In recalling the slightly unmentionable moments of my Boy Scout years, I remembered a phrase that Joey (the tickler) used to describe himself: polymorphously perverse, because, he admitted, he liked the thrill of tickling girls and boys his age and looking at their reactions. He also liked being tickled.
Funny, how quickly a childhood can be forgotten and remembered.
Time for lunch — fresh peaches (first of the season!), fresh strawberries (last of the season!), potato chips, potato chip butter (i.e., sour cream) and a hummus sandwich.
Have a great day! I have books that wait to be read and I an urge to read them.
How do we award, reward, reinforce and otherwise encourage our behaviour?
There is beauty and there is the beautiful.
A scar across one’s face may lend one an air of distinction but we see in the mirror only an ugly scrape across our once unblemished visage.
Perception vs. reality.
At mid-life, I see my skin and its many changes due to sun/UV damage, knife cuts, wrinkles, blood donation needle entry points, and cat scratches.
None of these external marks on my body have affected my ability to drive a motorcar.
With age, however, my reaction times have slowed.
Therefore, my driving capabilities are diminished from the time, a year or so after getting my driver’s licence over 30 years ago, when I was best able to speed dangerously fast on backcountry, twisty roads, racing other kids in their late teens and early twenties.
There is, in other words, a time and place where our health, both mental and physical, is and isn’t detrimental to our sharing highways with other drivers of multitonne killing machines.
Yesterday, while dining with my wife at Nick’s Restaurant, a young man of 18 years crashed through vehicles at a traffic light and then proceeded 1.5 miles to the next intersection where he crashed into several more vehicles, killing a ten-year old child in one of them.
According to comments by readers on a local news company’s website, the driver is “Very sweet kid, good student and athlete!” and “an amazing kid and a close friend of mine he is diabetic”.
Yet, here we are looking at a dead child and many injured people because of one driver.
Should people with known medical conditions, which could endanger others — epilepsy, diabetes, old age related reaction times, etc. — be kept from driving, much the way aeroplane pilots lose their licences due to findings in medical examinations?
What is the threshold we’re willing to set that puts the best qualified people behind the wheel of a vehicle?
We already set age cutoffs.
Another reader commented, “How do you pass out from low blood sugar and keep driving? I know the family of the little girl who died. I am absolutely heartbroken for them. Praying for all involved.”
We could look at statistics which point out the benefits of a road system that sets a relatively low qualification threshold for driving a vehicle has increased our economic output higher than the detrimental effect of death/injury by many magnitudes much like we can say that the economic costs (gains?) of our “war on terror” is magnitudinally higher than the economic loss of dead/maimed military.
A ten-year old girl didn’t wake up to see the sunrise this morning or eat breakfast with her family.
Why?
Because an 18-year old boy drove when he shouldn’t’ve.
Perhaps cars and trucks of the future, before they’re all autonomously-controlled, will use technology that could have prevented yesterday’s tragedy.
Perhaps…
Let’s hope so.
The life of your ten-year young child may depend on it.
Fun in downtown Athens, Alabama.
For some, a shock heard ’round the world. For others, what they’ve waited for.
Either way, here’s an alternative history lesson — what if the Boy Scouts integrated homosexual boys back in 1962? Let’s take a look…bringing the innocence of 1962 into this new controversy…
This issue also sponsored by the following:
Kanaan, where cars were entertaining June He stood beneath an amber moon And softly murmured "someday soon" He, dissed and clung to gearheads Then, tomorrow was another day The win five hundred miles away With heed, a bunch of wrecks at bay, Now, when twilight dims the sky to black Recalling deeds and tires on rack There’s one race that he's put to fact Return to taste the Indy milk <instrumental> Then, tomorrow was another day The morning found him miles away With still a million things to say Now, when twilight dims the sky above Recalling thrills of our love There’s one thing that he's certain of Return he will to old Brazil That old Brazil Man, it’s old in Brazil Brazil, Brazil
With a nod to Christopher Hart’s “Humongous Book of Cartooning” and Sumo Paint Bamboo 2.2 app in the Wacom Bamboo dock on Windows 8.
To paraphrase: “if we can’t assimilate ’em, we assassinate ’em.”
Message received loud and clear, boss — our exterminators have been deployed, our mission clean and pure as water.
Unintendeed conseequences? Seedy, eh?
treetrunkdings 