If The Present Is A Gift, I Want The Receipt
Let’s briefly snap back to the present, for some lunch-break thoughts from the snowbound metropolis of Richmond.
First up, let’s envision the main entrance to my office this morning. Two four-lane roads intersect at a stoplight, and there are two left turn lanes for northbound-to-westbound turns into the complex. The roads had barely been plowed, so people were (rightly) forming one turn lane in the most passable part of the road, backing up into the main drag, but avoiding the possibility of spinning out in the snow/slush-filled intersection while another driver is making a turn alongside you.
Of course, this wasn’t good enough for some people, who had to speed around the established lane at 50mph and form a parallel turn lane, creating two safety hazards in one (excessive speed, then the parallel-turn spinout possibility). What I found interesting were the two types of cars being driven by people doing this:
- 10+-year-old, beat-up American cars — presumably these folks just don’t care whether they get in a wreck or not, because it won’t impact the value of their car one bit.
- Soccer-mom SUVs — the folks who think 4x4 vehicles make them invincible. The classic case of this was the Jeep Grand Cherokee I saw spun out along US 360 East in Amelia County last year. Blizzard conditions had stopped about a half-mile west of there, leading to an understandable sense of relief, but which brought on some world-class dumb driving in this case. When I came along I could see the tire tracks where the driver had stomped the gas as soon as their vision cleared, slid first to the left, spun the rear end of the vehicle to the left side, regained traction at a 90-degree angle to the roadway, and promptly planted the vehicle across the roadside ditch.
Next, has anyone else with a high-capacity MP3 player noticed a tendency to cluster certain types of songs in “random” mode? What I’m getting at is that if that group of songs were being selected from your collection by a human DJ, you’d be able to tell he was in a particular mood. As evidence, I bring you my iBook’s iTunes selections from last night:
- Counting Crows, A Long December (I intentionally started on this song)
- Barenaked Ladies, Falling For The First Time
- R.E.M., I Am Superman
- Illinois Xtension Chords (covering Rick Springfield), Jesse’s Girl
- Dave Matthews Band, Bartender
- Blackhawk (covering Warren Zevon), Lonely Boy
- Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue
- Billy Joel, Keeping The Faith
- Billy Joel, Through The Long Night
- Dave Matthews Band, Halloween
- Metallica with San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, Of Wolf and Man
No Christian, no real country, no classical (all of which have reasonable-sized representation in my library). I’d be curious to see iTunes’s pseudo-random (since nothing purely computer-generated is ever truly random) song-selection algorithm.
Alright, enough observations; my chicken fingers and Chee-tos are done, so it’s time to return to the fray, at least until the freezing drizzle begins.
26 January 2004 / 1 Comment / Tags: life