jhetley: (Default)
jhetley ([personal profile] jhetley) wrote2004-07-29 08:10 pm

Evening wildlife report

Deer out at the airport on the evening bike ride, doe and two fawns. Cute as all hell, but I wouldn't want to be goosing a loaded KC135 for takeoff and meet one of them in the middle of the runway....

Speaking of transportation and our national security, couple of friends of mine were just traveling and had some uniformed doofus ask them for a "camera permit" when they tried to take photos in a train station. Happened twice, no warning signs posted or anything. Shades of Stalinist Russia, where possession of an unregistered typewriter was evidence of counterrevolutionary terror.

15 miles, 1:01:30

[identity profile] pernishus.livejournal.com 2004-07-29 05:27 pm (UTC)(link)
I might also point out that Soviet border formalities certainly did not accomplish their purposes -- at least judging on the basis of the ease with which I brought out microfilmed samizdat materials in February, 1980 -- at the height of the furor over the cancellation of US participation in the Olympics following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

[identity profile] pernishus.livejournal.com 2004-07-29 05:28 pm (UTC)(link)
I am sorry to report that I have had considerably more trouble with various unpleasantnesses at the US-Canadian border than I ever had entering or leaving the USSR even during the darkest of the Brezhnev years. And how well I remember my self-righteousness when Soviet rules about photographing bridges were explained to me at the orientation session before my first trip there in 1972. "How silly they are," I thought at the time... I'm sorry to see that my fellow citizens are allowing equally silly things to be done with their country... Prolongued residence abroad certainly provides one with perspective, whatever else one may derive from it.

[identity profile] jhetley.livejournal.com 2004-07-29 05:35 pm (UTC)(link)
I've heard multiple horror stories about the border here in Maine, especially in the split communities where you have to cross the border to go to church or get your mail and the nearest store or gas station in the US is fifty miles away over bad, bad roads. And the PTBs are playing hell with permanent cross-border workers, like the hospital up in The County where about half the nursing staff live in New Brunswick. Then there are places like Campobello Island, where the only year-round access to Canadian territory is through the USA.