I was heading home this evening after a bit of a drive, dazzled by the monochrome of the landscape.
We’re maybe two-thirds of the way through the brief season of universal chlorophyll in Iowa - everything not made of concrete or steel is flush with green. It won’t be long before the brown creeps in, especially in the weedier bits, but for now all is verdant. We may as well be in the South; the lawns seem barely restrained from bursting into full-fledged rainforest undergrowth.
I was coming down a long, shallow hill, looking at the trees. The sun was nearly set, and the last streaks of daylight sleeting horizontally through the atmosphere had lit the trees of a nearby ridge with gold.
Traffic slowed a bit as an airplane skimmed over the ridge. I’m no expert but I think it may have been a P-51 Mustang.
It probably belonged to an airshow, but maybe it was in the hands of a dedicated hobbyist.
The houses, other cars, the highway in front of me, all on the lee side of the ridge, had already made the transition into dusk and were cast into blue-gray. The Mustang, flying so low that my breath caught in anticipation of a tangle in the power lines, was nonetheless high enough to clear the shadow of the ridge, making it suddenly the only object in the world to have color. The sunset reflected off its yellow and green paint bright enough to make you shield your eyes.
It was coming in to land at the little airstrip on the south side of town, frequented mostly by crop-dusters, as far as I know. Its path took it through the middle of my field of vision, from left to right, cutting across the highway.
It’s a good thing I had to stop at a light, because I was paying more attention to the plane than the road. A couple with his-and-hers motorcycles had stopped in the lane next to me and were staring hungrily at the Mustang.
You’d have sworn it was the only real thing in the scene. Everything else in my view was literally pale by comparison. The Mustang seemed to have punched a hole in a painted backdrop to fly around a fake world and flaunt its 3-dimensionality.
The bikers and I tracked it until it touched down and taxied out of sight.
It was the kind of scene that makes me wish I brought a camera with me everywhere I go.
image attribution
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I’ve noted before how Holly is better at updating her blog than am I. I am especially behind at the moment.
I have a bunch of pictures to post. My folks were here for a week, and we went to Utah for a week immediately after that, and then had to go to Utah again.
There are pictures from all of those timeframes, and I swear I’ll get around to posting them sometime soonish.
Everything’s backed up at work, and Daphne is sick… she isn’t puking anymore, but we are still dealing with watery former gastrointestinal tract contents which have been expelled at high speed, only from the opposite end of the spinal column, if you take my meaning.
So, it will be a little while yet before blog posting responsibilities rise to the top of the to-do list.
In the meantime, here are a couple of fun little tidbits:
Remember my rant a while back about James Dobson? Well, Fafblog (which is pretty funny, in a surreal way) has a lovely interview with him. Go read it.
Secondly, for those who may have missed the news for the last couple of days… Ahmed Chalabi, the wacky Iraqi expatriate leader and convicted fraudster, who had such a key role in supplying the United States Govt. with all the crappy-useless-forged-bulls*** intelligence it needed to justify the Iraq war, for which assistance he received millions of taxpayer dollars, and who has been touted as a possible future president or prime minister of Iraq, is now under suspicion.
Not under suspicion of providing bulls*** intelligence. We already know for sure that he did that. Not for the whole bank fraud thing either, as he’s already been convicted of that (to be fair, the prosecution could conceivably have been political, as he claims).
No, he’s being investigated, and his offices raided, and his colleagues hunted down, on suspicion of being a spy for Iran.
That’s right. Millions of dollars of Taxpayer money - yours, mine, everybody’s - may have been spent on a con artist who told administration types everything they wanted to hear while simultaneously lining his pockets by selling us out in Iran.
Gives you a warm feeling, don’t it? :)
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Well, I’m behind in blogging as usual. My folks were in town to visit last week, and this week we’re in Utah to do some visiting. I promise I’ll write something down about both topics, at some point.
If I were at home, and had some more time, I’d probably post a lengthy and venomous rant about the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal (warning: link contains disturbing images, plus gut-wrenching information regarding additional, as-yet-unreleased images).
But since I’m not, I’ll just pass along a couple of things I saw on BoingBoing today:
Cool.
Not cool.
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