Occupation of Independence

When I got together with a Tucson friend yesterday my first question was about the photo-surveillance cameras used here; then a ticket is mailed to the citizen-criminal. I was concerned about tardy payment penalties being added to the speeding tickets of travelers who only get snail-mail forwarded every month or two. My Tucson friend has indeed gotten a camera-based ticket the past year, and his wife got three. Each was over $200. Hers were at the same intersection, but on different days, which helped her think that they were repeated notices of the same "crime". (She didn't read the dates or times apparently.) She didn't pay all three tickets and got her driver's license suspended. The good news is that the Tucson reich sends somebody to your house before raising the stakes. At another time they called on the telephone. What a relief that was. It keeps the citizen-criminal from being completely at the mercy of snail mail delivery, which alarmed me the

I've only gotten close to an owl once before today, and that was when mountain biking in a ponderosa forest. They are larger and more powerful than I expected. They seem more exotic and menacing than other raptors. So I grinned from ear to ear when a friend walked us over to an owl nest on the southwest side of Tucson. (Gee, maybe I should provide GPS coordinates so readers will have the ultimate in convenience in finding the owl. Isn't that how "RV blogs" are supposed to work?) An impudent Malevolence in the shadows...  

In Tucson yesterday I noticed a sign alerting drivers of photo-enforcement of the rules of the road. As a bicyclist I should probably approve, but I don't have the guts or the foolishness to ride my bicycle on these busy highways anyway, despite all their efforts at putting in shoulders for bicyclists. What happens to a traveler who is caught by one of the surveillance cameras going ten miles per hour over the speed limit? Is a $350 ticket mailed to his mail box in South Dakota or Livingston, TX? There must be a time limit for paying the ticket. What if the traveler only requests his junk mail be forwarded every month or two. Has the speeding ticket now become a $1000 ticket? Does he need to appear in court because the ticket is unpaid? Will he need to hire an attorney? At the end of the year, I wonder how the traveler would categorize that expense? I would put it in the "transportation" category or whatever you call the cost of being mobile. Now please don&#

There are readers of a mild and sanguine disposition who probably think the opinions on this blog are excessively cynical and critical of contemporary American culture. Oh very well, live in your rose-colored dream world, if you must. But let's put your happy-spin to an empirical test: consider this year's winner of the Westminster Dog Show, and tell me that our society hasn't already gone past the tipping point. Photo by Seth Wenig. Of all the weird looking dogs to choose from, did they have to pick one that looks like a rap star?