I have no problem with the fact that drivers are perpetually in a hurry. I also have no problem when they break the speed limit in order to get there faster. I not-infrequently do the same. I will do everything that I can to enable that someone is allowed to go the speed that they want to go. But I do that because I am a nice guy, not because I am under any moral or legal obligation to.

So while I don’t wholly disagree, I have some reservations with the point-of-view of this fellow:

The entire point of on-ramps and merge lanes is to allow you the possibility to get up to the same speed as the highway you are about to be launching your car onto — that you do not take advantage of that opportunity is indicative of a remarkable lack of self-awareness, an even stronger lack of situational awareness, and an amazing amount of purebred stupidity. There is absolutely nothing worse than being stuck behind some dumbass in an econobox doing 40 trying to merge onto a highway where the speed limit is 65, and traffic is moving at 80. That is, there is nothing worse than that except actually being on that highway as the dumbass in the econobox just lurches out into your lane doing 40, and make absolutely no attempt to get up to a rational speed.

I have some sympathy for the person in the former situation, wanting to merge onto a highway but not being able to pick up what you consider to be safe speed because of the car in front of you. I don’t have nearly as much sympathy for the latter person.

There is no reason under any circumstances to be going 80 miles an hour in the right-hand lane of a freeway unless you know for a fact that you are nowhere near merging traffic. I don’t want to hear any crap about how it’s somehow “unsafe” to go the speed limit on the freeway. I have experience studiously holding below the speed limit and experience hovering 10-15 over it depending on whether I am on or off of traffic probation. If you go the speed limit, you have a place on the freeway. It’s called the right-hand lane.

I’ll even go a step further, though. Even if you live in one of those western states with an 80mph speed limit, it is still a monumentally bad idea to be going 80 miles an hour in the right-hand lane anywhere near a traffic merge. Honestly, I’d recommend against going 65mph without a clear idea of what merging traffic is going to do (ie you see who is about to merge, are gauging their speed, etc.).

Why? Well, because some drivers try to merge in at half the speed of traffic-flow. But even if the merging drivers are as good as you believe yourself to be, there are a number of people that may be going significantly below the speed limit. Examples:

Sometimes “merge” lane is actually an entrance/exit lane wherein a car will be in front of them slowing down to get off the freeway and onto an access road or intersection.

They might have had to slow down because back when they were going 65mph they weren’t let in and they were running out of lane/shoulder space.

They might be driving on a donut or otherwise have a temporarily impaired car that they need to get home or to the auto shop.

They might have just been on an on-ramp that had a line of cars, meaning that they’re accelerating from a stopped position and cannot speed up in time.

Some onramps are metered so that they force people to stop before entering the freeway.

And no, it is not everyone’s job to have a car on the road that can accelerate from zero to eighty or close to eighty from the beginning of an onramp to the end of merging lane. Not everyone is going to have a car with that kind of pick-up, and not everyone needs to, and nobody should be forced to in order to assure the freeway drivers’ right to go as fast as they want in the right-hand lane. Yeah, if their car is incapable of getting up to 50 with ample merging time they represent a hazard. But beyond that, you should be ready. Anyone that wants to go 80mph almost always has at least one lane in which they can do that. That lane is not the right-hand lane.

While some people are understandably quite frustrated with cars entering the freeway too slow, I frequently have to deal with cars that get upset, honk, and flash their lights as they whirl around me at excessive speeds in the wrong lane when I’ve given any driver going at a reasonable speed more than enough time to slow down (and indeed, even at their unreasonable speed they always have enough time to change lanes, honk, flash me with their lights, and flip me the bird as they whirl on by. I’ve yet to have a close call, but I am sick and tired of the attitude that some drivers have that their desire to go 75-80mph is crucial while my need to get on the freeway (as opposed to being forced to drive on the shoulder or run into a concrete barrier) is some sort of imposition.

I can’t afford a Camaro and, contrary to the drivers whose little fingers I meet, I have nothing to apologize for.

-{via Dustbury}-

Headline: A Hipper Crowd of Shushers
Clipping: In the last few years, articles have decried the graying of the profession, noting a large percentage of librarians that would soon be retiring and a seemingly insurmountable demand for replacements. But worries about a mass exodus appear to have been unfounded.
Reaction: There was never any risk of the country running out of librarians. Seriously. Nearly every Lit major I know were angling to become librarians. Beats serving coffee.

