Dead Animal Survey

...did another dead animal survey coming into work today... in the approx. 37 mile drive to work i spotted

1 dead tarantula,
1 dead Jack Rabbit,
1 dead opossum,
3 dead raccoons,
2 dead deer,
1 dead armadillo, and
1 dead something-or-other.

I also saw 1 live deer crossing traffic in front of me.

That's a total of 10 dead animals on the side of the road or splattered in the middle of the road driving in to work today between Wimberley, Tx. and Austin, Tx.

I stopped and took a picture of one dead raccoon.

Officially this is all known as roadkill (one word i think), but this nomenclature tends to downplay and even jest about what is simply dead animals on the side of the road run over by automobiles. The Texas Hill Country (this area) should be deemed the Dead-Animals-on-the-side-of-the-Road capital of the world.

All White with No Criminals in Site

There is a street in Austin, Texas named Gun Fight Lane. It is near Shotgun Ln., down the street from Ammunition Dr. and just off of Gatling Gun Ln. I guess this works in Texas. I bet there's not a Gun Fight Lane in East St. Louis, Illinois or Detroit, Michigan.

I'll bet this well-to-do white neighborhood was built prior to Columbine.

Speaking of Columbine, was it ever clear from Michael Moore's documentary that American's are not just so much in love with guns as that they are just basically paranoid? - it's the combination of the two that sparks danger.

Even a more interesting point from Moore's movie is the fact that all Americans lock their doors - a symptom of their general paranoia. (By definition - an unjustifiable fear that "someone out there" is "out to get me")

Most of my life I've hardly ever locked my doors. I consciously do not lock my doors unless I see a good reason to do so.

I mean why does it take a movie to point out that you can open your door and look around on the street and bascially see that there are not criminals running around looking for unlocked doors? Isn't it obvious?

But our media tells us otherwise.

And we listen to the media and form a world-view in our minds (a map) which is not congruent with the world that we can see and sense all around us (the territory.) Isn't this the very definition for insanity?

Korzybski thought that it was this incongruity between the mental "map" of the world and the objective "out there" of the world - the actual territory - that defines insanity.

I think Americans exemplify this incongruity best with their fear of "the bad guys" by the simple execution of always locking their doors. Cars or houses. We always lock 'em up and usually set an alarm, too.

I spent a couple of nights at a good friend of mine last week. I couldn't leave his house to go to my car or even step outside for a few moments without always unlocking the doors. They live in an quiet neighborhood with mostly old people.

I bet if you walk up and down Gun Fight Lane in Austin, Texas and check the doors - every one will be locked. The homes are on average $180,000 to $200,000 homes. All white with no criminals in site.

I wonder if in the days before air conditioning, when everybody sat out on the porch and walked and talked to the neighbors, if they locked their doors everytime they stepped in and out?

[Remember in "Bowling for Columbine" Michael Moore did the same test in Canada, by walking up to houses to check if the doors were locked and they were all unlocked - in contrast to the American homes tested]

Hmmmm, what is it we have lost here? Something important, but I'm not sure what. Maybe we should go over seas and kill all the "bad guys" before they get a chance to come over here and kill us. Am I sounding paranoid now? I better turn on the news and check.

[Full text of Korzybski's "Science and Sanity" here. But you should read some of the reviews here - very interesting.]

Animals on the Road: Dead or Alive

I saw 'em cleaning a dead deer off the side of the road yesterday and thought to myself, "hey, I oughta just track how many dead animals I see on a single morning's drive to work."

So this morning I did just that. (...counted live ones too)

Road - Distance	Animal	Dead or Alive	Notes
Sandy Point Rd - 2 miles	Deer	Live
	Deer	Live
FM 2325 - 8 miles	Skunk	Dead	Freshly dead - smelled
	?	Dead	unidentifiable
	?	Dead
	Vulture	Live	Turkey Vulture sitting on post
	Raccoon	Dead	Big one... real pretty fur
	Deer	Dead
Highway 290 - 13 miles	?	Dead	Deer ?
	?	Dead	Deer ? ...been dead awhile ...looked like a skin rug
	Deer	Dead	large doe
	Deer	Dead	small doe

There's the chart.

That's a total of 12 wildlife specimans spotted on just my ride to work this morning, and 9 of them dead.

I spotted a deer (which I thought was dead) which was just tangled in the barbed-wire fence a while back and set it free. Awhile back I also saw a small goat stuck in the fence. I turned around and drove back to it - filmed it - then set it free. About 2 days ago, there was a very big cow trotting down the side of the road. About a quarter mile up the road was a Hays County Sheriff officer pulled over. I stopped in front of him and told him about the loose cow. He said, "Why do you think I was pulled over and fixin' to go back there?" He acted like I was a crazy fool to even approach him about it. (Another jerk cop in my humble opinion.)

A lot of things don't matter that are supposed to; one of them is well-funded government schools.

So here's a New York City "Teacher of the Year" telling us that school is crap! ...a couple of interesting statements that he makes:

Last year at Southern Illinois University I gave a workshop in what the basic skills of a good life are as I understand them. Toward the end of it a young man rose in back and shouted at me: “I'm 25 years old, I've lived a quarter of a century, and I don't know how to do anything except pass tests. If the fan belt on my car broke on a lonely road in a snowstorm I'd freeze to death. Why have you done this to me?”

and again:

Does going to school matter if it uses up all the time you need to learn to build a house? If a 15-year-old kid was allowed to go to the Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine, he would be taught to build a beautiful post-and-beam Cape Cod home in three weeks, with all the math and calculations that entails; and if he stayed another three weeks he'd learn how to install a sewer system, water, heat and electric. If any American dream is universal, owning a home is it – but few government schools bother teaching you how to build one. Why is that? Everyone thinks a home matters.

