I went to the store to do some grocery shopping, and on the way home decided that I'd stop by the local bank to visit the ATM. The turn-off to go to the bank is a "Y" intersection -- coming from the direction I was coming from, you can either bear right onto a new road or go straight; someone coming from the other direction can either go straight or turn left onto the new road.
By law, of course, traffic bearing right has right-of-way. Accordingly, there is a "Yield" sign for traffic coming from the opposing direction, but there isn't one for traffic coming from the direction I was coming from.
So, when I got to the intersection, a pick-up truck was arriving at the same time. I signaled and bore right. He turned left and came up right behind me.
I drove up to the bank and pulled up to the ATM, with the truck right on my bumper the whole time. "Interesting coincidence that he's going to the ATM too," I thought.
As soon as I stopped at the ATM, the driver of the truck started honking his horn. Not a quick honk to get my attention -- a long, steady honk followed by a brief rest, then another long, steady honk. "Do I have a tail light out or something?" I wondered. So, I leaned out to ask him what the problem was. No response, except for another long honk.
So, I quickly concluded my business, figuring he must really want to use the ATM.
As soon as I pulled out, instead of pulling up to the ATM, the guy stayed right on my bumper, laying on the horn again. "Something must be wrong," I figured.
So, I stopped and prepared to get out, wondering what the problem was. The guy pulled up right next to me, close-enough that it would have been difficult to open my door. He was a rather heavyset white guy, somewhere in his 60s, I'd guess.
He proceeded to scream at me. He screamed at me about how I'd gone right through the "Yield" sign and how he'd almost hit me. This caught me off-guard for a couple of seconds while I reviewed the previous couple of minutes. Of course, I hadn't seen (nor obeyed) the "Yield" sign because there wasn't one -- not in my lane; it was in his.
He screamed at me a few more seconds, and insisted that I was clearly on drugs of some kind. [Maybe because I wasn't responding the way that he thought I should?] I nearly burst out laughing at that, but I managed to keep my composure.
After hurling a few more insults, he roared off.
I've pondered the incident for awhile, and my guess is that he's some privileged white dude who's used to getting his way. That I had the sheer gall to make him wait for a couple of seconds before making his turn (what was I supposed to do, I wonder? -- come to a full stop in the middle of traffic; he's the one who had a turning lane and a "Yield" sign, not me) apparently really ticked him off.
It was dark, so I couldn't tell, but I'll bet good money he had at least one "Trump" bumper sticker ....
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Please don't correct me if I'm wrong. This image is going to amuse me for days.
I can see it. This Angry Guy is in a huge diesel powered jacked up 4x4. Surprisingly not festooned with various oversized flags waving from the bed. He's all raged out at you because you didn't yield at his sign. You, looking both professorial (tweed, elbow patched jacket over flannel shirt and sturdy denim pants) and Grizlzy Adams (hence the incongruous flannel with tweed but still fashionable) driving a car that's two sizes too small for you (first or second generation Prius or Ecco).
My daughter and I were at a red light in our neighborhood a few weeks ago; the left lane clearly has a left arrow painted in the middle of it. The right lane does not; it is for going straight, or turning right. I was in the right lane going straight. Light turns green, and the guy in the lane to my left, instead of turning left, attempts to go straight too. But there is no lane for him to go into, so he ends up behind me. He then proceeded to ride my bumper, weaving back and forth all the way down the road. Normally I would have pulled to the side and slowed down to let him past, but we were almost home and with my daughter in the car I figured I would rather be in my yard rather than on the side of the road in case this guy was planning to do something really asinine. So we proceeded like this for about half a mile and when I made a left turn to go turn into my subdivision, he laid on his horn and flipped us off as he continued up the street.
Now every time we go through that intersection my kid points out that the left lane has a left arrow painted in it for a reason...and that is it rude to flip someone the bird, especially when you're the one in the wrong!
She has also noticed that a lot of people don't like being passed by our Prius on the highway, and they either suddenly speed up as we attempt to go around them in the passing lane, or else they speed up and pass us immediately after I turn back into the travel lane. True fact!
