Random Thoughts While Whiling Away the Time at an Airport

I usually travel to Virginia and the Carolinas in the springtime. Their's is more advanced than ours by May with most of the fruit trees having blossomed before I got there. The strawberries are ripe and delicious, sweet as the sweetest candy, while ours aren't even thinking of coming up yet. Maybe it's my imagination, but the quality of the morning light on the deeply green trees is somehow different from other places. I have taken many pictures over the years to capture the mood but they don't do justice to the reality.

Driving around in this area of woods and shacks, I am struck by the prominence and seeming importance religion plays in the area. Churches abound here and they don't come small. Sure there are your little roadside clapboard one room churches, but many are huge, with high capacity parking lots and much activity even during weekdays. There are billboards proclaiming the need to repent and pray. I even saw one sign which read, simply, "HOLINESS!" Not sure what that was supposed to mean but it certainly has somethiing to do with religious observance. The radio stations, those that aren't public radio and that don't play rock and roll, offer up a steady diet of sermons, scripture readings, and gospel songs as well as interviews with repentant sinners who offer advice on how to keep your marriage afloat and stay out of debt. Some of it is really quite interesting, especially the scripture readings. Some of the programs contain some pretty anti-jewish bias but that comes with the territory.

Speaking of religion, apparently, a very popular radio personality catholic priest was photographed on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, bare chested, embracing a woman in a bathing suit, and the picture was published in a spanish language tabloid. This caused his boss to remove him from his post for a violation of his vow of celibacy. I don't know. They finally get a priest with normal proclivities and they punish him for it.

Georgia is known to be the second largest chicken producer in the US, after Iowa. On entering Gainesville, GA, a large water or oil tank on the side of the road proclaims "Gainesville, the poultry capital of the world." As I came into Gainsville the other day, I was behind a flat -bed truck carrying live chickens in coops. I subsequently passed another such truck on the highway (the coops on this one were empty) and counted the coops. There were about 600 of them stacked eight high in four ranks and about 18 rows all on one truck and the one with live chickens had a lot more than one chicken in each coop. They were just hunkered down in the coops, looking balefully at the traffic behind them. At least these could see the road. The ones inside probably couldn't see anythiing.
Naturally, driving 802 miles in four days ( a little less than on some trips) I have to listen to the radio, and when I have enough of the preachers, I listen to, you guessed it, NPR. NPR seems to have a bit of a truth hangup when it comes to the Mexican flu. They keep insisting that both scientists and themselves are baffled by the fact that no one seems to die from this disease anywhere but in Mexico and they offer up some really strange reasons for the phenomena, that it's been around Mexico for a long time and therefore is very potent, etc. It seems to me that any child could tell them that the state of hygiene and medical care in Mexico is not a standard a country should aspire to and in a filthy crowded and congested place like that it's a wonder there haven't been more deaths. It's that political agenda again.

The longest lines in the United States are to be found in the post offices. As you enter a post office, there is a line at the stamp vending machine. Proceding further into the manned (or womaned as the case may be) section, you will see a bar usually shaped like the letter L where people can place the item(s) they are mailing. Rarely are there fewer than 15 people waiting along this bar and just as rarely is there more than one person handling the customers. There are plenty of other people behind the counters walking back and forth and pointedly ignoring the line of patient potential mailers. I think the line of customers scares them and that's why they retreat behind the wall as soon as the crowd builds up. If they would fire these people, who don't do anything anyway, they wouldn't have to raise the postage every two years.

Someone should throw a pair of shoes at the chief of the postal service.