Some local and other stuff caught my inner irony eye:
We have our usual summer events around East Tennessee, like the "death by personal watercraft" at 4 am, and more tragic carnage of drunks running off the road and killing everyone but themselves, which happened last night at the other end of my county. Why does it happen that way?
And there's the shootings and cuttings and so on, but those aren't special, like the Church Deacon charged with taking nude videos of an under aged girl at church camp:
Sheriff Ronnie "Bo" Burnett said a deacon at the First Baptist Church, Ralph Coffelt, was arrested for "especially aggravated exploitation of a minor," which begs a question about church officials and pedophiles, but I'm not sure which question it is. Maybe if we knew what "especially aggravated" meant in this case.
A rare species of orchid was found growing in a roadside ditch in Farragut, TN, which is sort of outer Knoxville. Sweet-scent Ladies Tresses is notable because it smells good. One recommendation was to fence the orchids off to keep people away. They may have guided field trips, hopefully for the public to be allowed to sniff the rare plant. They have decided to quit mowing and spraying herbicide in the area.
There's trouble brewing between some big name environmental groups and the US Forest Service over all terrain vehicles. I'm sure that doesn't surprise you but this "enviro" group is Trout Unlimited, more of a sportsman's group than an enviro-nazi group...They're the ones who normally ride atv's and now they want them restricted. Seems T U and the State of Tennessee have been working on restoring the brook trout to their native streams in the Smoky Mountains and now the ATVs are stirring up the mud and killing them off.
Amazingly, the first step in restoring brookies is to kill off the rainbow trout. Trout Unlimited stepped up and educated their sometimes narrow minded membership to their wider environmental responsibilities, and I totally applaud them pursuing restrictions on ATVs for the greater good. I wonder how this one is going to turn out.
...And from the WhitesCreek International news desk comes this item: An heir of Romania's royal family has put "Dracula's Castle" up for sale. Legend has it that Vlad, the Impaler, spent one night in the Bran Castle in the 1400's and it is a top tourist attraction.
Silly people!
The randy old count had a reputation for spending the night in lots of castles nipping at the necks of aristocratic ladies who had apparently put away their garlic necklaces. But in supposedly being a vampire, wouldn't the real Dracula's Castle would be the one in which he spent the daytime.
Enjoy your Fourth of July. It really should be America's biggest holiday.
Peace,
Steve
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