Wednesday, November 1, 2006
On January 18 of this year I got a speeding ticket for doing 53 mph in a 35 mph zone on a barren stretch of Sawtelle Avenue at about 7 a.m.
This morning I drove behind two CHP patrol cars — one was license plate #1204664 — doing between 54 and 57 mph for at least two miles on the exact same stretch of Sawtelle. They obviously weren’t in the act of pursuit or anything. They stopped to get gas.
There really should be a place to report law enforcement personnel who abuse their power like that. Cops in LA are notoriously bad. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat behind an LAPD officer who flipped on lights and sirens just to get through a red light.
Thursday, February 22, 2001
I’m much more interested in how this particular speech pattern became known as “the female register” than I am in the legal aspects of this discussion.
“Once they have been arrested, even the toughest thugs turn to jelly. More precisely, Ainsworth says suspects lapse into a deferential mode called the female register, identified in women’s speech 25 years ago. When speaking in this way, people turn statements into questions and avoid direct commands. They use the conditional form of verbs, such as “might”, “may” and “should”, to weaken the impact of what they are saying. They also hedge everything with phrases such as “kind of” and use inflections more appropriate to questions.”
Wednesday, July 5, 2000
Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?
- John Ritter
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
- the cop who just gave me a speeding ticket
