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Transcript

4-panel comic by War and Peas.

Panel 1: A waiter carries a martini on a tray toward a green car seated at a bar table and clears his throat, “Ahem…”

Panel 2: He offers the drink, “This is from the gentleman at the bar.”

Panel 3: A hypnotised-looking deer sits at the bar nursing a glass of wine.

Panel 4: The car’s headlight-eyes droop wearily as it groans, “Not again.”

    • OS2Warp@lemmy.zip
      3·
      9 days ago

      One of my favorite copypastas:

      Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.

      I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn’t there the moment before. I looked down: “Rail? WTF?” and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.

      Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife’s pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC’s pulling, and 2 Dash-9’s pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!

      Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?

      A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.

  • arrow74@lemmy.zip
    7·
    9 days ago

    Has anyone noticed that they’ve been having far less close calls with deer while driving?

    My theory is they’ve begun to evolve to not jump in front of cars. Which makes sense since getting obliterated by a car is certainly a selective pressure

    • groet@feddit.org
      82·
      9 days ago

      Every year the forests get smaller and more fragmented. More land gets turned into lawns, and fields or covered with concrete. The air and the ground water gets poisoned. The native plants replaced by invasives.

      Most likely, there are just fewer deer.

      • naticus@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        Same, I have a small area on the edge of town with a road that only locals use which cuts through a lot of trees. All the older deer will wait and are rarely a hazard. All the fawns though? Gotta be extra careful of them.

    • Doomsider@lemmy.world
      1·
      9 days ago

      I lived in SE Idaho and the amount of roadkill was staggering. Without fail everyday on the way to work I would see new deer carcasses and other assorted roadkill.

      I live in Alaska now and I had a deer standing on the side of the highway suddenly decide to cross right before I reached it. I slammed on the breaks and hit if going about 15 miles an hour. It went directly underneath my rig without my tires hitting it and got back up and ran off. Too close of a call and I hope it was not seriously injured.

      • arrow74@lemmy.zip
        2·
        9 days ago

        Interesting, coming from rural Georgia we used to have to dodge deer all through the fall in my childhood. Slamming on brakes was a common occurrence. But when I got older it became rare. I traveled much of the state for work and during “peak” seasons with much less issues.

        Georgia does have a much higher population density than Idaho and Alaska. Meaning deer would be under more pressure to adapt to avoiding cars

  • M137@lemmy.today
    4·
    9 days ago

    Here’s something absolutely everyone should know:

    If you ever have an animal running on the road (that you can see in time), slow down and dim or turn off your lights. They’ll run into the forest almost immediately. When the lights are on they are just trying to get away from them by running in with the lights at their back, they don’t know that the lights are moving and that they won’t follow them.