Did he say 'It's only a goose!'?

As I was listening to sports talk radio from Minneapolis this morning, desiring to be among the first in the world to immediately know if and when Brett Favre leaves his house, what he had for breakfast and whom he called most recently on his cellular phone, a totally unrelated topic raised its ugly head.

An e-mail responder to KFAN's "Common Man" lambasted a lady driver who had first committed the unthinkable---slowing down on I-35W to the posted speed limit or below. Secondly, it was reported from reliable sources that the dizzy woman had done so merely to attempt to save the life of a wayward goose which had made a daring decision to cross the interstate freeway to get to the other side.

(STOP THE PRESSES! Brett Favre just left Lambeau Field in his SUV, so he is not practicing with the Cheeseheads today. I swear the earth beneath the state of Wisconsin just moved again.)

Now back to the lady on I-35W. Apparently, without harm to her personal life or limb, she maneuvered her vehicle onto the median, got out of the car and tried to coax the goose into taking flight to safety.

The e-mailer to the call-in sports talk show shouted (I imagine he wrote in CAPITAL LETTERS), "Lady, it's only a goose!"

After all, how dare she cause these city slickers to slow down to anything less than 80 MPH on the interstate.

They wouldn't survive in Pierre, that's for sure. There, not only on the streets in the vicinity of Capitol Lake but also all over town, the geese who winter there and those who stop by during the other seasons have the right of way, whether any traffic signs state this fact or not. Over the years it has become commonplace for cars to back up a block in both directions, without any impatient driver pounding his horn, to await a goose's passage across Capitol Avenue on one side of the lake or Broadway on the other side.

Just this past year the rescue squad was called---and dutifully responded---when some goslings became trapped in a culvert near the lake. Imagine how the city slickers would have hooted over that sort of occurrence!

I can't be sure if the lady in question is still stranded on the median along I-35W. Hopefully the goose has taken flight and that some driver (no doubt one from outside the Twin Cities) has slowed to allow the lady's vehicle back into the traffic stream.

How dare she pull such a stunt!