I don’t really know how to tell my non-Tennessee readers just how ridiculoso this headline is:
Moonshine and marijuana found in Cocke County
And in more breaking news…
Pope confirmed Catholic
Shocking new evidence: bear poo found in woods.
Even the discovery of a stash of oxycodone along with the grass and whiskey isn’t in the least surprising. Perhaps if the police had bothered to check the back yard they might have found the chop shop and the fighting cock houses.
Regular readers will know I do like to garden. I’m pleased to say my fingers (UK) and thumb (US) are pretty green – I have a nice depth and breadth of knowledge for an amateur gardener. My parents, though, will probably be pleased to note that I know almost nothing about growing marijuana.
I don’t know what kind of growing conditions marijuana needs. But just looking at it – and knowing where it grows, I’d guess it needs heat, more light than you’d find in an average basement, and a fair bit of moisture. But maybe not. Despite a bad growing season for most things in Tennessee this year, maybe Cannabis is more drought tolerant than I thought – cause it’s been a bumper year for dope in Cocke County.
Tennessee Highway Patrol helicopter pilot, working with the Governor’s Task Force for Marijuana Eradication, spotted marijuana plants in a Cocke County cornfield Monday valued at half a million dollars.
…
It is the largest harvest in Cocke County this year and perhaps the largest marijuana eradication in Tennessee this summer. The more than 45-hundred plants, ranging in height from eight to 15 feet tall, were collected and taken to the Cocke County Highway Department, where they were destroyed Monday evening.
William at Nashville is Talking wonders about the consequences of the Cocke County crackdown:
in a year of unprecedented drought where traditional crops have failed, how many rural farmers in Cocke Co., one of the poorest counties in TN, will not be able to feed their families?
…or indeed keep their families pacified.
gephyrophobia (pronounced: JEFF-i-ro-FO-bee-uh) “bridge phobia”
At a conference last summer, I met a woman who had bridge phobia. Bridges and overpasses. She could not drive over a bridge. She was pretty open about it. She was talking about it in the bar with other delegates gathered round. I guess she couldn’t deny it, because at the same conference the previous year she had a team of people working out how she could drive from the venue back to her home without crossing a bridge. It was apparently a lengthy and circuitous journey – crossing the breadth of England – but no bridges.
On the way to the seminar apparently she’d suffered a trauma when she’d come to some kind of large flyover outside Birmingham. She’d had to stop her car on the motorway hard shoulder and just wait – I assume trembling and trying to work up the courage to drive across. Some kind soul stopped and after a little discussion and perhaps a tearful admission, this young fellow drove her car across the bridge.
Now, how’s that for a phobia? You can’t drive over a bridge, but you’ll let a random person drive your car with you in it. (Coincidentally, she emailed me not too long ago with an opening line – “I don’t know if you remember me…” and I thought to myself: Of course, I do – you’re the bridge freak. )
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Apparently, she’s not alone. Loads of people have bridge phobia. According to an ABC News article:
Bridge phobia is more common than many may think; more than 4,000 people per year relinquish control of their vehicles and let state officers drive them across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland, for example.
“Their fear is not that the bridge is going to collapse; their fear is that they will get halfway across and freeze or drive off the bridge,” says Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorder Association of America
Although, apparently bridge failure or the thought of bridge failure can trigger a lifelong anxiety, one London sufferer of gephyrophobia said:
His fear of bridges began suddenly when, in his early teens, he was walking across a footbridge over a stream near his hometown of Cookham in the Thames Valley “Halfway across a friend mentioned that bridges were dangerous and could collapse. I had never thought about it before, but suddenly became very nervous as I became conscious about the danger”.
Some friend….thanks, buddy.
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Of course, a phobia is supposed to be an irrational fear. But now, following the horrific bridge collapse in Minnesota, the phobia doesn’t seem quite so irrational and a bridge doesn’t seem like a thing that poses no actual danger.
And there are loads of creaky ol’ bridges (i.e. structurally deficient) in the US. Via TGW:
Scores of ‘Deficient’ Bridges | 9:44 AM The Department of Transportation’s 2005 judgment that the bridge was “structurally deficient” has emerged as one of the most prominent signs of a missed signal of an impending disaster. But there are many, many more bridges with that rating, according to a 2006 count by The Federal Highway Administration. Minnesota alone has 1,135 bridges on the list of “Deficient Bridges,” and other states have thousands more. Check your state against the “SD” column on this spreadsheet.
According to the very long list of crumbling infrastructure, Tennessee has 1,324 structurally deficient bridges
You know how NASA has had to admit that sometimes the astronauts are flying high? And they just let them go ahead because it would cost ka-jillions to scrub a flight.
But the thing is, they have B-team astronauts, or at least they used to. One of my college professors was an astronaut also-ran. He was selected and trained and all and they probably fitted him for a suit with a bubble head helmet – but he never went up.
If I were the a B-team astronaut, ready and waiting for my chance, the day the A-team astronaut got gastric flu or something and I found out that they were letting A-listers fly drunk, well I would be really pissed.
It’s true. Twelve US Senators harbor a dark secret. I know that it’s true because I saw it in black and white. Some canny reporters blew that story wide open. Phil Gramm, sneaky bastard that he is, couldn’t even muster a denial in the face of the stone cold facts.
“It’s all true,” it quotes Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, as saying. “I’m amazed
that it’s taken you so long to find out.”
Only one paper was brave enough to tell all.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Going where no congressional critics have gone before, a
supermarket tabloid contends that 12 U.S. senators are space aliens. And many
of them are "admitting" their otherworldly origins.
The Weekly World News.
And now they’re closing down. And why? Why is obvious.
The Bush Administration knew they were getting too close.
We can’t handle the truth.
——
Hat Tip to Joe Powell. And I still have my WWN t-shirt which proves that 12 US Senators were space aliens.
UPDATE: Someone might be willing to take on the gaping void that the Weekly World News will leave.
The Vol Abroad 