End of March Parking Specials

End of March Parking Specials
Tim Long

With spring approaching it's difficult to pay attention to the white lines in parking lots. In my new hobby I've found it difficult to go one day without spotting a parking faux pas.

Here we have the, "My car is the most important thing in the world to me. My kids wear dirty, tattered clothes, but my (cheap) car is so important that I use four parking spaces to hold its hulking mass." This guy trims his nose hairs daily. I'm not even going to comment on the semi truck parked in the background taking up 28 spaces.

Here the multiple dents in the doors say it all. This lady's been in so many accidents that she backs WAY back into spots just to keep the front bumper from getting ripped off. Of course the back bumper was riddled with dents and pock marks worse than a greasy teenager's face.


This is a friend's vehicle. I snapped this hasty shot when I went over to her house. Her reply when I showed it to her? "Looks perfect to me." 'Wow', is about all I can say. Move to Florida.

Another little occurrence in the warming weeks, is the growing numbers of exotic cars. Ok, the Porsche isn't exactly exotic, but it is when it's owned by a guy who's annual salary won't cover the entire cost of the car. I've seen numerous Ferraris, a bunch of new Porsches, and even a couple of Lamborghinis. It seems that I always see them sitting in traffic on city streets burning more fuel in two blocks than most people use all week. It's always aging men wearing ugly (but expensive) sunglasses driving them.

Send in your photos to footfeathers@gmail.com

Mental Anguish & More Parking

Mental Anguish & More Parking
Tim Long

We had a scary rain storm late yesterday afternoon. I swore after the last time I was caught in traffic on the way to a meeting when it started raining and the highway traffic slowed to (no shit) 25mph. But, alas, I was already on Park Rd. when the rain began. I think people here assume their tires are made out of glass, because they immediately...

...apply the brakes. I miss driving up north where you'd slow to 60mph if there were blizzard conditions with 12" of snow falling per hour.

This pic is blurry because everyone decided to SLAM on their brakes. No traffic lights, no intersection, no one turning, just brakes for the hell of it...


Oh, and here's another great parking job. I like to align people's parking habits with their personality traits. This lady's parking job screams, "I'm pushy and nosy, and I will pry into your personal life."

I'm having a great time snapping photos of morons with cars. It's so easy! People probably think I'm some sort of insurance adjuster.

Happy driving, and if you're scared of driving in the rain, please, by all means, stay off the roads.

Blind Parking

Blind Parking
Tim Long

I was inspired by another blog dedicated solely to bad parking (I forget the name of the blog). I just started taking photos of poorly parked vehicles and had two in the first two days.

This dope almost got it right. How much more effort would it have been to back up and pull in straight? I guess he figured he has a lot of open space in his brain, so why not a lot of space for his jeep.

This is at a Chinese Restaurant. This guy was in such a hurry to get at the egg rolls that he not only parks exactly in the middle of TWO spots, but forgets to put up his tail gate. This is the type of guy who walks around proudly with his pants' fly down 'cause he's too busy to be bothered with details.

This isn't really parking related, but, HOLLY SHIT! I couldn't help snapping a photo of this highway pile-up waiting to happen. Only in the South. A Massachusetts Statey would have you pulled over and in cuffs for this.

Please feel free to email me photos (that YOU take) of people doing stupid things car-related. Should be pretty easy. footfeathers@gmail.com

`Redneck Shop' creates dispute in S.C.

Just when I feel like civilization and intelligence is creeping into the dark corners of the South, some sweaty, fat hillbilly redneck pokes his bug-eyed, toothless face out of the shadows and reminds me that we have a long way to go...


'Redneck Shop' creates dispute in S.C.
By KATRINA A. GOGGINS, Associated Press Writer

LAURENS, S.C. - A black civil rights activist is fighting to close a store that sells KKK robes and T-shirts emblazoned with racial slurs. David Kennedy is confident he can make it happen. After all, he says he owns the building.

Since 1996, the Redneck Shop has operated in an old movie theater that, according to court records, was transferred in 1997 to Kennedy and the Baptist church he leads.

