Friday's Odds and Ends

Some cities, concerned about the amount of litter on their streets, have imposed a fee for using plastic bags at stores. Dallas is the latest. Granted, litter is a problem. I hate to even say how much trash I see along the county road where I walk each morning. I also hate to admit how many times I've seen someone toss a drink can out a truck window as they are driving along. When I was a kid, if I threw something out the car window, my father would stop and make me go pick it up. Believe me, I never tossed even a gum wrapper out after that.

That's a point that a Dallas resident, Barbara Whitfield Streetman made in a letter to the editor. She challenged parents to do what my father did, "Teach kids never to throw anything out of the car window or throw anything on the sidewalks or anyplace. Just carry it home and dispose of it."

What a concept.

Reactions to the latest violence - the mass shooting in Paris - incited the same kind of hateful rhetoric and behaviors as the last two in the United States. Sadly, and I may keep saying this until more than two people get it, that will not stop until people stop reacting with their emotions. Someone once said, "Hate the sin, not the sinner." I think that was Jesus, and so many of the people reacting with hate and anger call themselves Christians?

Hmmmmm.

That's it for my rants today. Aren't you glad? Just for fun I took a picture of my cats this morning. All four of them are on the edge of my desk watching the birds that are fluttering around in the flowerbed. The cats are twitching tails and ears and wishing there was no glass between them and the birds.Every now and then I hear a little chirp and it is one of the cats talking to the bird. I wonder if Harry is saying, "Come here little bird. I won't hurt you."

Harry is the black cat closest to the window

Now for some Friday Funnies. This first one is from Luann by Greg Evans. Luann's parents, Nancy and Frank are sitting at the table in the kitchen working with some papers and Nancy says, "I can't believe it's another new year already."

"No kidding," Franks says. "Time is flying by. When I was a carefree kid, a year lasted forever. Now that I don't have a spare second, the days flash by. Life is backwards."

Nancy looks at him in surprise. "You'd rather rush through joyful childhood and crawl through grumpy old age?"

"Maybe I wouldn't BE grumpy if I had more T... " He looks up. "Wait a minute. How did I become a grumpy old man all of a sudden?"

She goes back to the paper she was writing on. "Time is flying by."

Here's one from Pickles by Brian Crane. Opal is sitting in the overstuffed chair, surrounded by hangars. Nelson stands in front of the chair watching what she is doing. Earl leans on the back of the chair and asks, "What are you doing with all those hangars, Opal?"

"I'm crocheting colorful covers for them."

"Silly question... Why do they need covers?"

"Covers keep clothes from slipping off the hanger. And they're pretty."

"Ah that makes sense." Then Earl walks off with Nelson and says, "I didn't have the heart to tell her I could accomplish the same thing in a tenth of the time with a roll of friction tape."

Finally, this one from Crankshaft by Batiuk & Ayers. Crankshaft and his son-in-law, Jeff, are watching a news program on television and the weather forecast starts. The meteorologist says, "This is the big one, people. The mother of all snow storms.

"We're not going to get inches of snow...!!! But FEET of snow.

"We're going to get snow, snow, snow... and even MORE SNOW!!"

Crankshaft looks at Jeff and says, "He must get paid by the flake."

Another new feature I would like to start on the blog is "Writing Wisdom". Each week I will add some bit of inspiration or advice that I find helpful. This week I found a piece that Anna Elliot wrote,  In Praise of Quitting, for Writer Unboxed, and I found her article very helpful in thinking about projects that we start and then abandon.  I'll just post a short excerpt here, but do click over and read the whole article. It is well worth your time.

Now, maybe I’ll go back to the abandoned story someday.   At some point, I’ll at least pull it out of the drawer and give it a read-through to see if there’s something there.  Maybe there is, maybe there’s not.  But that’s the good thing about stories.  They’re very forgiving.  They’re not going to be mad at you that you walked away and left them to sit idle for a couple of months or even years.  Sometimes they actually even reward you for having walked away by suddenly revealing to you just what the fatal flaw was that made them impossible to finish before.

