Del Taco Pleasure Pack

Just another trash day.

Swinish Flu

I happen to have my camera with me this morning when the dog and I went out this morning. It really isn't note worthy to photograph litter but I read recently that several people have turned their blogs into money making publications. One was about how pet owners dress up their pets and how stupid they look and the other was about how dumb white folks are, so maybe a collection of photographs taken by our house is worth zillions.

Has anybody ever considered the true cost of giving out all those free condiments?

Every Day Should Be Earth Day

Unfortunately everyday is trash day.

Giving Up Golf

Giving Up Golf For The Troops

Warm weather can bring out folks in the morning that you normally don't see. As I have mentioned in an earlier blog my dog requires an early morning walk. Actually several walks a day have been requested but she often doesn't get what she wants. With the temperature reaching a hundred some days it is best to walk, jog or ride early. We usually start out from the house and make a short loop picking up plastic bottles and cans laying in the gutter or bushes across from where we live and return that load then start out again.

We pass through the park then cross over to the bicycle path that runs several miles in each direction along a creek. On Saturday morning the joggers are out in force, so are the riders and strollers. The creek doesn't have much water in it and in summer the water flow is basically run off from driveways and front yards. The water run-off doesn't travel far from the neighbors sprinklers that's aim includes the street, in enters the storm drain, crosses underneath the street then dumps into the park, flows halfway through the park, then underground again and comes out in the creek. Since California is blessed with both a finite water supply and an infinite supply of idiots the ducks continue to swim in our creek after the head waters run dry.

Maybe twice a week the dog and I venture down into the creek bed to harvest the plastic bottles, cans and golf balls that grow there. Actually the golf balls don't grow where we enter the creek bed they swim upstream about a mile from the driving range that borders the creek by the railroad tracks. These balls have escaped the horror of wild swings practiced daily by those who have not given up golf in support of out troops as our noble president has. It is easy to identify those who have escaped as they have a black prison line on them. For a long time I had surmised that the runaways relied on their own efforts until Saturday morning I saw that someone was aiding them. Not unlike discovering Santa Claus I found there was a retired couple emptying their pockets and throwing golf balls into the creek. We approached them and asked what they were doing.

The leader replied that they pick up the balls while they are walking in the morning and when they reach their turn around point they throw them in the creek. Without raising my voice and in as polite manner as possible I explained that those golf balls will eventually wind up in the ocean at Dana Point and it takes lots of effort to remove them before they make a break for the sea and added a personal request that if they need to throw golf balls they could use my driveway as my knees tend to reject climbing up and down the rocks. The leader actually said he was sorry and he would not do it again.

Actually I never started playing golf and can say I have never played the game with the exception of miniature and one visit to a driving range more than forty years ago so please don't confuse me with our president that quits but keeps playing. So I keep these striped critters jailed in a bucket where they are save from further beatings and drowings.

Previous Word of the day:

Poshlost is an untranslatable Russian word (пошлость) defined as a kind of "petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity" (Alexandrov 1991, p. 106). At more length (and with a more scholarly romanization) Boym (1994, p. 41) writes,
Poshlost' is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and a lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost' is a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s.

"It is interesting," said Nassrin, "that Nabokov, who is so hard on poshlust, would make us pity the loss of the most conventional forms of life." (page 50)

Taken from Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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