10.30.2005

A note to drivers in California (PSA)

...and with apologies to my readers across the country, but this is a public service announcement that a) may be forwarded to any California drivers you know and/or b) apply equally well to drivers in your local municipality. Please feel free to print this epistle and place it on the windshields of offending cars, as warranted.

Attention, cell phone users (and I am one): if you cannot drive and talk (and I can), kindly relent: do one or the other. If you are speeding up and slowing down and speeding up and slowing down, and speeding up and slowing down? If you are neglecting your turn signals (more below) because you cannot simultaneously drive, eat your bagel, put on your tie or mascara, and hold your phone to your ear? If you are "sharing" my lane?: You cannot drive and talk. And since your huge car is about to squish my precious Blanche, GET OFF THE PHONE AND DRIVE.

Attention, fuckwits and shiteheads: that little arm there on the left side of your car's steering column is a TURN SIGNAL. Here's how you use it, and I'll use small words so you can follow along: when you anticipate making a turn (note the word "anticipate", 'cause it means to plan or think ahead), push that little arm up if you're thinking about making a right turn or changing lanes to the right, and push it straight down if you're thinking about making a left turn or changing lanes to your left. (Please note that this is especially important the faster you're driving.) What will happen is that a small yellow light on either the rear right or rear left side of your car will begin to blink. It will be visible to cars behind you, and on either side, to your rear, and it will tell them what you plan to do -- it's like talking to those other drivers! -- isn't that nice? You will hear a clicky-clicky-clicky noise, and you will see an arrow flashing on your dashboard console; this arrow may be green or yellow, and the "clicky-clicky-clicky" may be fast or slow. Do not be alarmed! This noise (and the blinking and the flashing) will go away once you have made your lane change or right or left turn. Yes, it will. And no harm will come to your car whatsoever by using this device, called, say it with me, a TURN SIGNAL. What is key, fws and shs, is NOT to turn this signal on AFTER you slam on your brakes and change lanes or make a turn off the thoroughfare on which I am following you.

Attention, Mr. and Mrs. I Own the Whole World: Your p.o.s. miniature 4-door sedan does not need a 12' parking space, especially in San Francisco, where street parking is at a premium. Go ahead and get right up there 6-9" behind the next car up, or pull back to the next car back. Have a care for the rest of the driving public. A word to Mr. and Mrs. I Drive the Biggest Car Yet Invented to Make Up for My Obvious Shortcomings: you do not need to grease and lever yourself into an 8' space so that neither the car in front of you nor the one in back can leave until you've flattened their bumpers into slivers removing your behemoth from that weensy spot.

Attention, Mr. and Mrs. LEARN HOW TO FUCKING MERGE: Speed up when entering the freeway. Whether it's 101 or the 405, even the slow lane is going a minimum of 55 mph (and yes, I saw you there, Mr. I-Thought-It-Was-the-Crawl-Lane, but I'm not talking to you right now, although thanks for the opportunity to test my brakes by pulling in front of me going 47 there in Irvine when everyone else was going a comfortable 70), and you need to adjust your ass to the fact that you are entering a highway and not a g.d. country road. Speed up, SIGNAL (see above), and flow smoothly into traffic. This does not mean speed up to 85 and ride the breakdown lane in order to get to the "front" of a never-ending line merging onto the road -- you're not going to get to the front, son, because there is no front. Similarly, while I appreciate you anticipating your exit once you see that nice big green sign telling you how long you've got, kindly do not slow to 40 in the right lane 3 miles before said exit. And use your fucking turn signal.

Love & kisses, Auntie Dew

p.s. Oh, and to all you BMW drivers out there, I apologize. 20 years' driving made me think your cars didn't come equipped with turn signals, but I was proven wrong on Thursday morning when one of your 3 Series cut in front of us and didn't turn his signal off for 12 miles down the 405.
p.p.s. Here's what to read if you need to know how to give directions.

10.22.2005

Uh, not to minimize the original charge...

...but in addition to being tried for the shooting of "B-movie actress" (why do they always say that?? Can't they just give her the dignity, in death, of plain old "actress"??!) Lana Clarkson, shouldn't the LA County D.A. consider prosecuting Phil Spector for this?



I mean, come ON!!! Whitey, wake up!

10.21.2005

Rest in peace, little ones

Grieve and pray for the innocents, but spare a prayer, too, for their mother, whose schizophrenia diagnosis and attendant inability to stay on the Haldol that helped her should have made the state deem her unfit to have unsupervised visits with her sons, aged 16 months, three, and six.

Late teens and early twenties, as I understand it, is when the worst of schizophrenia begins to manifest, and Lashaun Harris was in the grip of the disease,
it would seem, when she heard the voices telling her to drop her beautiful sons into the San Francisco Bay on Wednesday evening. You know I've got only revulsion for people who wilfully hurt their kids, but this case seems all too similar to the Yates tragedy, and once again a young mother who is known to suffer from mental illness doesn't get the treatment she so desperately needs, with horrifying results. Dark times.

10.18.2005

Vacation's all I ever wanted....

So, if you're wondering how the hell to reconstruct the Amy & Lynne's Adventures in Paris saga, you have to read 9/29, then 9/30, then 9/27, to get it in chronological order as it happened, rather than as I posted. Heh; fun with hyperlinks, yo.

It's not like I ever promised I'd make sense, people, so don't think you're getting your money back or anything! Wait. This is free. Never mind. You can have a full refund!

10.17.2005

Sarah Bunting is my new best friend -- and she doesn't even know it!!!

Ok, she's not really really my new best friend ('cause Amy's got that covered, as it happens), and I'm not even really her Internet stalker like the title kinda makes it seem like I am, but I came across this, while reading Di's blog, and I almost wept, so giddy with joy was I that someone else wrote what I would have if only if only if only I had thought of it first. (I think, in fact, I might take a few of her points and extend them, but that's mostly 'cause I've seen such shockingly bad manners as make me want to howl at the fucking moon, but maybe you guessed that already.)

So peep this, gentle readers, and venerate her as I do!!

10.09.2005

Is there anybody out there?

Is there anyone at all? I put a counter on here to see whether anyone besides me and the half-dozen people to whom I've given this url are reading this opus, and I see it's up over 800, but apart from a handful of comments (mostly from Di and a couple from entertaining strangers), I usually feel like I'm talkin' to myself over here.

Funnily, this is a common lament: lack of feedback was one of the things the fantastic Ayelet Waldman said made her blogging somewhat unsatisfying (of course, she, unlike me, got a column on Salon.com, to assuage her need to chronicle the vagaries of life. She's also a novelist, so writing is her "thing" on a daily basis, which I must tell you I'm bowled over by, not just because it stuns me that someone so funny and wry can hang a plot together and develop characters and hold me in suspense and all, but because she does it all while momming four kids aged 4-11, and being happily married [to Michael Chabon], too). (Whoa, that was the mother of all parentheticals, wasn't it? Even for me!)

Anyway, what was my point? Oh yeah: just who's reading this
screed?? C'mon, 'fess up! Ping me, even if it's just once. Does something make you grin? Chuckle? Guffaw? Snort? Fume? Hiss? Learn somethin'? Read somethin' else? Roll your eyes up so far in your head you're gonna sue me for getting them stuck up there? Make ya say "hmmmm"? Anything at all?? Ok, well, I've gotta go make lasagna for the men, so that's it for today.