jeff yen

Out of the way, I’m a motorist!

I've done a lot of driving in the last few days, and I am bound to do a lot more in the next few. From the experiences I've had on the road lately, and keeping in mind the mobile hours yet to come, I have compiled a few helpful tips for my fellow travellers of this great nation's freeways.

• The car in the lane next to you on the freeway is not your soul mate. Have you ever been walking down the street, and in front of you are three or four people abreast, taking their sweet time getting nowhere at all, while blocking the entire sidewalk so no-one can get by? It's no less annoying when you do it in a car. Unless you are passing or being passed, you're either driving too slow or you are in the wrong lane.

   

• You are driving too slow if any of the following apply to you.
  • I am behind you.
  • You are driving within 10 mph of the posted speed limit.
  • You are in the far left lane.
  • Anyone is passing you on the right.
  • There is a three-mile-long train of cars behind you.
  • More than one of the following fairly describe you:
    • Old
    • Chinese
    • Female
    • Driving any vehicle that could be justifiably characterized as a "shitbox."
  • You have just been passed by an 18-wheeler, RV, horse trailer, or Lil' Rascal.
  • There is still space between your accelerator and the floor mat.
    • (That's the go-faster pedal)
    • • (The one on the right)
        • (No, you press it DOWN)
  • The highway patrol can catch you.
• Accidents, offramps, and roadside checks are not tourist attractions. Every time someone rubbernecks, an angel gets its wings... caught in a meat grinder.
• If the front of my car is visible in your rear view mirror, you need to merge right.
• If the back of my car is visible through your windshield, TURN OFF YOUR FUCKING HIGH BEAMS.
  • Alternatively, if you are driving an SUV, industrial-sized pickup truck, or any other ludicrous vehicular indulgence of people with tiny brains and penile insecurities, choose any three of the following and perform them with all haste:
    • Go F yourself.
    • Go F yourself in the A.
    • Get a reasonable car.
    • Adjust your headlights so they point at the road, and not directly into my rear view mirror.
• Any 1996 Nissan Sentras should be treated as if they are emergency response vehicles with lights and sirens going full blast.
  • Or an M-1 Abrams tank with an extremely reliable habit of blowing the crap out of your car if you don't get out of the way.

     

• If you drive an Excursion, Escalade, or Expedition, and I have to change lanes to pass you because I can't see anything because of the fat ass on your car, pull over to the side of the road immediately.
  • Exit your vehicle.
  • Remove your pants. They will come in handy later.
  • Lie down in front of said vehicle.
  • Recruit any individuals available to repeatedly drive over your genitals.
  • Use aforementioned pants to staunch the flow of blood from your shattered reproductive organs. See? I'm not completely heartless.
  • Remind any children you may have that this is what happens to people who drive unnecessarily gigantic cars to appease their own egos.
  • Slap them around if they fail to get the point.
  • Repeat every three miles until you purchase a car that isn't a hazard to your fellow motorists and a symbol of your wasteful decadence.
  • • People that I know and/or like are exempt from this rule. Still, get out of the way.

Oh yeah... and buckle up.

Day tripper

This all happened in early November, and I managed to forget about the post until now.

Rather than spend another Saturday dissolving into a gelatinous puddle of goo in front of the TV, absorbing such delights as "Made" marathons, I decided to take a trip to San Francisco. I imagined myself a younger, yellower, and immeasurably less eloquent Bill Bryson, whose books I've been enjoying lately (my favorite so far has been "In a Sunburned Country").

True to form, I missed the train I meant to take, so I wound up waiting around for an hour at the local Amtrak station for the next one. I took the opportunity to observe my fellow travellers.

There was a young Asian couple, deliriously taking pictures of each other in front of everything that moved. When they shot me a speculative glance, they didn't even have to speak; I stood up and held out my hand, taking the camera from them and immortalized the image of the giddy pair in front of some particularly lively piece of lint blowing past on the breeze.

There was an African-American man with the most stunning set of upper incisors, which were capped with shining gold. He was carrying on a more-than-lively conversation on his cell phone at full volume, the kind that happily includes the words "I," "will," "fucking," "kill," and "you," not necessarily in that order. Every other person at the station was pointedly pretending he didn't exist, which was possibly the kind of thing that was upsetting him in the first place.

There was a middle-aged white couple off in one corner, the wife clutching a department store shopping bag, and the husband with several strewn about his feet. The small explosion of bags, along with his full, white beard and a vaguely stunned expression, made it look as if the Air Force had finally tired of Santa gallivanting about in their air space.

