Blogtrek

Farm Sanctuary

We visited the Farm Sanctuary today. This place is a farm where mistreated farm animals, including cows, pigs, goats, sheep, turkeys, geese, ducks, chickens, and rabbits were brought back to health and allowed to live their lives in peace. The place had no dogs, cats, or horses. It had a gift store where you can buy T-shirts, vegetarian recipe books, organic products of all kinds, and bumper stickers with such slogans as “use your own skin” and showing cattle on it. Is that a request to refuse the support of cruel treatment of cattle, or a call to go naked?

We can refuse to support the mistreatment of animals but habits are hard to break. We were brought up on hot dogs, hamburgers, eggs, and milk, and it is hard to break the habit, especially with the great quantity of restaurants that offer beef, veal, and so forth in this country. It will be along time before we treat animals humanely, and in the meantime there is a greater need – the mistreatment of humans, in prisons, Iraq, Palestine, and other places.

I-99

On my trip to Rochester, NY, I found something interesting in Pennsylvania: signs saying “Future I-99”. This is the highest number any major cross-country interstate highway can have. An I-100 would be a spur to an I-0, if one were to ever occur. It would connect Corning, NY with Williamsport, PA. Up to now US 15 connects these two places. The route once went through towns, winded around mountains, and was slow to traverse. In the last 20 years I have seen improvements radically change the road. Now interstate-like highways connect Williamsport with Covington. However they have a lot fo work to do before the road can be called I-99. There is a gas station that causes the interstate like highway to lower to 55mph. He would have to be put on a spur to the highway at an exit. There is a two-lane highway built around a dam in the 1970’s. Much of this seems too narrow so another high bridge would have to be built. But so far, they arfe ramming laines into the existing highway, and I heard that a rhubarb was caused in southern New York by the prospect of I-99 coming up through their area.

I-99 sounds sort of final. It reminds me of the year 1999, the last before the Third Millennium. Is I-99 the last of the major highways? Sure, more roads may be built, but will any be finished? I understand oil will run out by the end of the decade and the need for highways would become moot. I-99, the final highway. It sounds so final, like a highway to the end.

Baseball’s Third Strike

I am not interested much in sports. The only American football I like is that by my graduate school, Northwestern. I could give a darn about basketball, hockey, and especially auto racing. But baseball is something that I have been interested in since I was a child. I followed the Rochester Red Wings (St Louis Cardinals, then Baltimore Orioles farm team) regularly. I stopped my interest in professional baseball because my favorite teams did not win, but more importantly, because there were other things that interested me more.

Now I hear that baseball is about to have its third major walkout – when large numbers of games get cancelled. The winner of the 2002 World Series may be the same as the winner of 1994’s World Series. I do think some players and teams get far too much money, and the entire thing has become a game in which the fan is the loser. In any case, baseball has it all wrong – you don’t walk on a called third strike.

West Nile Hype

Terrorism, lying accountants, a lagging stock market. Now we have something else to worry about. West Nile Fever. This disease came to this country in 1999 and has been spreading. The media is bringing about all kinds of dire warnings about West Nile Fever – such as that there will be soon a thousand cases and that it will spread to all the states. But how much of a threat is this disease, really? I have heard from this very same media that 2 out of 3 people who pick up the virus show no symptoms. That means West Nile is a non-disease for the majority of us. The vast majority of the rest will suffer a flu-like illness. Only rarely will the dreaded encephalitis-type symptoms develop. If that’s the case, where are all the dire warnings about ordinary flu? That kills the same percentage of people. How about lightning, vehicle accidents, and falls? How about AIDS? These kill more than West Nile will ever kill, and yet we don’t hear media clangor about them. This whole thing about West Nile is a media creation. Be careful, of course, but don’t make radical changes in your lifestyle simply because of West Nile, for there is a far more serious syndrome going around – Mediahypitis.

Snakeheads

Now they are going to kill all the fish in our pond to get rid of a few evil snakeheads. They are going to drain the pond. Guess what? Ordinary fish will die because they don’t have anything to breathe. But snakeheads will simply walk to the next body of water – perhaps the Potomac. And are we about to destroy the entire world just to catch a few evil snakeheads such as Saddam?