ORIGINAL: Cap Mandrake
"Then I come around a bend and the soil and wild grass center divider has come alive seemingly overnight with millions of lupines in a dense carpet 30-40 yds wide that literally goes on for miles. It was astonishingly beautiful. At least as dense as the lupines in this picture.
Then I passed a toll station and here is this big tractor with a commerical mower chopping the poor things down to the bare ground. [:@] Thanks for that Caltrans. I blame the idiot in the tractor. I would have faked a mechanical malfunction before I did something like that. They coudln't wait 2 weeks? You know if the lupines were that good there were millions of California poppies ready to bloom too. What a bunch of chowderheads.
[:-] Mandrake, Caltrans is just doing what it always does: saving us citizens from ourselves. You and I selfishly want to enjoy a natural vista of peaceful spring native flora. What fools we are! But thank goodness Caltrans knows the ugly truth: those lupines are actually the scourge of all mankind!
They are sucking precious carbon dioxide out of the air, and sequestering it into plant material. Ergo, the lupines grow and spread, the CO2 level in the atmosphere decreases, the atmosphere cools, AND SOON WE ALL DIE FROM GLOBAL COOLING! ( Hey, look it up: Hanson and Gore's Textbook of Climate Theory with Modern Slide Rule Modeling, v. 1942b, published by the M&M Enterprises Scientific Textbook Division.)
So Caltrans does the only thing they can do to save a dying planet: kill those evil CO2-sequestering plants. Incidentally, that's also why they are always tearing up perfectly functional roads and causing construction-related traffic jams: cars stuck idling for hours put a lot more CO2 back into the air than if they were sailing down the highway in a smooth, fast and above all quick 70 MPH commute.
You just don't appreciate how much more your government knows than we do! [:)]
