There are many reasons to become a more competent and more conscious user of the American road, but allow me to acquaint you with one reason that you’ll regret having done so: once you get to the point where every action you take behind the wheel has a defined and precise purpose, you will find the unconscious and purposeless actions of everybody on the road around you to be utterly maddening. I’m talking about the people who wander from lane to lane for no reason. The drivers who speed up to match you as you pass them on the freeway, not out of anger or machismo but simply because their subconscious herd-animal instincts tell them that it’s completely safe and comforting to be driving at 75mph next to another 4,000-pound unguided missile. Tailgaters. People who can’t merge at speed. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I’m not saying that road rage and aggressive driving isn’t a problem in the United States — it obviously is — but much of the bizarre behavior you see out there on the road is simply due to the fact that the average driver puts no more thought into his choices behind the wheel than I do into selecting toilet paper at the supermarket. They aren’t trying to offend you or “beat” you. They’re just kind of stroking along on instinct and the dimly remembered lessons of high-school driver’s ed. That’s why you will have somebody blow by you in a 55 zone only to hold you up in the 75 zone that follows: they aren’t even looking at the speed limit signs. Instead, they’re simply doing a speed that feels comfortable to them. It’s completely unconscious.
Jack Baruth, “How To Mentally Manipulate Your Fellow Drivers: This is not the lane you’re looking for…”, Road and Track, 2017-03-07.
February 10, 2019
QotD: Hell is other drivers
January 3, 2019
The “Full English Breakfast”
My friend Liam emailed me to ask whether I had strong opinions on this serious debate despite having been raised in Canada. This was my response:
Yes, of course. I have a pulse, you know.
A proper Full English Breakfast is actually composed of eggs, bacon (English bacon, not side, back, or peameal), beans, and black pudding. Sausage is for wimps who can’t handle black pudding. Optional, but completely acceptable additions include fried mushrooms, fried onions, fried tomatoes, potato fry-up, and toast.
Anything else is an Abomination in the sight of the Lord. ESPECIALLY chips.
As to the positioning on the plate … these must also be people who colour-code their sock drawers and have secret notebooks filled with locomotive spotting numbers. You know, “anoraks”.
Bloody wankers.
December 10, 2018
QotD: No one “owns” a culture
To own something is to have the rights (1) to determine exclusively how it is used, (2) to appropriate exclusively any income or other benefits it yields, and (3) to transfer the foregoing rights to others by sale, gift, or bequest. In this light, it is clear that no one owns a culture, and hence no one may legitimately seek state violence for the defense of such asserted property rights.
One may have preferences about culture. One may have affections for or aversions to a culture or particular elements of a culture. But such preferences do not entail any rights of ownership. Moreover, all cultures are constantly changing to a greater or lesser degree by spontaneous, decentralized processes, including interaction with other cultures. Such interaction has always been the case except for the cultures of people completely isolated from the rest of the world.
To treat the arrival of new members of society who live to some degree in accordance with different cultures as if these persons were “invaders” who threaten to destroy one’s culture is simultaneously to evince little faith in the attractiveness and strength of one’s culture and to seek its defense as the enforcement of property rights where no such rights exist.
Robert Higgs, “No One Owns a Culture”, The Beacon, 2018-11-19.
September 30, 2018
Model buildings
Lindybeige
Published on 3 Oct 2014I tell you a bit about how I made my model buildings – the ruins, the card buildings, the vacuum-formed stuff,
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
QotD: Limits of expertise
When you wrote your original article … you might have relied on public sources, but you might also have contacted one or more academics. If those academics did not flag for you that there was a substantial constitutional debate here, you might want to ask yourself if you were treated fairly by them or if they were themselves poorly informed about an area where they mistakenly thought they had expertise.
That’s an uncomfortable question. It is not intended to be ad hominem. But when an academic does not recognize his or her own limits, they are not really useful to themselves or to anyone else.
Seth Barrett Tillman, “Tillman’s Response to a Liberal Journalist’s Inquiries”, The New Reform Club, 2016-12-07.
September 11, 2018
Is this what true love used to be?
Megan McArdle recounts a story of a couple who lived through the depression (well, the Great Depression … in culinary terms, they may never have emerged from the ordinary depression of lunchbag letdown):
August 28, 2018
The darker side of those cute, playful dolphins
David Warren considers the parallels between certain dolphin behaviour and its human equivalent:
Spinner dolphins
Photo by Philippe Bourjon via Wikimedia Commons.
