Sounds like the name of a prestigious law firm, doesn’t it? It’s not. It’s just a list of today’s blog topics, in no particular order. Yes, this will be a bit of a long blog … call it a make-up blog, since I skipped a few days back there.
I am thrilled this morning because I received a telephone call from Simon. For those who haven’t followed the blogs I follow, Simon is a fellow in Britain who was recently diagnosed with a form of cancer which will soon end his life. He is a brave man, and even in his weakened condition he has embarked on a mission. He’s taking his narrowboat, the Wey Tamarisk, on a trip that will cover hundreds of miles and dozens of locks on the canal system, a trip which will by all accounts take several weeks, in order to deliver it to his girlfriend before he passes on.
I have been following this journey closely, by reading the blogs of the folks over there who are helping him along, particularly Henry The Thirst who is now for the second time aboard the Wey Tamarisk as First Mate / Moral Supporter. (For some GREAT photos, see this nice blog.
A group of us bloggy people have been sending text messages to Simon’s cell phone … just friendly greetings and encouragement, to let the man know he’s got a fan club and that we’re all pulling for him. I sent one such message today, and about five minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Simon! I could barely make out the words … I tried going outside to improve matters, but I think perhaps they were in a bad position for cell reception. When Simon spoke I could hear about the first two words, then the phone went silent until he stopped talking … very odd. I could hear Henry the Thirst yelling greetings to me in the background. Communications were difficult, but I got the idea that the two were doing fine, that their engine troubles aren’t quite sorted out yet, but they’re working on it. The two sounded in good spirits, and nothing could have made my day like getting a phone call from these two fine gentlemen. Fair winds and following seas, my friends, and a safe voyage.
The family and I spent a lot of time in the boiling hot sun this weekend, but we managed to pull a pretty good time out of it. Unfortunately, sometimes holidays bring out a lot of outrage at the incompetence of local governments, and this holiday was no exception.
First of all, Stone Mountain Park is no more. The place I thought was such a wonderful, idyllic getaway has turned into an amusement park. They’ve built a replica frontier village, complete with amusement rides and dippin dots vendors. They’ve closed the lake to swimming, so as to increase patronage at their new waterslide complex. DUKW’s (DUCKS, most people call them … amphibious vehicles) now buzz around on the once-tranquil lake. Helicopters giving sightseeing rides zoom noisily overhead. In a lighted circle where a fine piece of sculpture once stood, there now sits a big yellow SUV with the name of some car dealer emblazoned on its side. A riverboat carries people on excursions, on a lake that’s barely large enough for such a behemoth to turn around. There’s a 4-D theater. There’s even a train, although they’ve closed all the stops except one, so it’s basically a train to nowhere. The place really stinks now.
All of this happened when the State of Georgia decided that it was being too greedy, operating the park all by itself, and decided to lease the whole works to a private corporation and let them run it. That’s when everything went to hell, because while governments at least pay lip service to the public interest, corporations want money … and lots of it, and to hell with natural beauty.
The people in charge are also clearly idiots. July 4 is the park’s busiest day. So, naturally, they closed the shuttle that takes people from attraction to attraction, blocked most of the major thoroughfares, shut down several of the attractions themselves, sent most of the crowd control people home, and generally made a big mess of things. The area where the fireworks were to be viewed was inaccessible because security had allowed people to line up lawn chairs and blankets directly in front of the doors! Einstein was right, the two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Our little suburban town of Douglasville had its fireworks display, inexplicably, on July 5. The announcements in the newspaper said it was at the West Pines Golf Course. So, we turned up about an hour before the appointed time, and found both entrances to the golf course blocked by police cars. They helpfully told us that the entrance was at the other end of the golf course, which I immediately knew was BS because the other end of the golf course is now a Wal-Mart and there’s no access from there. So, we did what everyone else in town did … we filled the Wal-Mart parking lot to overflowing and watched from there, as the ice cream trucks and cotton candy vendors worked the crowd, having got the clue sometime considerably earlier than we. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
The good news here in Georgia is that a long-standing idiocy in Georgia law has now been corrected. Georgia is one of those states where the legislature is so busy, they seldom have time to remove antiquated laws from the books. Thus, while fortified wines and hard liquors can be sold in our state, until recently no beer could be sold that contained more than 6% alcohol by volume. As any beer lover knows, that takes a lot of beer off the table! No more, though. As of July 1, beers containing up to 15% alcohol by volume are now legal to sell in our state. My local package store has got the ball rolling by importing some very nice Belgian ales, some of the darker and more flavorful German biers, and even a few English ales and porters we couldn’t get before. I went beer-shopping recently and got a few things I’m fond of, along with a number that I wanted to try for various reasons. I bought one just because of its name, after I finished laughing like a maniac. It’s called “Entire Butt English Porter”. Now, my American readers will be laughing already, but the Brits will be wondering what all the hilarity’s about. In America, the word “butt” is slang for … well, the southern part of a northbound person, to put it delicately. Well, OK, let’s be indelicate, it means bum. I’ll bet even those normally reserved British would snigger mightily at a beer called “Entire Bum”.
When I got through chuckling, I remembered that in olden times a “Butt” was a barrel or keg, and then it made sense … but it’s still darned funny. It’s not a bad porter, either, at least to my American taste buds. I have no idea how it rates in Britain.
That’s all for today…whew! Hope I left something to write about tomorrow.