Passing Strange. Rush seats, in the pit. $26.50. Hell yeah.

The Empire Hotel rocks. Kinda reminds me of “The Parker.”

Just wishing all of you in the blogging community a happy and safe Fourth of July.  This here blog type thang is going to go dark for a few days while my wife and I visit New York City for our holiday.  What could be more American than a road trip on the Forth, right?

Last night, as I returned home from work at 4:30pm, I was startled to see a flock of about twenty or so Canadian geese walking along the breakdown on 490 eastbound, in front of the East Rochester exit.  It seemed like a curious oddity until I talked to my wife and discovered that she’d also seen them on the road at 3:30 that same day.

It then dawned on me that the geese were trapped.  You see, geese need to have a bit of open, level ground on which to run and get a head of steam before they’re able to take flight.  For whatever reason, these geese got stuck on 490, where there is no such room. . .  unless of course they cross the highway.  And every time they do, there’s a good chance some of them might not make it.  Every time they do, there is the potential for a very serious automobile accident at 65-70 miles an hour.  Indeed, on our ride east later that evening, we saw signs of what danger there was, as we saw no less than three dead geese in the road in the space of maybe 100 feet.

We contacted 911 yesterday evening to alert them of the issue.  We were informed that the 911 dispatch had actually recieved more than one call before us about this same situation and were assured that someone would take care of it.

This morning, my wife and I went to the public market.  Guess what we saw on our ride home?  Three more geese dead in the road and the remainder hunkered down in the space between the East Rochester off-ramp and 490 east.  Nothing has been done.

We contacted 911 again this morning and I carefully and patiently explained the situation to another operator.  I think it’s pretty clear they didn’t get it right off the bat - and neither did the other operator - but once she did, she took it much more seriously.  Both operators said they’d gotten calls previously on the same situation, but as yet no action occurred.  I don’t think anyone knew what to do, for a start.  She gave me the number for Pittsford’s animal control group.  When I spoke to someone there, he was also aware of the situation, but from his perspective, he couldn’t stop traffic without the sheriff’s department’s help.  So far, no sheriffs had yet been deployed to the scene in over twelve hours.

So I contacted the Monroe County Sheriff’s department in Pittsford.  By the time I’d gotten to them, they’d received calls (probably from 911 and the Pittsford animal control, both) and finally said they would be deploying sheriffs to the scene.  That was quarter to nine this morning, a few minutes ago.

As much as my wife and I love nature and respect animal life, I don’t pretend that others necessarily feel the same way.  I can understand that - at first blush - the idea of geese on 490 conjures images more absurd than dangerous to many people, especially those not familiar with the dangers of highway travel in rural areas.  But this situation is both remarkably torturous for the birds and remarkably dangerous for human commuters out there on the highway; I would have expected that a more serious effort would have been initiated much, much sooner to resolve this issue.

I’ll try to keep this space updated with what I hear and see over the day about this problem.

If you don’t even know what these things are for, you my friend are among those who have kissed a girl.  If you do know what they’re for and secretly want one, you can always cling to the fantasy of your girlfriend from Canada.

Scientists are starting to look at hallucinogens again as a means of therapy and guess what?  They work.  No shit.  They’re starting to look deeper into psilocybin, the active hallucinogen found in mushrooms, which makes sense: that monster of a drug Tim Leary invented - LSD - lasts upwards of fourteen hours, which is a bit much for a single session. . .  unless you’re being indoctrinated into an order of Incan priests. Then maybe.

On a side note, I don’t know who the chick is that they interviewed for this piece, but she’s got some seriously weird issues if you ask me.  I’ve done a ton of shrooms in my time, but I’ve never felt as though my heart was ripping open.

Seriously, you might want to have a doctor look into that. . .

From the people who brought you “LOL Cats” comes “GraphJam.com,” a truly bizarre collection of humor from people with entirely too much access to Excel:

When it comes to trumpeting the failed policies and anaemic strategies of the national Republican Party, our local Republican Representatives never fail to live up to expectations.  Randy Kuhl and Tom Reynolds (who?) are both making public statements in favour of more drilling to solve our nation’s oil crisis.

Where is the pressure - from either party - on American auto makers to produce energy-efficient cars?  Where is the effort to bring manufacturers together around the idea of creating energy-efficient home appliances?

Debating the efficacy of drilling or bitching about coal isn’t getting us anywhere.

