A 63-year-old boat captain loses
a hand . . . a 93-year-old power walker loses her leg . . . a 113-year-old drunken
party animal loses his head . . . geezers and gators obviously don’t mix.
Verna Christopherson was
driving up I-75 the other night feeling pretty darned chipper. The 79-year-young lady had just done that
which almost all fail to do—she had escaped the Seminole Casino in the chips and in the black. And so, who could blame the woman for being
happy as a lark as she drove home through the Florida Everglades along a
stretch of road dubbed “Alligator Alley”?
Her young son, Mark, 54, sat next to her strapped into his child’s restraint
seat.
Suddenly, up ahead a mile or
so, the lady’s headlights spotted something that looked like either a large
12-foot long saw log with four legs and a scaly tail inching across the road or
a dark-colored two-man submarine being dragged slowly across the road by invisible
steel cables. No mention if Verna “confused”
all these things with a 12’ gator in the road or if she “confused” the gas for
the brake when she gunned it but the vehicle hit the object full tilt and was,
of course, “launched” into outer space. When the auto returned to earth a short time later
the astronauts, both Verna and her son, were shaken up but uninjured. Not so the scaly saw log/submarine/gator. It--all one thousand pounds of whatever IT
was-- was put out of action permanently.
Another gator—and another
12-footer, at that--caused more freaky accidents up at St. Pete as he too, like
the other, tried to cross the road, no doubt to chase down that same chicken who also
crossed the road.
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Bad
Way to Go #313—Much
like the old gal above, Nate Williams and Erika Robinson were just tooling
along the other night over at Land ‘O Lakes, Florida, just a havin’ a groove. No, the twenty-somethings were not returning
after paying their white person’s tax at an Indian casino, nor were they on the
interstate, nor were they even in a car.
The speed-demons were flying along in a golf cart at the stuffy-sounding
Lake Padgett Estates East Bath Country Club Golf Course and Racquet Club. The couple were rocketing along doing at least
five or six mph.
At some point Nate and the
golf cart turned left, and Erika didn’t.
It’s that simple. The young woman
flew out, or, as the newspaper reports, she was “ejected.” Some one tell me: Just how fast do these damn
things go, anyway? Fast enough, I vouch,
since the young woman was seriously killed.
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Note: Quiet,
mysterious, secretive,
Michelle makes motions now, which is to say I know she is planning
something. All during the numerous trips we have taken over the past few
years, I seldom knew where we were going until mere days—or in some cases, mere
hours--before we actually went. I prefer it that way and it works well
with my wife’s “wake-up/ take-off” nature. Even so, if I observe her
closely there are little hints that give her away: 1) More time spent
than normal on the telephone, 2) long periods of silence while on the
computer, or 3) . . . . Yesterday the woman came in cold and asked
the man, “How do I look?” It was the latest addiction addition in her
brazen clothes collection; it had scanty Scandinavian summer written all over
it. New clothes, shoes or bikinis are a sure sign she is hatching it out
and hitching ‘em up. My bet/hope is Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, the
North Pole, or any place less hot than south Florida. Thus, if one does not hear from
this codger blogger for weeks and weeks and weeks, the above is the
reason.
Meanwhile, для вас, из России с любовью.
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Photo for the Day
