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tax breaks for the unborn
Tuesday, September 25 2007
Every now and then an idea occurs to me that concisely captures the absurdity of some ongoing outrage (usually a Republican talking point or "we have a hammer and everything is a nail" solution). Such an idea is like a cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, whose concision with the presentation of complicated ideas is legend. Today's idea amounts to "Stop abortion: tax breaks for the unborn." The idea is to tie together the absurdit obsessions of the two wings of the Republican party: the pro-life nutjobs with their fetishizing of disgusting embryoes, and the "let's have the rich make all the decisions" taxcut nutjobs. If tax cuts work so well (indeed, Bush advocates them as a fix for the health care crisis), why not extend them to the unborn, thereby allowing them to, I don't know, bribe their way out of being aborted.
I've decided to add electricity to my new woodshed, partly to aid in fetching wood in the dark and partly to provide energy for an electric chainsaw. It seemed like a fairly easy feature to add, so why not?
To get electricity to the woodshed required digging a trench and burying special buriable cable. But the house is cut off from the yard above it by a stone path set upon a deep concrete foundation, so I had to route the cable around this path. It turned out that there was a void between two of the steps leading down to the Stick Trail that I could thread the cable through, but beyond that I'd have to go through first an enormous pile of branches and then a thick tangle of tree roots. The branch pile proved easy to bisect using a bowsaw and a hatchet, but the roots made for more of a barrier than expected. I didn't want to cut through them (they're large and they stabilize a steep hillside), so I tunneled beneath them as much as possible. But it turns out that trees (at least hemlocks and pines) like to run their roots along the surfaces of rocks such that there is no dirt available for tunneling. In two places I had to solve this problem by drilling through the native bluestone with a masonry bit.
I didn't just use a mattock, a power drill, and a hand spade for digging. I did much of it with my bare hands, and by the time I'd laid the cable I'd wrecked a couple fingernails and had painful injuries on several cuticles. I also had a couple puncture wounds on my right hand from where I accidentally brushed into the bowsaw as it lay atop the bisected pile of branches.
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