Jaysus jumping on a pogo stick…the morning commute in Huntsville has been crawling through some gnarly thick traffic lately. Back in sixth grade I was sure we’d have a hovercraft in every garage and flying car lanes by now (there ARE some fly-only lanes in the latest Star Wars flicks, but technically they’re in another galaxy, and special effects don’t get me to work faster…)

This isn’t all bad, because I just downloaded a new book from www.audible.com that’s been on my “to read” list for a long time, but it kept getting superseded by others, like Whitley Strieber’s latest, The Grays (hold onto your hat before opening that one!) Anyway, the book I just downloaded is Robert M. Pirsig’s 1974 classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. As I was saying, traffic isn’t all bad because the more jam, the more audio book before getting to work.

But metaphysical glass-half-full cogitation aside, it ain’t gonna get mo’ better soon.

The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) is relocating 4,700 federal jobs from Washington, D.C, to Redstone Arsenal. An equal number of support contractor jobs is expected to arrive. In fact, Colonel John Olshefski, garrison commander at the arsenal, says the region should prepare for a total influx of up to 20,000 defense-related jobs. Add the service jobs required to support that many people (fast food, retail, teachers, doctors, plumbers, hookers, lone sharks…) and you get ripple-effect vertigo.

The fed moves don’t have to be complete till 2011, but most of the influx will happen over the summer of 2007 and 2008. The effects are already being felt. For instance, 600 new kids in the county school system this year. I mean, things haven’t even got rolling yet, and thirty-something portable classrooms have taken up a huge chunk of the parental visitation parking lot at Monrovia Elementary–a parking lot that should be expanding is actually shrinking.

“I don’t think people have really grasped the significance of what’s about to happen here,” says Bob Harrison, Madison County Commissioner. Jaysus jumping on a pogo stick…

And that doesn’t even take into account all the immigrants pouring in from Central America! :-)

Now for perspective: over 30,000 children starved to death yesterday; slow traffic isn’t really that big of a deal.

Ask what Superhero I would like to be
And my brain clock warps to 1983
Stanislav Petrov–pay respect to that name
Because he’s sitting in the Saved-Your-Ass Hall of Fame

On September 26, just before midnight
Something freaky showed up on the commie satellite
The comrades got a whiff of their bunker underwear
When the early warning network showed birds in the air

Five Minuteman arrows rising over their heads
Special D from Montana, buttons blinking red
With no time to conjecture Petrov was taken aback
But he had to give it up or launch a counterattack

One button said START, and it was FUBAR straits
Five thousand missiles pointed at the United States
His legs were like cotton and his hands were numb
Petrov could only wonder how a jack could be so dumb

With a helter-skelter room shouting in his ear
To fire at the Yanks before mushrooms appeared
Petrov took a step back with polar ice in his veins
And we all owe him thanks because we still remain

He wasn’t pink-slipped, and he wasn’t transferred
And he didn’t get a medal, and the freemen never heard
That a screwball computer almost lost the whole jake
And you might think the world would get a clue from this mistake

But the forest of inspection grows leaders that are dense
Seems they want to fight first, screw the world at our expense
It’s a new playground where the kids are philosophic
And the headmaster bully has a punch that’s catastrophic

–Jocee Kipp

Former navy pilot Paul Johnson once told me the scariest thing he’d done was an instrument-only landing on an aircraft carrier at night with lights out, but that was before he started regularly landing his 1941 J-3 Cub on top of a moving 1969 Pontiac Catalina.

But even that wasn’t enough. Now, he’s gone and pushed the envelope of hot-rod culture by driving a 1979 Econoline with…what else? A jet engine.

He also installed a parachute in the back, because once the candle’s lit…that baby moves!

Check out his website: Wright Attitudes

I ran into JJ Wigelsworth at Phuket’s Thai restaurant this morning, out by the Providence subdivision. He dashed off this poem on a napkin and said I could post it:

     Evening

     Evening was the time for dreams
     Inviting lush ladies and lords
     Swishing through electric gardens
     Hijacking elevators to the glittering vault
     Ransacking booze, raping hope
     Improvising and denying madness
     Colliding with fate, stirring destiny
     Relenting to enjoin as gods

If you aren’t familiar with JJ, his full name is Jamar Jasper Wigelsworth. He’s an iconic English composer and singer of popular music, best known as the founding member of The JopDeBops in which he and Bryce Burris formed the massively successful Jasper-Burris songwriting partnership throughout the 1990s.

Wigelsworth’s songwriting was often full of pain and hope. His melodies were at times beautiful and at times dark. Wigelsworth’s lyrics reflected his personal and career demands, philosophical outlook, his unease with his fame and current events. He and Burris popularised the return of analog effects and melody in rock music.

Through television and in films, such as Two Coins (1999) and by press conferences and interviews, JJ revealed his rebellious, iconoclastic nature and quick, irreverent wit. Wigelsworth channeled his fame and penchant for controversy into his work as a peace activist, artist, and author. He currently resides in semi-seclusion on a twenty-acre goat farm he bought near Huntsville, Alabama.