Nader is Nuts!

Just when I think that politics has gotten irredeemably rotten, when I think that politicians have sunk lower than whale shit and cannot possibly  get worse, just when I think that my savage indignation may finally simmer down, comes some fresh fucking outrage to make me ask “Where the hell is the Lee Harvey Oswald for the new millenium when we need him?”

I refer of course to Ralph Nader’s announcement that he will run for president.  Isn’t it enough that this sanctimonious prick screwed Al Gore out of the presidency?  I mean he had lots of help and all, but everyone else who conspired to keep the man who got more votes for president than anyone else, ever, out of the White House was a Republican, for god’s sake.  In case you forget, Gore was screwed out of Florida’s electoral votes by a  pathetic series of instances of fraud and chicanery, and ended up getting 537 fewer votes, officially, than that jackass from Texass, the nation’s head cheerleader, the Alfred E. Newman of world affairs.  Nader was credited with over 97,000 votes in Florida, and if you think that any of those people would have voted for the Shrub, you are even stupider than the Republicans would like you to be.

Adding insult to injury, that self-righteous fuckwad Nader even denies his role in handing over the presidency to Dubya.  Good grief, even his supporters are calling him an egomaniac. 

I wish someone would drop a Corvair on his ass. 

 I could just scream.

A Near Moose

As many of our constant readers know, living in Alaska is not like living in other places, especially if you are us, as most of you are not.  Our  household consists of seven mammals–three primates, three felines, and a canid–sharing a leaky old trailer, stratospheric IQs, poverty, and a thousand in-jokes in one of the most beautiful and serene (except when the weekend snowmachiners show up) areas on the planet.  One thing that tells you right away that you are not in Kansas any more is the moose.  We have moose.  Boy, do we have moose.  We love them, watch them, photograph them, shoot them, eat them, and share our space–including highways– with them.  And there’s the rub.

Moose did not evolve with internal combustion vehicles.  And loveable though they are, they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer and generally do not realize that behind those  funny lights coming at them  at night is a ton or so of steel and glass and plastic and primate.  Add the fact that moose tend to be most active at dawn and dusk–times when we primates are rarely at our sharpest–and you can get trouble.  Big trouble.  Fatal trouble.

In an encounter with a vehicle,  the moose usually gets the worst of the deal.  In one recent  case, a young moose was hit but not killed by a careless motorist.  It lay  on the highway bleeding, and a speeding SUV came by and ran over its legs.  It bawled in pain and confusion. Finally a trooper showed up and put a few bullets into its head  Life gets awfully real here sometimes.

The only thing you can do is be hyper-alert and drive as far under the posted speed limit as possible without being a traffic hazard yourself.  Personally, I keep my speed between 40 and 50 at night–when the roads are slick, and they usually are, I keep it closer to 40.  I get passed a lot, and probably cursed at, but that isn’t my problem.  In the summer, when the roads are dry and visibility is good and the moose are mostly  back up in the mountains, I truck along between 70 and 80.  In the winter, I’m a pokey old fart.  But I digress.

On our last town trip, we got out early, having done our grocery shopping before our 7:00 pm NA meeting.  So we were heading north on the Parks Highway–which is mostly two-lane blacktop, the kind that gives highway safety experts nightmares–chatting about this and that with our favorite smooth jazz station playing softly in the background.  Then there it was–a moose in our lane directly in front of us, ambling across the road.  Kathy screamed, which distracted me and slowed my reaction time by a split-second.  Then I braked and down-shifted and prepared to take evasive action, such as driving into the ditch if necessary.  Luckily the roadway was fairly dry, and I had been fitted wth new trifocals that very day, so I saw it as soon as the headlights caught it.  And the moose didn’t do anything weird, it just kept on ambling, so I was able to  slowly drive by it.

Kathy later said I missed it by about a foot.  And a miss is as good as a mile where moose are concerned.