Eight Feet Deep

If I have learned one fact in my life it is that stupidity and drunkenness is as bad a combination as fire and gasoline. Am I wrong mon amour? Consider a 34-year-old French woman named Sadrine Helene Sellies.

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) — A French woman who is terrified of flying admitted in an Australian court Monday that she drunkenly tried to open an airplane door mid-flight to smoke a cigarette.

Sellies claimed to have taken sleeping pills and drank before she left the ground because of her fear of flying.

Mon dieu! She was only trying to settle her nerves. I mean, when you are anxious there is nothing better than a little fresh air.

“Open ze damn door before I get really obnoxious!”

The judge, who told Sellies that one must behave while on an airliner, placed her on a bond of almost $750 U.S. dollars and told her she would have to pay that amount if she did something similarly stupid within the next year. For the sake of future airline passengers who might have to share a cabin with Sellies, I certainly hope she will heed the judge’s advice.

Menard Creek in the Big Thicket National Preserve is a pretty nice place to visit.
It’s nice to go to the woods every now and then. This is a view from the Menard Creek Corridor Unit of the Big Thicket preserve near Livingston, Texas. The Birdwatcher’s Trail on which a friend and I took a short hike this afternoon is only one of two hiking trails open in the preserve due to damage from Hurricane Rita. Hopefully they will open others in the near future.

The world is in such a fix. War. Crime. Disease. A hurricane just tore the hell out of my city less than two months ago. Despair, despair, despair.

But isn’t the world always in a fix? Isn’t life just death sucking on a Lifesaver? Think about the 17th century. Does plague ring a bell? Brother fought brother during incredibly bloody battles in our own great nation in the 19th century. In the 20th century we had two WORLD wars! It’s like Rosanne Rosannadanna said: “If it’s not one things, it’s another.”

Thus I feel Lenny Bruce’s saying topping our blogspot is most appropriate. Human beings are almost universally up to no good. Always have been up to no good. And probably always will be up to no good. Don’t fight it. Cherish it. Laugh about it. We’re funny sumbitches. I wish more people could appreciate that. But then, we wouldn’t be funny sumbitches anymore would we?

Looking for a clue Mr. Holmes? If so I am afraid you are staring at the wrong guy. For I have not a clue what someone dressed as the famous sleuth is doing at the Girl’s Haven Gumbo Festival on Crockett Street in downtown Beaumont, Texas, on this semi-dreary afternoon. I would like to think this Sherlock was looking for bad gumbo ingredients such as foul fowl, perhaps even a poultry-geist or a hen with an avian flu. But I actually think he’s a hallucination. If I check the blog later and he’s still there then I guess my theory will have been shot to hell.

More literary action figures. This time with a twist of Dickens. I think these people were part of a gumbo team. I wonder if they have any cheers for their team like in high school football?

“Get that flour
Make that roux
Throw in a little sausage
And chicken too.
Rah, rah, rah.”

And that is why I would starve to death as a poet.

Even more confusing? Why yes, now that you mention it. I don’t really know what a dragon is doing at a gumbo festival. Even if it was Daryl Dragon. Yeah I did kind of reach real far down into the bag for that one. Daryl Dragon was the Captain in the Captain and Tenille in case you didn’t know. I never knew why he was a captain and not an admiral. Of course, the captain is lord of the ship even if an admiral is aboard. But the captain is supposed to go down with his ship so I see that as a drawback.

This is kind of behind the scenes stuff. It is a photo of what happens when a dragon poses with teenage girls. And you know, I’m not really sure what the gender is of this dragon. Or if it has a gender. Or a past. You get what I am saying? No? Okay then.

Finally, for your musical enjoyment I give you three guys playing Celtic folk songs. The song they are playing in this photo is about Celtic folk who go from village to village doing deeds so Celtic folk singers will write songs about them.

Actually, the band is called Alternate Route and for three working stiffs (the lead singer is a district attorney’s investigator), they sound pretty good. They were probably the least weird of what I saw downtown today at the gumbo festival.

Oh and the gumbo? I didn’t eat any. I just knew that I forgot to do something when I was at the gumbo festival!

Do people really look like their pets? Some people do. But I would be hard pressed to find people who look like certain animals, were such animals pets. Take this Budgett’s frog for instance. It’s kind of cute in its own amphibian kind of way. If I were to describe this frog I would say it is something that looks like a saucer with legs.

Pandas are sort of bizarre looking. They look kind of like a stuffed animal that was dreamed up by someone with a dark soul who probably read too much Poe when they were younger. Probably someone somewhere thinks Sen. Dianne Feinstein looks bizarre as well. I don’t think she looks bizarre. I’ll just kind of leave it there.

Of course the king of the weird is the jackalope. What a perfect creature in every respect except for being a taxidermy trick. Just think of the havoc a jackrabbit with antlers could unleash out in the wilds. Probably a lot of lower limb injuries to humans would be one result were jackalopes aggressive. And real.

Remember: Be kind to animals. You never know what they’ll do next. And you don’t always know where they’ve been.