Category Archives: Culture Jammin’

Twitter Q&A, pt. 3: The randos

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OK, I need to stress again that I’m operating on very little sleep, but I believe it goes something like this: At some point within the next 100 years, we achieve technological singularity. In the subsequent explosion of new advances, the supercomputers building better supercomputers always operate to forward the best interests of the human race, since humans programmed the computers in the first place and the computers exist to help us prosper.

But it turns out people are stupid and weak and need to be coddled, so the ultimate fallout from the singularity is that computers start taking care of more and more of our daily tasks. That’s pretty awesome at first, but eventually technology advances so far that pretty much everything is automated. The computers never become self-aware or turn malicious — fundamentally they must do what is best for humanity — but their plans go awry.

The computers start genetically engineering people — or insisting that people genetically engineer themselves, I’m not really sure yet — so that they’re most efficiently built for the new, post-singularity worlds. Future, computer-controlled people have no need for any semblance of excess fat, musculature, hair or skin tone, so those are all bred out. I don’t know why you can’t just keep having hair, but the whole point is that the computers are way smarter than us so you just have to trust them on this one. Eventually, people pretty much look like this:

Oh, for some reason we also need really big eyes in the future.

Eventually, due to some impending traumatic event, the computers recognize that the now-pitifully weak human race is in jeopardy. But because the future humans are now so unlike their hearty ancestors, the supercomputers have to develop time-travel devices for us and send us back to the U.S. around the turn of the 21st century to find people at their very fattest. By a completely random series of coincidences, all the 21st-century people that get probed for genetic material happen to be insane.

Then the future people go back home and make babies that look like crazy Kansans and feed the benevolent Matrix.

Well, sure: Quantum physics explains the way matter behaves and pitchers are made of matter.

Yodels. Felt like they had the highest frosting/lard:cake ratio of the Drake’s Cakes.

A fair point

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Your blog today, come on man. You can’t lump VA drivers based on Fairfax County. That’s Northern VA… that’s DC-light. It’s transplants from other places. They may have VA tags but their histories and lineage are not Old Dominion. And they may not even be a majority of the drivers on the roads but it’s enough of them that THEY are what you notice.

– Ben from Lynchburg, via email.

This is a fair point. When I said “Virginia drivers,” I should have said “Northern Virginia drivers.” But I promise, it was actually the majority of them that were looking at other things besides the road. I’m only going by empirical evidence and about a 50-car sample, but this is hardly the first time I’ve noticed the area vehicular obliviousness.

Virginia drivers

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I’ve discussed this before: There’s no shortage of bad drivers anywhere there are drivers. But after years of research, I believe there are clear regional tendencies in bad driving styles.

I have no idea why this might be. Maybe it has something to do with intricacies in state-by-state traffic laws, the ways in which various local police departments enforce those laws and the long-term effects. Or perhaps certain bad habits just become socially acceptable in some places due to years of lousy role models and impotent driver’s-ed instructors.

It was a gorgeous day for a drive yesterday and for some odd reason, traffic along the northeast corridor mostly obliged. But I was coasting along about 12 miles per hour above the speed limit in the middle lane of a three-lane highway with very few cars on the road when a silver compact car pulled up right behind me and started driving maybe 10-15 yards from my tailpipe. I maintained a consistent speed and he could have easily passed me (on either side, no less), but he stayed there for minutes, making me nervous: What’s he up to? Why’s he chasing me? Is this some sort of unmarked cop car about to pull me over? Does he even see me or is asleep at the wheel and just plowing forward?

Finally, he lost patience and whizzed past me on the left, only to speed forward to the next small crop of traffic down the road and do the exact same thing to some other car in the middle lane. As he passed me, I took a look: Kid in his early 20s with a baseball hat slightly askew, a decal for his college occupying the bottom half of his rear window, a factory spoiler and New Jersey license plates. Classic Jersey driver.

Later on the drive, the Mazda Tribute in front of me in the left lane slowed from about 78 to 60 despite no traffic ahead of it and no obvious obstructions in the road. The car’s break lights never lit; it looked like the driver simply, suddenly took his foot off the accelerator in the left lane on I-95. As I craned to see what could be going on, the car veered toward the shoulder then jerked back into the lane. The driver, a salt-and-pepper haired man with glasses, turned his attention back to whatever it was he had splayed out across his steering wheel.

I looked at his plates: Virginia, of course.

No state I know of breeds more oblivious drivers. I’m staying with some friends in Fairfax County and I walked to a 7-11 on Lee Highway this morning. At an intersection, I tried to judge how many of the passing motorists were occupied by something other than the massive two-ton, fuel-filled steel machines hurtling around them in every direction and the ones they were themselves charged with piloting responsibly.

