Common sense is rapidly dissolving on the jam-packed streets of LA, and though the newly imposed no-cell-phone law is a start, it's just not enough. Sure, everyone makes a boneheaded move occasionally, but driving at any hour on any freeway in this city is practically a life or death proposition.
Part of the problem is that technology has turned the average driver into a blubbering idiot. Why maneuver when VSC, VDIM, TRAC, ETC, VGRS, and all of the other can't-actually-drive-but-my-car-will-do-it-for-me-acronym-heavy systems will keep the car rolling in the right direction while the poor schmuck you cut off takes a header for the ditch? Why actually pay attention to the road when your Lexus has the active safety systems to help you avoid accidents?
The problem is here: let's compare braking in feet from 60 MPH to 0 MPH.
Lexus IS350-119 feet
Honda Civic-126 feet
Ford Edge-158 feet
A Lexus IS350 with amazing safety features and an oblivious driver that cuts off a Ford Edge has a great chance of causing an accident because of the braking comparisons.
Pair this with the oblivious driver that cuts off a semi and you have a real catastrophe.
Now, to the don't be a dick part.
If you have ever:
1. Cut someone off and then slowed down...
2. Driven less than the speed limit in the fast lane (that's the left lane, to any of you that wonder)...
3. Darted in front of a big truck...
4. Darted in front of a classic car...
5. Driven in the right lane and refused to let someone enter the freeway...
6. Hit someone's car and ran...
7. Waited until the last second when you know a lane is ending to jump in the other lane...
You are a dick.
Have some respect for classic cars. What's more, many of them have drum brakes. Don't know what that means?? It means they can't stop as fast as you, and when you cut them off, the massive amount of steel used in their rigid construction will mutilate your puny little unibody wonder. And probably you too. So when you see an old car cruising along, resist the temptation to jump in front of it and slam your brakes. It's bad for your health.
This goes doubly for big, big trucks. Countless accidents show that people don't understand physics or velocity, but the proof is the pudding that semi trucks make of pedestrian vehicles. This goes for pick up trucks too. They will maul you, though not the extent of the overworked and underpaid trucker making a delivery who will barely feel the thu-thump of your Honda under his axle.
This pretty much comes down to looking out for someone other than Number 1. Remember that often times you get home alive because someone else out there decided to let you in that lane, even though you were too close to their car. That someone may have been Bigskeptic.
Taking care of each other is something that has to happen everywhere, even on the road. Especially on the road.
Skeptically Yours.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Monday, August 25, 2008
You want a suburb WHERE??
On approach to LAX it becomes nauseatingly clear that Los Angeles is a city of suburban/urban sprawl, which stretches its homogeneous breadth from Orange county all the way to the desert. It's ugly, even from the air. Looking down from that height, it's clear exactly how much land space was wasted for concrete and streets and houses that celebrate commonality.
Somehow, someway, the suburban mindset travels like an air born disease, which also affects people's sense of how to be neighborly. In the countryside, where generation after generation of farmers live and plow, big business landed and surveyed.
The landscape was beautiful and serene, and so they started buying up farmland. Farmers these days have a tough road, because industrialization has put a big fat feather pillow on the face of American food production and suffocated the first line of defense. Driving down prices to inflate their own bottom line, our mega-corporations like Tyson Foods, et all, have made living as a farmer practically a service to charity.
So when these companies come and offer money for land, the farmers see a profitable way out and sell and run, and Jeffersonian America's perfect independent citizen is one step closer to extinction. And now---welcome suburbanites to the country.
But there are farmers who stay and do what they do, which is, believe it or not, actually farm. The newly transplanted suburbanites hoping for countryside tranquility get a taste of sharing the road with tractors, smelling hogs and cows, breathing dust when the hay is bailed. And that's country life.
But that's not suburban life, and there is an inherent clash. There is a clash when a stray calf makes his way into the neighboring suburb. There is a clash when the farmer has a 1978 Chevy truck that doesn't match his suburban neighbor's idea of "transportation." There are grounds for lots of clashes.
But here's the question: why would you want to move to the country and build on a pint sized lot near hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields, and then complain about the thousand acre hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields that have been there for many, many more years than your suburb?
