The bikers are getting out of hand here in the NW. Every Sunday there is a large gaggle of them that rides up and down the street in front of our house, taking up the whole bike lane and most of the car lane. This morning I saw a pedestrian almost run over by a biker riding down the sidewalk, going against traffic.
And now there is the story of the biker in Portland who is suing the bus authority there because..well, read it for yourself here.
Outrageous. The bikers in Portland have become militant. They are staging protests where they block streets, they are calling for more money to be spent on "bicycle-friendly" traffic imporvements, and now apparently expecting to be able to just ride down the middle of a lane of traffic and have cars, trucks, and busses go around them. Oh yeah, and they don't pay a cent for any of it, because the highway dept. here in Oregon is funded almost exclusively from gas taxes.

And another thing. I have been noticing that people have been dumping thier Christmas trees willy-nilly all over Salem. I have seen several in the barrow along the road, piled up near trash containers at apartment complexes (apparently for the manager to deal with because far be it from the tenents to take any personal responsibility) in open fields, and piled or just randomly tossed in parking lots. I even heard of someone's neighbor planting thier (cut, mind you) tree in a nearby park because they, "didn't want to throw away a perfectly good tree when it could grow somewhere." Amazing.

Well, a couple rants. I'll end on a positive note:

This is a mule kicking the snot out of a mountain lion that decided to try to make a meal out of the mule. Final score: Mule 1, Cougar 0. Mules are cool.

Well, I just spent the last 3 hours studying New Testament manuscripts and weighing the pros and cons of whether an article was present in the original or if it was added by a copyist later. It is a tedious process of looking through a lot of expensive books.
But I love it. I don't know why, but I am facinated by history. I love studying old things.
Alas, tomorrow I must go and clean filth out of carpets again....

Well, I spent an hour posting pics and putting cool linkies in the descriptions, then I accidentally refreshed the page w/o saving. Poof. So much for that. I don't want to go through that all over right now. Maybe this weekend I'll try it again.

I heard a great story on public radio this morning. It was about a "researcher" who is studying how windows effect birds. He says that it is an unknown fact that a billion birds are killed every year flying into windows. He found this out by taking some window panes out into the forest and seeing if any birds hit them. Lo and behold they did. Next he went and found the average number of birds that hit a particular building, multiplied by the number of days in a year, then multiplied by the estimated number of buildings in America. Hence, one billion. He says that every new building should have "bird-friendly" glass.
Let's dissect this for a second. First, if he cared so much about birds, why did he murder them by placing window panes in a previously window-less environment? Of course the birds hit them. If I was walking through a forest that I had frequented for years and all of a sudden there's a window pane hanging there I would hit it too. Next, did he take into consideration that there are many areas of the country where birds don't normally hit windows? I don't remember birds ever hitting any of our windows where I grew up in Eastern Washington. I have a freind here in Salem who commented that there had been two birds to hit the window of thier home in five years!
Next in the story they found a university somewhere on the east coast that installed so-called "bird friendly" windows in a new building. They installed two "thump" detectors to see how many birds hit those two buildings in a year. They found that five hit the windows. So say there are 50 windows. That means these "bird-freindly" windows KILLED 125 birds! And it is a major science building, and they said it was mostly glass. So I'm guessing the total number of windows is more like 500. I don't even want to contemplate the carnage 500 windows would visit upon those poor, defenseless birds.

Oh yeah, Greek is hard too.

That's it for today.

Well, thanks Danny! Now I can post with reckless abandon.
I took a week off work to work on homework.....and do other Christmasy and New Yearsy things. It was great. I did everything from researching the history of biblical Philippi (BTW, why is the city spelled with two "p's" while the ruler, Phillip, for which it is named spelled with two "l's"?), to playing 12 hours of Battlefield 1942 with a good friend. Life is grand.

In case you haven't heard, the Willamette Valley is floating away, well, parts of it. It isn't as bad as No. Cal. but I saw a news report of how "heavy rains" caused flooding in Salem. The city works department said there was nothing they could do. If you know us then you know how I feel about the city works department. Somehow they manage to spend $2,738,701 of our taxes and fees last year and every time it rains some part of Salem floods. This city goes nuts anytime there is a major weather event. If it ever snowed I think you'd have to put most Salemites on suicide watch.

Well, I have to help out at work tonight (9pm to 1am), so I better get to goofing off. My wife got me Age of Empires 3 for Christmas and it is beconing me....