Isn't It Ironic?

You be the judge.

Since I was sick yesterday and the day before, I had a chance to seriously catch up on some reading. I finally finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia bookset that my parents gave me for my last birthday. Well, re-reading, actually, since I had read them once long ago when I was to young to really recognize the themes that C.S. (Jack) Lewis wove into these tales. I finished The Last Battle yesterday morning and started looking through the book I got with the set, The Companion to Narnia. From that and some looking at other sources I learned of the following little tidbit.

Jack Lewis got married fairly late in life (in his 50s) to a woman he knew to be in bad health (she was suffering from bone cancer). She went into a brief remission and lived another four years before the cancer returned and claimed her. Jack soon after wrote a book about his grieving process titled A Grief Observed, but since it was so personal he decided to release it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The ironic part is that Jack later had to come forward and admit that he was the one who wrote it. Why? Because so many of his friends started to recommend the book (that he wrote!) to him as something that he might read to help him with his own grieving process.
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It isn’t just the President.

Today at work I went to a presentation given by a woman who works at one of the old Manhattan Project sites in Oak Ridge. She has worked there for quite a long time. She is a highly educated woman and very well trained in what she does. You would think that such a person, especially one who is quite articulate (is she is) would not share one of George W. Bush’s particular idiosyncrasies, but she does. She kept saying “Nucular” (rhymes with ‘New Cue Blur’, but without the ‘B’). Not just once, but at least two dozen times during her talk, and possibly more. I think I gritted my teeth even tighter at every occasion. I felt like getting up and shouting “Nuclear! NEW-CLEE-ARR!!!” But I didn’t. That would have been rude.
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And speaking of rude…

I was on my way to the Post Office after work today. It was rainy and the light was failing, so I was really on my guard in traffic. Good thing, too. I was driving down the street perpendicular to the road the Post Office is on when I noticed a car driving through the parking lot on the right hand side. I just had a bad feeling about how fast he was going, and I was also very far into ‘defensive driving mode’, so I kept an eye on him and was ready to cover the brake. Good thing, too. He pulled out directly in front of me to turn in the direction I was coming from, saw my car, and stopped right in the middle of the lane, set up perfectly to get t-boned. I still don’t know how I was actually able to stop in time given the rain and the slight downhill slope, but I did get stopped and within mere inches of his door (hurray for anti-lock brakes). And then, he flipped me off and drove away, nearly hitting another car on the other side of the road (they had slowed down dramatically when they saw what was going on).

What the… He flipped me off?!?