Evil
Roadrage
Is there anything worse than being on a 1-lane highway? Up until now you’ve been cruising down a two lane divided, people are moving at a decent pace. Maybe you’re in a hurry, maybe you’re not, but you’ll get there reasonably close to when you expected. Then you lose a lane…
Instantly, every 5th driver around you turns into a moron and an annoyance. We’ve all been there, and you know any kind of predictability for arrival time goes out the window. This isn’t the biggest issue if you’re heading out just to take a sightseeing drive, but when (like me) you’re trying to catch a ferry it becomes problematic.
Know Your Obstacles:
1. The Sunday Driver: Only drives their car over to town a couple times a week. Doesn’t understand that the car can go faster than 50km/h (31ish mph) despite being in an 80 or 100 zone.
- Likely Driving: Honda Civic, Chevy Cavalier/Optra, VW Golf/Beetle, Dodge Caravan
2. Old Man in a Hat: Similar to the Sunday driver but will often go a bit faster. Unfortunately he brakes for almost anything (including sunshine) and takes forever to get back up to that speed. Also changes lanes at a pace more appropriate to an oil tanker.
- Likely Driving: Caddy, Ford Crown Victoria, Mercedes C or S class, Toyota Corolla
3. Nervous Nellie: Possibly a new driver, but just as likely not, they’re nervous about everything. Likely a city driver that doesn’t often get on the highway. The key symptom on a 1 lane each way undivided is that they flinch every time a car comes the other way. This often leads to them slowing down, or even more dangerously actively slamming on the brakes anytime an opposite direction car passes. Particularly annoying (and dangerous) at night when their nervousness climbs into panic and no matter how far back you stay you’ll still risk hitting them.
- Likely Driving: Toyota Prius, VW Jetta, Honda Civic, Mini Cooper, Mazda 3
4. Captain Curvaphobic: Some of the most frustrating people to try to pass, this type is absolutely terrified of even the slightest bend or curve in the road. The moment the road turns from a straight line he’ll drop his speed by 15-20 km/h. Those of us who like to use our cruise control find them absolutely infuriating. What’s worse is the moment you’re back on a straight section of road where you can actually pass, he’ll accelerate again and make it difficult.
- Likely Driving: Jeep Grand Cherokee, Dodge Neon, Toyota Echo/Yaris
5. Shepherd and his Sheep: The Shepherd is likely one of the above types who has gathered 5-10 sheep who are too nervous to try to pass him, but are sticking so close together than someone who comes up from behind needs to pass the entire herd at once or becomes part of it and exacerbates the problem. Most of the time periodic passing lanes can break this up, but this part of Ontario doesn’t seem to believe in them.
a. Likely Driving: Everything under the sun.
6. Trailer Tom: Usually a pretty similar situation as the shepherd. Often slow because they’re pulling a large trailer with a ridiculously underpowered light SUV or Minivan or even worse a car (enjoy the yearly transmission replacement morons.) The sheep in this case find it harder to pass since the two vehicle train is longer to pass. I’m not as anti-caravan as the Top Gear guys (I quite enjoy camping) but come on, if you’re planning to pull one buy something with the power train that can handle it.
- Likely Driving: Honda CRV, Dodge Caravan, Mazda Tribute, Ford Taurus, Dodge Caliber
7. The Explorer: We’ve all seen this guy in town too, usually a tourist trying to find a specific street and slowing/stopping at every intersection trying to read street signs. On this kind of highway he’s the guy who either can’t read a map or simply can’t remember a road number. Everytime you pass a sign indicating an upcoming turnoff or split he’ll be slowing and swerving as he tries to read a map and drive at the same time. In some cases he’ll do this for hours, apparently so bad at reading maps that he can’t even tell that he’s not even in the ballpark of his exit yet. Why people can’t print off a google map or make a quick sequential list of the Highways/Roads/Exits they’ll before I they leave on a trip to an unfamiliar area I’ll never understand.
- Ford Focus, Ford F-150, Ford Explorer, Dodge Ram, Hummer, Honda Pilot
8. The Big Heavy Truck: You’re driving down one of these roads and off in the distance is a farmyard or gas station with a soul crushing sight. Waiting to exit: a massive double load tractor trailer. You hope and pray that it’s either turning left, or that the traffic flow is constant enough in front of you to not let it in. Of course it won’t be, and you’ll find yourself slowed to a crawl as this behemoth struggles to make it up to 50 then takes another five minutes to get to 85. God help you if this is a hilly road, because this truck is so full of anvils, tungsten or cows that it has to slip into a crawler gear and put on blinkers to climb. Soon there will be a train of 30 cars behind you, but none of you will be able to pass because a stadium parking lot worth of cars will suddenly be travelling the other way at perfect intervals, except when there’s a double yellow line.
