She drew this Dalek for her Dad
Haseo is Carolyn's birthday present, too.
Jigglypuff for me, all ready to draw on people's faces!
Dec25
Audrey Drew us Christmas Presents!
Dec1
Don’t Drive Like an Idiot!!!
I’ve complained about this before, but I’m hoping that my message here will get spread around a little more now that my tiny blog is linked to facebook. Every time I get in the car, I narrowly avoid getting creamed by people who don’t know how to drive – and I think part of it comes from not knowing why they should be following certain rules, or why those rules exist. Let me start with the text, then follow with the semi-nifty graphics.
1. USE YOUR TURN SIGNAL!!! The law here in NJ is that you signal at least 100 feet before turning or changing lanes. The purpose of your signal is to let other drivers know what you are about to do. The turn signal is not a reminder to yourself of what you’re going to do, and it’s useless if you wait to use it until you’ve already started to move. If you are changing lanes and you signal well before doing so, drivers in that lane will know not to speed up (one would hope) or honk their horns to let you know they’re there (in case you don’t see them in your blind spot.) If you are turning, people behind you won’t run up your tail, not knowing why you’re slowing down, and you’ll also save someone who’s waiting for a break in traffic a lot of irritation (how many times have you lost an opportunity to turn into a break in traffic because you didn’t know a driver was turning until more traffic started coming?) Nobody can read your mind! Signal! It’s one of your car’s most important safety features!
2. TURN ON YOUR HEADLIGHTS!!! We have a useless law here, wipers on/headlights on. People ignore it because they don’t understand why. They figure that they can see just fine, so they don’t need their headlights. IT’S NOT ABOUT THE DRIVER BEING ABLE TO SEE! Sorry for so many caps, but yes, I’m screaming in my head as I type this. The human eye loses up to 20% of its ability to detect motion in dim light, which means that it’s more difficult for other drivers to see you if you don’t have your headlights on. If it’s dawn, dusk, raining, snowing, foggy, anything other than full daylight, you can be tooling along and be completely invisible to another driver until it’s too late to avoid an accident. If you don’t have your headlights on, it’s your fault, not the other driver’s, because YOU ARE INVISIBLE!
3. PARK HEAD-IN!!! This has more to do with pulling out of the parking space than pulling into it. You see, when you back out of a parking space, your reverse lights turn on. Pedestrians and other drivers will see those lights and know that you are about to move out into the driving lanes. They will be able to avoid hitting you or being hit by you. They have no such warning if you are parked facing out. As a corollary, if you are driving in a parking lot and see the reverse lights on a parked car, yield. The driver can’t really see until his windows are past the cabs of the cars to either side of him, so you can see him well before he can see you. Don’t drive on the left side and zip around him, that’s an a**hole move that endangers everyone around. And if you’re the one pulling out, do it slowly enough that other drivers and pedestrians have time to react.
4. DON’T CUT CORNERS WHEN YOU TURN LEFT!!! This one is practically de rigeur in Toms River, and I’m surprised there aren’t more accidents caused by it than there are. Cue semi-nifty graphics:
5. DON’T RUN THE LIGHT!!! Up north, people jump the green, which is a problem in and of itself. Down here, though, they don’t slow down for yellow – or sometimes, even red. That’s bad, but it’s worse when there are drivers caught in the intersection waiting to turn. To wit:
There are more – there are always more – but these are the most common, and most easily avoidable mistakes that people seem to make. I feel far more endangered from these than from most of the idiotic things people do on highways, because there’s so little time to react and so few ways to avoid drivers who do these things. So stop doing them. Right now. Just stop. Please.
Nov30
The (Annual) Christmas Rant.
Once upon a time, Christians wanted everyone to celebrate their holiday.
They wanted children to get excited about it, so they allowed the myth of Santa Claus to be created and perpetuated, and nobody seemed to mind if a few non-Christian children got presents from him at Christmas.
They wanted to have the day off – they wanted the whole nation to have the day off – so Christmas became a Federal Holiday. They didn’t mind that it had to be turned into a secular holiday for that to happen, and they didn’t mind that non-Christians got the day off, too.
They wanted Christmas music to fill the air everywhere. They wanted schoolchildren to sing songs of Christmas in school, even if they weren’t Christian children. When music for other holidays, or for secular Christmas celebrations had to be included, they didn’t mind. As long as the children sang Christmas songs, it was OK.
They wanted Christmas to be a big, big deal. When glossy Christmas sale ads started coming out earlier and earlier, they didn’t complain. When Christmas music started being played in stores and shopping centers two months before the holiday, it was welcomed, because it got people in the spirit. When TV and movies and books and magazines told the world that Christmas was a season for giving, a season of generosity that filled all the people of the world regardless of their religion, their voices did not rise up in protest.
They wanted to share their holiday with everyone, so they allowed whatever compromises were necessary in order to do so. It went from being a minor holiday, a distant second from Easter, celebrated with their families and church congregations, to a mass-marketed, materialistic, completely secular festival of excess with their full approval and encouragement.
But now that it has become a holiday that excites children, that frees workers all around the country for at least a day, that is sung about in public places, that is celebrated most of all by retailers, now, only after this, is there a protest.
“Keep Christ in Christmas,” they say. But how? They are not asking the nation’s parents to tell their children the truth about Santa Claus. They are not asking December 25th to be removed from the list of Federal Holidays. They are not asking for Hymns and Carols to be removed from the musical repertoires of non-Christian musicians. They’re shopping for toys and decorating their homes with pagan icons just like the nonreligious. If they themselves aren’t doing anything to return to the religious celebration of Christmas, how can they expect anyone else? And how can they now expect an entire nation – no, many nations worldwide – to stop decorating trees, to stop telling children that Santa filled their stockings overnight, to turn off the radio so they don’t hear “The First Noel” or “We Three Kings of Orient Are”, to stop buying presents or traveling to see family or even serving dinner in soup kitchens? Is “Keep Christ in Christmas” an ultimatum? Celebrate it our way or don’t celebrate it at all? Yet, for all the protests against the secular holiday Christmas has become, none of the War on Christmas militia seem to be leading by example, by celebrating Christmas without any of the non-Christian trappings that their predecessors so blithely allowed.
Christ cannot be inserted into a holiday that has had more than a hundred years of concerted effort put into its secularization. It is immoral and wrong to create a tradition, expand it so that it crosses cultural boundaries, intertwine it with an entire season of the year, and then turn around and insist that everyone must suddenly adopt the religion that is now only loosely associated with it. The damage is done, so to speak. Religious people are welcome to their own traditions, are allowed to share their rituals and celebrations exclusively among their own, and can make whatever changes to their own significant events that they want. At this point, though, the secular Christmas belongs to everyone. They gave it to us willingly. You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game, and you can’t take this ball and go home anymore.