My teacher used to tell me this.

Being a webpage designer (not a very good one) and a software engineer (mediocre at best) it's good to know that there are super-smart people in the 99.9 percentile (technically "ISPE" level, somewhere between "Poetic Genius" and "Prometheus" level) that are dumber than me. I mean... just think how smart you must be to figure out that black text on an ugly grey is hard to read - not to mention ugly.

Oh, but the cool message patting ourselves on the back with an Einstein quote on a firey background... ahhhh, now that makes up for it all! [hint: mouse over the flaming torch where it says, "Click here to see a hot message"]

Feeling Guilty but Not in Jail

So here's a few basic guys in prisons pleeding for letters. But they or someone's got to pay this website for them to put their profiles up. This is the group that nobody's written to yet. Dang! I bet it's lonely in there. What's that scripture quote from Jesus? "When you didn't visit that one person in prison, it was the same as not visiting me." [my paraphrase]

I need to visit somebody in prison, but probably won't. I sure do feel sorry for 'em though. I guess I'm as guilty as every other middle-class white Amercian Christian free man out there. Dang I feel guilty. I guess "neurotic" should be in there too.

Anyway, here's some cool quotes from Mike Tyson. What an angry man! Whew!

Prisons are Inhumane and It Could be You Next Time

Having spent time in jail now (see prior posts) I have much greater sympathy for those in prisons. One fellow that was in the holding tank with me at the time was facing 5 years in prison for multiple DUIs. He showed me paper-work and tried to put a good spin on it with, "Prison ain't so bad, they feed you everyday." When we were brought our meals (Hays County, Texas - county jail were I was being held for a driving violation), this fellow asked everyone else if he could have their meals if they didn't want 'em. It saddened me very much then and now to know that this young man's life is hopelessly going nowhere - basically because, due to what seemed like a semi-normal tendency to party and be a bit rowdy, he was pulled over by a cop after he'd been drinking.

I came from Illinios and am sorry to say that Illinois is famous for its prisons, but I didn't know how famous till I came across this article. I am even more ashamed now of the state I grew up in. Almost as ashamed as I am for the infamous ways Texas law and police seem to be treating their public citizens lately. (see posts on my being thrown in jail - Yes! I am mad about it!)

Here's an interesting piece of one man's story that starts with, "On April 1st, 1969, I was sentenced to a term of from two to six years at hard labor in the Illinois State Penitentiary, for possession of marijuana. "

Cool. They discovered little humans - hobbits! Oddly enough, they lived on the same islands where komodo dragons lived. Fantasy comes to life!

I was driving home last night and saw a buck deer sitting oddly close to the highway up on the shoulder of Hwy 290, west of Austin. I thought about stopping but figured if it had been hit by a car, then it was wounded and would probably die anyway. Sure enough on my way into work this morning, I looked for it - and of course it was lying there dead... nice little buck too... about a 6-pointer. There's lots of roadkill everywhere here in the Texas hill country. It's a shame we can't do something to help prevent so many animal deaths from automobiles.

I finally went and got my driver's license updated.... i had been driving around without the correct address on it and that's a bad thing... actually, i got throwed in jail already for it once - indirectly... no, wait... i was directly thrown in jail, but it was because i indirectly didn't update my license... and so i went to jail because they couldn't mail me and to let me know that my license was suspended for not paying a surcharge that i didn' know about. i didn't know about it because they will not forward mail to my present address and will only send it to old addresses... since i didn't update my license, i went to jail... make sense? ... to me neither... that's the Amercan justice system for you... screw up and go to jail and we're proud of it!

Anyway, i got the picture from my best friend who every once in a while spams me with the latest funny thing that he and everybody he knows emailed around to each other.... here is the funny story attached... (i didn't want to spam-mail my friends, so i blogged it instead, giving me a chance to quickly google for a driver's license and cut n' paste some wasted time here at work...

A man was walking down the street when he was accosted by a particularly dirty and shabby-looking homeless man who asked him for a couple of dollars for dinner.
The man took out his wallet, extracted ten dollars and asked, "If I give you this money, will you buy some beer with it instead of dinner?"
"No, I had to stop drinking years ago," the homeless man replied.
"Will you use it to go fishing instead of buying food?" the man asked.
"No, I don't waste time fishing," the homeless man said. "I need to spend all my time trying to stay alive."
"Will you spend this on greens fees at a golf course instead of food?" the man asked.
"Are you NUTS!" replied the homeless man. "I haven't played golf in 20 years!"
"Will you spend the money on a woman in the red light district instead of food?" the man asked.
"What disease would I get for ten lousy bucks?" exclaimed the homeless man.
"Well," said the man, "I'm not going to give you the money. Instead, I'm going to take you home for a terrific dinner cooked by my wife."
The homeless man was astounded. "Won't your wife be furious with you for doing that? I know I'm dirty, and I probably smell pretty disgusting."
The man replied, "That's okay. It's important for her to see what a man looks like after he has given up beer, fishing, golf, and sex."