Ask Big Daddy

Dear Big Daddy,

It looks pretty unlikely that we’re going to get any action on health care this year, but what about water? Do you think we’ll see a deal on the governor’s plan?

–Reservoir Doug

Dear RD,

When the governor announced a “special session on water,” I was worried. That’s what I started having about a dozen times a night when my prostate went bad. A man gets to a certain age and he starts running to the bathroom more often than a pregnant lady.

I got even more worried a couple weeks ago when the governor declared “Prostate Cancer Awareness Month”–given that our chief executive is about as subtle as a flash flood, it was hard not to see this as a hint. The good news is that we have no evidence that Arnie’s prostate has joined all the other parts of him that have ceased working. The same cannot be said for his brain, if he thinks he can broker a deal on the stuff of life.

To hear some Democrats talk, you’d think salmon knew how to hack v
oting machines. Republicans, meanwhile, don’t seem to believe that water is being stored if it doesn’t drown something. I know they say seeing is believing–which is why I hope some Dem brings one of those covered coffee cups to negotiations to explain how water can be kept underground and it’s still there even if you can’t see it. Maybe after that they could do the bit they do in third-grade classrooms where they leave a glass of water out and show how it disappears even without anyone drinking it, so Dems can explain how evaporation relates to “surface water storage.” I’m sure that’ll go over well.

You know, my heyday coincided with the later years of our nation’s great dam-building frenzy. There’s a lot of talk about how the West ended looking like a society run by totalitarian beavers (also the nickname of