driving

I’d have to say that “the back seat of my car” is somewhere near the top of my list of Places Not to Keep an Alligator.

Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save the day. Alas, after about five hours troubleshooting and researching and on the phone with Microsoft and Dell customer support, I was forced to admit that the hard drive was toast. Three different Dell technicians all gave me the same advice: Reformat the hard drive and reinstall WindowsXP.

Doing that would have deleted all of her data — including her 3000+ iTunes library. This was clearly not a good solution.
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A few days ago a friend from a long, long time ago recently reinstalled AIM and contacted me out of the blue. While we were chatting I started to mention something about a road trip I’d taken in another life. I was going to say that I had once gotten lost in Washington D.C. on my way to Philly via I-95. What I found interesting was that — after years of living in Los Angeles — I almost referred to the East coast’s massive superhighway as “the” 95. My brain caught my fingers before I’d typed it that way, but it started niggling at me. In LA we honor all of the highways with the definite article. It’s not just 405. It’s the 405. You’d never tell someone, “Take 101.” You tell someone, “Take the 101.” Nobody — afaik — on the East coast refers to “the 95″. The only highway in Florida that gets a the is The Turnpike. In LA every highway gets a the.

And how about this? In Florida if you’re telling someone how to get from Jacksonville to Tallahassee you would say, “Take I-10 West until you smell the Seminoles.” But in California if you’re explaining how to get from Century City to Santa Monica you would say, “Take the 10 west until it ends.” Same road.

Anyone else ever notice that?

On May 20, 2006 I was tagged for speeding on the 405 while returning from my friend’s wedding in Valencia. This was one of the (rare) instances when I felt I was undeserving of a speeding ticket. There were cars on either side of me and a guy was coming up my rear like a bat outta hell. I even said, “Look at this happy a**hole!” as I gunned it to get out of his way and into the right lane. The happy a**hole was a CHiP and he gave me a ticket even though I tried to explain to him that I was only getting out of his way.

I had to deal with the ticket by July 14th, and of course that didn’t happen. I actually had the date confused with the court date of a different speeding ticket so I went to wrong courthouse. Ha! (Note: The LA Superior Court didn’t find this even remotely comical.) Even though they were upset, the State of California allowed me to reschedule and set a new court date. I had to appear at the San Fernando Courthouse in September.

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This month’s issue of Discover Magazine featured an article on The Math of . . . Changing Lanes. It was the usual drek on reasons why I shouldn’t drive like a maniac. It’s the sort of thing my mom would clip and mail to me with an “I told you so”-type note attached. Sneaking its way into the first column is this almost-too-crazy-to-believe fact:

… drivers are about 35 percent less likely than usual to die in an accident in the month after receiving a traffic ticket, and that driving fatalities increase immediately following the Super Bowl — 68 percent in the losing team’s state but only 6 percent in the winning team’s state.

So they’re saying that February (or, lately, with the longer post-season, March) *always* has more traffic fatalities than January (or February)?! That’s hard to believe. That’s very hard to believe.

For some ridiculous reason I was still at the office at 11:45pm yesterday. When I got on the highway at 11:55pm, I mistakenly assumed that traffic would be minimal and I would zip home.
Ha!
They closed the 405.
They. Closed. The. 405.

Comically they chose not to let you know that it was closed from Getty Ctr. Dr. to (freaking!) Sepulveda until you were about 50 yards from what turned into an hour-and-a-half delaying detour through un-get-off-able mountain passes and backwoods backroads.

What’s amazing to me is that there are the same number of maniacs applying make-up, reading, pitching pilots on their portables, and trying to eat ramen with chopsticks while driving at midnight as there are at 7am. (That number, by the way, is two trillion.)

Every city I’ve ever called home has had something nasty … some ineffable idiosyncrasy … that its dwellers hold high, wave with pride, and flaunt in the face of visitors. In Daytona it was how stupid all the tourists are (were), in Gainesville it was the humidity (and / or stupidity of visiting Seminoles), in Boston it was the months of dark, gray winter. Have you ever had someone from Gainesville visit your home city? “You call this humid? In Gainesville this would be dry!” How about a friend from New England? “You think this is cold and crappy? Hell, in Bahstin we’d be running around in t-shirts if we were lucky enough to have this sawta weathah.”

In LA it’s the traffic. People here brave the traffic and even - though they would never admit it - take pride in battling the world’s worst commute every day.

The Superior Court of California has a terrific web site. I have no idea what possessed them to use *images* instead of *text* for all their links, though. That’s just plain stupid. But … I was able to pay my latest traffic citation on line, which was very nice.
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A rather odd thing happened to me on my way to the theater Friday night. I was chased by a helicopter. Yes. I know that sounds odd. Imagine - just for a second - how odd it would feel to drive several miles with a helicopter about two car lengths behind you and only about thirty or forty feet above you. See? Very odd.

So it turns out (obviously) that the helicopter wasn’t exactly following *me*. We were just going to the same place at the same time. And he decided to follow the 101 for some reason. And he decided to fly at what seemed to me to be at a telephone-pole tempting height. It was kind of cool to look over my shoulder in a paranoid panic and act like I had the secret weapon in my briefcase and the commies were after me. But only for a second. Then it was just kind of strange.
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My drive home is always exciting.

From the “Frequently Asked Questions” page at the California Highway Patrol web site:

I have heard that some gangs are initiating new members by driving with their headlights off and when people flash their lights at them, they must shoot the drivers of the cars who do this. Is this true?

Ha!

Jiminy Cricket! Here it is, the #3 of January, and I’ve yet to make any resolutions! Obviously there is a ball and I’ve got to get on it, and soon. I’ll resolve some things as quickly as I can.

Resolution #1: Make resolutions #4 - 10.
Resolution #2: Make no more U-turns on Ventura when there is an overly aggressive, incredibly rude and foul-mooded Officer McAdams (Ca. badge #14190) slinking about the bushes ready to ticket anyone she can find disobeying traffic laws because as she claims, her job is not “to protect and to serve” - which is what is (apparently improperly) emblazoned on the cowl of her motorcycle - but is, in fact, “to write tickets”. Actually it would be better to make no more U-turns in the State of California because - completely opposite of the State of Florida rules - you are only allowed to do so at intersections, which seems insanely more dangerous to me, but what do I know? I’m a lawbreaking fool.
Resolution #3: Try to write fewer run-on sentences.
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East Bound and Down - The Smokey & the Bandit theme song

Y’know how sometimes you’ll drive somewhere and not know it? You get to your destination and realize you haven’t been paying attention and all of a sudden you’re there, but you don’t remember the drive, passing places or things, making the turns. I got to work this morning and realized that I had accidentally hit the ‘repeat’ button on the CD player: I must have listened to The Beatles’ Ticket to Ride ten times in a row. I didn’t even notice until I turned off the engine. Strange, that.

A man in Connecticut rented a car and was shocked to discover a $450 charge for speeding on his bill when he returned the vehicle. It seems the rental company has GPS devices in their cars so they can track what the driver might do. Now … in general I think this is a pretty good idea. I’m in favor of using technology to do neat-o things like this. And if it was in the contract the guy signed before he rented the car, well, he’s got no one to blame but himself. I rented a car in Louisiana last month and got busted for speeding by an old fashioned police officer with a radar gun. I would have been in much bigger trouble, though, had the company been clocking me the entire time I had the car. I am going to have to remember to read all those little clauses and notes and tiny-print items on contracts in the future.
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