Dexter Iowa Community Site

Consider this quote from Abe Lincoln

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

     Sometimes I have the feeling that we aren’t all playing with a full deck. Lately there have been a few news stories that have made me chuckle under my breath and wonder what people are thinking. Since we seem to have more than our share of scandal and ugly news lately, I felt that this week we should sit down and share a few of the funnier things I’ve read lately.

    We start with a Massachusetts man who should be elected king and have a parade held in his honor. After 35 years of paying the mortgage on his home, he made his last payment in pennies. Sixty-Two Thousand to be exact. You and I both have owed money to someone and wished that we had the cahonies to pull off a stunt of this magnitude. I’m only slightly curious about where he got all those pennies and how he managed to haul 800 pounds worth into the bank to make that final payment.

     Did you happen to catch the news Sunday night where a couple of dudes from out in Oregon got all hopped up on hops and decided to strap their lawn chairs to 300 helium filled party balloons? They were sure their craft would make it to Montana in the grand style of the movie UP! Unfortunately for the duo, they did not complete their Wilderness Ranger badges in meteorology and didn’t understand that cumulonimbus clouds contained hail. Their craft crash landed thirty miles from the start of their adventure.

     Then there is news from Indiana that everyone who is thinking about taking their loved one on one last flight should be aware of. It seems that a gentlemen was flying his grandmother’s ashes home for burial and chose not to “check” her. At security the TSA official opened the urn carrying the ashes spilling “a third of her on the floor”. Sadly the article didn’t state how the ashes were cleaned up or if the man had paid for her seat.

     Finally this week, closer to home, a big “what the heck were you thinking?” goes out to our friends in Cedar Rapids. Their recent “goose round-up” was a great success. Anyone who has worked in an office or spent any time near a pond or lake can certainly understand how pretty a couple sets of Canadian geese can be. Unfortunately, much like Lay’s Potato Chips, you can’t ever just have one, and suddenly your perfectly manicured lawn looks like the parking lot after a Friday night football game. The superior intelligence of our eastern neighbors won out as they rounded up over 350 of the geese in one weekend.

     I know you are saying to yourself, what would you do with that many geese in the back of your pickup? The answer must have come easy to the event organizers as they drove the geese to a wetland near Ames and released them! I am pretty sure that it was some sort of payback for a Cyclone drumming of the Hawkeyes last year. Besides, it’s not like the geese could actually fly back to where they had come from…right Les and Herb?

See you next week….remember, we’re all in this together.