I am, let me confess, no expert on dolphins, nor on any other member of the cetacean paraphyly. Nor, for that matter, on anything at all, in my current recollection. I do however know that dolphins can swim very fast, can leap high out of the water, can be as long as thirty feet, and that even small dolphins, no longer than a man, are very strong. I would not mess with one in the water. Before assuming that their behaviour, in the state of nature, is entirely benign, one should ask some fish. Even a porpoise could tell you: they have their dark side. Especially a porpoise: for dolphins have been known to murder hundreds of them, for no stated reason. They can take a dislike to each other, too; and for reasons that we may darkly surmise, act upon what we take for their emotions.
Example: when they throw each other’s children in the air, they are not being playful.
On at least one occasion I have had to explain to an environmentalist that the sob-story he was telling, about dolphins found dead or dying on a Virginia beach, had nought to do with capitalist perfidy. On forensic examination, all the beached dolphins were found to have suffered severe blunt-force trauma — administered by other dolphins.
They have also been known to dislike humans, for instance pulling them under the water until they stop making bubbles. Brooding, “loner” dolphins are particularly noted for the sort of behaviour that we might be inclined to characterize as evil.
Smiley-face, bottlenose dolphins, of the Tursiops genus, are among those sexually dimorphic, which is to say, the males are decidedly bigger than the females. They are very smart, in both sexes, but not nearly as sentimental as our New Age propagandists have advertised. I cannot imagine a feminist being pleased with their courting rituals, which closely resemble entrapment and rape. I take an unsentimental view of the dolphins myself, though I am prepared to admire their skills. I cannot believe male dolphins are gentlemen.
A story forwarded to me this morning from the London Telegraph tells a commonplace tale. A bottlenose dolphin has been terrorizing swimmers off a beach in Brittany. A loner male, with a marked preference for human females, has alas “progressed” from being a source of entertainment. The theory is that he is sexually frustrated. This strikes me as possible, but possibly narrow. I have read several stories before — from different continents — in which just such a loner male dolphin graduates from public entertainer, to public nuisance, to public danger, around a specific beach. In every case it seems the dolphin is believed to be sexually “aroused.” I would not be surprised to learn that the same symptoms accompany psychopathic behaviour in dolphins, as they often (if not always) do in rogue loner humans.
August 15, 2018
Emergency video to be played in times of crisis
Lindybeige
Published on 25 Jul 2018Everything is all right.
June 21, 2018
Extra Scenes! James May Explains Boomerangs | Earth Lab
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 23 Aug 2013James May discusses wings and propellers in these extra scenes from why boomerangs always come back.
May 15, 2018
James May is scared of heights! | Extras | James May’s Q&A (Ep 29) | Head Squeeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 12 Jul 2013James shares his thoughts on why some people are afraid and reveals that despite his fear of heights James has actually been as high as 73,000 feet in a U2 spy plane.
March 12, 2018
Sarah Hoyt on women’s advantages and disadvantages
A recent post at According to Hoyt:
I did not ask to be born a woman. At least presumably I didn’t ask. If we look too closely at this, we get into all sorts of things about pre-existing souls, reincarnation and what not. Neither fit into my system of belief, but neither am I absolutely sure of what happens after you die, or before you’re born, because how can I be? Eventually I’ll find the one out, the other also if my system is wrong. And in either case it matters very little to here and now.
However, I do know being born a woman wasn’t some sort of achievement, like I just won a race and deserve a medal. I am a woman, and that’s fine. My little tomboy self didn’t always think it was a good idea, this being a woman thing, but I’ve come to enjoy it. I can still slay dragons and drink but I can also wear bitching shoes while doing it, and no one looks at me sideways.
Or to put things another way: I have my limitations, my sticking points, and things I do that make people look at me oddly. The limitations and sticking points have bloody nothing to do with being female. Even in Portugal, where I was presumed to be dumber than most males (it’s a cultural thing) I never found that to be an impairment, because I wasn’t and I’d eventually show it. Also, because I’m that kind of person, I enjoyed the look of shock on their faces when I showed it. The sticking points: I’ve gone to pot, physically for various reasons, mostly having to do with hypothyroidism and asthma, and true, I was never as strong as most males. So in a test of strength, I’d have failed. But I was quite strong enough when I was young to carry furniture as heavy as the movers did, and for as long (I never had to tell my husband “I can’t lift this” until my fifties. And in a fight I just had to be twice as low-minded and nasty. Because a fight isn’t won on a straight up context of strength.
I never found being a woman an impairment. I did take shameless advantage of it a time or twenty. It’s easier to get out of a ticket, if you act the ditsy woman. It’s easier to diffuse a situation that for a male would end in a fight by smiling and talking in a “little girl lost” voice.
Do I feel bad about using the advantage that the evolutionary triggers against hurting females gives me? Oh, please. You are born who you are born. You use ALL your weapons. All of them. Why not? There are disadvantages that come with your advantages. There are disadvantages for everyone. You use all your advantages. They’re yours. Why wouldn’t you use them?