After a few gleeful minutes imagining what might have become of the reindeer, I stood as the train pulled up to the platform. We all hustled aboard, and I found my way to a choice seat on the upper level. The afromentioned (har har) guy came up to me and gave me a questioning look, and I waved him into the seat opposite me.

Turns out, he'd missed his stop on the way in, and had had to buy a ticket to go one stop west. I didn't ask about certain things -- impending homicides, for example -- but his mood seemed to have lightened considerably. We chatted happily for a few minutes until I nodded off, and when I awoke, he was gone. I even forgot to compliment him on his teeth.

The scenery was largely monotonous, being mostly observed on my part through closed eyelids. When, on a few occasions, I managed to lever open one bloodshot eye and press it to the window, I was treated to a lovely and wide-ranging set of views.

Fishermen were casting lines into a wide lake, the sunlight gleaming off its surface in a blinding flare. A bare-chested, white-haired paraplegic leaned back in his wheelchair, one hand holding a can of beer, the other raised in a cheerfully lazy wave as we hammered past his al fresco tanning salon. Grey industrial towns, farmland lying fallow, rocky beaches, and soaring bridges over water all populated the trek west -- with which, now that I think about it, I should have been more impressed. There's no helping some people, I guess.

After a transfer to a bus and an hour or so slumped in a seat that smelled vaguely of old sweat and puke, I stepped off the train into a brisk, sunny day in what I was told was Union Square. In all honesty, I was disappointed.

Looking around, the place was largely populated by department stores and brand-name retailers; in short, this was a glorified shopping mall. The only local color that I could see were some street performers dressed up as tin men, doing "The Robot" to some spastic tune coming from their boombox.

I looked in on the tram turntable, which seemed to be a big deal for the kind of people who walk around with fanny packs, prescription sunglasses, and twenty-pound cameras strapped to their necks. It must have been mating season or something, because they were fucking everywhere.

I got into line for the tram, but gave up when an empty car pulled in, was immediately jam-packed with people, bellied out of the station with the groan of steel at breaking point... and the line hadn't budged an inch.

I decided I'd just walk down to Fisherman's Wharf, a straight shot down the street for about 4 miles or so. It was a pleasant stroll, and I recommend it to anyone and everyone. It'll take you through what I can only assume was Chinatown, which I cleverly deduced from all the Chinese people walking around, and the most fantastic store names in existence anywhere, like "Long Wang Drugs," "Fu King Chinese Restaurant," and so on.

After being treated to a few glares by passing Chinese as they spotted me for the race traitor I am, I spotted a cool-looking tower in the distance, obviously part of a church. It was just a little north of where I was heading, so I took a little detour and ended up at Sts. Peter and Paul Church, which I assume is very nice. I didn't actually get to see much of the inside of the place, since there was a wedding going on. That didn't stop a determined pair of tourists, who bulled through the front doors unabashed, but I decided not to crash the party and poked around a side door, in true ninja fashion. The interior was dim but warm, with the sense of slight pressure against your eardrums. The kind of feeling you get in old buildings with lots of stained glass and untold years' worth of people talking in whispers and padding around in soft-soled shoes.

Feeling a little like I was going to be attacked by a flock of cherubim at any minute, I found a flight of stairs and started climbing, with the vague hope that they ended at the top of one of the towers I'd seen. Alas, I would never know. After three flights, the stairs ended in a locked plexiglass door, which apparently led into a school on the church grounds.

"Ah, shi- uh... shingles," I thought, proving that even an optimistic agnostic like myself can be guilted into proper behavior through the Catholic tendency towards gold leaf and colored glass.

The odd thing about walking out of a church, I've found, is that all the sounds on the street suddenly seem magnified slightly, and lights and colors seem a little brighter. It's like your senses all twisted the knob left a notch as you stepped in the door, and now they're turning it all the way up to 11.

From the church, I made my way down to the wharf. I had a chance to spend far too much time poking around Pier 39 on a previous visit to San Francisco, and I had found out that in all honesty, there is little to do there but walk around in constant bewilderment that a cup of clam chowder can actually cost six dollars.

So I took a look around at the other piers, and was fortunate enough to find a place called Musee Mecanique at Pier 45. This place is, in the parlance of haute couture, totally tits.

Let me give you an idea.

Stepping through the entrance, I am greeted by a display detailing the history of San Francisco, or some other crap. It was very nice, and also not terribly interesting.

