Ah, democracy; the god that failed. It turns out that simply opening entry into the political class to the entire society doesn't actually make the political class less dangerous.
My brother and his gaggle of four toe-headed (extremely blond) children are constantly touched and photographed in Macau; the mere fact that he has four kids is also subject to astonishment. People hold up four fingers and look puzzled.
I like that a lot better. Don't get me wrong; I like scantily clad lasses, but something about cheesecake heroines and bulletproof nudity rub me the wrong way.
Relative to the bus, I would assume it appears to lurch "backwards" since we are connected to the moving bus, and the balloon is relatively free. Would this be relative acceleration towards the back of the bus? Let's go look at the answer.
The longer version is that we got off a train we had hopped from Spokane to Cheney and quickly realized that we'd leaped a bit early. We went to get back on and a cop waiting for the train to pass flicked his lights and flagged us over.
We ran.
Through another train headed the other way, into a barn and out the other end, into (and through) a swamp, we realized that we had stirred up a hornet's nest because now there were four patrol cars running code up and down the road.
When we left the marsh, there was just open field right next to the road, so we crawled on our bellies along the berm of a drainage ditch. The cops passed several times up and down the road but never got out of the car, and it was dusk so we thought we'd got away clean.
In reality, we had crawled into someone's backyard. We were so focused on the road ten feet away that we didn't bother looking ahead. A woman was standing on her deck looking at us like we were something she'd stepped in.
Cheney is not a large town, so of course, she know the cop who had honked at us and had already called in. We got a grilling by the side of the road, and they took my bitchin' Rambo knife that I had bought for $5 at the fair. They called our parents (I was 14) and told us to take the first bus back to Spokane and not come back. This was back when police and parents had some discretion.
Nowadays I'd have probably be automatically charged with a host of offenses, and had a very different life. I certainly wouldn't have ended up being an MP in my twenties.
The last time I hopped a train, it led to me running from police knee deep in swamp water, with a makeshift bandage around my bloody knee, which I smashed along the tracks because I grabbed one rung too low as the train went by. Ah, memories. Do ride the train; it builds character.
Yup, I get it now.
The longer version is that we got off a train we had hopped from Spokane to Cheney and quickly realized that we'd leaped a bit early. We went to get back on and a cop waiting for the train to pass flicked his lights and flagged us over.
We ran.
Through another train headed the other way, into a barn and out the other end, into (and through) a swamp, we realized that we had stirred up a hornet's nest because now there were four patrol cars running code up and down the road.
When we left the marsh, there was just open field right next to the road, so we crawled on our bellies along the berm of a drainage ditch. The cops passed several times up and down the road but never got out of the car, and it was dusk so we thought we'd got away clean.
In reality, we had crawled into someone's backyard. We were so focused on the road ten feet away that we didn't bother looking ahead. A woman was standing on her deck looking at us like we were something she'd stepped in.
Cheney is not a large town, so of course, she know the cop who had honked at us and had already called in. We got a grilling by the side of the road, and they took my bitchin' Rambo knife that I had bought for $5 at the fair. They called our parents (I was 14) and told us to take the first bus back to Spokane and not come back. This was back when police and parents had some discretion.
Nowadays I'd have probably be automatically charged with a host of offenses, and had a very different life. I certainly wouldn't have ended up being an MP in my twenties.