Critters and cretins

*Started my morning with some of each.  I totally screwed up the settings on the running app, and thus missed most of the prompts for slowin' and goin'. Plus it was 300 degrees out there and there were landscrapers and garbagemen to dodge the whole way, but when I just got started from the halfway point back home, I had to stop. Not for panting or cramps, but for this:



Initially, Deer Heart here was out in front of the house with that om-nommy back yard, and I was setting up for an even closer-up picture from my phone, but some overentitled beyotch decided I needed to be honked at as she rounded the busiest corner on the whole run and scared my subject into that yard.

* Lowest of low life forms: middle school kids in a Rochester suburb, who I'm sure you've heard about by now, terrorizing an elderly bus monitor and then uploading the whole thing to Teh Interwebs. The video went viral, 4chan is already well into a counteroffensive against the little special snowflakes (who the district won't name but they certainly can), and others on the Web have raised over $200,000 as of this writing for the victim.

* Speaking of Internet stupid, here's one more reason why Gawker.com is worse than just plain Gawker. I had to drive to Rochester today, and on the way there saw a massive backup in the opposite direction, behind the wreck of a banana truck that went out of control in the westbound lanes. (Fans of Harry Chapin are all thinking of one thing now.)  It didn't affect the eastbound side, but it was bad enough to make the top-of-the-hour news when they announced the lanes had been cleared. It turned out that most of the gachablacha was not from the recovery effort itself; they had the truck on the grass beyond the shoulder by the time I passed it heading the other way. No, the reporter said it got exponentially worse on account of rubberneckers not just slowing down to look, but, of course, slowing down, taking out their phones and shooting pictures of it.  It was all clear, but the truck still there, by the time I passed it heading home several hours later. A mess, to be sure, but nothin' special as these things go.  Makes me wish the beyotch from earlier had been out on the 90 to honk at THEM.

* And finally, the latest from the Not-so-Wild Kingdom of modern day urban life:

The City of Rochester is marshalling resources to tackle a persistent and vexing problem. Open-air drug markets? Truancy? Yes, but this time they’re also talking about groundhogs.

“We’re not getting taken over, but we have a groundhog issue,” says City Council President Lovely Warren.

The hungry herbivores are helping themselves to residents’ gardens, she says, and their burrowing is undermining the stability of homes, garages, and other structures.

The problem seems to have started last year, Warren says, and she’s gotten a handful of complaints so far this season.

What’s behind the invasion? Habitat destruction, she says.

Walt Nelson, agriculture and horticulture program leader with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County, says it’s simply nature at work.

“If there’s ample food and the weather’s good, the breeding goes on and the numbers start to increase,” he says. “So it goes up and down, sort of like a roller coaster.”

And their brilliant solution to the problem? Bait-and-shoot? Catch-and-release? Letting Bill Murray loose on them?  No- a solution so stupid, our neighbor Betty just laughed about as hard when we showed her this than Eleanor has ever seen her laugh:

Warren says some residents trap the groundhog, and then Rochester Animal Services will take the creature to the end of the driveway and release it. But that’s not a solution because the animals can come back, and they’re usually part of a family. And Animal Control Services staff have warned against taking the animals to wooded areas, Warren says, because that would upset the balance in individual ecosystems.

Oh yeah. Like they're not upsetting the balance in ours? We have a freakin' mega-molehill next to the front of our house from one of these varmints going digging, and at least one neighbor across the street has reported trouble with them, too.

Maybe we can just assign them to school buses and have middle-school bullies shame them back to their original nests.

Drowning sorrows....

They canceled the 5K I was training for:P Along with the related half-marathon, which I wouldn't be ready for until 20-something.

Here are my lovely parting gifts, though:

My inspiration for doing it, who was going to make the 11-hour northbound trek that I made to her NC Hill that same weekend of last year (yeah, bluesilverkdg, Ima talkin' to you:) is going to come up anyway, to meet Eleanor and Emily and hopefully Jenn and have roller coaster and chocowine and other assorted funs:)

Also, in my travels today I either met or re-met a Canadian alt-country singer named Kathleen Edwards, thanks to Open Tunings on WRUR. This, in particular:

When you hear Marty McSorley in lyrics, you know you're among your people.  And that IS Marty McSorley in the video:)

We're halfway through Paper Man, an awesome film about a frustrated author played by Jeff Daniels. (Not to be confused with A Dog Year, where Jeff Bridges plays a frustrated author who also turns out to be less frustrated by the end;) 

Tomorrow's the only day this week I don't have to put on the monkey suit and go someplace. Looking forward to actual accomplishments. And I'm still staying on the 5K regimen, if only not accelerating it as much.