Droning on

We went out and bought one of those little red laser pointer light doohickeys. Everyone said that everyone who is a cat enjoys chasing that little red dot all over the house.  We will see about that.  We've only had the cats for a week The cats have only owned us for a week now and maybe it's best to wait before we get them all worked up with gizmos.  We'll let you know how it goes!

Laser pointers have worthwhile uses outside of the cat world. Imagine going to the observatory and finding Ursa Minor without one! (I dated a girl by that name, and once found her in the cloakroom with some random guy, but anyway.) They can also be used for emergency signals for people lost in the woods, they can be rigged up as substitutes for chalk lines in drywall work, and the truly creative can make a burglar alarm out of one, using the beam as a tripwire.

I don't own a drone, although that could be the first line in a poem. But drones can have cameras attached for surveillance.  For instance, they can send instant reports about fires, traffic, and what-have-you.  There are firm plans to have Domino's deliver their mediocre pizza by drone, and their drones will have to avoid the Amazon book-delivering drone above your house.  Even Martha Stewart has one flying over her sprawling estate in New York state so she can see how things look from above.  She is an innovative woman.  Longtime fans will remember how she showed fellow inmates how to fashion a makeshift kitchen knife out of a tuna can lid.

So, with all the good that can come from lasers and drones, why are there fools standing around in their backyards pointing their pointers at the cockpits of airplanes and helicopters, the intent of which action can only be bad?

And who are these rakehells who fly their drones to within a foot of a landing jet airliner?  It's happened three times.  This week. At one airport - JFK in NYC.

And we can only expect both of these abuses to become more common as the holidays approach, and more people celebrate by giving drones and lasers.

It makes me miss the days when people called 911 to report that their neighbor got a jetpack for Christmas and was hovering over the neighborhood, just as Rudolph had done the night before.

But let's try to be as sensible as a child would be with our toys this year;
how would that be?