I’ve had this on file for a while, and cannot remember where it came from. 

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I don’t get it.

Why is McCain accusing Obama of playing the race car?  What does playing with a race car have to do with the presidency or the election?

Jeesh.

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WARNING – WARNING – WARNING

This post contains explicit descriptions of avian sexual activity. Reader discretion is advised.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mourning doves are just too dumb to live.

It’s dangerous to place a value on intelligence, especially in non-mammals. After all, a number of creatures that have survived the longest without finding it necessary to make any evolutionary changes are not known for their intellect. Crocodiles and sharks come to mind.

But, still, from what I’ve seen, mourning doves just don’t have the sense God gave a fencepost. Maybe it’s just the doves out back of my house. In any case, that is one stupid bunch of birds.

Oh, sure, they make that sweet little noise that sounds like they’re, well, mourning. And they’re very pretty – all plump and soft-looking. And one of their cousins is supposed to represent peace. And their name and profile have been adopted by a successful line of lotions and shampoos.

Nevertheless.

I have a bird feeder and a birdbath within a few feet of my patio door, so there are a lot of birds out there a lot of the time. I get sparrows and blackbirds, blue jays and cardinals, robins and doves. The squirrels make more-or-less successful raids on the feeder, and the rabbits pick up whatever falls on the ground.

When I walk by the window or the door, they all scatter. The birds fly away, the squirrels jump to the tree, and the rabbits run. Even Twit, the baby rabbit who is inexorably destroying my impatiens, has the sense to fluff up his little white tail as a warning flag to the rest of his family, and hop away.

All except the doves, that is. They sit there, munching away, watching their cohorts head for safety, and looking confused. I swear, if I were a boa constrictor, I could slither over there, grab one of them, squeeze the life out of him, and have him half eaten before his buddies figured out anything was wrong.

“Hey, Gomer, look at that. They all left. Just leaves more for us, huh? Whaddya suppose that was all about, Gomer? Gomer? Where’d he go?”

During warm weather, of course, the birdbath lives up to its name. There always seems to be a bird over there, splashing and preening. In the winter, it serves only as drinking water.

The doves have the disconcerting habit of sitting there on the rim, facing away from the water, with their tails dragging in the water. In the summer, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. But in the winter I have seen as many as six of them, all facing outward, with their tails submerged in near-freezing water. I suppose they have no more feeling in their feathers than I have in my hair. But in mid-winter, my being outside with wet hair would have little survival benefit.

Earlier this year, I noticed a pair of doves on the patio, one of them being fed by the other. At first I thought it was parent and baby, but it soon became apparent that it was a mating pair, and he was offering her tidbits of food to get her in the mood.

Finally she decided the time was right, and hunkered down in what I have to assume is the approved gesture of receptivity. He strutted around to her backside, started to get himself in position – and fell off.

By then, my quasi-voyeuristic opportunity had turned into a raunchy Vaudeville act. As I left, he was following her around saying things like, “Aw, common, baby. Gimme another chance, huh? Really, that never happened to me before….”

Still, we do not lack for mourning doves. So some of them, somewhere, must be avoiding boa constrictors, keeping their tail feathers warm and dry, and mating successfully.

Just not, apparently, in my back yard.

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I have a hint for would-be writers: Learn to express yourself well with words alone. If you can’t get your idea across using only letters and spaces and a few numbers and other such symbols, then read some more and see how others manage it, or take a class.

I am considering asking for legislation limiting all writers to one instance of underlining and two exclamation points per month. And, by God, if you choose to use both of your exclamation point in one sentence, it had better be an announcement of the imminent Second Coming. Like in the next 5 minutes.

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Continuing the theme of blogs about my home….

In case anyone out there doesn’t know, I’m a libertarian. I bristle at concepts like “common good” and “collectivism” and “communal property.” It’s not that they are inherently bad ideas, especially for very small groups. It’s just that no two people can agree on a definition, and everyone wants to enforce his or her own definition.

Let me give you a trivial but telling example.

A surprising number of people expect libertarians to live out in the woods growing their own food and shooting anyone who comes on their property. Well, no. The concept of libertarianism is perfectly compatible with the idea of voluntarily giving up some of your freedoms by entering into a contract that suits your needs. I live in a condominium, and I pay monthly dues to the homeowners’ association to cover lawn mowing and other common-area maintenance, snow removal, painting, and roof repair. I have given up my freedom to paint my house any color I want in exchange for not having to paint at all. I can’t plant flowers in the common area, but I don’t have to mow or shovel snow. It suits me just fine, and if there comes a time when it no longer suits me, I can move.

