You receive an invitation letter from AARP. The waitress at Denny's hands you the Senior Menu. You have more hair growing out of your ears than on top of your head.
The young woman who waits on you at the garden-supply store carries the peat-moss to your car without asking whether you need help.
Considering the global plastic bag ban and the damage of phosphates to the ocean life & eco system im surprised they don't just ration a few shovel fulls into the boot of your car and say how lucky you are to have got in the front of the que. is this a plastic bag ban conspiracy thread in disguise ? Bowesers hair style looks like it could do with a few hundred dollars worth of cheap throw away plastic hair clips to pollute the water ways.
I understand in England they're re-establishing some peat bogs that were drained in Victorian times. I hope other countries do it, too, because it's a very useful product of nature. I'd be happy to have it come in reusable burlap sacks. The time I spent in Ireland, we burned peat for heating and cooking. It came in brick-shaped chunks. The men would shove the whole load off a truck, in a big heap behind the mess hall, and everybody came with sacks to take some back to their quarters.
"Says I to myself what a pity to see such a fine strapping lad fotting turf 'round Tralee" (The Kerry Recruit) Peat bog - the production land of the "useful resource" - may be the least beloved landscape on the planet; and despised, uniquely, by those with the most rather than the least up close and personal experience with it. The northern border of Minnesota was officially surveyed on foot during the winter in straight lines through miles of that misery - which makes the accuracy of the results the notable aspect, rather than the glitch visible in that odd bump on top. One interesting thing about peat is that it can catch fire and burn below ground level - burn for years. Garrison Kieller once made - during a road trip for The Prairie Home Companion radio show, in New York City - a pitch for investing in Minnesota peatland, based on the prices he saw in the garden and house plant suppliers of that town. He pointed out that there were "hundreds of acres" (iirc) of peat for sale at very reasonable prices (the figure he put up was something like ten times the going acre price, and the acreage available orders of magnitude less than one can see in even the bare bones road maps of northern Minnesota, but it still made theoretical overnight billionaires of the bold and canny investors with New York connections who filled the seats). And while the band, most of them with personal experience of peatbog landscape, was building up to incapacitating laughter, the audience appeared to be going quiet, apparently calculating, apparently trying to figure out what the catch was.
That's not Bowser. We're yet to hear his explanation as to why he is using that kid's photo as his avatar. There may be copyright issues, for all I know.
Florida circa early '70s just at dawn the smoke from the underground peat fires in the partially drained everglades wafted o'er the land to the atlantic coast The locals said that it had been burning for years
I once heard a comedian say that you know you're getting old when police officers and mothers with small children start looking young. I long ago stopped wondering if young girls with small children were their sisters or mothers. Now, if they look old enough to be mothers, they're probably the grandmothers. You know you're getting old when young mothers with strollers pass you as if you were standing still. I'm often tempted to ask bus drivers if they're old enough to drive. The best thing about getting old is you can start every sentence with, "When I was your age...."
Draining is the problem. As long as you leave wetlands wet, they can't burn, and peat does runoff or even sewage. Best filter in the world, short of charcoal - and after it's burned, if you let the water back in, it is charcoal.
And they don't dare to punch you, in case you keel over dead, which is nice. But they do feel free to ignore you, keep you waiting, which can be a problematic, since you can't be that far from a bathroom for that long.
