Picking Up After Your Dog

Translation:  "Curb Your Dog"

I was riding my bike on Oleson Road, approaching the Garden Home Recreation Center.  It was a spring day and the afternoon sun was out.  A young woman was walking  her dog on the sidewalk coming toward me as I was traveling south in the bike lane.  It was some dark brown short-haired breed, smaller than a Labrador and while fifty yards still separated us, it stopped and hunched and shat in the middle of the concrete walk.

All My Dreams Blue

Here's a song by the Youngbloods, a Sixties/Seventies band.  They are best known for their anthem of the hippie era; Get Together.  Which is a pleasant enough song about brotherhood and getting along and all that mellow flowers-in-your-hair sentiment that lasts until you catch a roommate eating your peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon.  


It's their signature song, but they didn't write it.  Dino Valenti did in the mid-sixties and it was recorded earlier by The Byrds and even Jefferson Airplane, before Grace Slick joined them.

Touch Your Cell Phone And Die.

This isn't about distracted driving.

July 2013.
Amy Stiner, 37, of Machias, Maine and Melissa Moyer, 38, visiting from Pennsylvania went hiking in Roque Bluffs State Park early in the evening and got lost and called for help on a cell phone.  A landowner found them and brought them to his house, where a park warden picked them up and then drove them to Ms. Stiner's parked minivan.  By this time it was nine P.M. and rainy and foggy and instead of turning left on the road back to Machias, she mistakenly turned right toward  the park boat ramp.

Zimmerman: Part 2 White Lessons

What white people (or partially white people) should learn from the Zimmerman trial and media passion play.

1.  Don't follow persons wearing hoodies.  This is now considered racist.  If you find yourself behind and walking in the same direction as a hoodie-wearer abruptly halt and change direction one-hundred-and-eighty degrees.  If this puts you behind another hoodie-wearer then go to the right or left.  If there are still hoodies in those directions, call a taxicab.

The Kindness Of Strangers

I'm not sure how old I am for this story.  

But I could ride a bike so I must have been six or seven years old.  We lived on Seventy-Seventh and Holgate and it was summer and hot and cloudless and I was headed for the local swimming pool.  That pool was located in the confines of Mt. Scott Park.  

If anyone has seen the Movie, SANDLOT, you'll know what my neighborhood pool looked like.   It seems there are thousand of these pools scattered all over the United States and they all look the same and they were all built around the same time.  Municipalities must have used the same architect to save money.

Zimmerman: Part 1 Hoodies

Much has been made of the hooded sweatshirt as regards the Trayvon Martin killing.  It has been suggested that Martin was targeted (unfairly) because he was wearing a "hoodie".

The reasoning goes something like this: Black youth wear hooded sweatshirts.  Some black youth commit crimes while wearing hooded sweatshirts. Trayvon wore a hooded sweatshirt.  Therefore George Zimmerman must have figured Trayvon was black and up to no good and thus racially profiled and killed him because of what he was wearing, and all innocent hoodie-wearing kids are now targets.  Or so it goes.

I'm going to suggest to you that Trayvon Martin's apparel could not have been a factor in George Zimmerman's suspicions because it was raining that night back in February in Sandford, Florida.