A car with a QAnon sticker cut me off today, then sped through a stop sign turning into the courthouse.
So there's that.
Please tell me this story has a happy ending in that the driver got a ticket.
About a week and a half ago, some jackass passes me on the right when I’m probably doing about 60 mph in a 50 zone. The jackass, who must be doing about 75, proceeds to weave recklessly through cars in all three lanes, never using a turn signal, of course.
About a mile later, I see a police car light up. When I finally catch up, I see the aforementioned jackass has been pulled over.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see someone get ticketed. I’m not exactly the world’s safest driver (demonstrated in going 10 over the speed limit myself, though in my defence, that part of the road is empty, so 60 is roughly commensurate with the flow of traffic there*), so when you’re going fast enough that I think you’re a maniac, you done fucked up. And beyond his speed, I found it even more offensive how closely he was tailgating people, how close he was cutting his lane transitions, his lack of turn signals, and so on.
I just sort of assume that almost anyone that drives that recklessly is a Dump supporter. Kind of goes hand in hand with the complete disregard for others’ safety. And it wasn’t as if it was plausible that he was just late to work or something: it was 9:15 pm. Dude was just an asshole. (Also I don’t know for sure that the driver was a dude, on account of how late it was, but come on – he was a dude. That kind of driving is symptomatic of testosterone poisoning.)
*As an aside, I’ve been thinking for a while that seemingly half of posted speed limits are either too high or too low. The ones in areas with lots of residences are often too high – a lot of poor areas of town with lots of houses have roads going through them with speed limits of 35 or 40. It’s easy to forget those houses are even there, and I frequently think of the actual speed limit as being “posted speed limit + 5”, so that means I typically go 40 or 45 through them. Which is… not great. If the speed limits were 30, I’d probably go 35, which would be significantly safer.
On the other hand, a lot of areas with almost nothing in them have posted speed limits of 45 or 50, which is probably lower than it needs to be, to the point where people just ignore the speed limit signs in those regions entirely. I’m not sure that’s great either; obviously jackasses like the one above would ignore the speed limits regardless, but if the majority of cars go 60 in a 50 zone, you’ll wind up with occasional cars sticking stubbornly to the posted speed limit, which results in more lane changes than is necessary – and thus more accidents.
It’s defensible to have speed limits lower than the typical flow of traffic when there are a lot of pedestrians or cyclists in a given area – hence my support for lowering speed limits in parts of town with lots of houses. However, there are several parts of town where there are long stretches of nothing on a given road, punctuated by entrances into closed-off subdivisions that are divided from the road by a wall or a ditch or a lot of trees or something. You probably won’t actually have pedestrians or cars turning into traffic without a traffic light there, and thus it might be OK to raise the speed limit there.
Of course, I haven’t actually studied urban planning in depth – maybe there’s reasoning behind some of these decisions that I’m not aware of. I suppose the reasoning is if the speed limits were 60, everyone would go 65 or 70 instead, which would obviously be ridiculous. I think 55 would at least be defensible, though, and I don’t know that you can really accuse this of being a particularly planned county, in any case.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
It never happens in the UK that speed limits end with a 5 - they're always multiples of ten. The only exceptions are not on true roads - you might see an occasional 5mph or 15mph limit on a hospital car park or similar.
At one time the USA seemed to prefer the X5 numbers: the limits were all like 25, 35, 45, 55. I don't know if that's still the case.
It’s a bit sad that if I were to say something like yeah America thought the 0 looked too much like a vagina and churches fought against the obscenity on their roads, or it was believed 0 was invented by communists and replaced everywhere with _ during the red scare... you might not immediately guess I was bullshitting because that all seems pretty sane compared to the real America.
But no, a quick look shows that during WWII a 35mph speed limit was set and during the gas crisis a 55mph limit was set, and then areas went off of those raising or lowering the limit in 10mph increments often leaving the 5 stuck at the end.