"Our ownership puts an end to that history as far as violence and hatred, racism being practiced in that place and also the recruiting of the Klan," Kennedy said. "This is the same place that we had to go up into the balcony to go to the movies before the Klan took it. So there's a lot of history there."

But legal documents also indicate that the man who runs the store, 62-year-old John Howard, is entitled to operate his business in the building until he dies. Now the dispute may go to court.

Kennedy, 54, has led protests outside the store since it opened but said he's never been able to close it because of the agreement that Howard can run the shop for life.

The reverend envisions the building as a potential future home for his New Beginnings Missionary Baptist Church, which now meets in a double-wide trailer.

Kennedy claims he can't even visit his own property because Howard won't let him in when he appears in the door. But that didn't happen during a recent visit with an Associated Press reporter and photographer.

"Reverend Kennedy, where you been hiding?" Howard shouted when the door opened.

Inside the store, hooded Klan robes hang on the same rack as the racist T-shirts. Pictures of men, women and children in Klan clothing and pamphlets tell a partial history of the organization.

Howard used to own the whole building. When his store first opened, he said, people threw rocks at his windows, spit in his doorway and picketed. A month later, a man intentionally crashed his van through the front windows.

"If anything turns people off, they shouldn't come in here. It's not a thing in here that's against the law," Howard said, adding that he was once the KKK's grand dragon for South Carolina and North Carolina.

To blacks, Kennedy said, the store is a reminder of this region's painful past, which includes the lynching of his great, great uncle by a white mob.

The town of Laurens, about 30 miles southeast of Greenville, was named after 18th century slave trader Henry Laurens.

Some street addresses are still marked with the letter "C" that once designated black homes as "colored." Racial tension was heightened in recent years when two white female teachers were sentenced for having sex with male students — all of them black.

Kennedy has a long history of fighting racial injustice. He protested when a South Carolina county refused to observe the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, and he helped lobby to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse dome.

When people in the region allege racism, he rallies attention to the cause. A walk through the neighborhood where he was born shows that he seems a stranger to no one.

"Hey Rev," one man says as he strolls by.

"Pump it up," Kennedy responds with the phrase he uses at his protests.

Mary Redd, who lives across from the house where Kennedy was born, said blacks know to contact the pastor with their problems.

"And he helps them out," added neighbor Deborah Cheeks.

Kennedy said progress has always been slow to come to Laurens.

"There are two powers in the world: the mind and the sword," he said. "In the long run, the sword is defeated by the mind. I want to destroy the concept of hatred."

Courtesy - Part 1

Courtesy - Part 1
Tim Long

With the ease of use of email, texting, and cell phones, why is it so difficult for some people to respond to messages? Before you think it, I'm busy too, and receive a hundred (or more) emails a day. Last month I had 1200 text messages! I respond to every single legitimate note or message.

It's even more frustrating after sending a few emails to someone with no response, then see them somewhere and ask, "Did you get my emails?" And his response is, "Oh, yeah. I was going to respond to those later today." Rrriiiiggght.

Don't bother commenting on this post, because I won't respond.

Shark Attacks Rise As Their Population Plummets - What Gives?

Shark Attacks Rise As Their Population Plummets - What Gives?
Tim Long

I read this article yesterday (bottom of this post). Even though the title is somewhat of a dichotomy, the statement is true and makes sense. Anyone who knows me, knows that one of my fears for the world is over population of humans. I remember in October 1996 when we (the world) hit the six billion mark. It was a dark day for me and one that I had been dreading since I began to understand what population and over population meant when I was young.

So, you put more humans in the waters where sharks live, hunt, breed, and do whatever else they do and you're going to increase the chances of attacks. I don't abide by the word "attack". "Mistake" or "provoked defense" is more suitable. In the following photo you can see the shark (in its natural habitat) sharing the same space with eighteen humans. Accidents are bound to occur.But if the shark population is decreasing, why are the "attacks" increasing? One may ask.

Shallow waters are where sharks (the great sharks like Tigers, Whites, Bull, Reef, etc.) spend time, so even with diminished numbers, they are still congregating in the same proximity as humans.

It's really ironic. As the article points out, there was ONE human fatality in 2007 resulting from an encounter with a shark, which, I'm certain received ample press. This article states that 38 million sharks are killed by humans EVERY year. I believe the numbers to be about double that actually.

