Tag Archives: traffic

Getting Home Early

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been working my ass off lately, and decided today would be a good day to leave work early, at 6PM, and treat myself to an evening commute in daylight. Best laid plans, etc, as a major accident on I-95 intervened. This accident happened at 2PM, and I was aware that I-95 south had been closed. My commute doesn’t involve driving on I-95, and I’m heading north, while the accident was to the south. What the hey, I should be good, right?

Nope. Bail-out traffic off the 95 clogged side streets, parkways, and alternate routes. My 45 minute commute turned into a 1.5+ hour adventure, and I arrived home in the dark yet again. If we ever need to evacuate this region, we won’t be able to.

Might as well have stayed in my shabby cubicle, and worked on packaging up the latest openSSH.

-k-

[stags]work,traffic,NorthernVirginia[/stags]

Snow Day??

Posted on by
3

We had an inch of snow last night; fluffy, dry, light snow. Since I’m on-call this week, I got paged at 4AM, fired up the laptop, and turned on the teevee. Schools are closing in droves. Where I grew up, the rule was “If the snow hasn’t trapped you in your house, school will be in session.” I don’t know what the difference is between now and them, except the passage of a lot of years. Oh, and we walked to school; we had no need of a fleet of buses bigger then Greyhounds’ to transport little yaders to the halls of learning. I remember walking behind my dad; he took the lead to cut through the wind and blowing snow, so I could get to school. Here, the buses just add to the traffic population, and supply yet another group of drivers who can’t get through the snow.

You may dismiss all this as the ramblings of an old man; OK, then, here’s a little piece of poetry for y’all:

As children grow older
They usually find as a rule
That the older their parents get
The further they walked to school.

-k-

Tasers and Farm Animals, Vol 2

Posted on by
Reply

I don’t know how this happens, but I’m becoming a magnet for stories involving farm animals, law enforcement, and Tasers. One might opine that I go out of my way to find these tales, but nope, they come to me like the spring rain to the fields. This particular instance involves a cow, and a Colleton County (SC) Sheriff’s deputy.

The hapless bovine evidently got through a fence near Walterboro SC, and narrowly missed being hit by several cars, whereupon Deputy Jeff Scott received permission to stun the critter, so its owner might slip a rope around the animal’s neck. Unfortunately, after the first jolt:

The cow lunged forward and fell to the ground but not into a position where the owner could wrangle its neck. The deputy charbroiled the cow again for another five seconds, but the owner still was unable to corral the animal.

Charbroiled? Gotta love that. And the owner evidently needs some help with his ropin’. And from this inauspicious start, we’re heading downhill in a tailwind:

By then the Taser prong fell off the cow, and the animal ran off. The report says law enforcement officers spent the next several hours chasing the cow in and out of traffic before giving up.

Wow. Several hours? And then:

They received a call later that the cow was running down Furlong Road toward Walterboro. City police spotted the cow but eventually lost it, according to the report.

The article doesn’t mention whether or not the critter was ever rounded up, but concludes with this observation about Tasers and animals:

A Taser International spokesman said then that the strangest animals he ever heard of stunned by officers were two moose in the Yukon and an ostrich.

Tasin’ a moose would take some major league cojones. Moose size being what it is and all, and their poor eyesight leading them to use strength they don’t know they have.

-k-

No Mas(s) Help

Posted on by
1

The Big Dig debacle continues, from 2 billion to 14+ billion, for a public works project benefitting the few at the expense of the most. Plagued with overruns, institutional incompetence, and huge slabs of concrete killing citizens, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wants to make it right, again on the backs of the US taxpayer.

From this Boston Globe article:

Romney said state transportation officials haven’t begun to estimate the cost of the repair work, but he said he made a pitch for federal assistance in a meeting yesterday with Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry and US Representative Michael E. Capuano.

Followed by this:

“I’d be embarrassed if I didn’t always ask for federal money whenever I got the chance,“ Romney quipped, saying he had asked for help in paying for a comprehensive safety review of the Big Dig, for which the state has allocated $20 million.

He quipped? Nope, he wants his grubby ”Mitt“ in our pockets yet again. It is devoutly to be desired that our rollover Congress has the balls to vote down any further help for this project.

-k-

Technorati Tags: ,