Maiden Voyage

So, kick the chocks out from under the wheels, grease the skidways, break that champagne bottle on the prow, and stand aside. Watch out for the icebergs.

This will be an occasional event, focusing mostly on local (D.C. area) natural history and whatever else happens to fall into my head at the time. The handle comes from my daughter, bless her heart, who calls me a "Renaissance Neanderthal adrift on a sea of technology". Her favorite jab is "Daddy! Evolve!" Like Lynyrd Skynyrd says, "I know a little and I can guess the rest."

An Andy Rooney (the old carmudgeon on 60 Minutes) moment; did you ever notice that when a parking lot starts to get full, people seem to loose whatever common sense they started out with? Case in point: tonight my wife, daughter, and I went to my son's high school to see him act in the student-directed one-act plays. The one-acts are a yearly school tradition and he has been in them since freshman days. The county, in its infinite wisdom, scheduled a basketball game for the same place, same time, same channel. Thus the lot, iffy at the best of times, was chock full. I dropped the family off at the door and joined the rest of the curbside crawl, in the forlorn hope that I would happen upon someone leaving and vulture into their spot. I began noticing cars, seemingly abandoned, willy-nilly and higgeldy-piggeldy all over the lot. It seems that after a pass or two, the drivers just stopped in their tracks and shut down. Maybe they didn't want to miss the tipoff or the first flicker of the house lights. Did I miss something in Driver's Ed? "So, to summarize today's lecture on parking, if you can't find a parking spot, just turn off your car wherever you are and walk away. Nothing bad will happen. In fact, the police expect this and will not give you a ticket." The best one was a white Mustang square in the middle of the entrance to the parking lot...I'm willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt. No one in their right mind would willingly park a car in the middle of that road - let's hope he had catastrophic engine trouble and just stepped into the school to call AAA. Let's hope it cost a mint to fix.