I realize not many people, at least who I know, care or think about the well being of sharks or marine life in general, but it leaves a lump in my throat and a sadness like a dull ache in my chest every time I think about it, which is often. One of my biggest regrets in life is not pursuing a marine biology degree. I've been enthralled by the ocean and sharks, especially, since the summer when I turned eight years old.

For anyone who's interested in gaining a better insight into the ocean, its health, and management of it, I recommend Carl Safina's book Song For The Blue Ocean It is one of the most beautifully written books on the topic that I've come across. Content aside, it was very enjoyable. Carl Safina's heart and feelings surge throughout every page.

Now for the article:

Shark attacks increase worldwide

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- The number of worldwide shark attacks overall increased from 63 in 2006 to 71 in 2007, continuing a gradual upswing over the past four years, according to figures released by LiveScience on Wednesday.

Because the global population of humans is growing fast, so more people go to the beach, said George Burgess, curator of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

And nowadays, beach-goers do not just go for a dunk. They hang out in shallow water (home for many sharks) for long periods of time to surf, windsurf, boogie-board, kayak and dive, he said while explaining the cause for the rise in shark attacks.

"There are more people in the water than there ever have been," Burgess told LiveScience. "We can pretty much predict that next year there will be even more attacks. Even if shark populations are declining, which we know they are, even in a local situation if populations have been depleted, there is still a probability of getting an attack."

Sharks are disappearing from the world's oceans due to over fishing, says Julia Baum, a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California.

Humans killed an estimated 38 million sharks for their fins each year, Baum said. That's as many sharks as the entire human populations of the 35 largest cities in the United States. Other estimates are nearly double that.

Some nations have banned shark fishing, but the bans are hard to enforce. And it is a free-for-all in international waters, Baum said.

A study conducted by Baum showed all great shark species in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean have declined by more than 50 percent since the early 1970s.

The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing to effectively close down much of the coastal large shark fisheries, Baum said.

Runaway Thaw of Greenland's Ice Sheet

This is turning into a doomsday blog.....or just a place for me to whine a bit.

Any moron who thinks global warming is a myth or overstated, needs to get his face out of the potato chip bag and start reading some.

Here's an article I came across today. I try not to search these things out because it just makes me feel sadder.

OSLO (Reuters) - Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland's ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday.

They urged governments to be more aware of "tipping points" in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon.

"Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change," the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature.

"The greatest and clearest threat is to the Arctic with summer sea ice loss likely to occur long before, and potentially contribute to, Greenland ice sheet melt," they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty," they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel.

A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, could set off a dieback of the rainforest.

"Many of these tipping points could be closer than we thought," lead author Timothy Lenton, of the University of East Anglia in England, told Reuters of the study.

Other sudden changes linked to climate change, stoked by human use of fossil fuels, included a dieback of northern pine forests, or a stronger warming of the Pacific under El Nino weather events that can disrupt weather worldwide, they wrote.

A possible greening of parts of the Sahel and the Sahara, if monsoon rains in West Africa were disrupted, was one of the few positive abrupt shifts identified by the scientists.

CLOSER

Even a moderate warming could set off a thaw of Greenland's ice sheet that could then vanish in 300 years -- raising sea levels by 6 meters (20 ft), or 2 meters a century and threatening coasts, Pacific islands and cities from Bangkok to Buenos Aires.

The U.N. Climate Panel foresees a rise in world sea levels ranging up to about 80 cms this century and reckons that a thaw of Greenland would take hundreds of years longer.

The new study said a disappearance of Arctic sea ice in summertime could happen in coming decades -- earlier than projected by the U.N. panel. That could stoke further global warming as dark water soaks up more heat than ice and snow.

The report also identified risks such as damage to northern pine forests -- widely exploited by the pulp industry -- because of factors such as more frequent fires and vulnerability to pests in warmer, drier conditions.

But it played down some other fears, such as of a runaway melt of Siberian permafrost, releasing stores of methane which is a powerful greenhouse gas.

And it said a shutdown of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean that brings warm water north to Europe "appears to be a less immediate threat."

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on:

http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)