Knitting in the Shadows: Muttering in Memory Lane

It's that time again. A Sunday when I don't have anywhere near enough progress to show on all the stuff I've been working on, and so resort to Unconscious Mutterings to jump start my post:

Pain :: and suffering
Lego :: my Eggo
Trooper :: Blair*
Flicker :: demon**
Character :: play
Determined :: tenacious
Wing :: and a prayer
Control :: freak
Automatic ::
Yeah :: So What?

And where did it take me?

Down an old and dim section of memory lane, and into the TV show I was watching last week.

First... the old section of memory lane. To *Trooper Blair.

Trooper Blair was a highway patrolman in California in the 1980's. Let me set the stage:

I knew a fellow then who liked to drive exotic cars. Porsches, yes, but also Mazeratti's, Lamborghini's, Ferrari's (do you detect and Italian theme here?). He owned an arrest-me-red DeTomaso Pantera (I even got to drive that one.... sweeeeet and very fast). It looked a lot like this one:

My friend was a self confident lad... cocky beyond his years. Capable of amazing politeness and generosity, but also, well, a bit more impressed with himself than maybe he ought to have been. We'll call him "Dick".

When Dick went to California, he'd manage to rent one of these exotic cars. The slowest most mundane car he'd get would be a new Mustang GT 3.0 convertible. How he pulled it off, being as he was under 25, I never knew, but he did. And one time he came home with a story about Trooper Blair.

My friend, you see, was driving one of these sporty exotic cars, as he did. He was zipping along some Southern California highway, almost certainly weaving in and out of the traffic at a speed even higher than the ten-to-fifteen-miles-over-the-posted-limit speed the rest of the folks were driving, when he passed Trouper Blair. Trooper Blair that that playing race-car driver on the California highways was inappropriate behavior, and duly pulled him over.

Did I mention that my friend was a cocky fellow? There he was, wearing nothing but swim trunks and beach shoes, racing along the highway ... and when he got pulled over.... he talked back to the trooper. The trooper, of course, didn't take this well, and said something along the lines that Dick's behavior was not tolerated on his highway. At that point, Dick actually said, "I'm sorry, sir, I missed the sign that said 'now entering Trooper Blair's highway'".

Dick then had to call someone to come fetch him from Trooper Blair's police station.

For some reason, the word Trooper today, took me there. (and then to Heinlein's book Starship Troopers ).

**Flicker, despite the frequency with which I use Flick'r to host photos that I then link to in Ravelry, did not take me to that site. It took me to "recent" (to me anyway) episodes of Supernatural. In season one, at least, flickering lights mean that the evil demon that (who?) killed Dean & Sam's mother (and Sam's girlfriend) is about to attack someone else. So. Flicker got me to demons. The mind is a very strange place to play, isn't it?

Edited to add: