’s in the Mueller Report, but no one seems to think that it will be a mostly funny and wryly-observed discourse on American social behavior, with virtually no mention of the whole Russian Interference in US Elections matter.

Except me.

Having gotten to know “Bob” (as he lets me call him in postcards I send him, which he never responds to) over the past 24 months, I’ve come to expect funny and wryly-observed discourses from him, intended to distract attention away from the subject at hand and make you basically forget about it. The idea being that no one really cared that our elections were influenced by a foreign adversary in the first place, so why not go for the funny bone instead? It’s not like Attorney General William Barr doesn’t have a sense of humor. In a recent poll, huge portions of the population listed “didn’t know there was an election” as the reason they didn’t vote, which I’m told the attorney general thought was hugely funny.

Anyway, you go with your opinion – a report mildly suggesting that the president was egging on the Russians to help the election in his direction; and I’ll go with mine – where Mueller is cracking one-liners and making risqué jokes and saying, “Bah! I’m sick of talking about this collusion witch hunt!”

We’ll find out this weekend!

Word on the street is that I don’t know how to tell a real emergency from yet more fake emergencies, but the truth is that I was directly involved in many an emergency over the course of my checkered health past. Did you know that I hang glided into a wall of rocks and broke ribs?

No, sorry, it was my cousin’s ex-boyfriend who did that. I’m much less clumsy than that guy! I’ve almost never broken ribs. Only in car accidents, beer-league softball games and via falling off bikes. It’s much less sexy to break your ribs falling off a bike that you shouldn’t have been on in the first place (icy roads) than by hang gliding. It’s like snapping a tendon in your left middle finger while trying to remove a sock. Who does that? (I did, but only once).

However, my most consistent exposure to emergency situations was provided by network tv in the 1970s via the aptly-named program Emergency! Each week, paramedics Roy DeSoto and John Gage were faced with several riveting emergencies. Choking victims; heart attacks; scorpions hitch-hiking back in luggage from exotic destinations, and so forth. One time, there was a construction worker whose leg was irrevocably wedged between collapsing beams in a building, and the whole shebang was about to come down upon him, his co-workers and our heros Gage and DeSoto. This called for the white-haired Doctor (Joe Early, according an Emergency episode I just watched on youtube) to come and do a quick amputation. He arrived with his kit bag (do they really have amputation tools in those?) but the team managed to extricate the victim and his numb leg before we could see the bloody details.

My favorite weekly Emergency! treat was to see the obligatory cardiac arrest, which required one of our paramedic heroes to karate-chop the dying patient in the chest in order to break ribs and facilitate chest compressions. That was always followed by defibrillator usage. “Clear!”

Now that it’s the future, we have learned that CPR can be done without karate-chopping, but it was so fun to see that back in the 1970s.

I don’t remember any episode involving an emergency wall being built, but maybe I just don’t remember all the episodes.