Thursday, Thursday, Thursday

There ain't no rest for the wicked, or so I'm told. No wonder, then, that with the arrival of my regular Web column at Road&Track I'm being double-published most Thursdays lately. So today I have two light pieces for you to help you get over my recent obsession with politics and social justice.

From R&T we have Caution: Cute-Ute Ahead. It's a brief homage to Patrick Bedard, one of my childhood heroes. Over at TTAC, we have There Once Was A Dream That Was 1000SEL. Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction.

For a bonus piece, you can now read my column about highway merging over at Esquire. Give me a click, why dontcha, and maybe they'll syndicate me again.

One more bonus: a Zimbabwean student explains why they don't cry for lions. Here's the money shot from the author, who lost his leg to a poisonous snake at the age of eleven:

We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.

Don’t tell us what to do with our animals when you allowed your own mountain lions to be hunted to near extinction in the eastern United States. Don’t bemoan the clear-cutting of our forests when you turned yours into concrete jungles.

And please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger

Yet I wonder if the author has considered just how much of his rise from crippled rural villager to genetic-science student has been fueled by that same unpredictable American altruism?