Headline: Research Links Lead Exposure, Criminal Activity
Clipping: The theory offered by the economist, Rick Nevin, is that lead poisoning accounts for much of the variation in violent crime in the United States. It offers a unifying new neurochemical theory for fluctuations in the crime rate, and it is based on studies linking children’s exposure to lead with violent behavior later in their lives.
Reaction: Doesn’t seem right intuitively, but fascinating if it is. The Post wastes too much space talking about the presidential implications and are missing the true story: if banning lead caused the crime droppage, that would make environmentalists and medical professionals the strongest crimefighters this country has ever seen.

Headline: No happy ending for divorced boomers
Clipping: Australia’s first wave of baby-boomer divorcees are far less happy as they approach retirement and suffer more physical and mental health problems than their married friends. No matter how many years have passed since their split, members of the growing grey army of over-55 divorcees without a new partner are likely to be less satisfied with life than a married person. And to confirm it is divorce that has the negative effect on wellbeing, divorced women who remain single are less happy than widows in the same situation.
Reaction: Uhhh, how many people that divorce intend on still being single at 55? Some, I’m sure, but not many. Wouldn’t it have been a more interesting study if they’d instead looked at whether trading spousing had any affect on happiness? I honestly suspect not for the most part, but it’s a more interesting question than this one.

Headline: Bring It On
Clipping: “I’m big on unstructured time,” says Reilly. “My kids aren’t booked all summer.” Her son, for example, would probably like to play league baseball year-round, but she discourages it. “Hey, I teach yoga. You’ve got to be able to feel good about doing nothing.”
Reaction: The second most irritating thing about Baby Boomer parents was their tendency to take whatever decision they decided to make for whatever reason they decided to make it (laziness, to be liked by their kids, cause the other parents are doing it) and exalt it into some zen-like state. It’s the parental equivalent of layabouts that have decided that they won’t get a job cause that’s what “the man” wants them to do.

Headline: An alternative political future for the District
Clipping: A proposal to grant the District a full vote in the House has passed the House and the Senate government affairs committees, and a full Senate vote is scheduled for July. President Bush threatens to veto the measure if it passes. But the congressmen promoting it are overlooking a radical and vastly superior alternative: giving the bulk of the District back to Maryland, just as Congress returned Alexandria and Arlington to Virginia in 1846.
Reaction: I was actually suggesting this to Clancy last week. This would ostensibly take care of the disenfranchisement problem, but it would come at a cost. Right now 400k people or so get three electoral votes all to itself and they’d have to trade that for a minority stake in Maryland’s senate seats and a shared congressman. In that light, it really doesn’t seem that DC has a bad deal at all.

Headline: New hazard: Driving while wired – States target growing use of electronics in vehicles
Clipping: Lawmakers in a dozen states are trying to ban drivers from using video games, computers and fax machines in cars in a new wave of driver-distraction legislation. Since January, states including Texas, New York and Arizona have considered bills that would limit the use of car electronics that go far beyond cellphones, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Reaction: It’s really pretty hard to argue against these laws, though I’m sure some libertarian might try. It would be hard to enforce, but would be useful when people are pulled over for some other reason or for declaring fault in case of an accident.

Headline: Al Gore’s son busted for drugs in hybrid car
Clipping: The deputy smelled marijuana and searched the car, said sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino. The search turned up a small amount of marijuana, along with prescription drugs including Valium, Xanax, Vicodin, Adderall and Soma. There were no prescriptions found, he said.
Reaction: For some reason this whole incident made me think of A.J. Soprano. Nobody knows better than the former vice president how tough it is to be a politician’s kid. Though Albert Jr himself never took the oath, the history of First Children is a long and mostly sad one. I’d say that this should put to rest any concerns Republicans might have about Al-3 having a political career, but considering the White House’s current occupant not necessarily.

An IM conversation between my coworker Pat and me.

wellpatr: Here’s what I don’t get. If Benoit was going to kill his wife and kid and himself, why do it over an entire weekend?
trumwill: Maybe he killed his kid cause he found out or was going to find out about his mom?
wellpatr: Could be, but if he was going to kill himself anyway why does it matter?
trumwill: It’s possible that he didn’t realize he had to kill himself until after he killed the kid.
wellpatr: He should have gone into this with a plan, decided who needed to die and why, and taken care of it in a much more efficient manner than he did.
trumwill: I think we may just have to accept the fact that when he killed his family and them himself, he may not have been in the most logical frame of mind.
wellpatr: Even so, the inefficiency is disturbing. It’s a good thing that he was a wrestler because he would make a lousy businessman.

