Spritz! Spritz!

Another little driving tip from me this week: wait until your car is at a stop light to clean your windshield! It’s as if people don’t think about inertia, or, more likely, just don’t care. Think about it: you’re spraying water onto your front window at, say, 50 miles an hour. Does the water know to stop at your window? No, of course not. Where does it end up going? That’s right – over your car and onto my windshield – and usually onto my JUST CLEANED windshield.

And believe me, I’ve tried many times to get ahead of these people just so I can clean my own windshield and teach them a lesson . . . I just never can because these always seem to be the people who tailgate others, won’t let you into their lane, etc. They’re just bad seeds overall and deserve to die in a fiery crash (which, of course, only takes out others like them and leaves all us good seeds unscathed.) That’s not too much to wish for, is it?

From the Moon to . . . France?

I realize you can’t expect too much when the 99-cents Only store is involved . . . but you’d think they might double check the name.

Well, they meant well.

(This is 100% real, it comes out of the Arizona Republic published Wed., July 28, 2004. Scanned for you by me.)

Better one . . . better two?

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing that the most stressful events of the week have involved answering my eye doctor’s queries about whether one lens combination was better than the other. “Better one . . . or better two?” Over and over, lenses flipping back and forth until the choices looked identical and my eyes could hardly focus anymore. Is my life too easy because I find stress in answering correctly, or am I too stressed out as it is that this little event is just adding to the stress?

This has been going on for weeks now – well, okay, it’s my third visit in several weeks, only months after going through this again with a previous doctor whose “minor” mistakes upheaved the confidence I had in him – these are my eyes, afterall, not a pair of unbalanced tires or a simmering pot of rice.

“Close” just isn’t good enough when it comes to vision, and when I discoverd several months back that my eye doctor had given me completely the wrong prescription in one eye I decided it was time to move on. Granted, I apparently have “difficult” eyes, as my right eye is three times as astigmatic as my left eye, which pushes it to the limits of what contacts can compensate for. But the original good doc had me in a lens that was so far off that it forced my left eye to take over being the dominant one, resulting in splitting headaches that I was becoming increasingly certain must have been the cause of a giant, pulsing tumor in my brain. Luckily I realized I didn’t get headaches with my old, out of date glasses on. That’s how far off this lens was – scratched up, two-year old prescription lenses were clearer. The doctor I’m seeing now, however, specializes in difficult-fit situations, and he’s determined to get this right – I like his confidence and determination. If anyone can get this done right, it’s him.

A little cherry to top it all off: he has an assistant named “Bambi ,” which is made even more humorous than the name itself already is because she’s exactly not the image of what you’d think a “Bambi” would look like. Short, brunette, perfectly average looking – not the image you get of a “Bambi.” I thought maybe they were joking around the other day when he first said it, but I heard him say it again that day and once again at this morning’s appointment. No wonder she doesn’t wear a name tag.

Urge to merge

A little driving tip that, if followed, would make the world a much better place:

When you see someone trying to merge into your lane of the freeway from an on-ramp that’s going to end (in other words, that car has to merge,) lay off the gas for just a moment, just one freaking moment and let that person into your lane. I guarantee you will not be any later for Starbucks or dinner or whatever really, really important event you’re in a rush to get to. Because you know what happens when you speed up as soon as you see that left turn signal going? I have to speed up – the laws of inertia simply won’t allow me to insert myself in traffic if I have to come to a near stop because you won’t let me into your lane. It’s pretty simple logic and yet this has happened no less than four times in the past twenty-four hours.

If you let me into your lane, you’ll even get the little “hand wave in the mirror” from me – and we all know how pissed off people get when they don’t get one of those. And if you don’t let me into your lane? You may just find yourself getting a very different gesture.

Saw

Saw may just be the sickest movie idea I’ve ever heard – the suspect doesn’t kill people himself, he lets his victims do it themselves, basically. How is that so sick? Because he locks them in a room filled with razor-wire and gives them a two choices: either don’t do anything and face certain death in the immediate future, or burrow through the piles of wire that will slice you up real bad with at least a tiny hope of living through it. Obviously the victims choose the latter but don’t make it through. View the trailer here. (Link found via Distorting The Medium.)

