GOOD BOY

lol’d: dog left in truck attempts to get at Tupperware full of bacon grease, inadvertently puts vehicle in gear, causes fender bender in parking lot

Sometimes we just need funny stories to brighten a day.  This is one of them.  Elvis, which is an appropriate name for this dog, attempts to get at some bacon grease and instead drives a truck into a parked car.

It’s not like Elvis could be held accountable for any of this, because it was his less-than intelligent owner who left A DOG, alone in a vehicle that had a container full of BACON grease, and somehow expected that everything would be okay while he went into the store.

Anyway, the best news of this story is that nobody was hurt, most of all Elvis.  A Mitsubishi Lancer took a little bit of a ding, but considering that it’s a Lancer, it’s not like any damage was done in the first place.  Unfortunately for Elvis, it didn’t look like he succeeded at getting any of that sweet bacon grease though, however. 😢

Upfront fares are what separates rideshare from taxis

Some ≠ All: some lobby group of rideshare drivers are salty about upfront pricing and decide to stage a protest in Australia

The RideShare Drivers United (RSDU) don’t seem to realize that upfront pricing is the one thing that separates rideshare from taxis.  If companies like Uber and Lyft were to eliminate upfront pricing and price based on time and distance, they are literally, becoming cabs, except minus the obnoxious orange or yellow color of vehicle.

One of RSDU’s demands is that the ridesharing company stop using upfront pricing, and return to a system where drivers are paid for the actual time and distance traveled.

Yeah no, that’s probably not going to happen.

I understand their frustration, because I can’t help but feel bad for a driver I’ve hailed who gets completely stuck in stand-still traffic for 20 minutes, but are only going to make $24, because that’s what the app said they would make, but that’s the reason why I took them instead of hailing a cab or some other alternative mode of transportation.

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A challenger appears

A different kind of fireball on the roadways: in a collision between tractor-trailers, one empties hundreds of mini-bottles of Fireball cinnamon whisky all over Interstate 40 in Arkansas

Normally I do my best to no-sell whenever somewhere outside of Georgia gets some sort of epic truck accident that results in a tragic amount of food all over the roadways, crippling traffic for hours, while crews have to work diligently and expediently to clear the road of random food and/or debris.  Often times, I’m envious whenever something particularly interesting is dumped out all over the place, and wish it happened in like Covington or Forest Park just outside of Atlanta.

However, in this case, aside from the most basic of white girl wasted cocktails most certainly catching my attention, it’s revealed that Arkansas has had its over veritable buffet dumped all over the highways over the last few years, possibly rivaling the sheer volume of wasted food done in Georgia.

Whereas Georgia has had a slightly more balanced menu scattered all over the roads with hams, chickens, cows, potato chips and numerous beer truck spills, Arkansas seems to go more for the college dorm diet, spilling frozen pizzas, and a whole lot of liquor all over their roads.  Allegedly there have been wrecks starring bourbon, gin and now Fireball cinnamon whisky stinking up the asphalt throughout the years.

Lord only knows how fragrant it might be at first, but as my brother points out, a little bit of sun and a little bit of heat, and I-40 in Central Arkansas is going to smell like unadulterated vomit not before long.

Either way, the magic is in the details, and a truck spilling whisky isn’t that much of a deal to me.  But a truck spilling hundreds of airplane-sized bottles of Fireball is kind of a tragedy, because god damn, does a Fireball-Dr. Pepper cocktail really taste delicious, regardless of how much of a basic white girl that would make me to admit to enjoying.

FREE BEEF

Haven’t done one of these in a while: tractor-trailer hauling live cattle overturns on Interstate 75 in Cobb County, Georgia, liberating several cows that systematically mangled the morning rush to levels worse than usual, until they were corralled and moved to onto the side of the road.  Seven cows did not survive the wreck. 😞

Now I don’t really take lightly the unfortunate deaths of animals, but considering what cows are typically raised for, I think it’s safe to assume that FREE BEEF has just been added to the menu of the buffet spilled across the highways of Georgia.  And frankly considering the typically inhumane ways that animals are put out of their misery before they become food for us mostly worthless humans, dying in a car accident might not be the worst way to go for the bovines lucky enough to escape their eventual destinies.

