Random Thoughts

Since none of the following subjects are in-depth enough for their own blog post, its time for yet another edition of:

Random Thoughts Brain Dump…..end of summer edition

I was riding my bike this weekend on a long meandering trail through the woods. It went over ponds and through farm land with corn growing high and the beans nearly ready for harvest. It passed through some small Michigan towns where the big evening event is going for ice cream at the family owned ice cream stand. There were lots of other people out on the trail….families out enjoying the day together, couples spending an afternoon with each other, solo cyclists like myself, but most of the time there was nobody in front of me and nobody behind me.

Then I saw it, tossed to the side of the trail, wet and dirty from the previous nights rain. A year ago it would have been surprising, even shocking to see this on a bike trail in the woods, but now its neither surprising or shocking, in fact I see them all the time laying on the ground in parking lots, hanging from rear view mirrors in cars, dangling out of peoples pockets….of course I’m talking about the blue surgical face mask. When we reflect on the year 2020, and think of perhaps one symbol of the year, I think it’ll be the blue surgical face mask and all that that entails.

My new favorite Twitter follow is the Sheboygan Scanner. Yes, I know social media can be an awful place, especially Twitter with its limit on 240 characters per tweet it doesn’t leave much room for intelligent conversation. And yes, I’m as guilty as the next person when I say I spend too much time looking at my phone and laughing at the snarky comments. But there is some good content out there….funny dog and cat videos, videos of small children hearing their parents voice for the first time thanks to hearing implants ( I dare you to watch one of those and not get choked up ) and I even find some interesting and informative news articles that I wouldn’t have found anywhere else.

Back to the Sheboygan Scanner…like most government entities, Sheboygan has various social media accounts to keep in contact with the public. It’s a fast and easy way to get the word out and also let the general population contact them. The beauty of the Sheboygan Scanner twitter account is its simplicity. For each call to their emergency dispatch center they tweet out a one line sentence of the call with the street name. Of course, most of the calls are very serious….someone fell down and has a head injury, someones having breathing problems, a multi-car accident….and so on, but occasionally you get a rather harmless call that leaves your imagination to fill in the details.

In the past week, I’ve seen these calls come across Twitter….

vehicle vs. tree; airbags deployed….I’m guessing the tree won that one, perhaps the person was looking at their phone, texting or was on Twitter.

victim agreed to fight, changed mind when he was losing ……oh, if only it was that easy to get out of a fight once started.

man has knee pain, has been in chair since Thursday……not sure when this was called in, but I’m guessing it wasn’t the following day so that means that this poor man has been in his chair for multiple days with knee pain, but I suppose it’s better than what happened to this next gentleman…

man popped hip out….I don’t know how someone pops their hip out. I’ve thrown my back out a couple of times picking up something heavy but I can’t imagine popping a hip out. Did he recently take up karate and he was practicing and popped his hip out, or perhaps he was doing yoga and he was deep into a Warrior 2 stretch when it happened. My imagination likes to think that perhaps he was having some wild, passionate sex with his partner when his hip popped out….we’ll probably never know…..or how about this gentleman…

man in 60’s, found on sidewalk….now before you think of me as callous and uncaring, it doesn’t say he fell and was injured or he was wandering around possibly lost, it just says man found on sidewalk. I’m betting the wife had something to do with this. She was tired of seeing him sitting around all day, so she told him to go get the mail, then she locked the doors for the day and he was left outside. He probably had nothing to do so he ended up sitting on the sidewalk. See nothing bad there except a couple that’s been married too long….but my personal favorite is….

trampoline in ditch….I’m guessing this is an item that didn’t sell at a weekend yard sale, and somehow ended up in the ditch. The trampoline was bought at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to keep the kids busy and out of the house, but now the couples getting a divorce and has to sell the house, both of them are moving to apartments till everything’s finalized, and they had to have a yard sale to sell the stuff they couldn’t take with them and now the trampoline is in the ditch, the perfect metaphor for their train wreck of a marriage.

Are info-mercials still a thing? Are they still on late night TV endlessly playing, filling the void of time and entertaining the insomniacs? Do people still buy merchandise they see on info-mercials or are they less popular with the ease of internet buying? Where would we be as a country if we never knew that we needed the Sham-wow, or hair in a can? We would all be standing in long lines at the grocery store buying rotisserie chickens if we didn’t have the counter top rotisserie chicken oven that we could just…

“set it and forget it”

I must admit to being mildly entertained by some of those info-mercials, and I did purchase one of the products I just mentioned, but I’m not telling you which one.

When I was a kid, I always thought I would have to worry about quicksand when I was an adult, but that hasn’t been the case at all. Either there’s just not as much quicksand around as I thought or it was used in a lot of TV shows and movies back in the 70’s and 80’s. There always seemed to be somebody walking into quicksand. They would twist and turn, sinking and struggling, and then finally be rescued at the last moment thanks to a errant tree branch laying nearby or some very strong vines that just happened to be within arms reach, or tossed to them by a rescuer. I haven’t encountered any quicksand in my life and I don’t anticipate coming across any. With everything else we need to worry about, at least I can stop worrying about quicksand.

Be kind to each other and as always, Peace

John