Progress on the Craps Table

Well, the home-made craps table is starting to take shape. I got a 4x8 piece of MDF cut down by Home Depot to make the 3x6 table top. I'll use the extra for the rails. (I bought another 6'x1' piece of MDF for the dealer's rail.) Here's the pieces at home:
So, I fine-tuned the lengths a little, and then put pegs in the corners. Here's the result:

Just don't touch it! There's nothing except pegs holding it together at this point. After this, I sanded all the edges down.

I started working on attaching the hardware to the corners to hold it together, and I've decided that I just don't have quite the right hardware. It was getting more and more complicated -- adding lattice pieces and additional molding -- I decided to take a different route. I found some different pull clasps on Amazon.com. They should be here in a couple days.

Also, I realized that the brads I have for attaching the molding are too long: they'll go right through. I need new brads. Also, the liquid nails was opened previously, and had seized up. Off to the store soon, then, to buy new brads, new liquid nails, and return the old clasps. Also, I think I won't need the lattice at all, but I've already marked it up, so I can't really return it.

I'm just going for minimalism on the first round. I'll improve it after it gets a couple of nights of play. I guess I'd better go buy some more 11.5g chips!

Great Opinion Piece in the Post

The Washington Post's Outlook section included an opinion piece this week on how America is culturally not like Europe, and why that's a good thing. Here's the thesis:

The stuff of life -- the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships -- occurs within just four institutions: family, community, vocation and faith. Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. The European model doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

The most frightening quote is his analysis of American political parties, that puts a halt in my slow slide toward sthe Democratic party:

The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.

Okay, so that leaves me still an Independent, but what can I do about it? The article falls short in that it offers few suggestions about what to do about this, but the piece is still well worth reading in that it points to problems I've been aware of, but articulates them in a way much clearer than I have seen or been able to describe by myself.