Excoriating Accelerationally-Challenged Imbeciles

I. Hate. Slow. Drivers. In. The. Fast. Lane.

Die. Die. Die painfully and slowly, the way that you have driven.

I cannot understand how a person could be so clueless as to dribble along, slowly enough for an arthritic octogenarian to do cartwheels around his vehicle, while a dozen cars pile up in utter frustration behind him, trying desperately and at peril of their lives to squeeze into whatever gap may finally open up in the other lanes.

I encountered such an idiot today, driving some kind of panel truck. For a good five minutes, he put-putted along I-95 at a speed usually employed by ducks waddling around a pond. Car after car rode his bumper but he was oblivious. In front of his benighted vehicle, the left lane was free and clear.

I tried and tried and finally my chance came. I gave him a look of pure hatred as I passed and made sure that he saw it. I jerked in front of him and slowed down nicely for a moment or two. It was a wasted lesson. As he vanished mercifully behind me, I could see that he had no intention of changing lanes, ever, and the line of traffic continued behind him.

My choices of torture for such a person would involve electric sanders, razor blades, vicious ants, rabid dogs, red hot skewers, colonic cleansing utilizing caustic chemicals and ground glass, forcibly-fed toadstool puree and a woodchipper.

One for the protesters

"Organizers canceled the final leg of the Olympic run through Paris after chaotic protests Monday, snuffing out the torch and putting it aboard a bus in a humiliating concession to protesters decrying China's human rights record."

All I can say, is good for those protesters.

I won't be watching the Olympics this year, whether the flame finally gets to Beijing or not. I hope that this thing gives the aging tyrants of the Middle Kingdom a whole lot of heartburn, if soul-searching is too much to ask for.

They may be able to crush all dissent in their own country and pretend that all is well, while they deny the Tiannamen Square massacre and their soldiers beat up monks, stifle Uighers and persecute Falon Gong. But they don't rule the rest of the world and they don't deserve any international respect.

The Olympics has embarrassed itself twice now in history, first by serving as a platform for Hitler's posturing in '36 and then by showing up in the gulag of the late unlamented USSR in 1980. Perhaps the third time is the charm?

Thoughts domestic and political

My Sweetie found a couple of nice tops at Kohl's yesterday and I was happy for Her. She's very picky about outfits and doesn't buy for Herself very often.

Of course, any man truly in love enjoys nothing more than indulging his Lady.

I'm baking bread again this morning. It will be a treat to smell that as the rain comes down again outside. Hope the garden isn't drowned.

She's in watching the Seventh Heaven dvd I gave Her for Her birthday.

I am contemplating a column that I cut from the paper the other day, by a member of the Occoneechee-Saponi tribe of Virginia. The writer's point: that only when Europeans invaded the New World, did political boundaries become imposed on the landscape, lines which it was forbidden for certain peoples, most especially Native Americans, to cross. The majority of illegal immigrants across these new borders are actually Native Americans of varying degree. An injustice.

I agree with him to a point, and the European impact upon the Natives was indeed a disgrace and a horror, even genocide.

But as for political boundaries? Those were here before. Capt. John Smith of Jamestown learned early on that an invisible line just west of the present-day city of Richmond, Virginia, marked where Powhatan's domain ended and Monacan rule began. A trespasser across those lines would not have a happy fate.

I just like this guy

Those old cartoon animators produced amazing art. Like this guy. I just like this guy. He showed up on a Flintstones episode, scaring the crap out of Fred.

Bleech.

Because there are no deer in "my" woods behind my house, I get spoiled. I can wander there with impunity and bring home nothing but memories.

Alas, other Virginia woods have lots of deer. And where there are deer, there also lives a certain disgusting, repulsive, nasty little parasite called a tick.

If you've never been tick-bit, count your blessings. Unlike a mosquito, which dines on you and then skedaddles to avoid being smacked, a tick intends to ride you for the long haul, sucking and swelling. Eventually, nicely engorged, the thing will finally fall off, but who wants to wait that long?

So you have to pull it out. That's no job for the squeamish.

Last night, something didn't feel quite right. I examined what at first glance appeared to be a mole, where I didn't remember having a mole before. Sure enough, twas a tick, probably picked up when I embraced the ground the other day taking those arbutus photos.

Experts advise that a tick should be removed firmly but not too quickly and not by burning it with a match head or other folk remedies. You don't want the thing's head by which it is attached to you, to break off and be stuck in your skin.

Evolution has given us wonderful creatures like the blue whale and ladyslipper orchid. It has also given us fleas, tapeworms and ticks.

Lunch break snapshots in spring

The rain has ceased and this is what I photographed on my lunch break today, in a forest near my office.



The above is the rare, trailing arbutus -- such a small flower that a casual passerby would surely miss it. I knelt down and inhaled its faint fragrance -- the first time in my life that I have ever had this opportunity.