Category Archives: Items of note

The Rock not ruling out presidential run

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The Rock knew about Osama Bin Laden’s death hours before Obama announced it. He also says:

Right now, the best way that I can impact the world is through entertainment. One day, and that day will come, I can impact the world through politics. The great news is that I am American, therefore I can become President.

Even if I disagree with The Rock on every issue, I’ll probably still vote for The Rock just to do my part to push us toward the future prophesied in Idiocracy. Also because it’d be hilarious.

DO YOU SMELL WHAT THE ROCK IS VETOING?

 

 

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.

Donut-related hostility on the 6 train

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The 6 train sucks at rush hour. It comes every couple of minutes, but it inevitably fills way past the threshold at which a commuter can enjoy an inch of personal space. And even despite that, plenty of idiots still block the doors at stops, refuse to move all the way into the train cars and shove their way on instead of just waiting for the next train like everyone else on the platform.

As the doors were closing at the 68th St. stop this morning, a guy tried to scramble in only to meet an unyielding wall of humanity. The door caught him on the side and jostled him forward into the train and into a collision with another dude, who, it turned out, had a deep, booming, Ving Rhames voice and a bag he was working hard to protect.

“MOTHERF@#$ER!” He yelled. “Can’t you see I’ve got f@#$ing donuts!?”

The first dude, inches away from and face to face with the angry donut-holding guy with nowhere to move, mumbled something inaudible as the train started moving.

“OH YOU WANT SOME OF THESE F!@#ING DONUTS?” the angry guy continued. “I’LL SHOVE THESE DONUTS RIGHT IN YOUR F@#$ING FACE!”

“Ay, dios mio!” said a woman holding a baby, sitting nearby. The perpetrator looked down and mumbled something else. Here’s my favorite part:

“YEAH, YOU BETTER F@#$IN’ HOPE THEY CHOCOLATE!”

Between 59th St. and 51st, Donut Guy announced to the man in front of him and basically everyone else on the train that he was getting off at the next stop. He appeared to do so without incident and, fortunately for everyone, without in any way compromising his prized bag of donuts.

So if some basso profundo co-worker brought donuts to your Midtown office today, make sure to thank him profusely. He put a lot of effort into getting those donuts to you intact.

More like Burrito Supreme Court, am I right?

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Given that the term “sandwiches” is not ambiguous and the Lease does not provide a definition of it, this court applies the ordinary meaning of the word. The New Webster Third International Dictionary describes a “sandwich ” as “two thin pieces of bread, usually buttered, with a thin layer (as of meat, cheese, or savory mixture) spread between them.” Under this definition and as dictated by common sense, this court finds that the term “sandwich” is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos, and quesadillas, which are typically made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans….

Further, PR’s reliance on Sabritas is misplaced. PR argues that a flour tortilla qualifies as “bread” and a food product with bread and a filling is a sandwich. In Sabritas, the International Trade Court applied the commercial meaning, rather than the ordinary meaning of bread, to corn tacos shells for purposes of levying tariffs. 22 C.I.T. at 59 (Ct. Int’l Trade 1998). Here, the commercial meaning of “bread” is inapposite where it is the ordinary meaning that is relevant when interpreting an unambiguous contractual term such as “sandwiches.”

– Jeffrey A. Locke, Justice, Superior Court of Massachusetts. White City Shopping Center LP v. PR Restaurants, LLC.

This comes via reader Dan with some help from real-life friend Bill, who points out that there have also been court rulings to determine the definition of the meat “chicken,” among other things. This one came in a case over a leasing contract at a strip mall: A Panera franchise had exclusive rights to sell sandwiches in the mall and its operators apparently bucked when a Qdoba moved in, arguing that Qdoba was also trafficking in sandwiches.

Anyway, the crux of all that legalese is that some judge in Massachusetts ruled in 2006 that a sandwich is not a burrito, which is notable but I would say hardly indisputable. For one thing, the cited dictionary definition of “sandwich” just does not hold up in any to the common sense Locke is so eager to appeal to, and thus seems irrelevant in this instance: “usually buttered”? “thin layer spread between them”? Doesn’t sound like most sandwiches I eat.

I have previously suggested I believe a burrito to be a sandwich, but I’m less certain now that I’ve started working toward a unifying sandwich definition. The NPR proposes something they call the “Neuhaus Rule,” which is “a sandwich is defined as a protein encased in bread product.” But I suspect it’s more complex than that.

Hat tip to Theresa for the NPR link.

Overthinking things

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Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain might even explain their struggle to eloquently describe performance after the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster shields in a battle, professional athletes temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to maximize activity in centers that guide movement.

“That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.”

– Nick Bascom, Science News.

Not to belabor the Hoyas’ win last night, but it’s hard to read that Science News excerpt without thinking of Hollis Thompson’s postgame quote about his tiebreaking three-pointer:

Um, I mean, I was open, and my teammates found me…. Honestly, I don’t remember.

The Science News article, which comes via Eno Sarris, is a good one but it mostly presents a bunch of evidence to corroborate things we already know from experience playing sports or from those same seemingly uninformative postgame interviews.

You’ll never hear a baseball player say after a walk-off home run that his secret was mentally running through all the potential ramifications of his at-bat while simultaneously considering the various intricacies of his swing mechanics and keeping conscious of the particular home-plate umpire’s strike zone and the pitcher’s arsenal and tendencies.

All of that information exists somewhere in his mind while he’s swinging, of course, but as the article asserts, it is his ability to process it and keep it in his subconscious during the actual important event that in part allows him to succeed.

Sometimes the cliches are cliched for a reason: You really don’t want to overthink things in sports. That’s for bloggers and experimental psychologists. The elite athletes are the ones who, on top of the physical gifts, have the ability to maintain focus on their tasks in spite of myriad pressures and exterior factors, and it’s really only when they waver that we notice it at all. Until then, we just snicker at the seeming meaninglessness of their postgame interviews without considering how we might gladly give up our presumed eloquence for their unfaltering control.

Stephen Colbert still awesome

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I don’t think you ever say ‘never.’ That’s a discussion I’ll have to have with my family. I’ll need to pray on it.

– Stephen Colbert, on the possibility of running for President.

If you’ve got 20 minutes and you appreciate Colbert as much as I do, read Charles McGrath’s entire N.Y. Times Magazine feature on Colbert’s real and on-camera personas.