A noticeable thunderstorm toddled through here a little after noon on Sunday. Nothing surprising there, nor in it taking the power out for most of the rest of the day.
In a lot of places, your papers are everything. Which is why it was especially alarming to hear that Joe’s new best friends, the Taliban, have been seizing the passports of American citizens in Afghanistan. In the Mideast, as in some other parts of the world, your passport is your identity. Without it, you are at the mercy of those who might not have your best interests at heart. Seizure of your passport leaves you naked and vulnerable. Your comings and goings are now no longer your decision.
What is there to say? Our country is governed by an ice-cream enthusiast who has combined the policies of Jimmy Carter with the presentation of Gerald Ford (if Ford had suffered rabies) along with his own diminished capacity — and he didn’t have that much capacity to begin with. In his speech Monday he sounded like that angry doddering guy on the front porch of the rest home who causes visitors to enter through the back door instead.
Not long ago, one of the gas lines on a piece of yard equipment here broke right where it connected to the plastic gas tank, causing gasoline to leak all over the place and rendering the thing unusable. I’d hoped to buy just the parts I needed from a knowledgeable person locally, but that was no longer possible.
Here’s something that I bet you know, but that it seems our government and news media — in large measure that’s redundant — don’t know: A lot of people are afraid of shots. They head the other way when the needle comes out. You know such people. Maybe you are such a person.
It was sad to hear over the weekend that Jackie Mason has died. He was 93, so it can’t be said that he didn’t have a full life, and we can all use the reminder that our worldly existence does end, inevitably, for all of us. But he made people smile and laugh, for good reasons, and we can never have too much of that.
Last Friday Pope Francis effectively banned celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass, a kind of worship that is unsurpassed in its solemnity and, at its best, in its splendor. In so doing, he flung down and danced upon one of the signal accomplishments of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and told millions of devout and pious Catholics around the world that the Church is no longer the place for them.
If you look in some of the history books, you’ll learn that the only significant battle in Ohio in the Civil War was fought at Buffington Island in Meigs County.
Well, that would certainly explain the sudden scarcity of medium-sized rodents around here.
Before we get too far along, let me confess an act — an in-act, actually (inactually?) — of idiocy. Normally I’m within arm’s reach of a camera. That has allowed me to capture many fleeting moments I would have missed otherwise. But this time I didn’t make a picture.
If you were here that afternoon, you remember it.
At about 6 p.m. nine years ago yesterday, a line of powerful thunderstorms swept across our area. It would get famous a few hours later, when it struck more fashionable parts of the country. Nine years ago today, the lights were out in Athens County.