As I said, it’s been a while, so I don’t even know where to begin searching out my last list of food lost on Georgia roads.  All I can really point out that with fresh beef finally entering the fray, joining chickens and hams, the only meat that has yet to represent on a highway is like some salmon, catfish or some other form of seafood.

But if that day ever comes, then Georgia roads can be the Arby’s of the United States highway system, since they’ll have had, all the meats.

Initial D, fin

Not a lot of people know this, but Initial D is one of my all-time favorite anime out there.  Easily in my top ten, quite possibly in my top five.  I’ll be the first to say that it’s far from high quality in terms of plot, progression or quality of animation, but when the day is over, there isn’t any other anime that I’ve revisited the status of availability over the span of 18 years, to make sure that I’m caught up to all the episodes.

That’s longer than my interest in Ranma 1/2, Rurouni Kenshin, Kare Kano, Kodomo no Omocha or Neon Genesis Evangelion, all other series that I could say would be up in my top ten.  Not many of them had nearly the longevity of Initial D, much less a variety of movies, OVA and live-action adaptations made for them, in spite of them probably being considered bigger traditional classics.

I recently finished watching the series after I discovered that the Fifth and the Final Stage seasons were available; after the cheesy way that the Fourth Stage had concluded, I was eager to see if the series could get back some of the gearhead excitement that defined the series as a whole.

To no real surprise, the last two seasons were by no means blockbusters, as the series in general is nothing really complex – dudes who love driving cars and racing, racing against other dudes who love driving cars and racing.  The only things that really change are the competitors to the Project D team, and occasionally the course does too.  At first blush, it’s hard to imagine the types of cars that are losing to a Toyota Corolla AE86 or an RX-7 FD3S, but the show surprisingly takes the initiative to explain and justify the mechanics to how such can happen.

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Have Lexus drivers passed BMW for biggest assholes?

For the better part of the last two decades, if anyone were to ask me what drivers were the worst drivers in the world, my automatic reaction would typically have been “Maryland drivers.”  But upon clarification of asking which automotive manufacturer has the biggest assholes that drive their cars, my answer becomes “oh, BMW drivers.”

BMWs have always been at a price point to where even the drivers of the low-end 3 series still felt validated to turn their noses up to everyone not willing to drop $35k (then) on a glorified Jetta.  Some of them were legitimately high-performing, and all of them came with a degree of luxuries that when combining all of the above, had a tendency to foster a sense of entitlement and arrogance from those that drove them. 

And it was no more indicative than watching the average BMW driver drive amidst the pleebs of the world; they’d cut people off without using signals, aggressively tailgate cars deemed inferior to their marvels of German engineering, and demonstrate all sorts of driving behavior that exuded me-first selfish and dickish attitudes.  It really didn’t matter who was driving the car, be it a white man, black woman, Asian teenager or an elderly Hispanic; once behind the wheel of a BMW, it’s like there’s a needle in the seat that goes straight up the driver’s asshole and plugs into a very specific node inside the body that triggers all sorts of degenerate behavior, thus fulfilling the destiny of BMW drivers all have to be assholes.

However, ever since I moved back into the ‘burbs, I’ve often been moderately fascinated at the sheer differences of my surroundings compared to my previous foray in homeownership.  Which is a nice way of saying that I now live in a slightly upper-middle class exuding white privilege which is overwhelmingly predominantly white, versus my old community which unfortunately sank into really lower-middle class that was overwhelmingly predominantly black, which in itself is a nice way to say that everyone in the neighborhood was black, and then there was Jen and myself.

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When in doubt, change the name, make logos

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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