I usually don’t mind horror films, but when the concept crosses the line between the fantastic and “could actually happen” I pretty much have to bow out. This is one of the times when the latter case wins out.

Rock grammar, issue #1: Paul McCartney “Live And Let Die”

Let’s look beyond the goofy flutes and/or whatnot and the oddly aggressive nature of the song (because it’s just so out of character for the nice man.) Paul McCartney screwed up “Live And Let Die” in a huge way in my book because of a horrible grammar mistake.

It’s no wonder the song’s so angry, he’s mad he wrote such a screwed up line. You know the line, I know you do – “But in this ever changing world in which we live in.” Come on, Macca, you’re better than this! That’s redundant – “world in which we live in.” It even works just fine, perfectly fine to just sing “And in this ever changing world which we live in.” I can hear it – just stretch the “world” out a little more. Okay, no, it’s not technically correct, but at least it doesn’t double up on the “in” – it’s gotta either be “in which we live” or “which we live in,” but it can’t be both.

And if he was insistent on covering the thing, Axl Rose should have at least taken a moment to correct the damned thing. Guns N’ Roses could have at least been the smart bad boys of rock and we all would have respected and looked up to them for it. But now? Without correcting that mistake? Just a footnote, surely no one’ll remember Guns N’ Roses in 20 years.

Leaning . . . building . . . of Manila

Apparently the folks in Manila live a much more . . . laid back . . . lifestyle than I do. When occupants of an office building noticed that the structure began to lean, they didn’t freak out and evacuate. Nope, they just kept on keepin’ on, fleeing the building only when they heard creaking noises and noticed pipes breaking.

“The building started leaning today but . . . eh, I’ll wait until the pipes break. Why stress out about it?”

Small victories

The greatest thing about waking up this morning and checking my Sitemeter stats is that when I went to bed last night it read “7” and today it reads “12.” That means some of you came back!

I am reminded of the time when one of my coworkers installed Sitemeter on his new site. Upon visiting the site, I saw that he had something like 1285 hits already. When asked how he got nearly 1300 hits, he responded that he’d started his hit-count at 1280 – you know, so it wouldn’t look like nobody ever visited. BUT NOT ME. Twelve hits is the REAL DEAL, dear Readers. Humbling, yes, but I do enjoy the “keepin’ it real.”

Liquid lunch

We saw a tanker truck on the way to work, which isn’t such an unusual sight, but emblazoned on the back of the trailer was the inscription “food grade ingredients only.” Now, I’ve seen milk trucks before but they always have the “Got Milk” and “3x daily” or whatever boldy splashed across the side. This just had something for “Indian River,” which means nothing to me. But it got me thinking – what “food grade ingredients” would need transporting by a large tank-trailer? Why wouldn’t whatever it is be packaged where it’s produced? Enquiring minds want to know – just what was in that truck? Possibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Tang
• Salad dressing
• Cookie dough
• Squeeze-cheese
• Pizza sauce
• Soylent Green

Space Truckin’

I can usually find some reason to work an odd phrase into a conversation, but I have yet to find a serviceable opportunity for the phrase “I’ve got no truck with . . . ” The problem isn’t that I can’t find a way to use it. It’s that I don’t really understand what it means. It’s a particularly Western sentiment, and by Western I mean “genre” not location. It’s just such a fetching term, why would anyone not want to use it?

I’ve looked the word “truck” up and it generally pertains to trading or bartering, and in the cases I’ve heard that just doesn’t make sense, things like “I’ve got no truck with Stinger McGee, the man’s done right by me.” So I take “truck” to mean something negative, like using “beef” to indicate the negativity of feelings between two parties. Unless, of course, it means that one party literally has no truck with the other, as in “I’ve got no truck with Stinger McGee, and I don’t know why I would share the ownership of any vehicle with that lowdown lazy varmint.”