My ass, meet the ground. I'm too old for Warehouseman duty, but I'm doing it so as to be able to store the Doctor-daughter's sports car in my over-crammed garage while she's on an overseas assignment. So, the Gorilla shelving I had installed to store a ton of tubbed-up dregs of my 68 years of life all comes down, and my rental 10X10 storage room gets totally reorganized to be able to handle all that extra stuff (I refuse to just rent a bigger room). All of this results in hard labor, and I'm feeling it.
I'm also having sympathy pains for LaMichael James #21, Oregon running back, and the best RB in the country now, who dislocated his elbow (on national TV) last night. THAT'S gotta hurt! I am also building a website (in Google-Blogger) for my Common Sense Gresham Project. Link when done. It's done!
So, if the above EXCUSES for missing Thursday Thuds are not sufficient, my apologies, and with the abject apology, I offer Friday Follies.
Folly the First: Goes to the Gummint of these You-Nighty States. Yesterday, Wall Street was moved to a moderate gain by news that "101,000 new jobs were created" last month. Hmmm...seems that almost half of that amount, 45,000 of those "new jobs", were Verizon employees who ended a strike-action and returned to work. How's that for cooking the books?
Folly, Part Deux: In today's fishwrapper, a story on how to make cutesey-kitschy crafts out of waste cat fur. I didn't know whether to laugh or toss my cookies when I read this, and my cat wouldn't give up his morning tear-around-the-house exercise period long enough for me to read it to him. Can we say "waste of time"? I knew we could.
Folly the 'toid: Goes to Tri-Met, the regional mass-transit authority, now best-known nationally not just for planting miles and miles of expensive streetcar and light-rail tracks all over the area, but for kicking young mothers with fussy babies off of buses. No, this isn't an issue of how legitimately the young mother was in this country, because it's happened more than once, so that leads us to believe that this might just be transit-authority policy. Well, in this writer's humble opinion, they're kicking the wrong people off of the transit. Squalling babies I can put up with, that's why I take my music when I'm riding. There's a volume-control app for that. The gangsters are another matter though, and while there's a .44 app for THAT, I'd prefer not to have to.
Folly Four: Goes, again, to Tri-Met. Tri-Met is funded by a tax on the payrolls of businesses, and there are taxing districts laid out to coordinate this tax. The districts are supposed to be there so that transit stake-holders can have their say in their districts. How very democratic of them. Well, there is one district, Boring (yes, THAT Boring, Oregon), where all the businesses are taxed on their payrolls, and yet they have no bus service to speak of. This bus service is the one that comes closest to my house, the #84 Boring Line. Until recently, it had ONE before-dawn outbound-to-Boring bus, and ONE after dark inbound-to-Gresham bus. This had gone on for over 20 years that I know of, and I think that the run was designed to co-incide with the shift times of a plywood mill in Boring, long since closed, which probably never had more than 50 workers on a shift, and probably 90% of them drove to work. So, a bunch of buisness owners get together and petition Tri-Met to end the service, which might, in a good month, transport 100 people between Boring and Gresham (I've never seen more than four on any bus since I've lived here for 17 years, and most of the time, the bus is empty). Tri-Met refuses, but increases the bus service to a total of 4 buses a day from 2, adding a run closer to actual business hours in each direction (making the line somewhat more useable, at least for transferring to the train to go downtown to Portland). A Board of some sort rules that the abandon-service request is legitimate due to the lack of patronage on the line, so it agrees to abandonment. Democracy works, right? Not quite. There are SEVEN more hurdles for the business owners to overcome before abandonment, and then, even if they clear all the hurdles, they have to pay the taxes for a full year before being able to stop. Presumably though, Tri-Met can stop the service in the meanwhile.
Folly the Fifth: The City Gummint of Portland, Oregon gets named here. The "Occupy Wall Street" rabble spread their protest to Portland yesterday, and several thousand of the usual Portland counter-culture mob took to the streets. Remember Portland being known as "Little Beirut" a while back? The mob that makes it Little Beirut is always ready to take to the streets. In this mob, you'll see many Pentagrams, indicating their thinking (or lack of same) as much as the Great American Chicken Track did for the past generation of street mobs. So, the mob wants to bring down Wall Street. Mind you, the Street is known for too many excesses, most being the propensity of corporate barons to act like, well, barons. The protestors didn't think it through, though. They are protesting corporate America, yet that same Corporate America makes it possible for them to NOT be out hoeing rows on food-farms for their very survival. Then, the City of Portland gets into this act. They waive the laws regarding camping overnight in the city Parks, allowing the protest to continue un-impeded today. The City Administration claimed, through a spokesmouth for Hizzoner the Lame-Duck Pedophile Mayor, that the laws were waived as a "Reward for non-violence". Well, there was no violence, because Hizzoner ordered his Police Chief to stay away from the protest sites! Since there were no cops involved, there were no arrests, and therefore no violence resisting them. Having now given the City's core over to the protesters, once wonders if the City will ever get it back, and what shape will it be in when they do?
Folly the Sixth: Wolves. That's right, wolves. North America's fearsome four-legged killing machine. Unlike the cougar, another serious predator, or the bears which will attack only if disturbed, wolves attack first, then eat what they've attacked, then have wolf babies and do it some more. For some idiot reason, the eco-freaks have decided that North American forests must again be populated with wolves, after the settlers of these lands (both native and interloper) worked so hard to get them out of the ecosystem. In Oregon, wolves are multiplying rapidly, but the State and Federal governments deliberately under-report them. If you believed these gummint liars, you would think that there are wolves only in a few wilderness areas where people don't have to live and work. That's a lie, a good friend (and one of the Chosin Few, and a native American to boot) tells me that there are several packs in the Bend-LaPine area of Central Oregon, a heavily populated area. None of these packs have ever been officially reported, even though various outdoor writers have acknowledged their presence. Here what they will do to your pets:
Ruby and Candy were bear-tracking dogs, working the scent of a bear in the ID mountains. The wolves eating them desisted when the hunter came up, but if he had shot a wolf, he would have been charged with a Federal felony, since the wolves have "endangered" status. You can't legally kill a wolf anywhere, for any reason, even to save your own life. The Government can and does kill a few to "manage" the packs (well, those packs they care to disclose), but only when the packs start to prey heavily on livestock, and even then, there's a lengthy process to follow to have the gummint thin a pack down. What will YOU do when you encounter a wolf in the wild?
