A Walk In The Park

Living across the street from a park must have some benefits. Having thought about it I never recall living so close to a park before although once in Huntington Beach we lived a block over from a site of a proposed park where we slowly watched the paint fade and peel from the sign. We finally moved to the edge of the suburbs where home owner's association supplied the fenced recreation facilities. Rather that tally the pluses and minuses whose weight would vary with ones point of view let illustrate some observations.

Lot of things get left behind there, some by those forgetful such as toys, clothing, socks and shoes. Dog waste and birthday parties are probably the most popular waste followed by a trail of fast food user, Del Taco condiments aka Mexican Manna and empty Marlboro boxes. The city subcontracts for emptying the trash containers and their effectiveness vary from not at all to just plain sloppy.

One wonders about those things left laying around that are not quite obvious . Examples such as discarded Coors Light and cans of whipped cream, or several discarded dust-off cans, plastic-sandwich bags and lots of used matchbooks. Today there was an interesting plastic water bottle that someone had poked a ballpoint pen in after removing the ink cartridge.



The picture shown is only using the SOBE bottle cap to hold the bottle upright and not part of some discarded bong laying around. In our not so distance past a food gather or hunter might have taken thousand of years to discover a tool or new way of doing something but with our technology what someone discovers today the world can know tomorrow.




Then every year March madness comes along and the basketball crowd celebrates my doing donuts with their cars between layups and free throws. Time today limits more pluses and others of being a park neighbor maybe next time I can add some more.

Previous Word of the Day

Link Rot

When an Internet link goes 404 (error: page not found) after a period of time

From Science 2.0 by M. Mitchel Waldrop in May 2008 Scientific American