Rude and distracted drivers in Coweta County—longtime readers of The McGehee Zone may already know about the tailgating and center-line crossing that goes on around here—have sent three rural mail carriers to the hospital this summer.
Betsy Tomlinson, a substitute carrier who’s driven all 15 of Sharpsburg’s routes, described the trend and the increasing “near misses” more bluntly.
“They’re rude. The drivers are just rude,” she said.
She described impatient drivers who follow too closely, and then slam on their brakes at the last minute or “sling out” into oncoming traffic to pass the carriers instead of waiting until there are safer sections to pass. While postal carriers pull off the road when they’re able, the problem with Hwys. 154 and 16 is that there aren’t a lot of places where the carriers can pull over.
“They’ll get right up on our rear end,” Tomlinson said. “I’ve had people behind me, follow me and watch me box the mail, stop after stop, and after they pass, they honk their horn at me. They get mad because I’m blocking their way, and I’m doing my job. Everybody out there is trying to do their job.”
A couple of weeks ago on our way home from dinner in my wife’s car, we were aggressively tailgated by a driver who didn’t like that Chris was obeying the speed limit. No matter what she did this lunatic didn’t back off for more than a couple of seconds—and then as we turned off the highway toward home, Rage Boy honked to make sure we knew his bad behavior was all our fault.
More recently, we were waiting to turn in at a local store, a left turn which mean we had to wait for oncoming traffic. When that traffic cleared, an idiot in a red pickup leaving the store honked at us for making our turn instead of letting him make his ahead of us.
Doesn’t it seem to you that acting rudely at a woman driver when her husband is in the car with her is kind of a dumb thing to do? That may be why none of these nutless wonders followed us to reiterate their displeasure face to face.
In my own truck, I was recently tailgated and nearly rear-ended by a woman in a pickup who was simply not paying attention to her driving. When I slowed to turn off, I watched in my rearview mirror and saw the precise moment when she realized she was about to plow into the rear end of my Bronco at 45 mph. And because my A/C is still out and I had my rear window partly rolled down for ventilation, I heard the screech of her tires as she locked up her brakes to avoid the collision.
What I don’t know is whether she was wishing, as she drove on after I made my turn, that she’d worn her brown pants. If I’d been in anything less massive myself, I probably would have been. At least she had the good grace not to honk at me for her mistake.
What will inevitably happen is that one of these rude yahoos will cross paths with another, and they’ll kill each other. Hopefully before they end up killing someone who’s merely stupid, or just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As co-blogger Jonathan reports below, the Obama campaign has sicced its lawyers on t.v. stations that might air a well-sourced NRA advertisement that correctly points out Obama’s longstanding anti-gun record. The proper response to such attempts to infringe on the First Amendment is to make sure that the video in question receives the widest circulation possible, to deter the Obama campaign, and other campaigns for that matter, from engaging in such tactics in the future. So here it is. Share it with a friend, with a note that Obama is threatening legal action against stations that run it, in violation of the First Amendment.
Like the one below about the mortgage bank crisis, this one also needs to be put in front of as many eyes as possible—though in this case, people who don’t imagine that guns roam the streets at night like murderous zombies, would be the preferred target. Also, those who don’t think it’s kosher for a presidential candidate to try to bully media outlets into quashing opposing views.
Just watched another episode of “Sons of Anarchy,” the TV program I mentioned in this entry.
Another theme being prodded from time to time on the show is anarchism. Apparently Jax’s late father was drawn to the “outlaw” lifestyle of the motorcycle gang culture by the idea of being free of society’s stifling rules and institutions. In the series we’re actually seeing a late-stage development in that kind of society as it would play out in real life, with the ruthless alpha—Clay—ruling all but unchallenged over his riders, and ruling with little real opposition over the town of Charming. Presumably by reading his father’s idealistic writings about anarchism Jax will be drawn to try to get back to those ideals and re-establish an earlier stage of anarchic society.
I don’t expect to deal with anarchism in my stories because I’m not drawn to examine fatally flawed political ideas in stories that I’m trying to keep grounded in real life. However, real life is populated by people who are, like Jax’s father, drawn to political ideas that don’t hold up well against the realities of human nature.
So, I toyed idly with the thought of whether the wildest über alpha in my story so far—Seth Scruggins—would be drawn to anarchism.
Six weeks or so from today, we should know how the elections have turned out. If we don’t, it’ll be nobody’s fault but the Democrat election examiners in counties with Democrat majorities for expecting Democrats to know how to vote for the Democrat ticket. Just like eight years ago.
Anyway. I’ve had numerous queries about whom I’m supporting in the upcoming election (yes, zero is a number). So here goes:
President/Vice President:
I’m supporting, endorsing, and voting for the presidential ticket that includes Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska). Palin is the only conservative-like candidate on either of the major parties’ tickets. She is also the only one with executive experience in the public sector. She took on the corrupt GOP establishment in her home state and beat the snot out of it. She took on a complacent incumbent Republican governor in the August 2006 gubernatorial primary, and beat the snot out of him. Then she took on the man who was, at the time, Alaska’s most popular Democrat—and a man who had already served two terms as governor of Alaska—and beat the snot out of him.
She picked up an incomplete and poorly begun project for a pipeline to bring natural gas from the North Slope to market, and came up with a plan that would work—while depriving trough-feeding oil companies of billions in “incentive” subsidies they had claimed were necessary to build the pipeline (those companies then set about planning to build their own pipeline, without subsidies).
In contrast to the empty rhetoric emerging from both men on the Democrat ticket, Palin is a proven achiever and deserves to be brought into the major leagues.