Friday's Odds and Ends

We are looking ahead to a busy weekend. Some of our kids are coming out to celebrate my husband's retirement from the Permanent Deaconate. He has served the church in many ways for 35 years, and is now ready to just sit in the pew like everyone else. We will also have an early Father's Day party on Sunday, so this will be a weekend for just family and friends and fun. Aren't those the best?

Most distressing to me is news that dozens of anomalies, including dented pipe, were reportedly found along 60 miles of the southern segment of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline being constructed in Texas. TransCanada is calling these concerning problems with the pipe “small imperfections” along only nine sections.

Apparently, landowners in Texas, including those near my town of Winnsboro, have seen crews out digging up sections of the pipe that have been down for as much as six months.  A spokesman for TransCanada has said,  “The company does not have to reveal what happened, but seeing a completed pipeline having welds and dents cut out is reminiscent of other infamous low-quality pipelines built by a variety of companies that PHMSA has identified in the last few years. The odds are not favorable to avoid a leak when we are seeing problems such as these with a newly constructed pipeline, and a leak poses dangers for the people who live along this route.”
 
Did he really say what some of us have been saying all along? That the pipeline poses dangers?

We in the U.S.  are not the only ones against the pipeline. Government officials in Canada have rejected a plan to build the Northern Gateway pipeline in British Columbia which would pump tar sands through the province for export. The officials cited a lack of evidence that the company has the ability to transport the heavy crude safely, nor could the company prove that they would have a sufficient response to a spill should one occur. Those concerns are legitimate. People in Michigan are still cleaning up after a pipeline ruptured and dumped tar sands into the Kalamazoo River in July 2010.
 About the same time that I was reading the news report outlining Canada's objection to the pipeline, I came across a rather absurd comment made by Exxon CEO Tex Tillerson in response to a proposal from environmentalists to set corporate goals for cutting oil emmissions. He said, "What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?"

Huh?

Okay, that's enough of a rant for the day. Now about a bit of fun from the comics. This one from Luann, another of my favorite strips.  Luann's parents, Nancy and Frank are trying on their summer clothes after a winter of having them packed away. Frank says, "Look I put on my summer shirt and found a pen and a pair of sunglasses in the pocket. And in my shorts I found a quarter and a dollar bill."

To which Nancy reponds, "Lucky you. I put on my summer clothes and found five pounds."

Unfortunately I can relate to Nancy. How about you?

Life Lesson: "Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction." Oprah Winfrey speaking to Harvard University graduates.

Monday Morning Musing

Have you heard that AIG filed a suit against the Federal Government for what they claimed was unfair terms of the 2008 bailout? In case you've forgotten that debacle, AIG is the insurance company that made multibillion-dollar bad bets on mortgages and put us on the brink of financial collapse. They were given $182 billion in bailout money, which current ads from AIG are saying that they have paid back, with interest. They also take thirty seconds of our time to let us know how much they are doing  to help victims of the terrible storm Sandy.

A little tug on the heartstrings to keep us from thinjing about the knife they proposed to stick into our pocketbooks. Keep in mind that any successful suit of the government means money out of our pockets, more money on top of what already came out of our pockets.

Talking to a friend about this, he commented, "That takes a lot of chutzpah. The operational definition of chutzpah being 'murdering your parents and then throwing yourself on the mercy of the courts because you are an orphan.'"

Thomas G. Donlan made the same statement in his article in Barrons, where he also wrote, "The AIG 'rescue' was a shameful episode in U.S. financial history, one that will come back to haunt the taxpayers and the government's creditors the next time an insurance company, a bank, a nonbank, a government-sponsored enterprise, or a Ponzi scheme seems too big to fail and too big to dismember, and is assuredly too big to succeed." 

Over the weekend I learned that AIG has backed down from the suit. According to an editorial in The Dallas Morning News, "After a little shaming and angry public backlash, AIG is sheepishly bakcking off, but it's reminded us that you can't spell ingrate without AIG."

So my post today wouldn't leave you on a downbeat, I looked online for a comic strip to share. Just for fun, check out today's strip from Luann. Young people use libraries for the most interesting reasons.