The common area here is very pretty. There is a nice grassy area with trees and plantings. There’s even a little wadi that was put in to facilitate drainage when it rains. The land slopes, so there are retaining walls, and a little walking path.

And bushes. We have bushes.

Originally our homeowners’ dues included bush trimming. Well, not any more, they don’t.

I think it started when some of the homeowners began to consider the bushes up close to their own buildings their personal property, and not part of the communal property. Some of them even dug up the bushes, or replaced them with something else. According to the homeowners agreement they weren’t supposed to do that. But, hey, we’re not supposed to park cars permanently in our driveways, either, and my neighbors have had a pickup truck in their driveway for two years.

Once people started to see the bushes as their personal property, and considering that their dues were paying for getting the bushes trimmed, a number of homeowners decided they could specify whether, how, and when the trimming should take place. Some wanted the natural look, and didn’t want their bushes trimmed at all. Some claimed the bushes should be trimmed in the fall, and some in the spring. Some wanted the bushes cut way back, close to the ground. Others said that would kill the plants.

A few homeowners took to trimming their own bushes, and then demanded a refund of that part of their dues.

One fall we all got a mailing from the homeowners’ association board saying there would be no refunds, but we should let the homeowners association know whether we were each going to trim our own bushes or not. The lawn service company would then trim the bushes of only those who wanted the service. That mailing was remarkably patient and polite.

I can only guess at the response that generated. The next year, the board sent out another mailing saying we could all just trim our own damn bushes, and to heck with us. No reduction on dues, either. Screw us all. (I have taken liberties with the wording, but I could hear the tone.)

So now I own a pair of hedge trimmers, and I whack at the bushes outside my front door and beside my patio once in a while. We never talked about who would trim the bushes that sit exactly between our two houses, but my neighbor has taken to doing it himself, and he really does a good job.

I guess that makes up for the pickup truck.

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No doubt about it, technology improves and enriches our lives. And anything that comes into popular use early in our lives feels normal soon after we embrace it.

But when some interesting and helpful new invention comes at us after we’ve pretty much settled into complacency about the world, the new device will always feel just a little foreign. No matter how enthusiastically we buy, use, enjoy, and appreciate all the new gadgetry, a small part of us, somewhere way off there in the far recesses, will always remain stuck in a time when all this stuff wasn’t available.

You can spot those of us who grew up with fountain pens and soda fountains, rotary dials on telephones and rotary dials on televisions, slide rules and parental rules:

We’re the ones who make lists before we go to the grocery store, and don’t even think to call someone on our cell phone as we walk up and down the aisles to ask if we are out of peanut butter.

We’re the ones who own devices with buttons we never use. Sometimes we don’t even know what those extraneous buttons are for. We would buy a simpler version if they offered it, but nothing simpler is available.

We’re the ones who know how to make change. We know you can give a customer the correct change without doing the slightest bit of arithmetic in your head. We even know how to count the change back to the customer to prove the amount is right. They used to teach that in school, you know.

We’re the ones who think it’s easier to multiply by ten or a hundred or a thousand in our heads than to get out a calculator.

We’re the ones who, when picking up lunch for a friend at a fast food restaurant, make a guess as to the salad dressing she wants instead of calling her on our cell phone to ask.

We’re the ones who prefer a phone number like 232-1112 to 798-9989 because, with a rotary dial, it could be dialed faster.

We’re the ones who are astonished when we accidentally stumble onto a game menu on a device we really thought was intended for placing and receiving phone calls.

We’re the ones who, when we see someone walking down the street, alone, with his hands free, talking loudly, assume he is mentally ill. We’ve noticed a lot of very well-dressed mentally ill people recently.

We’re the ones who, driving home in a rainstorm, smile and feel gratitude for the garage-door opener, because we remember so clearly what it was like before we had them.

We’re the ones who, even though we may use an answering machine to screen our calls, still feel a sense of urgency when the phone rings and we can’t get to it in time.

