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.