Secrets

    Not, mind you, very INTERESTING secrets. Just puzzling. This town has a way of not labeling things. There's a large facility off 12th St. Extension in Cayce. It has restricted entry, like a prison, but otherwise looks like a medium-sized college campus. It appears to be the operations setup for the local power company. I just can't figure out why this needs to be a secret. (If you never hear from me again, though, you'll know that somebody thought it was pretty important.) As their more white-collar headquarters is right up the road, complete with signs and stuff, it seems like any bad guy with a jones against infrastructure could figure it out anyway. So go figure.
    In Columbia itself, a motel became the Salvation Army's homeless shelter. At the time, the idea was expressly to be highly visible. Since then, the facility has expanded, but all signage is gone. One wall on Elmwood Ave. is a giant cross made of glass blocks, so it looks like a secret church. But that's it. Did somebody think that if there isn't a sign, nobody will see it. (Two-year-old hiding his eyes: "You can't see me!") Or that the homeless wouldn't be able to find it. Or is there a great sign that I'm missing somehow? It's a bewilderment.
    The secret police cars (or anyway the ones that are hard to pick up in your rear-view mirror) that I mentioned earlier turn out to be all FlexFuel Impalas. So it probably isn't my imagination that they are recent acquisitions, probably since the GM bailout. Rather like those 20 years there when nearly all government cars were Chrysler products. Now I kind of pity them; I imagine FlexFuel isn't a lot of help in a chase.