You have to look at the big picture

Gardening up north means growing plants. Gardening down south means killing plants. I was cutting back some weeds that were choking out the kudzu when I made the mistake of looking too close and realized I was scaring the living crap out of a brilliant green newborn anole no bigger than the first joint of my thumb. And I tried not to think of how many little lizards I had hacked in two already, or the teeny snails I was depriving of life-giving shade. And I kept right on chopping. Think that's how government and business leaders feel about us?

They were in a dead heat

You think this is hot? This ain't hot. In a part of Iran called Dasht-e Lut it gets up to about 70 degrees. Celsius. That's around 158 Fahrenheit. The area is abiotic, meaning it supports no life at all, not even bugs or germs. Too hot for people? It's too hot for baking meringue. Meanwhile, the World Sauna Championship ended when the last two contestants lost consciousness and had to pulled from the 110 degree C (100 is boiling) heat and hospitalized. One of them died, which I think means he wins, since he stayed in for his whole life.

Our little drama

Observations and musings from the Interstate: For one thing, the phrase "observations and musings" pretty much relegates me to the category of purveyor of droll anecdotes who ought to be named Josh Something. Dagnabit. Anyway, Alabama license plates used to say "Stars Fell on Alabama," recalling a lovely song from 1934. Now they say "Sweet Home," recalling Lynyrd Skynyrd. Note to Montgomery muckety-mucks: A jump into the 21st century shouldn't require a layover in the '70s. And then, here's my idea for a tribute band that plays Australian hard rock covers absolutely perfect down to the very tiniest detail. OCDC.

erratum

Remember when I mentioned that the world's largest pencil was hanging in front of an office supply store in Wytheville, Virginia? I was misinformed, and passed along this misinformation to you, the reader, without doing due diligence, fact-checking-wise. This was irresponsible. It falls short of the high standards you have rightfully come to expect. The City Museum in St. Louis has a 76-foot long pencil. It has 4,000 pounds of graphite inside, so this St. Louis pencil would actually work if you could find something to write on. Compared to it, the Wytheville pencil is a laughable piece of crap.

War has sort of ruined violence for me

The Journal of Psychopharmacology (JOP) reports that in clinical trials funded by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), doctors have been seeing encouraging results using ecstasy (MDMA) as an adjunct to talk therapy for patients with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). MDs in both the UK and US want to emphasize that these are only initial findings. Still, pretty soon you'll get prescriptions for ecstasy and marijuana, and nobody will want them. See, grownups ruin everything. They ruined baseball with Little League, they ruined rock and roll with a building in Cleveland, and now they're going to ruin drugs.

From my "Irascible Geezer" collection:

Remember when the cool kids had Nike or Adidas and you had to be a nerd or dweeb or doofus to be walking around in old-fashioned Converse? Then you may also recall a time when the hippest eyewear was tinted aviators and you had to be sort of a dork or geek to have squarish plastic frames on your face. But nowadays, it's hip to emulate the most out-of-it, uncool fashion statements you can find. But it somehow doesn't work when you do it on purpose. It turns out that being unselfconscious is one of the hardest things to fake.

After all the fireworks

It seems to me that we should be able to put our heads together and come up with a less fractious set of interpretations of the Constitution than the ones under which we currently operate. The problem, I think, is that we compartmentalize our concerns, picking and choosing articles and amendments to suit our agendas like a TV evangelist quoting chapter and verse. We need a more holistic view. Like, when you study the first and second amendments together, it becomes pretty dang clear that the founding fathers believed shooting somebody with a firearm was a form of protected speech.