A Modest Proposal for Louisiana (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Based on geology and prudence, it would be best if the Army Corps of Engineers revisited their decision to re-route the Mississippi following the flood of 1927. The Corps put up a levee and locks at the confluence of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers to force the Mississippi back into its old channel.

The simple act of cutting the levee would result in many changes for the good in Louisiana. First, it would reverse decades of salination of the Atchafalaya River Basin from the Gulf of Mexico. This would stop the decline of the crawfish population and save the centuries old Cajun way of life that has been threatened by the direction of most of the Atchafalaya’s water to the Mississippi.

The levee cutting would also confirm the major business relocation already underway in Baton Rouge. The capitol city and points north would become a major port and business center protected by 90 miles of solid land from the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting Boom Town would create tens of thousands of new jobs in Louisiana as well as bring needed opportunities to the needy rural enclaves of central Louisiana.

The re-routing of the river would also remove many flood headaches from New Orleans. The city would only have to combat flood waters from one direction instead of two, thus cutting the cost of levee building. The obsolete levees on the Mississippi side of the city could be cannibalized for dirt to build up the levees on the side of Lake Pontchartrain or the high land could be used for new high rise hotels that would be build as the result of the second part of my proposal – the legalization of sin in New Orleans.

The State of Louisiana could put the reconstruction of New Orleans firmly in the private sphere by going the route of Nevada – declare a special enterprise zone that allowed legalized gambling and prostitution within the confines of the city limits of New Orleans. Making sin safe and regulated as opposed to the current clandestine, corrupt, and murderous regime of the Crescent City would not be much of a political stretch in the libidinous and decadent precincts of Southern Louisiana.

The billions of federal aid proposed by President Bush is chump change when compared to the trillions of dollars controlled by our entrepreneurial economy. By cutting the levee and cutting New Orleans loose to its true nature, the people of Louisiana would be in the enviable position of having serious investments shoved into their hands by the enthusiastic capitalists of this country.

Natural Fluids and Annexation

I was just minding my business at the Waffle House the other morning when I heard a conversation at the next table. The main speaker was an old geezer who was obviously retired with two days of grey stubble showing that he was also sans a wife. He was wearing an ancient stained Snap On Tools cap and a used to be blue one zip Sears coveralls.

"You know, I just hate all them stupid politicians. Like this annexation stuff (he didn't say stuff, but the word started with an "s"). I moved out of the city back in the 60's when some of those liberal types talked them into putting flouride into the water supply."

"What's that?" said his companion who was also equally old but showed signs of matrimony like a pressed shirt and clean jowls.

"It's poison is what it is. Them damned communists had the world convinced that putting it in the water would make your teeth stronger. What it was really was a way of sapping our natural, God given American character. Look at what happened to America since they started messin' with our water and you can see it plain as day."

"Yeah, the whole country went queer", said the clean geezer.

"Well I told them to put their water where the sun don't shine and bought a piece of land and sunk my own well. I thought I was shut of the lot of them, but people kept building houses out in the county and then started pissin' and moaning about needing fire protection and garbage service and all of that. I kept telling them to move back into the city if they was so all fired up about living like they was in the city, but no. The damn idiots wouldn't be happy until they got annexed and pretty soon all of them was living in the city 'cept me."

"Buncha pussies," said the clean geezer.

"You don't know the half of it. They kept asking me why I was holdin' out and I told them that I wasn't going to die of any old water cancer from fluorine and those trihalowhateverthehellitis stuff (another "s" word) they put in the water. I had good water, sulpher water, water that would put hair on your chest. Drink some of that stuff from the water bottle in the Frigidare so cold it made your teeth hurt and it tasted better than that crap they called water."

"You shoulda bottled that stuff" said the clean geezer.

"Those idiots were just dumb enough to buy what you could get for free outta the tap. Well now they're going to put me into the city without so much as a howdedo and make me dig up my septic tank."

"Thats a bunch of stuff"

"You damn betcha, well they can do what they want, but I ain't disconnecting the well. I'm gonna water on even days and odd days and any old day that suits me. Only one thing really about this really gets me pissed off."

"What's that?"

"Taxes. Now part of my property taxes is gonna go to support those damn Wildcats."

Turtle Sex

Ho hum here we go again. Child gets reading list from teacher. Child hates reading, not only that but no one has made a movie of it so that Child can watch the movie and act like they read the book. Reading is work, Child hates work, and Child especially hates books that are 366 pages long.

Instead, Child finds a juicy part in the book, shows it to parent who goes ballistic. Next thing you know, book is now removed from required reading. There's a bazillion books out there and it isn't worth a battle at the Board of Education level to make Child read book. Child learns valuable lessons about hypocricy and how to game the education system.

The Bean Trees is the book in question and it sits on the State of Georgia's recommended list of books for ninth graders, but was assigned to an 11th grade class. As the Valdosta Times hasn't bothered to read the book, either, I'll tell you what the problem is.

Turtles have sex.

