Category: Orphans

With high gasoline prices helping make for higher everything at least one important service to my area’s taxpayers will not falter. The Jefferson County (Texas) Mosquito Control District says they will not cut back on spraying for the biting devils despite increased prices in fuel, according to an article in our local Beaumont Enterprise.

When I first moved back here three years ago I was a little taken aback by the fast-moving, low-flying twin engine plane that delivers mosquito spray for the control district.

But knowing how this area is a magnet for mosquitoes and the fact that diseases like West Nile and malaria are no fun at all I am glad to see the mosquito plane and spray trucks especially after days such as those last week in which five inches of rain fell.

So knowing that the mosquito district is not cutting back definitely qualifies as good news. And that, of course, is better than bad news as well as being somewhat identical to no news at all. Is that crystal clear?

This from a sticker on someone’s back windshield yesterday captures the essence of my feelings today:

“My Don’t Give a Damn is broken“

This afternoon I am boning up (pun intended)on hands. The primary reason is that a hand specialist (yes there are doctors who specialize in hands)told me that my ongoing thumb problem was a result of Stage 2 basal joint (thumb)arthritis. The tumble I took awhile back exacerbated the ongoing problems with pain, the doctor told me.

Like other osteoarthritic conditions this particular one is progressive and could eventually necessitate a joint replacement. Hopefully that is a ways away and right now I am wearing a nifty little thumb splint that was custom made by the bone and joint clinic.

I am unable to link at the moment but www.handuniversity.com (for real) has a lot of great information about hands and the like including great little pictures of joints with silicone joint replacements. So I guess if you get a basal joint replacement it’s called a “thumb job?” May be.

Once again, the Internet provides a great way to spend a Friday afternoon as I learn ever more about my infirmities. It sure beats sitting at home watching the “all-election-all-the-time” playing on cable. Why don’t we hold the elections on Labor Day and just get the damn thing over? I like politics as much as the next person but it just is getting to be a little too much.

Okay. That was my rant for the day.

My, not mine personally, congressional member Republican Rep. Ted Poe of Humble, Texas, sent me an e-mail today wanting my opinion about legislation he filed. Mind you, he wasn’t personally sending it to me personally no doubt because he is usually too busy with personally chasing off illegal Mexicans and appearing on Fox News and Lou Dobbs. And personally I wouldn’t want to seek the opinion of someone who uses personally more than once in a paragraph. But, hey he asked me.

Rep. Poe wanted to know how I felt about legislation he put in the hopper that would lift the moratorium on offshore drilling “and provide an incentive for coastal states by allowing them to share in the revenues from oil and gas leases off their shores.”

Now, technically speaking, he really didn’t ask my opinion because the only possible answers were:

“Yes”

“No, they will continue to depend on Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama to do all the work.”

“Unsure”

Obviously Mr. Poe didn’t leave the possibility for an open-ended “no” nor even a “not no but hell no.” So really the congressman was asking a trick question even though my true opinion is a complexly-qualified “yes.”

I suggest that if the good congressman really wants his constituents’ opinions he will genuinely ask for them and not just ask questions with the answers he wants. But then again I am sure he is much too busy stirring up animosity over immigration on right-wing talk radio and TV to contemplate little old my opinion. So I suppose I should thank him for taking time to e-mail me, even though some staffer probably did or even some machine. So, thanks, personally.

It’s a rainy Wednesday in B-town. (Beaumont, Texas and I know of no one who calls it B-Town) We are getting a “beneficial” effect of Hurricane Dolly while the folks in the Rio Grande Valley are getting an overabundance.

“Beneficial” has become quite the buzz word lately in everything from rainfall to cow manure. I don’t know when that happened, meaning the birth of that particular buzz word. I suppose I am guilty as the rest of using buzz words but I like to ridicule them too. But then some people think I am a narcissist.

Speaking of narcissist, check out the NY Daily News story here about conservative hack Bob Novack running over a D.C. pedestrian. I don’t see much humor in that as in, well, just sadness and I am sure the pedestrian didn’t see any humor in that. I guess that would make him a pedestrian pedestrian.

Pedestrian:
adjective
1. lacking wit or imagination; “a pedestrian movie plot”
noun
1. a person who travels by foot

Just shoot me.