Now They’re Stealing … Dirt?

Here’s another neighborhood mystery to keep me up nights.  Once in a while road crews dump piles of dirt alongside county roads near our housing subdivision.  I don’t know for sure, but presumably workers come along later and use the dirt to repair erosion damage along the shoulders of the roads.

Perhaps it’s some special kind of dirt?  While I was walking Schatzi this morning, I saw a guy pull over by a dirt pile on the shoulder of Houghton Road.  He got out, opened the trunk, pulled out several containers and a folding shovel, then began filling his containers with dirt from the pile.  He had plastic garbage cans, beach buckets, and empty coffee cans.  When he was done, he loaded the containers back in his trunk and drove away.  In his brand new Lexus.

I’m mystified.  Is this a thing now, stealing dirt?  Is dirt valuable?  Hard to get?  Could this be, indeed, special dirt?

From now on I will not step outside the house without my camera cell phone … I so wanted to take the dirt thief’s photo, I nearly ran back to the house to get it.

Possible novel/movie titles: The Thief of Dirt, It Takes a Dirt Thief, The Dirt Thief of Bagdad, Ali Baba and His Forty Dirt Thieves, The Dusty Getaway, The Brown Panther, Butch Cassidy and the Soiled Kid, Indiana Jones and the Missing Bag of Dirt.

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Well, that was stupid.  Fun, but stupid.  Speaking of stupid, how stupid can Senator Rick Santorum be, telling Senator John McCain he doesn’t understand torture?  Pretty damn stupid, it seems to me.  There are a few extremely stupid people in public life.  Sean “Can you name any country that became a democracy after a violent revolution?” Hannity, for one.  Representative Louis “Terror Babies” Gohmert, for another.

How do such people get so far in life?  I feel like Louise, the black housekeeper in the 1979 movie Being There, who, after the death of the rich man who used to employ them, sees her former colleague Chance the gardener on TV and says “Yes, sir, all you’ve gotta be is white in America, to get whatever you want.”

If Santorum, Hannity, and Gohmert were black or brown, they couldn’t get work stealing dirt.

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Another day at the air museum.  I’m going to spend two or three hours in the library writing fact sheets on the individual aircraft I plan to highlight during my walking tours.  These include the museum’s replica Wright Flyer, an SR-71 Blackbird, a C-47 Gooney Bird, a Hawker Hurricane, a Consolidated B-24 Liberator bomber, and a P-51 Mustang.  There are great stories behind every airplane, but these are the ones I’ll spend more time on than others.

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Donna’s birthday is next Monday.  I should have told her to wait until after Saturday when all the Jesus people fly up to heaven, leaving their worldly possessions behind, but last night she found a recliner chair she loved and asked if she could have it for her birthday.  Naturally I said yes, since it gets me off the picking-out-a-gift-for-a-hard-to-please-person hook, and now all I have to do is find the right card (oh, yeah, like that’s going to be easy).  And be prepared to offer lots of sympathy … this’ll be her 65th.

Off to the museum.  Where there’s 80 acres of dirt.  Should I worry?