9. The “I have an expensive car that obviously has cruise control but I’m not using it and driving you to madness”: Maybe it’s just me, but I see these guys all the time. You’ll be driving down the road at 105km/h or whatever and come up behind one of these guys. Prepping to pass, you’ll suddenly find them pulling away from you, so you re-engage cruise and relax again. Suddenly around the next bend you’ll be up near their bumper again, whatever cell phone call they’re on having distracted them into slowing down. This time you decide, screw it I’ll pass them so I can just stay cruising. No luck, they’ll pass you back a few minutes later.
- Likely Driving: Mercedes S/C Class, BMW 3 or 5 Series, Lexus LS460, Cadillac CTS. Audi TT, Volvo XC90, Mini Cooper S or whatever the current IT car is.
I don’t understand why it’s so much to ask for me to be able to put on my cruise control and enjoy the drive. If you aren’t comfortable driving on the highway, take a bus… the greyhound network here in Southern Ontario is reasonably good and likely wouldn’t put you into a stress induced early grave. My personal pet peeve though is the last type, mostly because there often seems to be active malice behind their actions as opposed to the just general stupidity of the other offenders. I’m not actively pushing for a death race 200 style combat/point system…or maybe I am?
How about?
- Sunday Drivers: 250 points
- Old Men in Hats: 100 points (way too common to be worth more)
- Nervous Nellie: 750 points (reasonably common, but twitchy so hard to hit)
- Curvophobe: 250 points
- Shepherd: 100 points (25 points per sheep)
- Trailer Tom: 120 points (easy target)
- The Explorer: 120 points (with the map up he’ll never see you coming)
- The Big Heavy Truck: 300 points to everyone within 100 kilometers in celebration
- IHAECTOHCCBINUIADYTM: the biggy a full 500 points!
We can of course add on the pedestrian scoring system from DR2000
- Teenagers: 40 points
- Toddlers under 12: 70 points
- Women: 10 points more than men at any age.
- Anyone over 75 (either sex): 100 points (Euthanasia Day!)
Hmmm, I think we’re on to something here. Now I just need to come up with a terrible nickname, a fun modding/paint scheme for my Mazda3 along with an alluring female navigator for the nude group massage scene.
A man can dream…
-Toast
p.s. What about the Toaster (main weapon: flamethrower?) painted in chrome and restyled to look like an old school Toaster. Hell we could even put a cylon eye on the front and mix that joke in.
Check out the shirt here
p.p.s. If you haven’t seen the original Death Race 2000 you really should, it’s amazing.
Toast sick..
…and catching up on work during recovery…
Back soon…
The word “unnecessary” springs to mind… as does the word “shite”
So I went to see I love you, Man last week. (funny enough movie, Jason Segel and Paul Rudd lovable and hilarious as always) Before the film I was hit with the preview for the latest Wayans Bros. movie…
If you haven’t had the pleasure, let me introduce you to the concept of “Dance Flick.” The Wayans Brothers (including new generation member Damon Jr.) have decided to do an incredibly timely spoof of dancing movies. Note also that it is Flick rather than Movie… lest they be confused with Friedberg and Seltzer and their Epic, Date, Teen etc movies.
From IMDB:
Street dancer Thomas Uncles is from the wrong side of the tracks, but his bond with the beautiful Megan White might help the duo realize their dreams as the enter in the mother of all dance battles
Sound familiar?
Yes, that’s right we’re getting a parody of Save the Last Dance, a movie released almost a decade ago, talk about timely. From what I saw in the preview I’d also say there’s some elements of Center Stage (2000) and other fantastic films. Thank you Senors Wayans, let’s hope you reach the heights of comedy you hit in “Little Man.”
A Kwazy Kwanzaa… and a solemn and dignified Ramadan to you.
Sandra Lee… In my American foodie brethren her very name evokes the kind of disgust usually reserved for Rachel Ray’s spouting EVOO (followed by an explanation) or by College_Student_04029812 asking for CHEEP FOOD IDEAZ 4 DORM PLZ for the millionth time! Those of us lucky enough to live north of the 49th have thankfully avoided her frankensteinian cooking methods and trailer park arts and crafts aesthetic thus far so I will explain.
When I asked one of my friends if she’d seen the cake referenced later in this post her response was “those box cakes you used to get at KFC after they stopped using McCain?” As a result, I’ll start out by pointing out that I am not referring to Sara Lee, though I will admit that in my youth I somehow ate a few of those stale angel food and crusted mortal icing bricks that they forced upon us. CANCON rules (I’m guessing anyway) have thus far saved us from Sandra Lee, a “chef” who presents a show called “SEMI-HOMEMADE” where she takes premade products and combines them into meals that, at least in her words, look homemade.