I would guess — and this is no exaggeration — that 75 percent of the people on the road were paying attention to something besides the road. Mostly their smartphones, but also their clipboards and knitting projects and novels and rosary beads. It was kind of beautiful to see, actually: People of all ages, shapes, races, and creeds unified by a cavalier disregard for all the dangers beyond their dashboards.

It rained today, and maybe 50 percent of the cars did not have their headlights on. People still don’t know about that! Does it not often rain here? Don’t many new cars do this by default now?

Today in suburban overreactions

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A Rockville Centre attorney is under arrest after allegedly holding a suspected teenage prankster at gunpoint until officers arrived at her home Sunday night, Nassau County police said.

Bernadette Greenwald, 47, apparently lost her cool after someone repeatedly rang her doorbell and ran from the home around 11:15 p.m. Sunday.

The “ding, dong, ditch” prank was apparently carried out three times and after the last incident, police said Greenwald, a former Bronx Assistant District Attorney, grabbed her .9 mm pistol and fired one round into the air in front of her house.

Police said Greenwald later saw a 17-year-old boy walking in front of her N. Forest Avenue home. She allegedly approached the teen and pointed the gun at him. Greenwald’s retired Air Force pilot husband apparently returned home to discover the youth inside his home.

– CBSNewYork.com.

Regular readers of this site know that I am a native of Rockville Centre, New York and that I was, in my teenage years, the perpetrator of various teenage pranks and the one-time quasi-victim, so to speak, of a wild overreaction to one of those pranks.

But thankfully no one ever pulled a gun on me, forced me into their house and held me at gunpoint until the cops came. And while I can understand being a bit miffed or unnerved by teenagers doing stupid things in the middle of the night, just, well… c’mon, lady.

Anyway, this seems like as good an excuse as any to note my favorite boredom-driven suburban pranks. Ding-dong-ditch (we called it ring-and-run, actually) got old pretty quick and toilet papering required money and coordination, but lawn ornaments presented ample opportunities for creativity without much risk or planning.

One thing we liked to do was pick up people’s lawn ornaments and tastefully arrange them on the lawn of a different house on the same block. I always had this image in my head of some homeowner in his bathrobe stepping outside to fetch the paper in the morning, noticing his missing cherub, then spotting it across the street alongside his neighbor’s walkway and being all, “WTF?” And then maybe he steals it back or maybe he awkwardly confronts the neighbor about it. The whole thing cracked me up.

But my favorite prank centered around these white, wooden reindeer that came into fashion in the town just about the same time we started driving. I don’t know where they came from — my family never had them — but I guess their understated, Nordic simplicity spoke to the people of Rockville Centre or something, because there were at least a pair on every block. And some homes had whole, ostentatious fleets of them: up to nine reindeer lined up in sleigh-pulling formation or otherwise just grazing on their front yards.

Since the reindeer were lightweight and very simply constructed, they were incredibly easy to rearrange. And it so happened that the two standard shapes of these reindeer lent themselves particularly well to being arranged in all sorts of suggestive positions.

That’s how I spent most of my December nights in my junior and senior years of high school: Reindeering, we called it. And we were in high school, so everyone involved was a hormone-fueled encyclopedia of vile, debased and downright bizarre concepts for how reindeer might seek pleasure. Those neighbors that made the mistake of hosting nine of the things regularly woke up to depraved Caligula orgies enacted on their front lawns with their simple, tasteful white reindeer.

After a while, people started going to great lengths to stake the reindeer down and wire them to trees, but it was just never terribly hard to move them around. Ultimately, the reindeer either went out of style or the townspeople grew tired of the Sisyphean ordeal of repositioning their reindeer thrice a week before the kids woke up to avoid that awkward conversation; they were scarce by my junior year of college.

So there’s no real specific story or punchline here. We were never caught or held at gunpoint, and I have yet to receive my appropriate comeuppance. I regret nothing.

None of the above!

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Do I really think Brewster’s Millions is the best baseball film ever made? No. It’s a really stupid movie. But it’s one of those awful movies that every time it pops up on one of my 15,000 DirecTV channels, I fall into some sort of drooling trance in which time stands still. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched the thing from start to finish, but I’ve probably seen it about 30 times in fits and starts. There are some things the film did well. First, it proved that you can stick John Candy and Richard Pryor in the same movie and not only render them completely unfunny, but you can in fact make them seem almost child-like. I mean, this is Richard freaking Pryor, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t use a single swear word in the entire film.

– Bradford Doolittle, Baseball Prospectus.

I was pretty excited to see Brewster’s Millions on Baseball Prospectus’ list of 10 favorite baseball movies, but then I read the accompanying blurb. “Awful”? “Unfunny”?

Get your head out of the spreadsheet, son. Brewster’s Millions is a classic, and this dude at work who went to film school agrees. The premise is outstanding and the Richard Pryor is Richard Pryor. And “None of the Above” remains the only political candidate to which I could ever give my wholehearted endorsement.