please don't get insecticide in my face next time. a reasonable reaction to a gross overreaction.

well, the unpredictable weather continued today.

it rained for near about 10 minutes this morning, then the warm sun burst through the clouds and immediately began drying things out once more.

yet, as i walked to my car, a government vector control truck drove right in front of me, and sprayed copious amounts of insecticide into the approximately 1'x3' 1/4 deep puddle i was about to walk through to get to the driver door. the amount of poison they sprayed was hardly relative to the size of the puddle, but more like comparable to the size of the puddle.

seriously?

i was gone for an hour and a half, and the puddle was dry when i got back.

it makes me wonder if this happens every time it sprinkles and i just don't notice it because they were driving so slow that their engine was silent, and if they hadn't engulfed me in a mist of ddt, as they almost ran me over, i wouldn't have even known they were there. that is unless i had been previously aware that the foamy surface of the puddles in my neighborhood was caused not by some anomaly of nature, but instead by the abundance of toxic chemicals that had been blasted into them.

all down the road they went, as i was stuck behind their slow moving rig for a block and a half, spraying anything remotely damp with an overkill of pest killer.

now, this is a far cry from the time i was in guadalajara, and saw red flashing lights, and heard blaring emergency horns. as i looked out the window which contained no glass, just a rickety shutter with quite a few slats missing, i saw a huge tanker truck with the vector control markings, and haz-mat emblems spraying insecticide from two fire hoses (one on either side) all over the streets and buildings, creating a fog of noxious deadly chemicals.

why?!

why would you draw so much attention to yourselves like that?!

of course i'm going to open my window and stick my head out when i hear what sounds like a tornado warning system going through a concrete mixer, and see flashing red lights outside my window, and frankly people sticking their heads out of open windows is the last thing you want to happen when you're doing something like blanketing the entire community with deadly poison. just ask the people of yolo county.

one muggy summer day in davis, CA, the radio warned me of an airdrop ddt sweep in the county. this to kill those pesky mosquitoes, ooh, they itch somethin' fierce.

the spray is perfectly safe, coos the voice, but here comes the legal: yolo county vector control advises citizens to stay inside their houses or places of business during the spray, with doors, windows, and vents closed tight. yolo county vector control also recommends keeping anything that you eat with or off of in closed cupboards or drawers until the spray has settled. yolo county vector control would also like to remind you to thoroughly wash any and all fruits or vegetables before eating.

well, that all sounds perfectly safe to me.

look, when i'm on my deathbed, probably in a couple of years, probably with some mysterious carcinogenic disease caused by exposure to modern society's advanced techniques for preserving quality of life, i doubt i'm going to look back on those mosquito free summers and think, "wow, dead at 30, but it was all worth it to avoid a few pesky mosquito bites."

but since this lowly little ol' blog isn't going to stop the powers that be from doing idiotic things like this on a regular basis, can i just make one plea for common sense?

if you have to wear a haz-mat suit just to get anywhere near it, take a little time and do your job cautiously. please don't spray it where i walk (sometimes barefoot, sometimes in shoes that i then wear into my house), or on my car door handle, or on the grill of my car (where driving will cause the fumes to circulate through the hvac system), or into my bedroom window, or all over the front door of my residence, or all up in my ventilation system where it will then blanket my silverware, flatware, and glassware. as you zip up your tyvek jumper with vinyl gloves and strap on your gas mask nice and tight, try and remember that if you see me walking down the street, or poking my head out of my window, don't spray the pesticides in my face, or all over my body from a foot and a half away!

if the goddamn gardener on the corner can turn off his leaf blower when i ride my bike past, i'd think you could have the courtesy to not accidentally poison me from point blank range.

thanks for nothing, government employee idiots!

sincerely,

someone with half a brain.

the circus seconds the motion for hobo catapult! also, smells cookies, where is that coming from?!

so, a while ago i made a joke about how walnut creek probably shoots their homeless people in the middle of the night and hauls the bodies to oakland so the residents don't have to look at them.

today, i'm doing some research on homelessness, and i come across a blog entry by a fellow from concord who follows the city government's doings and whatnot, and this particular entry was regarding concord's inability to overcome their homelessness problems.

apparently walnut creek and pleasant hill (concord's nutty and agreeable neighbors, respectively) have much better success at keeping their problems under control. "claycord" (the blogger) decided to send letters of inquisition to the mayors of these cities as to how they managed to wrangle their hobos (which, interestingly, and kinda awesomely, is short for HOmeward BOund, and you can never get back the space that fact is now occupying in your brain). mayor sue rainy of walnut creek informs him that the "fresh start" program has been the key to their success. fresh start allows cops to pick up bums (and probably those hipster emo kids too, why not?) and process them through the program which will find out where they came from (where their families live, where they grew up, or their last known residence outside of walnut creek) and give them a one way ticket the fuck out of town, and back to who-gives-a-shit-as-long-as-its-not-walnut creek. 

bravo walnut creek! a more humane way to let the homeless know that you wish they never existed (if their families wanted to, or could, help them, don’t you think they already would be?). 

one of the responses to the blog suggested that concord best walnut creek by installing a hobo catapult.

AWESOME!

i concur, anonymous responder! they could point it at walnut 

creek. even better, they could both get hobo catapults, and have real bum fights (a useful alternative to those petty cash fights). worst case scenario, the janitor at the walnut creek PF changs is scraping some hobo off the window. wait do they have janitors in walnut creek, or do the police just cite the trash and have it bussed to richmond?

another response claimed that when salt lake city got the 2002 olympic bid, they rounded up the bums and gave them all one way bus tickets to vegas.

that's classy like bottled beer (ironically people from salt lake city won’t get that joke due to the near impossibility of purchasing a bottle of beer in utah).

i propose a multi-tiered program utilizing the pre-existing hobo removal tactics. first: we take a page from san francisco's book, and make the bus stops smell like fresh baked cookies, then when all the hobos have congregated, hoping for some hot chocolate chips, we herd them into buses and send them to utah, where they will be given the death penalty for attempting to buy beer. most likely it would be a battle to the death with those given the death penalty for being gay (no holds barred, two men enter, one man leaves, and then is shot on site by a man wearing full body underwear under his clothes. that’s how they roll out there, right?).

i need less time on my hands.