I try not to be a food snob, I certainly have low grade junky foods that I love and won’t give up, but Sandra Lee takes it to a level that is just revolting. While some of her shows feature the occasional recipe that uses some pre-packaged ingredient in a novel and valuable way, most of them involve combining highly processed, very unhealthy foods together into one giant mess. The supposed time savings are often incredibly minimal or simply non-existent. The excessive use of easy store-bought “ingredients” means the end result often has a sodium or sugar level double or even triple what a proper dish would.
A few examples include:
A chicken and dumplings recipe that calls for a store-bought roast chicken (pulled apart), Pillsbury biscuit dough, canned gravy and the addition of 6 cups of broth. It also includes Bags of carrot and celery sticks that are then chopped up for addition to the chicken (yes you read that right… pre sliced carrot sticks, that you then chop… essentially saving yourself one or two knife slices per carrot at a 150% cost markup). I’m sure you can figure out the unnecessary repetition in this recipe from the chicken etc. Really basic dough like a dumpling is one of the easiest things in the world to make using ingredients most people have anyway, hell even using Bisquick is tons healthier than the Pillsbury kind and tons tastier
Mini Chicken Pot Pies using canned chicken…
Six Cheese Tortellini using Cheese Whiz and shredded bag cheese and cheese tortellini. Seriously… why are you not just buying a high quality jarred sauce, it’ll taste better.
For more horrors, simply visit the food network site (US version)…
I’d always thought Sandra was horrible from the odd time I flipped past her show while in the states or from the occasional unbelievable Youtube videos. I’d always meant to write a little rant about Lee, and when Amelie Gilette over at the AVClub posted the following this week, I had the perfect excuse: Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake.
Tony Bourdain (who I love dearly but who often tries a bit too hard to be ornery) had this to say about this concoction:
“The most terrifying thing I’ve seen is her making a Kwanzaa cake. Watch that clip and tell me your eyeballs don’t burst into flames. It’s a war crime on television. You’ll scream”
This cake starts out as a grocery store stale angelfood ring sliced into two layers. She then adds canned icing by the quart.
At this point you’re probably thinking “man he’s overreacting… my mom used to do that…” There’s a reason that Amelie refers to the cake as: “clearly a pile of ridiculousness slathered in despair and sprinkled with nonsense nuggets.”
The next step is to open a can of apple pie filling… and drop it with a plop into the middle of the hole in the middle of the cake. Not content to stop there, she then covers the cake with comically oversized candles and sprinkles it with pumpkin seeds and corn nuts. The nauseating result looks like something you’d find on the table at an elementary school craft fair and is yet more proof that pretty much everyone who watches her show will die of adult onset diabetes.
Behold:
Update:
Helpful Diagram courtesy of One Horse Shy
In the words of Frou Frou the talking cat
There’s no place like home…
There are varying degrees of culture shock that one gets upon moving away from one’s birthplace for the first time. Maybe you moved to Europe for school and you’re learning a new language (or multiple new languages). Perhaps you went to Australia for a year to find yourself (more likely to find beer and people of loose morals of the gender of your choice.) Or perhaps you only moved to Ontario…
As most of you who read this blog know, I recently (temporarily) moved to Waterloo Ontario to take an internship at Research in Motion inc. proud manufacturers of BlackBerry and BlackBerry related products. Is it whiny and lame of me to complain of culture shock moving to southern Ontario from Manitoba? Yeah, probably… but it’s more a combo of wistful homesickness and culture shock anyway.
Waterloo is an incredibly white town, somewhere around 90% of the city is very white, mostly of Germanic descent. The universities thankfully break this up a bit, bringing a more diverse student base, especially of asian backgrounds. As someone from Manitoba however, the absence of any significant aboriginal population is somewhat jarring. I was actually specifically told that I might want to consider not broadcasting the fact that I’m Metis as this area doesn’t have the greatest reputation of friendliness towards first nations people. I’m not entirely surprised as the city is fairly affluent and definitely seems to cultivate a wholesome whitebread image.
The weirdest things have been making me home sick… I’m the first to claim that Winnipeg drivers suck, but at least we’re relatively friendly. People in southern Ontario like to come very close to running down a pedestrian in a parking lot at least once daily, and will NOT come to a stop at crosswalks even if you’re already halfway across. When people pass you on the highway, they will cut back in front of you within 2 feet of your bumper, even if the lane is clear ahead and there is no one on their tale. One of the weirdest things that I still find jarring after two months is the sheer length of light patterns. Pressure plates seem to be non-existent here and many of the intersections near my place have light patterns in excess of 90 seconds.
