Pitbull vs kitten. Oooooh, you can only imagine the carnage! These people are so cheery and upbeat I want to smack ’em. But what they’re doing is wonderful. Now there’s the power of creative risk taking! (Sad irony, though, that they felt a need to include a question in their FAQ about whether their children are getting a proper education. How could anybody assume that sitting in a classroom could be a better education than they’re getting in this adventure?) “I Was Out to See America.” Riding the rails in the Great Depression. (Via Old Printer who points out that…
Category: Travels
Observations while wandering near and far.
Still deadlining this week — on every day but Wednesday when I snuck away with girlfriends for an orgy of junque shopping. So still only “lite” posting. But I’m working on another Big, Heavy Tome of a Thought, which I’ll probably drop onto the blog with a floor-shattering thud next week. In the meantime … It’s so weird how we just take news like this for granted now. “Today you were lucky, but you will have to be lucky always. We only have to be lucky once.” Why the IRA was successful and Al Quaeda not, according to a very…
Took me a while, but I said I’d have tales (and tails) from the Mother Earth News Fair. So here are a couple. The young lady with the radiant smile is — you can tell! — a member of the furry community. She wears her tail happily and presented me with a bushy faux wolf tail of my very own. Furry folk are much misunderstood and (you won’t be surprised) sometimes discriminated against for their playful self-expression. (The example at the last link happened on private property, so the security guards in question were probably within their rights — which…
A few choice items mined from comments and emails from blog readers: Have you thanked the above Wholesome Homeland Security Hero for keeping us safe by groping your children? Turns out TSA agent Thomas Gordon is so dedicated to our welfare that he even studied young girls in his spare time. (From winston; who noted oh-so-correctly that this news was inevitalble. Bet it won’t be the last.) From Pat: Turns out you can get paid for trying to inflict a conscience on Obama. Unfortunately, the few bucks these folks might receive doesn’t even begin to offset the thousands they had…
Angry man pours gasoline on himself. Police arrive. One guess: What does a genius cop do? (Tip o’ hat to P.T.) Intelligent, up-to-date discussion of the Japanese nuclear plant at The Mental Militia Forums. (Tip o’ hat to S.) An era has truly ended. Augustus Owsley Stanley, III is dead. For a brief, shining time, Purple Owsley was the holy grail of psychedelics. Oh yeah, and there was that band he was involved with, too. Oh lord. You know I’m for creators’ rights. But the government version is getting crazier and more Draconian by the day. Absurd. Government by and…
MS Jordan posted in the comments section yesterday about Phil Mocek, the Seattle man just acquitted of four counts stemming from his polite refusal to show ID at the Albuqueuque, NM, airport. There’ve been a quite a few blips of info on Mocek, but this news story, with its video and links to earlier stories about Mocek, gives the best look I’ve found so far. Took the jury all of an hour. No surprise. As usual the police/TSA account of Mocek “shouting” and creating a disturbance turns out to be a pack of lies. And as usual, the “authorities” didn’t…
I have a friend — very non-political — who loves to travel. But even she, who basically trusts government to do the right thing, was nervous about the porno-scanners now being deployed for the benefit of the security industry and peeping Toms in the TSA. Somehow this topic came up while she and I were on a long drive Friday. She said she longed to return to her favorite country in Asia but “didn’t want anybody looking at my boobs hanging halfway down to my waist.” But! Then she recently saw a news item on TV that included video footage…
The Paladin book is going into final edit before going off to the publisher and a S.W.A.T. magazine deadline looms this week. So the brain is a bit crowded right now (and that’s without … well, other stuff going on that involves three driven-to-distraction dogs and an overwhelmed but surprisingly calm guest kitty; more on that later). But, with a little help from my friends, here’s a bit of blogitude: Via Sam (thank you): What happens when an American traveler calmly refuses to answer questions upon his reentry into the “homeland.” Bold blogger, that guy. Larken Rose, who last time…
Greetings from the Pacific North(very)Wet! And thanks for being patient. As Joel has been posting, I made it to my destination, but am currently sans Internet. So what little blogging I can do (between hauling trash, unpacking, and painting the insides of kitchen cabinets before putting my stuff away) will be sporadic for a while. Stick with me, please … Thanks for all the good wishes and offers of help. You have no idea how great it felt, after the crappy start of my journey, to know I had friends waiting along the road. As it turned out, the final…
Have I mentioned that I dislike travel? Yes, I do believe I’ve said that I dislike all forms of travel. Or at least all forms available to people who don’t flit around in private jets and have mechanics on call for their fleet of vintage Bentleys. I may have even used words like “hate” and “loathe,” even though, properly, terms like those should be reserved for politicians, puppy-torturers, and people who dump truckloads of litter in the woods. To wit: Here I am, a whole, whopping 150 miles from my departure point. The last last 40 of it my truck…