My most frustration, when I'm driving is being in the first person in a lane turning Right or Left and having the person behind me (which is 100% a white person and 99% an OLD WHITE person*) honking at me to turn because they don't see the cars approaching.
I'M SORRY IF YOUR LATENESS IS MAKING YOU WANT TO HAVE ME DRIVE INTO ANOTHER CAR. THAT WILL MAKE YOU MORE LATE ASSHAT.
My impulse now is to back up or turn on emergancy lights and hop out of the car and ask them if they're in distress. Husand is trying to discourage me from that, but I AM DONE
*and OLD WHITE MALE 99.2%
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Ishmaeline of Domesticity drinker of smurf tears
Last edited by Qingdai; 08-11-2019 at 03:06 AM.
Reason: Old white males are asshole drivers
Husand is trying to discourage me from that, but I AM DONE
I'm sure he is just being helpful and giving you an excuse to back down. But I can totally see you doing it. Very politely. Very stubbornly. Very do it.
I've driven the New Jersey Turnpike with bumper-to-bumper traffic doing 75 - 80 mph. I've been told (though I can't verify it) that the police will sometimes ticket people for driving at 60 - 65 on the Turnpike -- for impeding traffic.
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“The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Carol Madonna, who has lived on the street since 1998 and attended Tuesday’s council meeting, said the situation could quickly become a slippery slope if the city continued to “cower behind freedom of speech.” If the city allows these emojis, she wondered if they would allow some of the more extreme ones, such as the poop emoji, and questioned where officials would draw the line.
"My dad was astonishingly and nonsensically racist, therefore anyone who criticizes Marie Kondo's methods is, too."
I don't have strong opinions about her, but her followers can be incredibly annoying. For way too many people, the things that spark joy for them are brand new, trendy stuff, spurred by advertising campaigns designed to elicit that response. Which is understandable, because people are inundated with advertising pretty much 24/7, but it just enables overconsumption by handing people an excuse to throw away usable things and replace them with new ones.
Maybe it is a difference between the American and Japanese culture to some extent, but the blame for that would go to Netflix for making and hyping that show for American audiences. For a while there, every time I'd open Netflix, it'd start autoplaying ads for that show.
American advertising is just so emotionally abusive and manipulative. My current ‘favorite’ youtube ad is a car commercial that starts by showing a bunch of trendy people running on treadmills like at a gym and starts with “The hamsters run in their wheels.” Like, I know we told you that the only way to be cool and happy is to buy a gym membership, wear the right on trend gym clothes and use only the best wifi enabled equipment, but now that you’ve done that, look at what a dumb caged rodent you are. Now if you really want to be cool and happy you’re just one more purchase away from standing out of the pack. Don’t be just another smelly loser rodent, consume, consume, CONSUME!!
One thing that I really like about Condo, that I don’t think a lot of americans understand, is the idea of thanking something for its use even if you no longer want it and are about to toss it away. Being able to appreciate the uses, or joy or ideas that didn’t pan out of stuff runs completely counter to the literal slash and burn of fast trend consumerism. Where everything old is consider useless junk you wouldn’t be caught dead still owning or it’s considered super special to be hoarded even though there’s nothing special about it.
Recently an old media drive started having problems and while I’m sad I’ll need to rerip/download things like DS9, the reality is there was nothing special on the drive because everything was mass produced consumer media. Nothing of value was lost because nothing was actually lost. There are thousands of copies of everything on the drive. With enough people consuming enough media it’s possible even my specific set of media wasn’t original and another drive out there exists with the exact same set of files on it. Not only are we taught to binge, purge and hoard, but many of our hoards might just be an uneeded backup of stuff everyone already has or can easily buy.
Her decluttering program seems very similar to others I have come across before, though some of the other ones are annoyingly and overtly (Judeo-)Christian, which - frankly - seems unnecessary in a cleaning regime. At least Kondo's "woo/religion" angle relates directly to the items, so less bewildering than the American versions that just generally go on about "blessing your home" when you dust etc.
Re: Miscellany
Linear Mode
