{"id":6210,"date":"2011-05-19T10:08:50","date_gmt":"2011-05-19T17:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6210"},"modified":"2011-05-19T10:15:28","modified_gmt":"2011-05-19T17:15:28","slug":"now-theyre-stealing-dirt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6210","title":{"rendered":"Now They’re Stealing … Dirt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Here’s another neighborhood mystery<\/a> to keep me up nights.\u00a0 Once in a while road crews dump piles of dirt alongside county roads near our housing subdivision.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it’s some special kind of dirt?\u00a0 While I was walking Schatzi this morning, I saw a guy pull over by a dirt pile on the shoulder of Houghton Road.\u00a0 He got out, opened the trunk, pulled out several containers and a folding shovel, then began filling his containers with dirt from the pile.\u00a0 He had plastic garbage cans, beach buckets, and empty coffee cans.\u00a0 When he was done, he loaded the containers back in his trunk and drove away.\u00a0 In his brand new Lexus.<\/p>\n

I’m mystified.\u00a0 Is this a thing now, stealing dirt?\u00a0 Is dirt valuable?\u00a0 Hard to get?\u00a0 Could this be, indeed, special dirt?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Well, that was stupid.\u00a0 Fun, but stupid.\u00a0 Speaking of stupid, how stupid can Senator Rick Santorum be, telling Senator John McCain he doesn’t understand torture<\/a>?\u00a0 Pretty damn stupid, it seems to me.\u00a0 There are a few extremely stupid people in public life.\u00a0 Sean “Can you name any country that became a democracy after a violent revolution?<\/a>” Hannity, for one.\u00a0 Representative Louis “Terror Babies<\/a>” Gohmert, for another.<\/p>\n

How do such people get so far in life?\u00a0 I feel like Louise, the black housekeeper in the 1979 movie Being There<\/a>, 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.”<\/p>\n

If Santorum, Hannity, and Gohmert were black or brown, they couldn’t get work stealing dirt.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Another day at the air museum<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There are great stories behind every airplane, but these are the ones I’ll spend more time on than others.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Donna’s birthday is next Monday.\u00a0 I should have told her to wait until after Saturday<\/a> 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.\u00a0 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<\/em> going to be easy).\u00a0 And be prepared to offer lots of sympathy … this’ll be her 65th.<\/p>\n

Off to the museum.\u00a0 Where there’s 80 acres of dirt.\u00a0 Should I worry?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s another neighborhood mystery to keep me up nights.\u00a0 Once in a while road crews dump piles of dirt alongside county roads near our housing subdivision.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,16,2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-flying","category-media","category-personal","category-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6210"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6223,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6210\/revisions\/6223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}