What's the point of leaving of Suburban-Where-You-Already-Are, USA? And if you do get that call-to-nature, and go, why complain about the lifestyle you are inherently joining by moving "to the country"? And why buy a house that probably looks like the one you are leaving?
Bitching about farmers in farmland makes as much sense as moving to Puerto Rico and bitching about the Puerto Ricans. Why move there if you aren't ready for the culture change? If you're closed minded, don't go. Do the locals a favor, por favor.
Farmers have it hard enough without a bunch of bored suburbanites knocking on their doors to tell them that their horses smell.
But know what? Horses and farmers built this damn country. Go pick up some literature by a man named Thomas Jefferson. And land developers: ignore a part of the country called Brown County, OH. It's really beautiful and we have a lot of farmers, and I like it just how it is. It smells like horses, cows, and pigs. It's dusty when it's hay season, there are tractors on the road, and at times, steam engines. Suburbanites, you would hate it.
*To read a discussion on the suburban encroachment topic on The H.A.M.B., click on this link: http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284286&highlight=farmer Be warned, though, that this is a forum of traditional hot rodders. If it's not your type of thing, they will immediately sense this and out you. Also, if you're a dick, they will punish you, and you will have deserved their flagellation. Enjoy!
Skeptically Yours.
Somehow, someway, the suburban mindset travels like an air born disease, which also affects people's sense of how to be neighborly. In the countryside, where generation after generation of farmers live and plow, big business landed and surveyed.
The landscape was beautiful and serene, and so they started buying up farmland. Farmers these days have a tough road, because industrialization has put a big fat feather pillow on the face of American food production and suffocated the first line of defense. Driving down prices to inflate their own bottom line, our mega-corporations like Tyson Foods, et all, have made living as a farmer practically a service to charity.
So when these companies come and offer money for land, the farmers see a profitable way out and sell and run, and Jeffersonian America's perfect independent citizen is one step closer to extinction. And now---welcome suburbanites to the country.
But there are farmers who stay and do what they do, which is, believe it or not, actually farm. The newly transplanted suburbanites hoping for countryside tranquility get a taste of sharing the road with tractors, smelling hogs and cows, breathing dust when the hay is bailed. And that's country life.
But that's not suburban life, and there is an inherent clash. There is a clash when a stray calf makes his way into the neighboring suburb. There is a clash when the farmer has a 1978 Chevy truck that doesn't match his suburban neighbor's idea of "transportation." There are grounds for lots of clashes.
But here's the question: why would you want to move to the country and build on a pint sized lot near hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields, and then complain about the thousand acre hog farms and dairy farms and corn and bean fields that have been there for many, many more years than your suburb?
What's the point of leaving of Suburban-Where-You-Already-Are, USA? And if you do get that call-to-nature, and go, why complain about the lifestyle you are inherently joining by moving "to the country"? And why buy a house that probably looks like the one you are leaving?
Bitching about farmers in farmland makes as much sense as moving to Puerto Rico and bitching about the Puerto Ricans. Why move there if you aren't ready for the culture change? If you're closed minded, don't go. Do the locals a favor, por favor.
Farmers have it hard enough without a bunch of bored suburbanites knocking on their doors to tell them that their horses smell.
But know what? Horses and farmers built this damn country. Go pick up some literature by a man named Thomas Jefferson. And land developers: ignore a part of the country called Brown County, OH. It's really beautiful and we have a lot of farmers, and I like it just how it is. It smells like horses, cows, and pigs. It's dusty when it's hay season, there are tractors on the road, and at times, steam engines. Suburbanites, you would hate it.
*To read a discussion on the suburban encroachment topic on The H.A.M.B., click on this link: http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=284286&highlight=farmer Be warned, though, that this is a forum of traditional hot rodders. If it's not your type of thing, they will immediately sense this and out you. Also, if you're a dick, they will punish you, and you will have deserved their flagellation. Enjoy!
Skeptically Yours.