What a remarkably silly story. And it’s probably even sillier that I comment on it, knowing how silly it is, but the rhetoric out there is just amazing.  Wes Clark was on Face the Nation, often referred to as “that show that’s on Sunday mornings after you’ve already left the house to actual do something with your weekend,” and seems to have opened a bee’s nest of controversy by pointing out something rather innocuous and obvious:

TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo | Obama Campaign Condemns Wes Clark’s Comments About McCain

But what did Clark actually say? In the course of arguing that military service alone doesn’t qualify you to be a commander in chief — a topic Clark himself knows something about — he said: “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”

And of course, the McCain camp is shrieking like a teenage girl over the unfairness of it all!  Why, what could be better hands-on learning to be president than sitting in a tiger cage?  The only better thing I can think of is free-falling in a late-sixties model fighter plane.  That’s just like being president. . . sort of. . .

But what’s worse is lefties like those on TPM - both Josh Marshall and the myriad of commenters - who seem to want to insist that this is a cause for Obama to fight, that Obama’s disavowal of Wes’ comments is a capitulation of epic proportions.  I realize we’ve all spent ten years watching Democrats capitulate and we all hate it, but seriously folks, pick your battles.

Because there are just some subjects which are untouchable, injuries inflicted that are simply not within the range of polite talk.  I’ll do myself the favour of not itemizing that list here, but we all know topics for which there are no good ends, and this happens to be one of them.

Of course, Wes Clark is 100% right: the North Vietnamese probably did not give lessons on International Diplomacy or Macro-economics while John McCain was detained there.  They almost certainly did not debate the merits of ethanol nor the weight of scientific data supporting the theory of Global Warming.  They probably didn’t practice diplomatic table-seating protocols, town hall meeting debate styles or the intricacies of the Farm Bill.  He was in a prison, not a primer school for American politicians.  We may regard his heroism as a mark of character, but by itself, it is not a practical qualification for being president.

The fact remains, however, that the public will always rally around someone on whom the mantle of hero has been bestowed.  It is an indelible mark of character, even while the current opinion of the man can and does wane.  Such is as much a reflex of our own war-guilt - about all wars, in all times - as it is an expression of support for McCain, and probably more.  You can say it sucks, you can say it’s absurd, you can insist its irrelevant, but you cannot change it.  And just like Geraldine Ferraro stupidly defending herself on television after making her “Archie Bunker-esque” comments about Barack Obama, trying to swim against that current is folly.

The counter argument generally goes that by giving in to the scream-fest, Obama is codifying the unassailable nature of John McCain’s service as a qualification to be president.  Well, that’s true.  But that genie is long-since out of the bottle, now, thanks to Wes Clark’s small mistake and Bob Schieffer’s giant leap of hystrionics.  It’s not going back in because Obama chooses to fight upstream on Shit Creek.

No, as much as it pains me to see him do it, Barack Obama’s camp is doing the right thing: disavow early, let the steam run out of the story, and move on to the next thing.  Better to let this go now and let everybody get back to remembering McSame’s vision of the future.  And oh, by the way, fighting this battle isn’t something the Obama campaign is supposed to be doing: this is the kind of thing for his supporters to take up for him.

Hint, hint.

I’ve made this point in the recent past, but it bears mentioning again and again, since the media keeps wanting to discuss “bipartisanship” as it applies to Barack Obama’s record.

“Centrism” is the limp-dicked insistence that the middle of the road on any issue is automatically the right course to take.  As Mr. Miaggi famously said, “Left side, OK.  Right side, OK.  Middle of road, Qeeuich!  Squashed like grape.”  It can occasionally be true that finding a middle ground is a more amenable solution and softens the blow of extreme positions on either side, but that does not mean that Centrism and Bipartisanship are necessarily the same thing.

Bipartisanship is the act of bringing together a coalition around accomplishing a single goal.  Notice that there is no mention of that goal necessarily being right, left or center.  It’s possible that a Bipartisan concensus can be formed around a Centrist solution, but it is equally true that a solution largely regarded as being from one wing or the other can also gain and hold Bipartisan support if the right politicians get together.

Therefore, to look at a politician’s record, declare it “Leftist” and therefore conclude that he’s not capable of Bipartisanship is simply wrong.  Not that veracity means much to the media, but maybe it means something to the rest of us.