Friday's Odds and Ends

Its a beautiful spring day here in East Texas and I was out early picking berries and then I took my dog for a walk. We have to enjoy these spring days before the blast of summer heat hits. Here is a picture of one of my favorite wildflowers. They grow abundantly in my front pasture and I have been known to drive around them when mowing.

 We're headed into run-off elections across the country and some of them could carry pretty hefty price tags. I like what one small town in Reeves County Texas did. The two candidates for city council, Bruce MacNair and Bryan Studer,  agreed to a coin toss to select the winner. All that cost was a quarter. A run-off election would have cost the small town of Wolfforth, which is near Lubbock, $10,000.

According to Texas election laws, a coin toss is a legal method to break a tie between two candidates, and it appears it may be legal in other states as well. In doing some research I found that a coin toss has been used in Illinois, New Mexico and even in the Philippines.

I have an idea. Why not make it law to have a coin toss to settle every election tie? Obviously those are the two candidates that most people wanted, and it could save so much money. And another plus is we would not have to suffer through all those horrid campaign ads that sling so much mud you want to put on your wading boots.

Here's a quarter to use.

 A Truthout article by Mike Ludwig shed new light on the controversial fracking method of extracting oil. Fracking is used in many states, Texas included, and right now there is an effort to halt the proposed fracking in areas surrounding New Mexico’s Chaco Culture National Historical Park. If you would like to urge the Bureau of Land Management to deny this proposal, you can sign a petition HERE

After reading Ludwig's article that opened with, "Energy Information Administration officials told reporters on Wednesday that they are cutting their estimate of how much oil can be drawn out of California's massive Monterey Shale formation by a whopping 96 percent."

Fracking involves forcing gallons of water, containing chemicals, deep into the earth to break up rock formations.

Ummm... do we really want to keep doing that?

Now lets close with some fun. I got these jokes from The Laugh Factory in the Family Jokes category.

A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says, "That's the ugliest baby that I've ever seen. Ugh!" The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her, "The driver just insulted me!" The man says, "You go right up there and tell him off – go ahead, I'll hold your monkey for you."

An elderly couple are in church. The wife leans over and whispers to her husband, "I just let out a long, silent fart. What should I do?" The husband replies, "First off, replace the batteries in your hearing aid!"