Lewis and Clark and Seaman

I had an epiphany this week. File it under the motto of making lemonade out of lemons. I now travel twenty miles to Saint Charles for work. This is double my former commute. My epiphany came when I realized that I was right next to Missouri’s longest bicycle trail, the Katy. It runs across the state from Illinois to Kansas. It also runs right by my Saint Charles office. After work, I hauled the bike and myself to the Saint Charles trailhead.

I only rode 15 miles and it is a good thing that is all I did, because I barely made it back to the car before my front tire went flat. Upon closer examination, I found that a thorn had wormed its way in-between the treads. When I pulled it out, what little air was left in the tire escaped it. I have heard of the problem with thorn punctures on the Katy, but this was my only firsthand experience with them.

This post’s picture is of the Lewis and Clark statue on the Saint Charles riverfront. They stopped in frontier Saint Charles on their journey of exploration. I did not know the name of the dog, so I googled it. The following was the first entry, “Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery ate 263 dogs while traveling to the Pacific Coast and back, but Lewis’ Newfoundland dog Seaman was never harmed.” Seaman’s name reminded me of Seamus, Mitt Romney’s dog.

The treatment of Seamus on a 1983 family vacation has become a political controversy. Seamus became car sick while riding in a crate on the roof of the car. Romney had to stop when excrement began running down the windows. He stopped at a gas station and hosed off the car, crate and dog. Animal rights activists have complained about Romney’s actions. Newt Gingrich raised this as an issue earlier this year and this week David Axelrod, Obama’s advisor tweaked the Romney campaign by raising the issue again. Romney’s campaign retaliated that young Barack’s Kenyan father had him eat snake, grasshoppers and dog.

Diversions like these will help the political pundits get through the next months until the elections. Crate-gate or the Dog Wars are already getting long in the tooth, if not in dog years, then at least in the daily churning of the political cycle. To this end, I would like to introduce you to what I believe will be the next mock controversy, Diaper-gate.

According to Dan Amira’s New York article, young Mitt was a diaper changing fiend, but once married; he washed his hands of all stinky diapers. He said that they gave him the dry heaves. Ann Romney got all of those from their five sons. I can hear the pundits exclaiming, if he is afraid of a messy diaper, how can we expect him to cleanup stinky messes, both foreign and domestic? Come election night, NBC, CBS and ABC will be jockeying to call the election first. I’ll go on record now that I will call it anytime between now and then, if I ever hear Romney utter the word poopie.