Did I mention in my last blog posting that things were busy? I guess the last 20 days have been full of things and I haven’t been able to write up a blog, so I figured I better try to do share some of my thoughts on things going on throughout the area.
=== Taking photos
Last Tuesday morning I took two photos. I’m not going to sit here and say I’m a professional photographer or anything. One nobody ended up seeing, the other ended up on the Radio Iowa and ABC News websites and a few others worldwide.
Pulling out of my driveway in the 4 o’clock hour of the morning and heading to work, I looked over to my right, and I thought I saw something or somebody on the sidewalk, staring at me. I was startled and had to flash the brights to make sure that it wasn’t some goofball roaming the neighborhood looking to cause trouble. It just happened to be a deer. I stayed in the same spot in the street for about a minute, not sure whether it was going to cross my path or not. At that point, I thought it would be a great idea to get the cell phone out and snap a shot with the camera in it. Obviously I had forgotten to turn the settings back to automatic flash. So I took a picture which ended up being a dark nothing. The deer after standing there moved right up the sidewalk, just like it was on a Sunday stroll.
Do you think we still have a deer problem in the state? I hit one with my old car in March 2009. Here’s a picture I took just off of downtown Mason City in the Rock Glen area back on June 23rd shortly before 9:00 PM. Will there ever be a solution to the problem?
Anyway, the second photo I took last Tuesday morning, you can go here to take a look at that one.
=== North Iowa Tea Party and….Tim McCarver?
As a regular reader of Michael Hiestand’s “Sports Television” column in USA Today, I noticed from his Monday column that the North Iowa Tea Party wasn’t the only one making references to the Hitler and Lenin eras.
Say what? It should probably go without saying that it’s not a great idea to compare sports front office moves with, say, killings in the Nazi and Soviet systems. But Fox’s Tim McCarver did just that during the network’s coverage of Tampa Bay Rays-New York Yankees on Saturday. In saying there was no sign of former manager Joe Torre at Yankee Stadium, McCarver made an analogy to “despotic leaders in World War II, primarily in Russia and Germany” who, after shooting some of their generals, then “airbrushed the generals out of pictures. In a sense, that’s what the Yankees have done with Joe Torre.”
Yikes. Kind of a stretch to compare Torre’s fate — he now manages the Los Angeles Dodgers— to those of military officers executed by their own governments. The Dodgers aren’t that bad.
=== KGLO/KWMT Tractor Ride
The 9th annual Tractor Ride is underway, cloverleafing out of Iowa Falls. You can keep up to date with the ride on the event’s Facebook page.
