Supporters of Christo’s Over The River please think again.

A massive rockslide closed highway 50 this week, less than a month after a wreck shut it down. These closures have and will cause painful inconvenience and financial loss to many, and they last a few days. Over The River, designed to be built in the very same area, will cause three years of hardship.

And what kind of nightmare will we travelers of highway 50 endure if rockslides, accidents and Christo happen in the same time? Imagine yourself living here, stuck, trying to get to work, trying to get to a hospital, trying to get your kids to school, trying to live your life. Chisto’s art may be visionary and even breathtaking to some - in the right place. Bighorn Sheep Canyon is the wrong place. Please don’t do this to us.

Source: Denver Post article

Eddie, my dog, and I were walking and nearly home when a pickup truck charged past a stop sign at a cross street, just stopping 18” from my right leg. The woman at the wheel was talking on a cell phone, oblivious to our presence until the last second.

The evidence clearly shows that it is not just punching buttons or texting  that makes phones dangerous while driving - it’s the loss of consciousness and focus.

Conversations require concentration that take focus away from the task at hand. 

Conversations engender emotions, and the emotional brain will, when stimulated, shut down the cognitive process.  Your awareness, thinking ability and reaction are all either shut down or limited making you, studies prove, as dangerous as someone who is DUI.

If you want to take your life in your car, that’s your choice. Please don’t take mine or anyone else’s. Please get it.

As surely as drinking and driving are a killing combination, so is talking on your cell phone while driving.

Please stop talking and drive or pull over and talk while stopped.

Picture source: Denver post - Bears in dens to be off limits to Colorado hunters.

Today’s hunting culture is a sick corruption of what was once a necessary survival skill. There is no “sport” in this barbaric practice. The argument that “game” licenses pay for conservation is a cruel joke. The needless killing of our wild neighbors is OK if a guy from Texas pays a little for a license to satisfy his bloodlust?

I try to be understanding but I have come to hate the arrival of the men who invade the countryside near our place, leaving a tail of beer bottles, cans and trash and hunting illegally from their pickups.

I’m having a hard time forgiving the ignorant jerk who ignored the posted signs we have up and illegally shot and killed our resident buck pronghorn within 30 yards of the house.

All the so called “sports”men will blast me for writing this and the “sporting” goods manufacturers lobbyists will get big bucks to influence lawmakers, justifying the craziness with claims of hunting’s importance to the economy.

One day, after we have grown more as a culture, there will be no more hunting and even looking at an old picture of someone gloating over a kill like this will bring tears to the eyes as this picture did for me.

“Daylight Saving time is like cutting one end off your blanket and sewing it on the other to make the blanket longer.” Anonymous  

Anybody beside me think DST is just a crazy inconvenience? Who do we have to thank for this wacky practice?  

 Benjamin Franklin is credited with conceiving the idea of daylight saving in 1784 to conserve candles, but the idea got legs through support from, you guessed it, special interests. 

New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson would spend his spare time after work collecting insects, an activity limited by daylight. Inspired to extend his extracurricular activities, he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift. 

Retailers, especially those involved with sports and recreation, have historically argued hardest for extending daylight time. Representatives of the golf industry, for instance, told Congress in 1986 that an extra month of daylight saving was worth up to $400 million annually in extra sales and fees. 

Some clever marketers use DST to promote. For example, Arm And Hammer reminds you to change the box of baking soda in your fridge.

Others use the event to remind you to change the batteries in your smoke detectors.

But not everyone agrees it is a good idea. After Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time in 2007, University of California, Santa Barbara economist and his colleagues observed a 1 percent rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million.

If time shifting turns out to be an energy waster, should the sun set on daylight saving? Certainly that would please farmers, who have long opposed it for how it disrupts their schedules.

This is one time I’d like to join the folks in Arizona and Hawaii who do not switch to DST. But since I’m in Colorado, I’ll be turning my clock back Sunday morning and my pets, who are kept in to protect them from predators until daylight, will  drive me crazy for an extra hour. 

What do you think of Daylight Saving Time?

Automate and increase your enjoyment, socialize with music lovers, and manage your need for fun:

Be part of the FluteDaddy Jazz experience November 7.

An analysis of 3,000 titles concluded that the words increase, socialize, automate and manage appear most in posts that prove popular. and increase the likelihood of a post being retweeted.

Is this self-promotion too blatant?

Joseph

More people live in poverty while we the people pay obscene amounts to finance war. What’s wrong with this picture?

1 in 7 U.S. people living in poverty

“The percentage of Americans struggling below the poverty line in 2009 was the highest it has been in 15 years, the Census Bureau reported Thursday, and interviews with poverty experts and aid groups said the increase appeared to be continuing this year.” Source: Recession Raises Poverty Rate to a 15-Year High - NYTimes.com

More money spent on  war 

According to the Center for Defense Information, the estimated cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will reach $1.08 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2010.

Read more: Estimated War-Related Costs, Iraq and Afghanistan — Infoplease.com

Crazy priorities

According to the National Priorities Project taxpayers in Mississippi, a state with 1 in 5 people earning below the poverty level, will pay $663.4 million for proposed total Iraq and Afghanistan war spending in FY2011. For the same amount of money, 83,746 people in Mississippi could receive low income healthcare for one year.

Use the interactive calculator at NPP to see the Federal Budget tradeoffs for your city or state.

How do we stop the craziness and reorder our priorities?  Your idea?