Damn Birds

The other day I mentioned "The Zone". Well I would say "Sully" Sullenburger was completely in "The Zone" when he needed to be. And 155 passengers on his plane owe their lives to him.

The word hero has been so overused and abused to describe everything from winning a sporting event to me poaching it's intent the other day and jokingly referring to myself as some sort of tragic computer hero. The word has been cheapened to the point that simply calling Sully a hero is not enough. This one incident to me personifies what a real Hero is. And yet because we are so quick to cheaply hand out the designation, Sully's extraordinary feat is not awarded it's due by using the word heroic to describe it.

Some would say he got lucky. Yeah, I can agree to that. But he was intelligent and experienced enough to squeeze every possible benefit out of that luck and everyone on that plane is checking their shorts instead of being signed into some morgue in New York City.

The whole incident seems to be a confluence of impossible events that ended in celebration and not tragedy. A flock of geese apparently started it all by flying too close and getting sucked into those huge turbo fans of the twin jets. With engines out and a dead stick, Sully just cleared the George Washington bridge and set the plane down in exactly the right spot on the Hudson where instant help was available by ferry boats. The odds of this happening in just this way must be astronomical. Regardless, 155 people are certainly grateful I am sure.

Another odd coincidence is the timing of this accident. With just a few days to go before we swear in a new president, this amazing accident has kind of lifted spirits everywhere setting up or continuing to build the optimism I feel all around me. Even as we face economic madness and folks are losing their jobs, there is a sense of positive things to come. That maybe we have stepped out from under the cloud and the Sun will shine once again. No matter what, I will take it as a positive sign of the future like some Indian medicine man seeing a hawk on a stump with a vole in it's mouth. If it flies into the Sun, good times coming. If it flies away, look out. Or something like that.
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I almost watched Bush say Adios the other night. Notice I said almost. I actually planned to listen to what the ole "decider" was going to say. Tuned in the speech a few minutes early so I could catch some of the pre-game buzz. What the talking heads predicted might, would or should be said by our outgoing President. But I could not do it. I thought I had mustered up enough whatever it was to be able to listen to his voice, pay attention to what he was saying and then maybe give him some points for at least finishing with some class. Since I never made it to the finish, I have no clue if he did it with class or not. I could only handle the first 30 to 40 seconds of the speech before I reached for the remote. Jeopardy, Leave it To Beaver, anything but Dubya.

You know what? I do not care if he has finally showed some humility and class. His prior 7 years of arrogant and poorly conceived policy decsions have dug too deep of a hole for me to give him any credit now. The man blew it big time. There are things he did I will never forgive him for. The Iraq war. Then not listening and keeping that bonehead Rumsfeld in charge at least two years longer than he should have. His wasting what goodwill the US had on stupid arrogant posturing. And his unwillingness to actually work for bi-patrisan solutions yet claiming those failures were not any fault of his. All around, the worst president of my lifetime. And that is saying a lot considering my opinion of Ronald Reagan.

But then today at 88.6 on the FM dial, I happened across Holy republican Freeper radio. I was bombarded with enough of the speech and lock step republican commentary to fill in any blanks about the final speech. Only the patriotic faithful truly understood what Bush tried to accomplish. Had he not been hamstrung with so many lefty pinko liberal losers, he might have just saved us from ourselves. Oh, and the tanking economy was really just bad luck and bad timing. He had nothing to do with it. Actually because of his efforts he forestalled the downturn that was really created by Clinton and his cronies. Overall, your basic Freeper primer of how to shift blame to Liberals.

Listening to it actually made my day. Many out of the blue belly laughs and much head shaking as I listened to this conservobot parrot all the Neo con buzz slogans. I knew all was right with the World. The fringe of the Right is rising again. They have found their soapbox and rediscovered their roots. Whining from the edges about how only godfearing devolutionist anti science people really have the clue to what it is all about. As a bonus there was a commercial for a book that explains why and how the Earth is really only 8,000 years old. And the idea that it is really millions and billions of years old is just evil propaganda from the dark side. I tell you it was great stuff.
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One of my more blunt and to the point commenters mentioned how I might have a problem with me being me. All based on the words I have posted in this blog. Sure I have problems with certain characteristics and foibles of mine. I would say anyone who even takes a moment to look at themselves as they think others might would find they have something that could be improved. As I said in my response in the comment box to him, I have never seriously looked at myself with the idea of fixing perceived shortcomings. Not once in my life have I made any resolutions other than to try and make it to the next New Year's Eve.

I cannot afford a winter vacation. I cannot afford a new red sports car. So what does a poor white trash 56 year old do to jazz his life up? Well, living in the cheap seats sure keeps the options limited to whatever he can drag out of nothing to change something. Because I want to get a lot of things done before I leave this planet, it was time to move out of the rut I had dug for myself anf try something new. But making a list of one or two things seemed like a token jestiure. If I was going to be successful I had to overwhelm myself with a list of as many things I could think of. Get em all down in black and white and see what direction I went from there. I have no illusions I will be even close to 100% successful. If I come out of with just the list, I will be ahead of where I was last year. At least I put some effort into figuring out where improvements would probably be appreciated.
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It's early evening and my belly is full. I am content and laid back. And this is a good thing since I am now typing on the slowest and saddest computer in Maine. York county anyway. Even after wiping almost everything off the hard drive of the old Windows 98 PC, it can still take minutes for a page to load. Although it has gotten noticelbly quicker. With a well fed and stupified mentality, I just do not care how long a page takes to load. So what if "f" sticks and "p" sometimes takes a emphsis hit to make it connect.

But it is a tough transition from my 19" flat scree Back to a dinky 13" tube style. The loss in zip is also a bummer. I like living here in Maine existing in the slow lane. But I hate cruising the Internet Highway on the shoulder. I want my computer with balls back. Hopefully we will have things back to normaal in a day or three. Until then, my visits to other blogs will be off I think. It takes so long for this old machine to get moving in another direction, I am going to use it as sparingly as possible.

Later...............