A Senior Moment

Internet, cell phone & land-line service went down around 1 pm for half of the tenants in my office building. My first thought, as manager, was "I should send a building-wide e-mail alert to let them know what's happened."




The irony ... it burns.

Don't Tase Eat Me, Bro!

Or, "Trodding Where Treadwell Trod".

From the Daily Mail:

A dramatic new series of photographs, by Russian photographer Sergey Gorshkov, show the bears fishing for their supper in Kurile Lake in Kamchatka, Russia.

How close did this guy have to get for THIS one?

The wildlife enthusiast risked his life swimming just a few feet from the animals at the rural site, which is home to more than 18,000 of them.

~ snip ~

'Photographing bears is risky. I have got as close to the bears in the wild as you could in the zoo.

'It is only now, looking back, that I realise how dangerous it was. Bears have caused more injuries to photographers than lions, tigers, leopards and sharks combined.' 

Read the whole article at the link.

At least he's not as oblivious to the danger as was the ill-fated Timothy Treadwell, who posited that bears were misunderstood, and just wanted to be our friends.

They ate him and his girlfriend, too.

h/t to Bayou Renaissance Man

Monday Moanin'

We haz it, from going back to work after a long, sunny weekend. If you've been in this little corner of the cortex in the last couple of months, you know we've had very little sunshine this year, and actually set a new record with 32 consecutive days of rain.

Today is supposed to be sunny & 67, which is about 8 degrees above normal. In fact, it's supposed to be nice all week. Maybe we could declare a sun holiday? I'm not saying we should go all Incan, but it's worth considering.

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Apparently the sunshine made folks here a bit rowdy. Last night there was two folks shot downtown, shots fired after a 3-car collision in the northeast part of town, plus a "disorderly crowd" where the police arrested several & tased one fellow, outside a bar where that crowd is typically, shall we say, exuberant.

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Finally, in the "Huh?" category, we have a letter to the editor in today's paper, where a gentleman opines that despite the bemoaning of only a 27% turnout for the primary election, we should celebrate our "right to not vote", if we so choose. After all, he says,

The most common and passionate objection is soldiers past and present laid down their lives for our right to vote, so how dare we disrespect them by not showing up at the polls?

However, did they not also lay down their lives for our right to not vote?

Not so much. Yes, our military fights to preserve our freedoms. And the letter-writer is free to vote or not, as he pleases.

But apparently the letter-writer in question has confused "rights" with "freedoms", and thinks that having a say in the form & function of government is too onerous a condition for citizenship. I'm sure there are plenty of places where voting isn't available to the hoi polloi. Makes me wonder when he's leaving.

Correction, Mr. Letter-Writer: you have the freedom to not vote. But don't say a stinkin' word when/if your taxes go up, or you disagree with your elected officials. You gave up the right to complain when you exercised your freedom to saturate the polls with your absence.

Just sayin'.