Already developing a mild case of tetchiness, I wander past the display and into the rows of wood and metal cabinets that populate the rest of the museum. Stopping in front of an unmarked machine at random, I notice that below a glass window, it has a coin slot. I dig in my pocket for a quarter, and drop it into the slot. There is a whirring, clicking sound, and a curtain behind the window rises.

Behind it is a scene from late 18th century France in miniature, little plaster and metal figurines arrayed around a stage. On the stage, there are a few more little figurines, standing around a device that largely characterizes that period in France's history -- a guillotine. Strapped to the guillotine is... yes, that's right... another little figurine. Keeping pace with my jaw, the blade of the guillotine drops, and the little plaster head falls into a basket.

Vive le France!

And the curtain rolls back down.

Perhaps you can imagine the situation: I'm expecting a dancing Howdy Doody, maybe, or a kid rolling a hoop down a dusty road. Instead, I'm treated to an intricate reconstruction of a gory public killing, presented with the same warm fondness with which your grandma might give you a cookie. I'm sure you can guess my reaction.

I burst out, "Holy crap!" and ran to find a change machine.

For the next hour or two, I browsed through a collection of antique mechanical amusements that boggled the mind.

The public-execution-peep-show theme was surprisingly prominent; I recommend the museum to any of the lawyers foaming at the mouth to sue the video game industry for promoting violence. They might just learn that violence has been around for a while, and it's been entertaining people almost as long.

Almost as common were peep shows of a less bloody kind. Seeing as these machines generally came from an era where the sight of an exposed ankle was likely to send any well-respected man into conniptions, I expect the teenagers lined up at them with fistfuls of quarters probably went home disappointed.

There were mechanical baseball games, rock 'em sock 'em robots, love testers, and a couple of machines where the object seemed to be to drop money into them and watch nothing happen. I cheerfully watched a few people use these, then replaced the "Out of Order" signs and went on my merry way. Not really. But that would have been fun.

They even had a few machines that were the spitting image of Zoltar from the movie "Big."

Yeah... they didn't work.

Internet Explorer is a hot, steaming piece of shit

The fact stated in the title of this post is brought home to me in all its shining glory every time I try to create a website.

I have just spent an hour and a half trying to prevent IE from shifting a colored blue line to the right by three pixels for no reason at all, while Firefox... blessed, sweet, good Mozilla Firefox... put the line exactly where it should have, without any fuss. While it was doing that, it folded my laundry and made me a cup of tea while giving me a back rub.

If this was a project for myself, I wouldn't have bothered. I would've just thrown up a note on my site saying:

This site best viewed with Mozilla Firefox. If you're using IE and refuse to switch to a better (read: any other) browser, feel free to come to my house and gouge out my nuts with a rusty grapefruit spoon, because it would be less painful than coding IE compatibility.

Sadly, this is a project for a client. So, I spent an hour and a half persuading Microsoft's pile of monkey turds to put a 270-pixel high blue line where I told it to. This has translated into an additional cost for my client, a situation which I am sure is being replicated in web development houses all over the world right this minute.

I feel like Microsoft's QA department owes the web dev world an apology, and at least an hour and a half of its time back.

I’m rich!

There is a very real possibility that by this time next week, I will be a multimillionaire.

While my chances may be dogged somewhat by the fact that I seem terminally unable to motivate myself to go and buy a lottery ticket, I consider this a minor setback.

I also grant you that even if I did manage to shuffle down to the gas station (I actually do need to fill up the tank... take that, odds-makers!) and buy a ticket or two, my odds of winning the jackpot would come in somewhere between that of my spontaneously sprouting a donkey dong from my left nostril and being savaged by a group of swimsuit models after trying on a new brand of body spray. Since I take great pains to trim any nascent equestrian genitalia from my nose, this is essentially nil.

Notice my use of big words, it makes me sound smart! I are a genus.

Given all that, the chance -- however infinitesimal -- remains that I might suddenly be catapulted into the social stratum of people who, having stripped to the buff in a public restaurant and beaten a startled dinner companion senseless with their pendulous scrotum, would be referred to as "charmingly eccentric" rather than "batshit crazy."

I think many people -- namely, those I see at the gas station buying a stack of lottery tickets three feet high -- fail to put this particular enterprise in proper perspective. I have heard the lottery fairly characterized as a "stupid tax," but I still buy a ticket once in a while.

