Darwin Award Honorable Mention

This guy nearly earned himself a Darwin award. Luckily both he and the bike escaped major damage, at least according to the Killacycle website.

(no subject)

Was debating whether or not to get some sleep before work, especially since I was dead tired this morning when I got home (I work a mid-shift from 10pm to 10am). But since I just ate, and I read somewhere that an active digestive system actually inhibits sleep, I decided to compromise... blog in the dark.

Last week I sent out a couple of packages to ionotter and krag_carbine. Not sure if they got them, or if they were in decent condition, since I haven't heard from either of them (hint, hint, hint).

I also browsed through some of my friends' LJs. Yeah, my life is pretty uneventful and unexciting compared to their stories, or at least they can tell better tales, but a couple of postings reminded me of stuff that happened to me recently. One was just the other day, the other was when I was in California last month.

The other day I was going out with technocollie to go see the Batman premiere. We're on our way to pick up one of our friends in Makiki, which is just past the University of Hawaii. I'm in the rightmost lane, doing roughly 55 mph to keep up with the traffic, when just around the corner the traffic in the rightmost lane comes to a COMPLETE. STOP. HALT. As in, slam-on-the-brakes-and-hope-you-don't-hit-anyone-or-the-guardrail type of halt. Good thing the Chevy Tahoe I was driving had good brakes. Oh yeah, and the traffic in the other two lanes to the left were flowing by smoothly, so there wasn't any heads-up of the traffic slowing down. So what caused the slowdown? Well, apparently a family of Indian *geniuses* ran out of gas on the freeway, so they pulled off to the right side of the road RIGHT AT THE FRIGGIN FREEWAY EXIT to go fill in gas, and the one person who was filling in was standing partway into the road. GEEZ, people, if you're gonna do something like that wouldn't it be MUCH smarter to roll the car OFF the freeway, where you DON'T have people whizzing by you at 50+ mph?! Yeah, I found out the brakes really work well on the car, but I was half expecting someone to slam into me from the rear (which thankfully didn't happen).

Back in California I was heading to Newport Beach to go to a wedding when out of nowhere I saw what looked like a large bird come flying at me toward the left. It came right in front of the car, slammed into the front grill and arced over the car. From the rearview mirrors I could see the bird land in the street, wing frozen in the up position, which pretty much tells you it's dead. There wasn't any damage to the car, kinda remarkable since I was going 50mph at the time. Since I was driving, I couldn't tell exactly what happened, but from what technocollie told me, the car to the left of us had iniitially hit the bird and sent it toward our car. When we got to our destination, I checked for any damage, blood or bird guts but found nothing. Evidently it was a clean hit.

That's only the second time I've hit anything in all my years of driving, not counting bugs splattering on the windshield. The first time was back in 1998, when I hit something small, furry and with four legs (either a cat or a raccoon, I think -- probably more likely a cat) on my way to work. It was dark and I was going around 50mph when my headlights caught something running in front of the car at the last minute. Unfortunately there was no time to brake or swerve, and I never learned what exactly it was that I hit. There was no evidence of damage to the car, and when I traveled down the same road the next morning I didn't see any roadkill.

I see the "states you've visited" meme is making the rounds again. Here's my result. I didn't count states that I simply drove through and only stopped for gas, or where I had airline layovers.


visited 17 states (34%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president