You'll Never Make a Monkey Out of Me!

or: "Charles D, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me!"

This weekend featured the Air and Water Show in good old Chi-Town, and living underneath it for the weekend, has motivated me to travel the 3rd week of August 2006. I can now fully commiserate with anyone who has done time on an aircraft carrier, and thus also camped out beneath a runway.

This event also apparently brought in the best and the brightest crop of tourists and suburbanites to wander aimlessly about my fair home (Sarcasm level: Colossal). Some my find this level of scorn highly unusual in your dear writer, and it is. With very few exceptions, I can usually summon up my basketful of "Minnesota Niceness" and dole out every possible rationalization to avoid being unkind to someone who might be new or maybe just a little off that particular day.

Not this weekend, though. The basket runneth dry, and you have a girl who is quickly losing her faith in science..."Natural Selection" my posterior!

A trip to the Museum of Science and Industry featured an exhausting bike ride of idiots on parade, a clue to everyone that balked about moving out of the way when politely asked "Passing left, please", what you were walking on is a BIKE PATH, it is used for the recreation of the entire City of Chicago and is not your personal property to dump sand or beer or God knows what else on while performing acrobatics or behaviors commonly practiced by a yard full of schoolchildren.... of which you are a long-time retired member!

Two highlighted incidents:

Tha'll Learn Her
Two fairly sloshed fellows ignored my request to move left and continued to swing their cooler, swerving all over the outbound lane. Apparently, pissed at me for still managing to finagle around them, they offered Bosco (who was following me) $5 to throw a beer at me.

Attack of the Flying Rats
Riding back from an unfortunately unsuccessful Museum trip, (it was for all intensive purposes, sold out) the bike path was scrapped in favor of the deserted downtown streets. A tourist crossing one of the bridges decided he could not coexist with a pigeon that was 4 feet away, harmlessly sitting on a curb. The fellow in question proceeded to run screaming at the bird, just as I was passing the intersection and it flew into my wheel. Luckily, my bike, the bird and my person were all okay. I yelled at the guy about the idiocy of such an action and asked if he was trying to cause an accident or get someone/something killed? His reponse "They're just flying rats, no'body miss it."

Grrrr. Snarl. Curses, that large rocks didn't materialize over the former parties in question and remove them from the gene pool. Not that I'd want to return to prehistoric days, but there is something amiss in a world where the natural perpetuation of species is not allowed to reject the terminally stupid. If this was 70 million years AD, they'd be Raptor Rations!

If this entry has left you looking for more maniacal mayhem, there’s always the 2005 Darwins…