I’m tired of these martyr faking scorpions….

I’m not the only one who saw the story on Yahoo:  "Man OK after airborne scorpion bite".  Aside from the inevitable comparisons to recent Samuel Jackson movies, it was a pretty interesting article.  I would suggest that the author study up on scorpions though — I don’t think that they even have teeth, much less that the man was suffering from "bites" rather than "stings". 

What really interests me, however, is that this was apparently just one of two different "scorpion on a plane" incidents in the last day or two.  Unlike the above report, which concerned a passenger flying from Chicago to Vermont on United Airlines, the Toronto Star article "Scorpion on a plane to Pearson" is about a passenger flying from Costa Rica to Toronto (by way of Miami) aboard American Airlines.  At first glance you’d think that they were misreported versions of the same story, but they clearly are not.

Now, once might just be a glitch in the system, but twice in as many days seems like unwarranted carelessness.  The powers that be would have you believe that no unscreened tubes of shampoo will make it on board American flights, but apparently poisonous arthropods don’t rate the same scrutiny.

The sort of giving that makes me proud

The following article from Pittsburgh’s ABC affiliate is the sort of response to Katrina that I’ve been hoping to see.

There were concerns of the truck being looted or hijacked in hard hit areas, but that is not stopping them.

"We’re
taking down three trucks worth," said driver Matt Hathaway. "It’s a
small dent in the massive destruction down there, but I feel proud to
be able to help somebody that’s less fortunate right now."

I don’t know if this is the logical thing for people to be doing.  It may be that they’ll end up 100 miles out from Orleans and have to coordinate their donations through 10 checkpoints, or even be sent back with full trucks.  However, it makes me proud to know that people from my area are trying to actually put their goods, their efforts, and their bodies where they think they are needed.

I’ve been hearing stories of the folks who have been waiting for 3 days for somebody come by with a bus to pick them up, and thinking about the fact that every city in the country has hundreds of school buses sitting mostly idle.  If I were a bus driver, I like to think that I’d seriously consider grabbing my bus and driving; calling my supervisor after I was on the road to tell him where I’d gone; and turning myself in to anybody who’d care to arrest me for it after I’d done my best to get at least 50 people to safety.

I’m sure that’s a stupid idea, and you can tell me so.  I don’t have a truck to load up with groceries, and I don’t have the skill to drive a bus even if I had one, so I’ll never know whether I’d actually have the guts to do more than talk about it.  But I’m still proud of our hometown grocers who are putting themselves on the front line, and of all the locals who are volunteering housing, and everyone else who are trying to proactively come up with ways in which they can help beyond looking in horror at their TV sets and hoping FEMA gets it right.