My V8 vs. Your Hybrid
Ooooohh---I bet I bet that makes your skin tingle, right?? The hybrid is the righteous little guy with the synergy drive, single handedly saving us from the oil crisis. The V8 is a boisterous and gas guzzling waste-mongrel, mangling the diminutive supply of petrol remaining. My gripe isn't actually the hybrid. It's the hybrid drivers, most of them. They look over at me, nose in the air, scoffing at my rumbly little Underdog Nova.
I laugh every time I pass a Steakhouse with Hybrid mobiles choking the Valet lot. I chuckle when I peak inside and see a well-equipped Hybrid bathed with leather interior. I emit nothing short of a chortle when the Hybrid lovin' nation totes home their succulent goods flown in from half way around the world.
My point? I have several. Let me expound.
Firstly, some of the most disgusting and air-f0uling emissions out there comes from my friend, the cow. I do not eat the cow. I do not believe we should mass produce the cow like this poor creature is living simply to be your steak, your boot, your belt. It's feces ends up in what we lovingly call a "lagoon." Sounds nice, right? It ain't. It's a festering, steamy pond of cow shit that actually eats away our ozone at levels way above what comes out of the Nova's exhaust pipe. Surprised? That's right. The Nova's dual exhaust is way less harmful than a herd of cows' asses.
Pack the Hybrid with leather, and you have this complete wash of anything that the little righteous-mobile was actually campaigning towards. So the car was halfway there, and then---yep, missed it! Now, these cows, manufactured by a completely industrialized and heartless system, die for your car. And their lagoon? It will exist for a very very long time.
My point further??
The goods from around the world. That's pretty self explanatory. Buy local, people. Local. I will talk plenty more on here about farmers. But planes = emissions.
What's more, hybrid drivers, you hate me, I know. I'm cool with that. Have you ever asked the driver of a classic car how much they drive it? What kind of mileage it actually gets? Here's some news...Mine? 18 MPG. Better than a lot of new cars. And not that much, i.e. to shows, on pretty days, and for testing out new parts. And when I am stuck in traffic next to a Hybrid, I always look over and make sure to smile at the driver.
The reaction? Almost always a smirk.
Skeptically Yours.
*For those of you out there that drive a Hybrid, can explain Hybrid Synergy Drive, forgo leather, and understand the concept of reduce, reuse and recycle, I applaud you. Don't smirk at me.
I laugh every time I pass a Steakhouse with Hybrid mobiles choking the Valet lot. I chuckle when I peak inside and see a well-equipped Hybrid bathed with leather interior. I emit nothing short of a chortle when the Hybrid lovin' nation totes home their succulent goods flown in from half way around the world.
My point? I have several. Let me expound.
Firstly, some of the most disgusting and air-f0uling emissions out there comes from my friend, the cow. I do not eat the cow. I do not believe we should mass produce the cow like this poor creature is living simply to be your steak, your boot, your belt. It's feces ends up in what we lovingly call a "lagoon." Sounds nice, right? It ain't. It's a festering, steamy pond of cow shit that actually eats away our ozone at levels way above what comes out of the Nova's exhaust pipe. Surprised? That's right. The Nova's dual exhaust is way less harmful than a herd of cows' asses.
Pack the Hybrid with leather, and you have this complete wash of anything that the little righteous-mobile was actually campaigning towards. So the car was halfway there, and then---yep, missed it! Now, these cows, manufactured by a completely industrialized and heartless system, die for your car. And their lagoon? It will exist for a very very long time.
My point further??
The goods from around the world. That's pretty self explanatory. Buy local, people. Local. I will talk plenty more on here about farmers. But planes = emissions.
What's more, hybrid drivers, you hate me, I know. I'm cool with that. Have you ever asked the driver of a classic car how much they drive it? What kind of mileage it actually gets? Here's some news...Mine? 18 MPG. Better than a lot of new cars. And not that much, i.e. to shows, on pretty days, and for testing out new parts. And when I am stuck in traffic next to a Hybrid, I always look over and make sure to smile at the driver.
The reaction? Almost always a smirk.
Skeptically Yours.
*For those of you out there that drive a Hybrid, can explain Hybrid Synergy Drive, forgo leather, and understand the concept of reduce, reuse and recycle, I applaud you. Don't smirk at me.
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