We’re the ones who don’t confuse instant messaging and text messaging shortcuts with correct usage. Mark Twain said, “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” We understand that the person who refuses to spell, capitalize, and punctuate properly is easily confused with the person who does not know how to spell, capitalize, and punctuate properly.

KsSmallBiz.com, June 28, 2006

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The best laws are the ones we don’t really need very much. They’re the one that tell us we can’t do what most of us wouldn’t do anyway. Few of us, even if there were no laws, would murder or steal from or beat up our fellow humans. For those few people who don’t understand the Golden Rule, the laws just allow us to grab them by the shirt collar, say to them, “See, it says right here you can’t do that,” and haul them off somewhere where they won’t be able to do it again.

Generally, I think there should be fewer laws, but that we should obey the ones that make sense. I am, after all, a Libertarian, not an anarchist. There are some laws, however, that make no sense, and are regularly ignored by large groups of people. A 35-per-hour speed limit on a four-lane, semi-residential street falls in that category. The requirement to turn into the nearest lane is another.

I have friends who unquestioningly follow all the laws. When making a left turn, even if they want to be in the right lane after they’re finished turning, they pull into the left lane, signal, check their rear-view mirror, and move over into the right lane. Many of us just turn into the right lane, and I see no harm in it.  I understand there are places where the law says you can turn into any available lane.  That makes more sense.

Here’s another one that I don’t understand.

Let’s imagine you are driving down a four-lane street in the left lane, and preparing to make a left-hand turn at the upcoming intersection. Here is what you will probably see:

There is a solid double yellow line immediately to your left. The two solid yellow lines mean that neither you nor the car approaching you on the other side can cross the line.

A lane begins to open up between your lane and the oncoming left lane. It starts out as a point, and widens as you approach the intersection, gradually squeezing the other four lanes apart. Something interesting happens to the yellow lines, too. On your side, the yellow line remains solid; you cannot cross it. The line on the inside of what will become the left-turn lane, however, is dashed. That means that whoever is driving in this as-yet-unfinished lane can cross out of it. You veer slightly right, following the curve of the solid yellow line that you may not cross for maybe 50 feet as the emerging lane grows to its full size.

Finally the left-turn lane is complete. It is as wide as the other four lanes. The two yellow lines have disappeared, replaced by the white line that indicates the division between lanes, but which you may cross at will. You signal, check your mirror, move into the left-turn lane, and come to a stop at the red light, waiting for your turn to pull into the intersection and make your turn.

As you sit there, I want you to think about something. Directly behind you, there is an area of roadway as large as the footprint of a modest home that NOBODY CAN LEGALLY DRIVE ON. There are solid yellow lines surrounding the lane which prohibit anyone currently driving in the vicinity from getting in there.

To be sure, if aliens beam you up and then drop you and your car directly in there, you can drive out. In that case, the dashed yellow lines are on your side, and you can cross them and be out there where all the other people are driving. But you can’t get in there without a helicopter.

Come to think of it, I guess, while legally positioned to make a left turn at the intersection, you could BACK UP into that forbidden zone.

I wonder if they’d arrest me for that.

KsSmallBiz.com, April 27, 2005

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If Shakespeare had lived in 21st-century America, he would have named his play “Like You Like It.”

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As many of you probably know, we Kansans had us some rains yesterday.  “Torrential” is a word overused in this situation, but this was the kind of rain where, if you were caught out in it, you would have to keep your face pointed down in order to breath.  It looked as if someone were continuously pouring 55-gallon drums of water over everything.

This afternoon I heard of one Topekan who came home from work to find every bit of cedar mulch from his front yard was gone — from the flower beds, from around the trees, all of it — washed down the driveway, into the street, into the gutter, down the storm drain.  All gone.

He let himself into his house and walked out to his patio.  There were five bags of cedar mulch, washed into his back yard from somebody else’s landscaping project.

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Once upon a time there was a marine biologist who developed a group of porpoises which would live forever if they were fed a diet of a specific seagull.

Everything was going along well (swimmingly?), until he ran out of seagulls.

So he walked down to the beach, found the birds he was looking for, harvested some of them, and put them in a bag.  He was carrying them back up to the lab when he came across two lions sleeping in the path.

Not wanting to wake them, he began tiptoeing carefully across them.  Of course, he was immediately arrested for transporting gulls across sedate lions for immortal porpoises.

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