Culinarily I’ve been having issues too, needless to say I can’t get anything George’s like here (though I’ve been pleased by being reunited with Popeye’s Chicken) and overall ethnic food wise the place doesn’t hold a candle to Winnipeg. The single greatest tragedy is the lack (at least that I’ve been able to find) of any true thai restaurants. Most of the Vietnamese restaurants in town bill themselves as Vietnamese and Thai food, but invariably their Thai dishes consist of a shitty tomato based Pad Thai and various Vietnamese style noodly bowls with “thai chicken” which near as I can tell just means they put extra lime juice or lime leaves in. If you’re especially lucky you might find a lackluster Tom Kha Gai soup. This wouldn’t be a crushing disappointment if it weren’t also very difficult to find Thai ingredients in the limited local asian markets. Proper thai curry pastes are nowhere to be found, much less something like Matsuman, but at least I can make some semi-proper pad thai. What I wouldn’t give to be able to head down to Vientiane tonight though…
You might think I should be thankful for the weather, but to be honest, other than the week of death back in January (Winnipeg: coldest place on the continent… beating out the ARCTIC CIRCLE) temperatures have not been far apart and we’ve gotten an absolute ton of snow that has made the wussy people around here hibernate even more. Even getting someone to go for a drink after work is like pulling teeth. I’m told things will get better here with the coming of summer and the festival season, but all I can say is thank god for movies and the internet. Regardless, summer brings Fringe back home and unless I can swing a trip back it’ll be the first festival that I’ve missed all of in well over a decade.
Matters are not helped by the fact that the famous southern Ontario attitude is alive and well here… Not long after arriving here I was shopping at best buy for a movie and happened to mention that I was new to the city and trying to keep myself occupied until I met some people. His response when he found out I was from Winnipeg. “So I guess things are a little more fast paced here hey? – – – Yeah that’s right buddy…Kitchener (population ~200k) is too fast paced for me, your towering downtown skyline of 3 or 4 buildings over 10 stories tall just blows my little prairie mind. Wake up, even Regina has a bigger downtown core than this dinky little town. I guess merely by being within 2 hours of downtown Toronto I should feel overwhelmed by the I AM CANADA aura that is the GTA.
Sorry, no dice.
Don’t you put it in your mouth
What canadian kid of recent generations can forget this classic video. To this day all I have do is sing “Don’t you put in your mouth” at a gathering of friends and at least a couple people will join in with the entire first verse. The hilarious WTF nature of the puppets always made it a favorite too.
The mentalfloss blog had an entry today about creepy kids TV and that video was on it. I never really got a downright creepy vibe from it though on second glance the face of the girl puppet is downright demonic mid closeup.
I can’t say that I see the this clip as anything but scarring for little kids. I love the works of the late great Samuel Clemens more than I can say, but man the combination of what is already a bit out there of a story with some skin crawlingly creepy claymation produces what I could only call guaranteed nightmare fodder for those under 10. Hell, I found it creepier than 99% of the “horror” schlock hollywood puts out these days. This episode of the adventures of Mark Twain was apparently banned from TV after one showing.
Oddly enough I haven’t actually read the story in question… but yikes!
The rest of the videos don’t quite reach that level though the pure comedy factor of the following necessitate a link.
From The New Zoo Revue (which by itself sounds like a goat-happy alternative lifestyle magazine) we learn about sex!
And one that’s apparently from a PBS show called “Many Voices, Many Visions” that, while obviously heavily edited and probably missing a ton of context, is still pretty cringe-worthy.
Thanks to Ransom Riggs over at Mentalfloss for making my morning… Check out their site!
The dark hunger of the soul…
Hot Pocket Passive Aggressive Notes
I noticed this at my old government job as well, anything hotpocket-ish (be it HP’s, Pizza Pops or whatever) is stolen far more frequently than anything else I kept in the fridge. There was really little excuse in my building as well since there was so often free food kicking around.
Is it to do with the portable form factor of the food? Perhaps one can be stealthier in microwaving and eating a Hot Pocket than say a Michelina’s Fettucini Alfredo, there is after all always the chance that someone will see you washing the fork (or alternatively noticing a bundle of plastic forks in your desk.)
The more I read of passiveaggressivenotes.com the more I realize that some people are just unfit to share any sort of communal space. I actually don’t mind not having access to the lounge at my place of employment (I’m not permanent staff so no staff lounge, nor a grad student so no GSA lounge) for that reason. In truth it makes me eat at my desk while working too, which in turn means I get to leave early.
Apparently there is a dark hunger in man’s soul that can only be only be sated by food in pocket form.