My partner came home the other day from dropping his son off at his ex’s. He came in ranting about her constant texting while he was trying to carry on a conversation about their son. She is a text-aholic, but when it comes to interfering with the care of her son, we’re talking a major and disgusted WOW!
Anyway, the next day I came across this article: “Ahem, Are You Talking to Me” and I simply cannot resist passing it on to you!
I have gritted my teeth about this topic for a long time, and frankly refrained from writing about it for fear of being pelted by half-full babybottles and tippy-cups full of apple juice. But I can stay silent no more! Here is the crux of it: I am tired of mac-trucks disguised as baby-strollers, and sherman tanks dressed up as supermarket carts with kiddie-car plastic things on the front that extend in total to half an aisle.
Here’s what kicked my ass into gear to write about this at long last. Today I was out of apples, and believe me, this is crisis material. Instead of paying a fortune for 3 or 4 apples of not even my favorite varietal at the supermarket, I decided to take advantage of the market’s midweek hours to get my apples. I have a favorite vendor for apples, and so of course, I got into my march forth mode and headed to their booth. There they were — all the shiny, juciy, and robust apples you could ever want! Surrounding them were bright oranges and green grapes the size of superballs.
The market was not particularly crowded, but right in front of those apples, positioned like an army battalion, were three very young and fresh-looking “Mommies” with their very little, and un-fresh-looking children, who were firmly planted in three of those huge strollers — one a tandom affair. Not only were they entrenched in front of my apples, they appeared to rival the Rock of Gibralter in their immobility. Thus I was relegated to reaching over some combination of child-Mommy-stroller
to get my four very-heavy bags of fruit, while fumbling helplessly to deal with the financial matters of this transactions. In the meantime, Mommy-dearests all stood around looking very beatific while I surely exhibited a veneer of frantic frustration.
Okay — so much for today. Now what about these Sherman tanks? I am convinced that one day someone is going to get seriously hurt by being run over by one of these things> And get this: my local supermarket has brilliantly redesigned their traffic patterns so now there are aisles intersecting east-west/north-south, halfway down. Add this configuration to the Mommies who schlep their kids into these simply outrageous cart affairs that belong on merry-go-rounds and absolutely no where else in the universe, least of all the supermarket aisle!
The crash of Air Fance flight 447 on May 11, 2009 has haunted me now for two years. Over and over I have pored over the same articles, looking for a missed clue or detail. something to indicate what caused that mighty plane to plummet to its sea-bed grave. Likewise, I have gone over and over in my head what those final moments were like in that plane as it tried to make its way through a violent thunderstorm. As one who white-knuckles it with nary a tail ripple, I can’t even imagine what was going through the minds of the people on that plane.
In the relative scheme of the things, not much of that plane was found, and several subsequent searches yielded nothing. It was feared that neither the wreck, nor its black boxes, may never be found, perhaps swallowed into the savage underwater mountain range filled with miles deep valleys and crevices.
But efforts to find the thing became frantic as both aviation experts and flyers — fearful or not — were stymied over what makes a big, beautiful Airbus just drop out of the sky and disappear? Not to mention the fact that manslaughter charges are pending against both Air France and Airbus — charges that could perhaps be mitigated or dropped based on evidence about what really happened.
And so now, it has been found, and with its large, intact section of fuselage are the bodies of souls, still strapped in their seats, in a grave 2 miles underwater. Now the question arises: do we preserve the entire scene, allowing it to remain ensconced on the ocean floor as a measure of paying respect to its victims, or do we bring it up and analyze both the bodies and the wreckage to help solve the mystery of why Air France 447 just dropped off the radar screen — permanently?
madmuser 