My campaign for convincing the world we're normal up here...
...is not going very well, I'm afraid--
I need an icon that skillfully combines "Bwahahahah!" and "WTF?!?!" somehow.
All in this past week,
- the Authorities confiscated an illegal wallaby from an apartment building on my side of town (and no, it wasn't mine, which would have been even weirder I suppose);
-I found out there's a new head shop* right around the corner from where I do my laundry, tucked in between the ticky-tacky-DIY-pottery place and the "family restaurant" and convenience store;
-a guy flying home to Europe ended up in Manchester NH not Manchester, England and complained in local news interview that we didn't have enough pubs (although you can hardly go a block in this city without hitting another bar already!);
-and finally, there's this cute news photo from the town that was hit by the flash-flood last year:
A spider sculpture, created by Bob Taylor, of Alstead, N.H.,
is shown on the bank of Warren Brook in Alstead Monday, June 5, 2006.
The spider was placed on devastated land caused by the October 2005
floods and was put there to add a little levity to an otherwise bad memory.
(AP Photo/Keene Sentinel/Steve Hooper)
Because nothing brightens up a storm-ravaged countryside where people were killed in an unexpected surge of the river than a giant, whimsical, metal black-widow spider.
--Okay, I think the spider is cute, and it would cheer me up a little to come across it I think if I lived in Alstead. But in terms of showing us as not all being escapees from a Lovecraft story, it isn't very helpful, I'm afraid. (Alstead, FYI, is out on the Vermont border and according to the nearest city's website, at one point in the late 1700s seceded from the state and joined VT for a year, which helps explain why Vermonters chipped in to help Alstead after the flood, that bit of cross-border man'chi I talked about. --No, there really isn't anything on the map but trees and the occasional old farmhouse out there. They're not leaving out the small towns at that scale.)
[I promise not to use any of it for buying illegal wallabies over e-bay. Or monkeys.]
* Head shops, for foreign readers, are (usually) small shops which sell bongs over the counter, along with other goods of somewhat culturally dubious or sketchy status. Wait, you say, but isn't smoking marijuana illegal in your country? Isn't even having any illegal? Can't they stop and search you or your house on mere suspicion of your having any? How, then, can it be legal to purchase drug paraphernalia [ominous music] openly in shops dedicated to the same? What about the War On Drugs?
Yes, yes, and yes - and so? There's nothing illegal in this state about selling little squares of roll-your-own-paper - lots of people make their own cigarettes still - or a hookah or a glass pipe; the store owner doesn't know [wink wink] what you're going to do with it, [nudge nudge] as after all s/he has no idea if you're going to hang it up for a quaint folkloric wall decoration, use it to blow really big soap bubbles, smoke perfectly legal tobacco in a cooler-than-cool manner, or ingest illegal substances through it. And everyone knows what is really going on. And no, the police in this town don't afaik stake out our already-existing head shops and tail people home or take pictures of their license plates and use that as a way of catching customers in flagrante delicto. They've got better things to worry about, like the sober drivers who drive like maniacs through the perennial roadworks, or the perfectly legal drunks who get in fights outside pubs. And no, it doesn't really make any sense - except to point up how inconsistent and not-taken-seriously the War On [Some] Drugs is, even by law enforcement, in NH.
In fact, last year, the local headshop downtown (right across from City Hall, two blocks away from the main city police station) had a thief work out his punishment by public penance instead of having him arrested: they gave him the option of standing in front of the store (which police cars pass all the time) holding a cardboard sign written in marker, "I tried to steal from Headlines and got caught" for a couple hours, before sending him off to sin no more. (Nothing said about breaking other laws, of course.) We're very traditional up here.
I need an icon that skillfully combines "Bwahahahah!" and "WTF?!?!" somehow.
All in this past week,
- the Authorities confiscated an illegal wallaby from an apartment building on my side of town (and no, it wasn't mine, which would have been even weirder I suppose);
-I found out there's a new head shop* right around the corner from where I do my laundry, tucked in between the ticky-tacky-DIY-pottery place and the "family restaurant" and convenience store;
-a guy flying home to Europe ended up in Manchester NH not Manchester, England and complained in local news interview that we didn't have enough pubs (although you can hardly go a block in this city without hitting another bar already!);
-and finally, there's this cute news photo from the town that was hit by the flash-flood last year:
A spider sculpture, created by Bob Taylor, of Alstead, N.H.,
is shown on the bank of Warren Brook in Alstead Monday, June 5, 2006.
The spider was placed on devastated land caused by the October 2005
floods and was put there to add a little levity to an otherwise bad memory.
(AP Photo/Keene Sentinel/Steve Hooper)
Because nothing brightens up a storm-ravaged countryside where people were killed in an unexpected surge of the river than a giant, whimsical, metal black-widow spider.
--Okay, I think the spider is cute, and it would cheer me up a little to come across it I think if I lived in Alstead. But in terms of showing us as not all being escapees from a Lovecraft story, it isn't very helpful, I'm afraid. (Alstead, FYI, is out on the Vermont border and according to the nearest city's website, at one point in the late 1700s seceded from the state and joined VT for a year, which helps explain why Vermonters chipped in to help Alstead after the flood, that bit of cross-border man'chi I talked about. --No, there really isn't anything on the map but trees and the occasional old farmhouse out there. They're not leaving out the small towns at that scale.)
[I promise not to use any of it for buying illegal wallabies over e-bay. Or monkeys.]
* Head shops, for foreign readers, are (usually) small shops which sell bongs over the counter, along with other goods of somewhat culturally dubious or sketchy status. Wait, you say, but isn't smoking marijuana illegal in your country? Isn't even having any illegal? Can't they stop and search you or your house on mere suspicion of your having any? How, then, can it be legal to purchase drug paraphernalia [ominous music] openly in shops dedicated to the same? What about the War On Drugs?
Yes, yes, and yes - and so? There's nothing illegal in this state about selling little squares of roll-your-own-paper - lots of people make their own cigarettes still - or a hookah or a glass pipe; the store owner doesn't know [wink wink] what you're going to do with it, [nudge nudge] as after all s/he has no idea if you're going to hang it up for a quaint folkloric wall decoration, use it to blow really big soap bubbles, smoke perfectly legal tobacco in a cooler-than-cool manner, or ingest illegal substances through it. And everyone knows what is really going on. And no, the police in this town don't afaik stake out our already-existing head shops and tail people home or take pictures of their license plates and use that as a way of catching customers in flagrante delicto. They've got better things to worry about, like the sober drivers who drive like maniacs through the perennial roadworks, or the perfectly legal drunks who get in fights outside pubs. And no, it doesn't really make any sense - except to point up how inconsistent and not-taken-seriously the War On [Some] Drugs is, even by law enforcement, in NH.
In fact, last year, the local headshop downtown (right across from City Hall, two blocks away from the main city police station) had a thief work out his punishment by public penance instead of having him arrested: they gave him the option of standing in front of the store (which police cars pass all the time) holding a cardboard sign written in marker, "I tried to steal from Headlines and got caught" for a couple hours, before sending him off to sin no more. (Nothing said about breaking other laws, of course.) We're very traditional up here.