There are certain immutable laws of nature and human behavior.

One is that when I’m not absolutely certain of a word, I’ll look it up in the dictionary, and this time, I’m really, really glad I did, because I can always use a good laugh early in the morning.  I found this treasure:  Immutable:  not mutable.)

Back to my point.

An object in motion tends to remain in motion.  Hot stuff cools down. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Teenage girls cannot write without using lots of exclamation marks!!!!  Ha ha!!  Teenage boys think that passing gas is funny.  And they never will outgrow that belief, no matter how old they get. Ha ha!! 

And thus it is that we can operate in our predictable world, knowing not to step out in front of speeding cars, and knowing that insulation in our attics will save us money and knowing that this, too, shall pass, ha ha!!

It is those events that fall outside of those immutable laws that take us by surprise.

If you have ever visited London, England where the laws mandate driving on the wrong side of the road, you know what I mean.  You are walking down the street and approach an intersection, wishing to cross. You automatically look to the left to make sure there is no approaching car in the lane next to the curb, and, finding none, you step off the curb and get squashed flat by a double-decker bus, coming from the right.

This, being bad for tourism and diplomacy, has caused the Londoners to paint on their sidewalks at intersections, the words:  Look Right You Yankee Doodle Idiots.   What they should do is save their paint and drive on the proper, or right, side of the road, pip pip.

As regular readers of this column cannot have escaped knowing, I take a bicycle ride every Saturday morning with a group of friends, and we have, over the years, experienced some of the most amazing things, ranging from cattle drives coming down the road at us to finding things in the road including a highland sheep, a carp, tools, clothing, snakes, frogs, deer, Osage oranges and other fruit, enraged and crazy homicidal drivers,  snarling dogs, Amish buggies, bicycles ridden by ghosts named Dr. Dude, and on and on and on.

Just the other day we were tooling down the road minding our own business when we saw a man standing in the middle of the road ahead of us.  A car passed us and the man began waving a flag to stop the car.  Just as we rode up behind the now stopped car, a bulldozer in a field pushed a gigantic oak tree, and it fell right across the road in front of the car and inches from the flagman. KAWHUMP!!!!

(That is a totally proper use of exclamation marks.)

The ground shook.  In fact, Doctors Routemeister, Megahertz and Loggerhead, being slight of stature, all were lifted, bicycles and all, into the air an inch or so by the shock of the impact.  Doctors Ciderman, Reagent and Yours Truly remained rooted to the ground more firmly than the giant oak. Immutable Laws of Nature.  Alas. Cotton-pickin’ Isaac Newton.

The wisdom of posting a flagman in the middle of the road to halt traffic had become, in less than one second, evident. What would have been even better would have been to put the flagman about 200 yards up the road to decrease the likelihood of causing heart attacks, but, of course, this would have required TWO flagmen, one for each direction, rather than one point-man-flagman standing in the cross-hairs where he could stop traffic in both directions.

If we assume that the flagman was earning, say, $15/hour, it is clear that the logging company saved a great deal of money by having one flagman instead of two.

                            by Jim Whitehouse

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