Maybe She'll Pay Me in the High Two Figures

In an unguarded moment, the wily and parsimonious Blue Girl in a Red State has caught me out. And you know? I asked for it.

In her Comments area, the subject of Calvin Trillin came up (as it so often does, of course) and I allowed that your average beguiling temptress could most easily find her way to the Jingo heart with honeyed, flattering words of comparison to the Sage of 33 Irving Place. Just trying to make conversation, you know how it is. Small talk. Cocktail chatter. It happens all the time:

"If the average beguiling temptress were to try to insinuate herself into your heart with honeyed, flattering words of comparison, the better to enslave you into durance vile, to which would you prefer being compared: Calvin Trillin or Stalin's Great Purger, NKVD capo Lavrenty Beria?"

"Oh, I think I'd take Trillin in a heartbeat."

And that's just what happened.

Consider me enslaved. I don't actually have the haunted moue about the eyes that Calvin's got in Blue Girl's pic, up there: My phiz generally takes a more dyspeptic cast, much like Doctor Johnson might appear as imagined by William Hogarth during a particularly irksome episode of gout. But clap the darbys on me anyway. Aw, hell, look at that -- she's not even going to make me a pie.

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Actually, a series of photographs have recently come to light that show your correspondent having an actual nice time. Dramatis Personae: two historical field researchers, Wonder Woman, and a sweaty bumpkin know only as "Landowner." See if you can pick him out with his new weaponry.

Enter Landowner, wet...