Yep, you heard it here first. This is a coming of age story of teenage girl who runs away from her rural Tennessee mountain home to avoid becoming a teenaged mother. She ends up taking on an orphaned infant and finds out about life. The juicy parts are when she fantasies about having sex and decides that it’s not for her.

Teenaged boys caught in their own coming of age stories deal with this problem all the time. Like books, there are other girls and a bottle of cheap wine and Prom night. This is why you don’t find many boys-coming-of-age books on High School reading lists.

Anyway, in part of the book she watches turtles have sex and wonder if it was good for them. I Googled this line of inquiry and have found that along with humans and some apes, only turtles enjoy having sex for pleasure; however, they prefer flamingos and not each other.

I join the Child in being upset that there isn't a movie of this book. My Google found no video's of turtle sex but here is a great cartoon.

Oh, one last part of this drama has yet to play out. Soon we'll get the "Valdosta's a so-called metro area and we have to put up with this silly stuff all the time" Rant and Rave in the paper. Hell, maybe I'll just submit it myself since everyone else is busy watching Ivan raping the Gulf Coast on the Weather Channel. That's known as Weather Porn, folks.

Friday Notes

Reality Bites

It was a very embarrassing revelation. This week the Valdosta Board of Education revealed its vote to replace the open slot caused by the resignation of John Klimko. The Board gave votes to only two of the three candidates. Local Dentist Jeff Newburn (disclosure, he's the dentist for my sons, Tristan and Robin) came up with the big goose egg. And he thought the only place he could get bitten was at work...

Sunday Drinking

The figleaf for drinking in public on Sunday continues to be the "right to have a glass of wine at a meal." This ignores the fact that any decent bottle of wine should be drunk after opening. That's more than a glass.

It follows naturally that any ordinance that allows for drinking at table should also require that there be enough adults at table to finish off the entire bottle with each adult getting two. My calculator for a standard 750Ml bottle tells me that you should have a minimum of four adults receiving two glasses of 3.25 ounces of libation each for 6.5 ounces total which contains just under one ounce of pure alcohol.

Of course, we then have to deal with the pitchers of margaritas and beer containing a good old American 48 ounces. A good ordinance should require that four adults can put away a pitcher only if there someone at least sixteen years old at the table who can help them all get into the car and drive them home.

Mathematical silliness aside, the true reason for wanting to have alcohol sold on Sunday is the fear of ridicule. Yankees drive in here off I-75 and get all snotty when they find out there's no hoots to be had. I thought we Southerners had outgrown caring a flit about what Yankees think about us these days, but there you have it.

My position remains thus: people who drink should have at least one day where they do it at home with their family and a good meal at home beats the heck out of any restaurant meal you care to eat.

A New Retirement Plan

In the 1880s, Otto von Bismarck crafted Europe's first pension plan. He had to pick an age at which people would be too feeble to work and therefore eligible for state support and entitlement. Bismarck picked 65. In that year, the life expectancy in Europe and the United States was only 45. Extrapolate that out to today's life expectancy and you get retirement at 115. Now that would make Social Security solvent!

Another Railroad Overpass?

After this week's piece on waiting on the train on Gornto, my friend Johnny Dukes proposed that we start pushing for a railroad overpass. One end would start just before the Y. My candidate for the other end would be the house on the corner of Gornto and Meadowbrook whose owner hacked off the neighborhood when announced he was going to turn his house into a convenience store as soon as the road widening was complete. Hey, we'll name the overpass after him.

The Train Boss! The Train!

I was sitting in a long line on Gornto Road the other day waiting for the train to finish passing when I noticed that the line was moving forward while lots of cars were going away. When I made the big curve at the Y I could see lots of people giving up and going the other way.

Where in the world were they going?

I mean, the train cuts Valdosta in half. You can head up the street to Baytree Road and just get into another line. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine there were people giving up and heading towards Gornto to try their luck.

Or, maybe they were just going to give up getting to the other side of Valdosta and going to the mall, back to work, or to a bar to to exercise their right to smoke. The only decent route I can come up with is rolling out on I-75 and heading north to exit 26 and then back to Valdosta down North Valdosta road. You can’t really call that progress as the train could end up any minute and you’ll get to the other side of town to see that car that was ahead of you in line already parked somewhere.

I guess even the illusion of going somewhere is better than just sitting in place to some people.

Necessity does breed entrepreneurial ideas like walking down the line selling generic Prozac from Canada. If I was the proprietor of “Old Timers” bar right at the start of the line, I think I’d change the sign to say “Why Wait in Line for the Train? Come in for a drink!”

Me? I just turned up the stereo and cranked up my Palm for a nice game of FreeCell. When you are nudging along at feet per hour, you can drive with your knees while trying to find a way to get those pesky Kings out of the way to release some Aces. My FreeCell string is up to 100 wins in a row and I’m considering changing the winner’s name to Norfolk Southern.

Safe? Sure, at least I’m not driving and talking on the cellphone…