Given, I am pretty stupid. However, I also fully understand that the true value of a lottery ticket is not the possibility of winning an obscene amount of stripper candy, but the entertainment value. That is, for the few days between your purchase of a ticket and your discovering you didn't win anything, you get to imagine what you might do with the money you won't win. I have a lot of fun with this every time I buy a ticket, and now that I am closing in on finishing a glass of rather sketchy cabernet, I am uninhibited enough to be willing to share a few of my ideas with you.

I) This is probably my most oft-recounted financial daydream. I'd like to take my Japanese economy car, and put in a gigantic engine. I wouldn't do anything like add a spoiler, bigger exhaust pipe, nice rims, or leather seats. I'd just make my ugly, slow car into an ugly, very fast car. That way, I could do things like drive very slowly in the left hand lane with my turn signal on, with the full knowledge that I could be going very fast. And in truth, isn't that the essence of privilege?

II) I would spend a few million buying votes in the Senate and House, in order to pass a bill dictating the following:

1. Christmas music on the radio and in retail locations will be forbidden, on pain of extreme pain, any time of the year before December 10th. 2 weeks of "Jingle Bells" is ample, and anyone who disagrees is free to lodge a formal protest with the Director of Internal Christmas Music Affairs, whose badge of office will be a very large baseball bat with a rusty nail in it.
2. Anyone who causes my telephone or e-mail notifier to ring with the intention of selling me something I haven't personally and specifically requested will be strapped to a gurney and will have their genitals Tasered repeatedly until they can sing the national anthem of Botswana backwards.
3. Anyone who can sing the national anthem of Botswana backwards will be shot.
4. Anyone appearing on the dating show "Next" will be forcibly sterilized.
   1. Ditto Elimidate.
5. The people responsible for cancelling Arrested Development will be gently educated as to their mild lapse in judgement with the judicious use of sandpaper and concentrated habanero extract.
6. Anyone who shrieks and cries tears of joy at the sight of a celebrity will be slapped around until they get a clue, preferably by the celebrity in question.

III) Daylight savings would be adjusted so that we always get an extra hour to sleep, and it never gets dark by four o'fucking clock in the afternoon.

Eh? What?

I am apprehensive, on some vague, almost-not-there-at-all level, that I am losing my mind. Not, happily, in the sense of foaming at the mouth and dry-humping cookware (after all, there are only so many ways to occupy a free afternoon). Rather, I have noticed that I am steadily losing focus. If I had to use a commonly understood name, I would probably call it ADD, but I despise the idea of using the shield of a label to hide what is, to me, a symptom of my apathy.

In truth, that might be an overly pessimistic view of things. It might not be a hard-wired facet of my own personality that makes my attention and memory falter. It could be that particular vapidity of MTV's programming, which simultaneously commands one's attention and shuts off all higher brain function. It could be the long periods of trance-like mental states, attained during marathon video gaming sessions when I was supposed to be reading up on the neurological bases of cognitive function (ironic, no?).

Whatever the cause, I have found that time seems to pass particularly quickly. More accurately, I constantly find that time has always passed by me with astonishing speed.

This is not uncommon; you always hear people talking about how the week just flew by, or my goodness, is it December already, I have to get the shopping done, and so on and so forth.

Now, I am not by any means trying to say that I am unique in this respect, but for most people, I imagine that the above sentiments are accompanied by some kind of explanation; i.e., they were busy at work or with the family, and while they were thus occupied, time marched on. I, on the other hand, am a particularly idle soul. You can ask anyone in a certain local cafe who their least profitable customer is, and you probably won't have to wait long until they point at me, walking in the door, just in time for my appointment to drink 50-cent refills of coffee all afternoon.

I don't even particularly like coffee.

Back to the point, perhaps it's just that I am unusually talented at wasting time. Given the considerable exercise this talent has gotten recently, maybe I'm simply out of practice at thinking. I haven't really had much of an occasion to turn my brain back on recently, so I suspect it has started to atrophy. Now that I'm trying to wake the damned thing, I can almost see it crack one bloodshot eye at me, before rolling over and pulling the pillow over its head.

It has gotten bad enough that I recently took to the practice of carrying around a memo pad and a pen, just to jot down things I might like to remember or think about later. This little brainstorm ran afoul of a small snag when I kept forgetting the memo pad at home.

I had similar sneaking suspicions a couple years ago, when I thought I was losing whatever laughably rusted, pitted remnant of an edge I might have retained from my more lucid days. I laid those suspicions to rest by taking a bunch of standardized tests, and resolving to never let myself get apathetic and forgetful again.

What was I talking about again? Whatever, it doesn't matter anyway.