The Agrinautica

   So ostensibly I'll be driving down to so-cal tomorrow. RandMcNally.com tells me its a seven hour, five minute drive. I've driven this route many a time now. Its a long monotonous drive down The Five, interrupted only by my car traditionally breaking down in Coalinga and the prospect of In-N-Out in Kettleman City. This drive gives one ample time to think. To think about things like.. whats wrong with all the other drivers.

   It seems there is a major school of thought on driving that is not in keeping with the actual legal directives on driving behaviour. This school of thought proposes a world where all drivers act selfishly and foolishly while in their cars, and thus in aggregate all slow eachother down. It is the dark side of driving behaviour. I will try to illuminate the subject. You may well be an adherent and you don't even know.

   The following are the basic tenets of the dark side of driving:
   (1) Where there are two lanes per direction of traffic, as is the case with most of The Five through the central valley, one will always drive on the LEFT (inner) side rather than the right. This not infrequently creates the situation where the left side ("fast lane") of a road is going significantly slower than the lanes to its right, but all these drivers have it set in their head that they drive on the left. The only reason in their opinion one should leave the innermost lane is:
   (2) the procedure for passing, since one presumably won't have any lanes on ones left, is rather that one should realize when there is a car behind them going faster than them and move over to the right so that they may successfully pass on the left;
   (3) in order to alert the car ahead of oneself that they should let one pass, one will either ride up super close behind the offending vehicle, or perhaps turn on their brights.


   Needless to say, I don't agree that this is an advisable driving system. Passing can occur much more successfully if it's the upcoming car that changes lanes for the experience rather than the lead car. The lead car is likely not to notice the need for a maneuver in a time efficient manner, and because a lot of these people have it in their head that they really are travelling faster than the car coming up behind them and they needn't let them pass.
   And of course, the methods frequently employed to annoy the forward vehicle into changing lanes are unsafe. Really there is no reason to ever get dangerously close behind another vehicle (unless I dunno, you're all trying to outrace a tsunami).

   The better system. The correct and advisable system, is that you remain on the right side of the road whenever possible unless you see that you are about to overtake the car in front of you and the lane to your left is going faster. What if the lane to your right is going faster? you ask. Well then why aren't you in it!? This once lead nibot to claim I was passing a car on the right. nibot is an ogre.


   The other day I walk into local taquaria Guadalajara with Kristy and we find codetoad and another young man there. The other guy greets me with "how can you believe in justice without a God?" and later introduces himself as "the king of livejournal, 1tophi."
   My first thought of course is that one can't be the king of livejournal if one hasn't even attempted to write 30 entries in the month of June.
   But its okay because I later learned that he and codetoad had had this adventure that evening.


Picture of the Day

Another of Kristy's pictures. She named these cats Joli & Angelina

Previously on Emosnail
   Two Years Ago Today: "I Think I'm in Hell" - yeah I'm not fond of summer in Davis
   Year Ago Today: Blogology II & III - 30 in 30 2004 gets going with two entries on the second day, both about Blogology. Hey it was new and exciting to me, and I had to set forth to my readers the brave new philosophies which 30 in 30 stands for. Bold and spicy philosophies. nibot would have you believe that half my entries were "meta" posts, but in fact there were only four.