County Crush

In the modern world, there are many, many things that the curmudgeonly ProfessorRoush does not understand.  Chief among these is the proliferation of late night television ads promoting iPhone and video games such as "Candy Crush."  Growing up in the era of "Pong" and "Space Invader" standalone kiosks, ProfessorRoush never caught the passion then, and subsequently never became addicted to the generations of video and computer games that followed.  Are these TV ads really cost-effective ways to promote the games and make money?   Or are the games themselves just a doomsday plot by nefarious actors, a mass way to engage the masses, similar to the gladiators of Rome?  Does no one else remember a young Ashley Judd acting in Star Trek Next Generation Episode 106,  circa 2002 and titled "The Game"?

Sorry, I'm off on a tangent from my original goal for this blog entry.  This isn't supposed to be about all the things I don't understand.  My original intent before the temporary mental digression was to rant as coherently as possibly about  a specific recent action by the country roadskeepers.   Bear with me, Readers, as I get to the point.

Walking Bella down the road on September 19th, I noted that the wild Liatris punctata clump that I watch for near the road and that I'd written about previously, had bloomed once again and was, in fact, proliferating nicely (see photo above and compare with the previous year).  Tall and colorful, and breathtakingly beautiful, it came complete with some pale yellow Clouded Sulphur (Colias philodice) butterflies as this photo proves. 

More recently, however, I noted that the county had mowed the roadside with a bushhog, as it does annually to increase traffic visibility near turns and make the roads "neater," an activity that my German genetic heritage regretfully approves of.   This year, however, the county mowed a broader swath, a "two mower-wide path", and in the process cut off all these beautiful Liatris clumps before they could form seed.  Please take a moment of silence here for this elimination of beauty from the prairie and mourn as well for the butterflies and bees deprived of food.  Dear County, was that act of environmental fascism really necessary?  Ozymandias, King of Kings, gaze on what you destroyed!

Thankfully, on a brighter note, even a two mower-wide swath didn't reach these fledgling Liatris further down the road.  I can only hope to see these mature and spread across the untouched prairie of our neighborhood.

What's my purpose here?  In a broad sense, it is to write again that, as always, nature is better left alone and I'm happier when it is.  And also I recognize that perhaps, just perhaps, ProfessorRoush doesn't fit so well in the "modern" world.