A Wicked Left Turn!!!!!!

So, I came across this on reddit the other day (by "the other" I mean "yester"). Now, if you've never lived in Michigan and experienced the "Michigan boomerang" for yourself, you'll probably think that I'm full of crap and that there is no way that this could possibly be real. I assure you, it's entirely accurate, all the way down to flooring it so you don't get hit by the semi as you complete the second half of the u-turn.

Now, according to the wikipedia article "Studies have shown a major reduction in left-turn collisions and a minor reduction in merging and diverging collisions, due to the shifting of left turns outside the main intersection. In addition it reduces the number of different traffic light phases, significantly increasing traffic flow. Since separate phases are no longer needed for left turns, this increases green time for through traffic. The effect on turning traffic is mixed."

I have some problems with this description, mainly because the effect on turning traffic is not "mixed." It's mainly bad. Normally, you might wait through a left turn light for one full cycle if you have bad timing. If you have bad timing at a Michigan left, you might have to wait through 3 red lights (this happens about 60% of the time in my experience.)

But anyway, the effect on traffic is not what I was trying to say. What I was trying to say was something along the lines of the excess miles drive to accommodate the Michigan Left.

Let's take some pulled-out-of-my-ass estimates here. Say there are 1000* such intersections in Michigan and that the average number of turns per day is 1500**. I have no idea if these are reasonable assumptions. But anyway, that means 1.5 million turns are tooken eachen day. Now, one time I measured how far I had to drive to make the right-turn-u-turn-to-make-a-left turn. It was about 0.25 miles. That means that every day, vehicles travel an additional 375,000 miles. Annually, that's 136,875,000 extra miles driven in Michigan. That also means that an additional 1.23*** billion tons of CO2 are emitted by these cars! That's more CO2 than is produced by all the sheep in New Zealand and all the caribou in Canada COMBINED***! So if you want to blame global warming on anything, blame it on Michigan. The world needs a good whipping boy, and Michigan is so down on its luck that it won't even notice the difference.


*Could be off by an order of magnitude.

**Might be nowhere close to reality since nobody has a job in Michigan anymore.

***Absolutely no basis for this claim whatsoever.

A Tale of Two CDs

So I've now listened to the latest Avett Bros. album approximately a baker's dozen times while driving to and from work and/or stores and I've come to the conclusion that I have to call it a total sell-out. It is basically a mainstream wannabe that lacks the pure poppiness of actual mainstream music without the vibrancy and banjo that made their past efforts (see Gleam and Emotionalism for example) so awesome.

Now this is hard for me to say, and I come by this after many hours of deliberation. You see, I've never heard any other Avett Brothers albums before in my life. However, I am aware that many of their "true" fans do not like the latest offering. I definitely don't want to be one of those Ralph-come-latelys because then I totally lose all my credibility (sort of like how I feel about people who have only heard the Kings of Leon's newest album, which sucks and is a total sell-out). So I am forced to pretend that I don't think this newest album is very good so as to look like someone hip and in the know. You wouldn't think being hip should be so difficult, but you are wrong. It's a lot of work.

The great thing about this decision is that even though I claim to think "I and Love and You" is a total cop-out, major-label, Rick-rubin suckfest and how they were WAAAAAAY better back when, I can still listen to it in secret. If I listened to it in public without shame, I would be opening myself up to all kinds of mockery by the real deal fans.

Basically, I just want to make sure I'm hipper than anybody else at work, which is, let's be honest, in the northern Detroit suburbs, like shooting a barrel with a gun specifically designed to shoot barrels with barrel-seeking missiles.

Uh???

So, I can't really tell. Which one of these is real???

Freakin' Poe and his law.

When The Going Gets Tough....

I was totally going to write something today, and then I decided, "Nah."

But then I was all, "I don't know, maybe I should..."

So here it is...

I think the most important event that's occurred all year happened 10 days ago, and has gone largely unnoticed. The social, political and economic repercussions will probably be felt for decades, if not centuries. Basically, what happened was


Ah, never mind. I changed my again.

Paint Your Body Red and Brown

So, the other day I was just sitting around watching one of the strangest, best, and most non-sequiturishly-titled movies of all time. Okay, no. I wasn't just sitting around watching one of the strangest, best and most non-sequiturishly-titled movies of all time, I was also reading the news on the internet. All of a sudden, out of the blue, out of left field comes this article about a national security higher-up guy talking about how we need to redefine privacy. It should no longer mean [REDACTED]. Instead it should mean that the government will keep your information private from other organizations. Those [REDACTED], crazy [REDACTED] think that we don't [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] them!

If they successfully change the societal meaning of privacy my family and I are [REDACTED].

Seriously.

I've Always Told Lies For Love

The other day, actually yesterday I think, my son told his first ever approximately correct joke. It went like this...

Person Telling The Joke (PTtJ): Knock Knock
Person Not Telling the Joke (PNTtJ): Who's there?
PTtJ: Popcorn!
PNTtJ: Popcorn who?
PTtJ: Popcorn Chicken!

Granted, it's not very funny but it's way better than what he usually does, which goes something like this...

PTtJ: Knock knock!
PNTtJ: Who's There?
PTtJ: Jiffy Pop Train to pick up a dog at the station!
PNTtJ: Jiffy Pop Train to pick up a dog at the station, who?
PTtJ: I screwed it up!!!

And now that that's out of the way, how was your weekend? Uh huh, uh huh. You're kidding! No, he couldn't have! OMG. Yeah, the weather was nice around here, a little cold at night, but I think my tomato plants survived. Yep, still going good, I've got more basil than I can shake a stick at. Well, half a stick anyway. They are doing fine. The little one is a little sick today, so he stayed home from school. Yeah, well say hi to them for me. Okay. See you later!

I'd say 75% of my interactions with other people are like that. The rest can be tabulated below:

5%: Conversations with my office-mate (an actual person, not inanimate office supplies that I talk to. Don't worry) about how screwed the world is that rapidly veer off course to conspiracy theories that he want to convince me of, many of which are proponentated by David Icke (follow the link, I dare you).

3%: Sports-related conversations in which I try to feign non-ignorance. I typically try to check some scores before coming to work on Monday during football season so I can sound normal. "Whoa, lot of overtime games yesterday huh?" See? It works.

7%: Discussions with my son about what he did at school, whether or not something is cool, what he wants for his birthday, what he did 2 years ago that he appears to actually remember somehow, and jokes (see above).

10%: Discussion with my wife about, literally, any subject imaginable. Once we discussed our mutual interest in a scientific paper on how many bullets it would take to kill a cow based on caliber, shot location, muzzle velocity and firing distance. That's probably one of the more straight forward conversations that we've had. ***Update: I'd just like to confirm that this conversation was purely hypothetical.***

ca. 0%: TV, because I've finally been able to become, as has been a lifelong dream, one of those annoying people that everybody hates who, whenever somebody starts to talk about some TV show or other, says "Oh, I don't even own a TV." Well, that's a slight lie. I do own a TV, but we can't afford cable and we only get one fuzzy channel (ABC, I think) so I'm kind of one of those people by default. But still, I can check that one off my lifetime "To Do" list.

Random Picture Friday: His Fangs Have Been Pulled

Just so you know, this is a picture plotting three thousand random numbers. For random picture friday. I kill me!







Also, just so you know, yesterday's stupid "poem" wasn't about anything or anyone. I hope you all realize this is always the case.