U.S. Senate:
Incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss flirted with joining a compromise that would have enabled Democrats to keep a moratorium on oil production from the continental shelf, but due in part to overwhelming negative reaction that compromise failed. While troubled by the senator’s minoritarian thinking that led to his erstwhile position on this compromise, I cannot countenance electing Democrat Jim Martin, who would certainly support keeping Harry Reid as majority leader—and who slammed his primary rival for having supported (as a majority of Georgia’s elected Democrats did) George W. Bush’s re-election four years ago.
U.S. House of Representatives:
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland has taken flack over the course of his two terms in Congress for positions he’s taken—and for daring to use the word “uppity” in a public context—but all in all I’ve found that his controversial positions have been (as they were in Georgia’s legislature) in the interest of protecting taxpayers from impulsive spending actions by his fellow politicians. Even when those fellow politicians are Republicans. While everyone else is imagining a Palin-Jindal ticket in 2012, I’m envisioning a Palin-Westmoreland ticket; whereas Jindal appeals to an impulse to counter-program the Democrats’ identity politics, Westmoreland seems to share Palin’s tendency to buck the establishment for the people’s benefit. Substance over symbolism.
I won’t bore people with my arguments on state- or local-level races, since in many cases there aren’t even any Democrats on the ballot for these offices in November.
UPDATE: I’ve consolidated this story in this one post, since it’s the one that’s received actual reader comments.
I wrote this story—or more accurately, the story this version is based on—years ago, and did actually have it posted on the web for a while. In retrospect the ending was beyond suspension-of-disbelief design specs, and OSHA should have closed it down.
By the way, alert readers might think they can figure out, based on physical descriptions, where “Clearwater” is. It’s true I may borrow from the physical environments of real places to describe the settings of my stories, but the people and events are entirely my own invention and are not meant to reflect on the actual residents of real places.
Except California, if it makes them look bad or weird. Because, I mean, come on...
It was a hell of a place to be afoot, out in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, walking along a stretch of two-lane highway where you were more likely to be bowled over by a galloping pronghorn than see a passing vehicle.
And if a car or truck did come along it would be just my luck if it was somebody from Clearwater who’d recognize me, hit the gas, and blow on by. The moral of that story is, step soft sometimes or you’ll curdle that milk of human kindness that just might save your life. A man could die walking across Little’s Empty, which is what people call this wide-open tract of nothing. I was facing a long hike in work boots, blue jeans and a T-shirt. No hat to keep the sun off, just a dirty red bandanna for a sweatband. My worn, shabby old gym bag wasn’t big enough for more than two changes of clothes and anyway I’d figured to ride my Harley the whole way home from Little Springs (named after the same guy as the desert, and if I owned this much desert I’d damn sure own the springs too) in three hours at most. Damn machine gave out on me halfway between, and now I’d been walking for an hour, the hot sun blazing down on me from a cloudless sky, burning the back of my neck as I trudged on northward.
My feet hurt like hell, but if I heard somebody coming I suppressed the urge to limp.
I’ve been having a number of frustrating problems with Firefox over the last few months, starting with a disturbing tendency for the browser to crash for no apparent reason on an entirely too regular basis. If it didn’t crash, it would suddenly stop being able to access websites, and cause my system to bog down until I rebooted it—after which everything would be just fine. Or, embedded streaming video might refuse to run more than two seconds, forcing me to use another browser (usually Google Chrome) to view the video.
Well, tonight I decided to defrag my two main hard drives and throw in a virus scan, and I discovered that there seemed to be some isolated disk errors—including one affecting Java. Which, reasonably, could cause trouble for web browsing.
Ran a disk scan, and then pointed my virus scanner at the folders containing the files affected by the disk errors, and now everything seems to be okay. I won’t know for a few days whether the browser crashing behavior, or the system resource trouble (neither RAM nor CPU usage, as far as any of my utilities could ever identify), are really gone, but disk errors on the boot drive are never a good thing, and they are gone.
<fingers crossed>
Update, Tuesday afternoon: So far, so good.
9:34 a.m., Wednesday: First browser crash since fixing the disk errors. We’ll see how long before the next one.
Around 10:00 p.m. Wednesday: Not a browser cache per se, but the system bogdown mentioned before, accompanying a loss of web connection. A re-check of the CPU usage showed there is actually an unaccounted-for 80-plus percent processor activity during these episodes, which I hadn’t seen before. Before rebooting I scheduled another disk check on my boot drive, and the next time I reboot there will be a scan for errors on the external drive.
Thursday afternoon: Firefox 3.02 auto-installed after a system reboot. We’ll have to see if the browser is more stable after whatever progressive disk-error problems I may be having, re-assert themselves. (I hope I’m not having progressive disk-error problems, but if I am, I need to know about it before the drive goes boom.)
I was interested in this when I saw it headlined on a well-known headline-aggregator’s website, but I held off because I figured if there was anything to it other, better-read blogs would cover it, and probably have a better handle on it than I’d be able to get. On the surface it looks perfectly like the alleged “October Surprise” from the 1980 campaign, which makes it both highly attractive, and highly suspect.
‘NOTHER UPDATE!!!!!eleventy!! It took only 24 hours for the Obama campaign to confirm the allegation, and four whole days thereafter for Bush and Republicans to debunk it—because Obama couldn’t.
Most of a week passed before the truth came out, and it DIDN’T come from the guy who was there and who was negatively impacted by the story.
The guy who thinks he’s entitled to be our next president.
