DMV revisited, and some observations on the local drivers

( No one at the DMV understands this form either )

I have seen a great deal of strange driving in the past few days, well above and beyond the normal California insanities. I've seen a Pennsylvania driver speeding; I've seen a Massachusetts driver signal; and I've noticed that the drivers here don't seem to speed as a matter of course, the way folk do on the East coast.

Today I had to pass a very tough-looking dude on a motorcycle because he was just going too damn slow. That's not right at all. Also today, I saw a Mercedes with California vanity plates that read "MTG BIZ". I'm sure it stood for something utterly mundane, NOT Magic The Gathering, but I couldn't help wondering, Where *is* Richard Garfield these days?

quote for toady

from quotationspage.com:

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938)

post-election thoughts

Okay. Our guy lost. The other guy won. Four more years of OMGWTF. So what?

Voting out Bush would have been a good start. So, logically, voting in John Kerry would have been... a good start, but just a start. Not a magic wand; not fairy dust to sprinkle on all our problems to make them go away. We still would have been left with a huge mess to clean up in Iraq (and no reason to believe President Kerry would clean it up any quicker, or any better, than anyone else). We still would have been left with the huge mess that is the economy. Most to the point, we still would have been - and we are - left with some disturbing questions about the will of the American people.

Do people not know they're being lied to, or do they just not care?

Does anyone NOT know that Iraq is about oil money?

Do the majority of the American people really believe that blood for oil is okay, as long as not too much of that blood is American?

What is it going to take to wake these people up?

There is a lot of work to do. I am reaching the unavoidable conclusion that the way to make America a better place is not by electing Our Guy and trusting him to do all the work for us; but by somehow getting each and every American to wake up, look around, and say, "This isn't right, and we're not going to take it any more." This will mean some of us will pay more to fill our cars with gas. This will mean some of us who are "too polite" to talk about politics will have to learn to talk about it anyway. This will mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. It won't be comfortable, and it won't be easy; but if we do nothing, things will get a HELL of a lot harder and more uncomfortable for just about everybody.

Okay, so the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Are we just going to sit back and watch, or pretend everything is okay? Or are we going to do something about it?