Rant #3,068: Bits and Pieces

In an unprecedented move for the Ranting and Raving Blog, for the first time in 3,068 posts, we are going to have a “Bits and Pieces” entry two days in a row.

This never happened before, and may never happen again, so bask in its glow while you can.

There are a few more stories that do not deserve full entry observation that I wanted to talk about yesterday, but could not fit in to yesterday’s piece, so they moved over to today.

It is something very unusual, but without further ado, here goes nothing—

Dead Woman Sent to Funeral Home, But Isn’t Dead: This may go down as one of the stranger stories of the year, but it did happen.

The other day, a supposedly dead 82 year auld woman who was in a Long Island nursing home was sent to a nearby funeral home to be burred, but upon further examination, it was found that she was alive and breathing.

The questions are many: why was she thought to be dead?; did a doctor thoroughly examine her and declare her to be deceased; and what exactly happened to awaken her from her stupor and return her to the living?

Look, she probably isn’t well, but I am sure that these are questions that her family is asking both the nursing home and the funeral home, and it was announced yesterday that the district attorney will be getting involved, too.

And was she ever pronounced officially and unequivocally dead by a doctor? I am sure that doctor will be questioned, and he or she better have some good answers, or I am sure he or she will lose their medical license for awhile.

On the TV news last night, one doctor having nothing to directly do with this case was interviewed, and talked about one of the possible reasons that the woman came to life again.

It might be this reason or it might not, but it appears to be plausible—although even if this did happen, there are questions about whether the doctor who supposedly declared her dead—if one actually did—did what he or she did with a thorough examination.

It seems that there are rare instances where a person could be dead for a very short period of time, but then the brain somehow reinvigorates itself, and when that happens, the entire body reinvigorates itself, including initiating blood flow and lung capacity once again, which means the heart starts pumping after it had stopped.

This does happen—the brain can lay dormant in certain cases, and perhaps was started up again by a variety of circumstances, even in the ambulance or whatever vehicle was used to transport the body to the funeral home—but it is a rare occurrence.

So whatever happened to revive this woman to some state of being alive, it happened, and can you imagine the shock of the funeral home employee who discovered that this dead body was actually alive?

School Bus Stop Sign Stops Traffic Until Drivers Get Wise: This is something that happened to me on Friday, and in my more than 48 years of being a legal driver, I can’t ever remember it happening to me before this particular incident.

As I was driving my son to work on Friday, I noticed a yellow school bus pulled over to the side of the road with its flashers and Stop sign out, meaning that all traffic on both sides of the road had to stop until the bus was done letting off its passenger(s) and the flashers and Stop sign retracted.

That is the procedure in New York State, and I have to say that I have followed this rule to the letter since it was put in place several years ago.

Anyway, as I approached the stopped school bus and stopped my car—and saw in front of me that other cars simply went through the flashers and Stop sign and were on their way as they broke the state law—I also saw that I wasn’t the only one following the law, as the car in the right lane also stopped as did cars on the other side of the road.

I was the first car in the left lane, so everyone stopped behind me, and all of us were waiting for the flashers and Stop sign to recede so we could be on our way.

This usually takes maybe a minute or a minute and a half to do, but I—and drivers on the other side of the street—discovered that for some reason, this retraction was taking longer than anticipated.

On the other side of the street, after about three minutes, cars started to move again, but since I was the first car in the left lane, I wanted to make sure that everything was safe to move on.

After about five minutes of sitting there, I inched up a little bit past the Stop sign, and although I admittedly did not get out of my car to get a better view, I noticed that from may standpoint, there was no one in the bus, even though the flashers and Stop sign were still on.

Whoever was driving the bus had pulled over for whatever reason, but did not shut off the flashers and Stop sign for whatever reason, so even though we all stopped as we should have been, I discovered that there really wasn’t any reason to do so.

I waved everyone on, and we all drove past the stopped bus.

Now I know that some of these buses also have cameras, and if this is one of them, the camera will show that I—and about 30 or 40 cars behind me in both lanes—went past the flashers and the Stop sign on the bus.

But this time it was warranted, since we sat there following the rules for at least five minutes, and I hope that I do not get a ticket for going past this bus.

If I do get a ticket, this is one to fight, but on the other hand, the only proof I have that there was no one on the bus at the time was my own eyesight.

In fact, the bus driver should be the one fined, for not retracting the flashers and Stop sign—and thus, holding up traffic on both sides of a busy roadway—when he wasn’t even in the vehicle.

Let’s see what happens, but whatever the case, I know I did the right thing.

It Was Three Degrees, and Now, It is 53 Degrees … and Counting: The weather is just so strange in my neck of the woods.

On Saturday, when I woke up at about 6 a.m. it was all of three degrees on the thermometer, and after a scant snowfall last week, I thought that we had finally hit winter after an extremely mild stretch that had it feeling like spring through December and January and into early February.

But then, the next day, the temperature had catapulted to a balmy 43 degrees, and yesterday, it was 53 degrees, with the next week and a half forecast to be in the upper 40s and into the 50s.

This has been one of the mildest winners on record in my neck of the woods, and believe me, I am not complaining, as other areas have really been hit with horrid weather.

But it is funny; when will it finally be winter over here?

Let me quote the singing group that has an appropriate name in lieu of what I just spoke about—The Three Degrees—when I bring up one of their biggest hits in my question to Mother Nature about the lack of winter we have had thus far:

“When Will I See You Again?”

That is it for me today.

I can retire “Bits and Pieces” for another day after doing an uncharacteristic back-to-back.

Speak to you again tomorrow … but no more “Bits and Pieces” for now.