Finally! Real spring. Ignore any snow and sleet you might see. It is an optical illusion. Last year I had daffodils in February. This year, not so much. Finally, this week they are blooming.
My winter pansies met with ill fate in some of the pots. About half survived. I have never lost quite as many as this past year.
It was a rough winter. I would take one like that every year just to get a summer like last summer.
On Wednesday, [Doug] Hughes, a 61-year-old mailman from a small town on Florida’s Gulf Coast who dearly wants campaign finance reform, flew his fragile little ultralight gyrocopter through some of the most closely protected airspace on the planet and landed it on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. He called it Project Kitty Hawk.
He announced his plans on the Internet and in his hometown newspaper. He said he felt compelled to do what he could to halt corruption in the nation’s capital. He attached a big U.S. Postal Service insignia to the aircraft fuselage, loaded it onto a trailer last Friday, and drove north. He would not go postal, but rather airborne, to deliver 535 letters to members of Congress urging them to tighten the rules on money in political campaigns.
“I have no intention of hurting anyone,” Hughes wrote on his Web site, the Democracy Club, which carries the motto, “Because We the People own Congress.” “There is no way I can prevent overreaction by the authorities, but I have given them as much information and advance warning as my fuel supply allows.”
The warning didn’t help. Air defense systems did not detect the copter as it entered restricted airspace above Washington, according to a North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesman. No one tried to stop the gyrocopter, which sounds like a lawnmower and looks like a flying bridge chair.
I am glad Doug Hughes was uninjured. He had no intent to harm anyone. But the question remains, how did we know that? It seems that there is some real faulty security around federal buildings.
I am surprised that the gyrocopter wasn’t shot out of the sky. Perhaps it should have been. There should be no exceptions and no slip ups that close to the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the White House.
