They can't budge it

I'm writing this on Friday night the 29th, so I have no way of knowing whether the government shut down or not over the weekend. I called Mitch and Chuck and Kevin and offered my services at brokering a deal, but I never heard back.

Which is good for those gov't bigshots, because I'm fairly certain we would be ok if we just left everything to two people - one red, one blue, with a nice pizza and a sack o' suds. Tell them to work it out and we'll be here in the morning when you do.

But in the last days before the deadline, we kept hearing the term "making a last-ditch effort" to avoid the shutdown. And since I reckon that darned few congresspeople have ever been near a ditch, let along dug one, I had to look that phrase up to see where we got it, and whether the warranty has expired yet. 

The dictionaries define last-ditch effort as a desperate, final attempt to do something. Like, if you're trying to talk your neighbor into going halvies on paving your shared drive, you take him and his kith and kin for a nice dinner out somewhere.

And where did we get the term? 

William of Orange, who really looked a lot like that one guy from Queen, was dealing with some unpleasantness with the French and the British in the 17th-century. He vowed to end it all and pledged that "I mean to die in the last ditch." 

The term did not gain popularity until around 1900; I guess it took that long before people were no longer afraid to volunteer to die in a ditch. But that's where we got the term, and I hope no one died over the weekend over this silly budget battle.