Here’s PJ O’Rourke’s take on the internet:
Whose bright idea was it to put every idiot in the world in touch with every other idiot?
Which pretty much encapsulates the whole phenomenon in this mad, maddening year of Somebody’s Lord, 2018.
As if to prove the humorist’s point, WFHB News revealed yesterday that someone — either in or out of local government; no one’s been fingered yet — created a phony Facebook page called “Monroe County Elections.” The page is down now but, acc’d’g to county GOP chair William Ellis, it could have been mistaken for an official page.
Dead Horse Strike No. 3,629: Our Dear Leader’s propensity to pull crazy/fictitious/fraudulent/criminally inaccurate/misleading bosh straight out of his 3XL bottom and present it to the citizenry via Twitter, speech, or press release has given license to the rest of the world’s non-elected a-holes to do the same. I’m not saying people didn’t lie before Li’l Duce became President Gag on a technicality, just that now the nation’s loons have been tacitly authorized by the Leader of the Free World to create the scary dystopia of their wet dreams.
As Gob Bluth states in Arrested Development, (Episode 4; Season 3), “I heard the jury’s still out on science.” As well as the most minimal understanding of the word truth.
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Circles Jerk
Perhaps my fave story of the year ran in the Herald Times this AM. Apparently, Bloomington police officers espied a man wanted on an outstanding warrant outside a west side grocery store last night. Before they could put the arm on him, the man jumped into his pickup truck and sped off, leading the officers on a chase into a field northwest of the city off Vernal Pike. The man drove off the road and into the open field where he commenced driving in big circles for an hour.
A BPD spokesofficer said the man wasn’t driving recklessly or aggressively, he just refused to stop. The officers fired pepper spray at the truck, a tactic whose purpose eludes me unless they wanted to make him sneeze uncontrollably, but whatever. After an hour, the cops shrugged their shoulders and went to fetch a resisting arrest warrant against the man, who by this time surely was feeling a tad dizzy.
Nearly an hour after that, neighbors called the police to report the man was still out in the field, driving in circles. With Indiana State Police troopers backing them up, the Bloomington cops, using their own vehicles, put the squeeze on the loopy fugitive. He was arrested and is being held on a $4500 bond.
Humans (need I even say this?) are truly a fascinating species.
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Big Talk
Tune in this afternoon for Part 1 of a Big Talk two-parter on the proposed Bloomington Cohousing neighborhood under development on South Maxwell Street. Cohousing is an idea that originated in some Scandinavian countries back in the early 1960s and it has since spread across Europe, Canada, and this holy land. These neighborhoods consist of a couple of dozen smallish homes centered around a common green and a common house containing a shared community kitchen, dinning room, library, crafts room, day care center, etc.
Proponents say its a great way to revive the old, tight neighborhoods we’ve all heard about from the fuzzy past. One observer once wrote in support of cohousing: “Children should have 100 parents.” — which either is or isn’t a selling point for the concept.
Anyway, scads of folks are excited about this idea. The city’s signed off on it and groundbreaking is expected sometime later this month.
My guest this afternoon will be developer Loren Wood, proprietor of Loren Wood Builders. Next week’s guest will be Marion Sinclair, the woman who co-founded the organization that got this thing going, the Bloomington Cohousing Project.
Tune in to Big Talk today at 5:30pm on WFHB, 91.3 FM, or catch the podcast (a link will be provided here tomorrow morning). And don’t forget to read all about the plan in my Limestone Post piece on Sinclair slated to run a week from today.
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