“Roadwork May Relieve Traffic” – And Other Ironies

Feeling particularly crabby (please note ‘double b’s’ and not ‘double p’s’) as we inch into another day of record heat and tipsy topsy storylines – many of which are developing so fast no one is able to keep up, leaving us confused and stunned and without that sense of conclusion and reassurance we all seek.

We’ve got civic officials murdering journalists – a story driven  home by the fact we happen to know some of the players and what happens to a newsroom when a trauma like this happens to it. We’ve got a local deputy sheriff getting to a place where he apparently felt it necessary to murder two people in Dublin and we’ve got people jumping from high places so often it’s beginning to look like the dreadful opening scenes of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

So when we saw the title of this morning’s Opinion Burst on a local news tease and found ourselves shaking our heads and murmuring: “No, building more roads isn’t going to solve our traffic problems, any more than Zippoing all those hamlets saved Vietnam” we realize the morning is lost and we’re officially crabby. Even the morning visit by all our resident House Finches isn’t helping.

Described as dogged so many times in our past it must be true we shake off the morning’s unintended ironies, put our heads down and slog ahead. On the Good News front we have a brand new site to play with, apparently, after a lot of hard work by people much, much smarter than us. We used our Social Media interfaces to explain where we were and how we were praying to the Tech Gods to save us and how, eventually, they did. Users may note a new quickness in our step, a delicious new alacrity we’re hoping will get us through the Traffic Bursts we see more regularly now. It was not an inexpensive move but we promised you we would make it happen and we have.

So we’re taking some joy from that before, you know, falling back on feeling crabby again.

Many of you will be pleased to note that we’re staying away from developments on the national political scene, not because we fear your castigation (perhaps just a little, you soccer moms can be absolute knife fighters), but because we’re headed down a path and it’s going to take a while to get where it takes us. No use in flogging the donkey.

Keeping an eye on Balmoral and our cousins abroad. Despite being of decidedly anti-Royal bent we must say that the Queen and her people have shown this country many kindnesses over the years, particularly during our darkest moments, and we would think it only right to reciprocate during a time like this.

Here at home, we’re hoping to get through our shift without any of the vegetation or structure fires we’ve seen in recent days, our photographers feeling a little charred around the edges and trying to get the smell of smoke out of their clothes. Shrugging into harness, we’re putting our game faces on and hardening the armor necessary to push on in super-heated times, trying not to focus on the many ironies we encounter on a daily basis because, in the end, you’re not alleviating traffic, you’re just paving over more ground.