March 4, 2018
The dirty secret of a lot of “traditional” family recipes
At Atlas Obscura, Alex Mayyasi spills the beans about a lot of secret family recipes:
When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother’s secret potato salad recipe.
“I told the chef, ‘My very favorite potato salad in the world was the one my grandmother made,’” Meyer recalls.
That’s a big statement coming from Meyer, a successful restaurateur who has earned Michelin Stars and founded the fast-casual chain Shake Shack. At the time, his grandmother had already passed away, but Meyer remembered that she kept recipes on three by five index cards. After a search, he found the right card and handed it to the restaurant’s chef, who invited Meyer to try it in the Blue Smoke kitchen.
When Meyer arrived, the sous chefs had a big bowl of potato salad that brought back memories of his grandmother. He tried it, smiled, and told the chefs, “That’s exactly right.” They grinned back at him mischievously. Eventually, Meyer broke and asked, “What’s so funny?” A chef pulled out a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise and placed it on the table. Meyer looked at it, then realized that the secret recipe his grandmother had hoarded for years was on the jar. It was the official Hellman’s recipe for potato salad.
This actually seems to be a common phenomenon. The television show Friends even features a similar discovery, when one character, Phoebe, realizes that her grandmother’s “famous” chocolate chip cookie recipe came from a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.
Two months ago, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in accounts of their own discoveries. We promised a (loving) investigation of grandparents lying about family recipes. But instead we got a delightful look at the power of imagination, the limitations of originality, and the halo effect of eating a dish or dessert made by family.
February 19, 2018
QotD: Experiencing an earthquake for the first time
I have experienced a couple of earthquakes in my life. Most of them were so tiny I didn’t notice, but a big one happened in Scotts Mills, about 15 miles from the home in 1993. The quake was 5.6 on the richter scale, and did some damage around the town, although little if any that I could see in the house.
I left the house when it started, in my bathrobe. At just before 6:00 it was just getting light in March and cool outside, but I was alone. I stood there, as the rumbling stopped and the movement died down staring at the ground.
What was once so solid and trustworthy, wasn’t any more. All the terms you use to describe something absolute and reliable: rock solid, rock bottom, foundation, all of them presume the place you can go for safe stability is the earth its self. Now it was moving around, it couldn’t be trusted. Suddenly the world felt… untrustworthy. I was filled with a queasy sense of unease and uncertainty. There’s simply nowhere else to go when you can’t trust the solidity of the planet beneath your feet.
Christopher Taylor, “ROCK SOLID NO MORE”, Word Around the Net, 2016-06-13.
January 24, 2018
Charles Stross on Heinlein’s “Crazy Years” notion
Heinlein called it, back in the 1940s, and Charles Stross provides a few more data points to prove he was quite right:
Many, many years ago, in the introduction to my first short story collection, I kvetched about how science fictional futures obsolesce, and the futures we expect look quaint and dated by the time the reality rolls round.
Around the time I published “Toast” (the title an ironic reference to the way near-future SF gets burned by reality) I was writing the stories that later became Accelerando. I hadn’t really mastered the full repertoire of fiction techniques at that point (arguably, I still haven’t: I’ll stop learning when I die), but I played to my strengths — and one technique that suited me well back then was to take a fire-hose of ideas and spray them at the reader until they drowned. Nothing gives you a sense of an immersive future like having the entire world dumped on your head simultaneously, after all.
Now we are living in 2018, round the time I envisaged “Lobsters” taking place when I was writing that novelette, and the joke’s on me: reality is outstripping my own ability to keep coming up with insane shit to provide texture to my fiction.
Just in the past 24 hours, the breaking news from Saudi Arabia is that twelve camels have been disqualified from a beauty pageant because their handlers used Botox to make them more handsome. (The street finds its uses for tech, including medicine, but come on, camel beauty pageant botox should not be a viable Google search term in any plausible time line.) Meanwhile, home in Edinburgh, eight vehicles have been discovered trapped in an abandoned robot car park during demolition work. This is pure J. G. Ballard/William Gibson mashup territory, and it’s about half a kilometre from my front door. The world’s top 1% earned 82% of all wealth generated in 2017 — I’m fairly sure this wasn’t what Adam Smith had in mind — and South Korea has such a high suicide rate that the government intends to make organising a suicide pact a criminal offence.
Go home, 2018, you’re drunk. (Or, as Robert Heinlein might have put it: these are the crazy years, and they’re not over yet.)
January 2, 2018
How To Get Your Shoes Shiny – James May’s Man Lab
James May’s Man Lab & Toy Stories
Published on 7 Jan 2014Grubby shoes? Then you are not a man. But don’t fear, we’ve flown in Platoon Sgt. Mark Buckingham to set the bar for shiny shoes. So shiny he can see the Queen’s face in them.