The eruption after the whole Chris Benoit thing got me thinking about the morality of watching productions the cause its participants great harm.

Wrestling is one of those things. If steroid usage is as widespread as it often seems to be, we are watching an army of people destroying their bodies and/or consigning themselves to an early death for the sake of our entertainment. To the extent that we suspect this is happening are we or are we not morally bound to act on these suspicions?

Of course, what’s frustrating is that on television there is no drug-free alternative to the WWE. It’s not like boycotting Walmart and going to K-Mart instead because there’s nowhere for you to go. On the other hand, wrestling as a whole can be more easily replaced by comic books, and action shows on TV.

It’s not entirely a new question. To a lesser extent we see people putting their lives in great jeopardy every fall and winter Sunday. We watch boxers pound their face in. The difference, to the extent that there is one, is that in wrestling and football we are watching people compete. It’s an athletic competition. Wrestling, on the other hand, is an athletic display. Is that difference fundamental or something in my mind? I honestly consider things like figure dancing to be more a display than an actual competition even though it’s technically the latter.

What it actually reminds me of a little bit is pornography (I might as well earn this NC-17 rating that has been thrust upon me!). There are two basic moral objections to pornography that come to my mind. The first is that it is bad for the audience. Pornography combined with a lack of sexual experience can really warp one’s sexual mind. Their ideas of what a typical woman’s body looks like, what sexual positions are enjoyable or can be expected, and desensitization to sexual stimuli. The second is that it is bad for women. On top of the basic argument of objectification, many of them are selling their future employment and social prospects with images that last forever in a career that is typically very, very short-lived.

The last thing I am reminded of is gambling. For most people gambling is a frivolous activity or a fun game, but it ruins lives. We can talk all day long about how no one forces a gambler to go to a casino (just as no one forces anyone to audition for professional wrestling, play sports professionally, or star in porn), but be that as it may if there were no casino for him to go to his life would be materially better off and I’m not convinced that the lives of everyone else would be that severely disrupted.

I’m not advocating legally banning any of these things or even about government at all. They’d all persist even if illegalized. Rather, I am interested in the moral dimensions of engaging in activities of momentary benefit to you that harm other people a great deal. Even if you can handle pornography without getting desensitized, gamble without losing your life savings, or drink alcohol without drinking to excess, are we morally culpable for contributing to an industry that assists people in doing just those things? It’s not exactly something I’m comfortable with, but it’s hard for me to buy that I am not at least somewhat culpable. Sure, these things exist whether I partake or not, but that strikes me as something of a cop-out because it allows everyone to agree not to change their behavior.

It’s a common observation that atypical meats taste like chicken. It seems that we liken just about any meat we can to chicken, especially when we’ve never had it and have no idea what it tastes like.

So my question is… if every kind of meat tastes like chicken… how come the roast chicken breast at Subway doesn’t taste like chicken?

One of the crazier dieting ideas I got was in college when I read (erroneously) about how the body needs something like a gallon of water a day and that if the body got that much it would deal with calories more efficiently. So I started drinking a lot of water. A. Lot. Of. Water.

I learned pretty quickly that there was about a 45-minute turnaround between when I drank 1/2 gallon of water or more and needing to take care of my business and I made plans accordingly. One day I drank my morning gulps at work (I had an overnight job) and immediately got in the car to head to the Southern Tech campus to take my morning classes. There was some multi-car accident that had the entire Interstate closed. Traffic was at a standstill. Fifteen minutes, twenty, thirty, forty-five.

Gulp.

I realized that I had to do something. I couldn’t even pull off the road and use a public restroom. I had only one option: Three empty quart water bottles that I was bringing back with me to the Sotech campus to refill.

By the time I got back to the dorm, I had filled two of them and was over half-way on the third.

When I got back to the dorm I was so proud of myself for getting myself out of quite a jam that I immediately decided to share this story with my best friend Clint. Before he could respond I got the whole story out there. Then I had to relieve myself of the rest of the water I had drank that morning. When I got back I noticed that I had somehow closed thechat window I had open with Clint and opened one with my mom. Then I remembered how similar there names were, how I’d misdirected messages before, and realized what had happened.

“Must be nice being male,” Mom replied.