Saturday, October 13, 2007

The Gadfly On The Highway

Idle Thoughts While Driving: I wonder if folks in New York and Boston and Philadelphia have any idea what it is like out here in Wide Open Land and what it's like to hear the birds early in the morning in the woods? Can Dallas traffic get any worse? An hour and forty minutes to go 11 miles. Two hours-plus from North Dallas to Ennis. Jeez! Houston now extends for damn near 50 miles to the north. Few open areas all the way to Conroe. Restaurant operators in Longview, Texas, need to get their stuff together. All the restaurants are clustered way over there, a long ways across town from a bunch of motels (including the Hampton Inn in which we stayed a night). Shreveport, Louisiana, is a gambling hotspot. Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the Boston Mountains, is Hog Heaven to many; now, if the Razorbacks could just win a game....

Idle Thoughts While Sitting: Is there a Sonic at every interstate exit in Texas and Arkansas? Seems so. Why do most motel clerks speak broken English? Is English still spoken in south Texas? Thank the Lord for Cracker Barrel restaurants; those folks speak English. Never had a bad meal or bad service at a Cracker Barrel. In Nacgodoches, Texas, the local museum posts a sign asking all concealed carry licensees to please leave their firearms outside; I obliged, even as I'm thinking, "Okay, so only the bad guys will carry their firearms inside."

Idle Thoughts While Surfing The Blogosphere: Blogging with meat cleavers seems to be the norm on some sites; slash and cut, the nastier the better, the more outrageous the posts and the more misleading the headlines, the more salacious the allegations, the more fractured the English, the worst logic imaginable...all marks of some sophomoric blogs that offer little. http://www.demookie.com/ is an example.
Inferior Reporting: I was stunned the other night to see the array of 33 "weapons" police say they found in the home of a 14-year-old who (like others) fell through the cracks in the system. The authorities stood before this array of what appeared to be rifles and pistols found in the kid's home and talked about how dangerous firearms are. Later, in reading one story, I found a phrase missing in all the CNN coverage I saw: All but three of the "weapons" were air guns, for crying out loud. The kid had three real firearms, two pistols and a 9 mm semi-automatic rifle his mother bought her long-troubled son. She should be in jail right beside him. The home had been the site of three domestic violence calls in a year and the kid's behavior in school was so bad he was taken out to be home-schooled. The story reminds me of other kids who fell through the cracks, beginning with the two Columbine shooters. Like this goofball, they had firearms (and, in their case, pipe bombs) stashed in their bedrooms and their parents said they didn't know about them because they never went into their kids' bedrooms. Incredible. So I conclude from all this that what we need is not more gun control, but more parent control.

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