(edited to add: )

quote:

---

Okay... so... she's a dog!

---

quote:

---

One time I turned into a dog and these guys helped me.

---

When I told her that she was going to be a teenager in a few years, she said, "I know."

quote:

---

You gave your 8 year old the keys to the car and kicked her out of the house?

---

quote:

---

Last night I had a Jedi dream. There was a huge battle going on and for some reason I only had a toy Lightsaber. So I had to use other tactics and convince people that my Lightsaber was real.

---

"Hey you can't just cancel the contract."
"Sorry I can, acts of God clause."
"Huh?"
"Line 345, God shall in this contract be defined as Mister Black."

There was a commercial, I think for a Ford, where some ditzy twenty-something said (essentially), "Teehee, I don't know when I'm supposed to get my oil changed. I'm glad someone else had decided to do the thinking for me,(insert hair twirl here)."

So as cars are getting smarter are the people who are driving them getting dumber? No offense meant to anyone here, by the way.

People with Toyotas that got a stuck accelerator kept speeding up and ended up crashing because they didn't know enough about how their car works to put it in neutral and use the brakes. Is this really that difficult? Am I missing something about modern cars that would make this an impossible maneuver?

Forgive me, but I think if you're handling a 2000 pound piece of machinery you should understand at least the basics of how it works.

We shouldn't let it get to the point that we rely on computers to do our thinking for us or our brains will turn to mush.

What do you think?

quote:

---

What do you think?

---

A fellow here in Australia decided to save fuel by turning his car off while driving down a hill. Only, in doing so he locked the steering wheel, crashed into the back of a truck, and died. He had just been awarded his license (lnk).

It is something I both do and don't understand. On the one hand, the world is getting more complex; thanks to consumerism and a growing economy there are always more products being produced with shorter lifespans, the end result of which being that most users have no way to learn how to best use everything they have before the next product hits the market and obsoletes their previous one. Thanks to this mentality finding its way into consumers via ipods and cellphones and tweets, with all the distractions that they entail, when it comes time to, say, drive a car, it's dealt with in the same manner. To put not too fine a point on it: negligently.

Perhaps, once upon a time, technological progress was a new thing and we took time to learn about it. Perhaps back then, parents taught their kids about the world they were growing up in because (a) they didn't have TV or a 5pm appointment at the gym to distract them, (b) the world was changing at a pace that parents didn't feel like they were being made obsolete. There were big things happening in the world - cold war and nuclear weapons and post-war reconstruction - and those issues impacted everyone, so people wanted to stay informed.

Now, we're 'rich'. Products are released in a steady stream of feature creep less due to scientific innovation and more through a calculated design to maximise repeat sales. Responsibility, which goes hand in hand with moderation and self-control, is a philosophical bane to sales and marketing: With no moderation comes uncontrolled spending and a bigger cut for the shareholders.

This is a hobby horse of mine (obviously), but it's my opinion that this is a cultural disease that is as much indirectly responsible for overspending, greed and recent economic turmoil as it is for people having limited interest in education (when was the last time you remember your local university *raising* the entry GPA?) and/or the consequences of their actions. And so we come to the issue of negligence - whether it be a driver not realising there are other ways to stop their car, or a manufacturer producing utter rubbish because they know owners will just upgrade in a couple of years.

And to make this musing both lighthearted and, more importantly, random, I give you:

Pickles.

Cars might be getting smarter, but (1) they're a long way from being able to drive themselves anywhere, and (2) they're so gadget dependent and computer dependent, not to mention delicate-in-the-name-of-fuel-conservation, that they're much harder to operate than they once were. (My driving instructor told me her family used to stop their Model T by bumping it against a tree trunk---just try that with your brand new Toyota.)

The Olympics have interfered with watching other things on TV. I once watched Part One of an episode of "Bewitched," with a stay in Salem and a warlock who'd been turned into a bedwarmer. They were running it as filler between Olympic sessions (the games were in Munich that year).

Part Two was supposed to be on the next day, and I looked forward to catching it, but when I turned the TV on, they kept showing these long-distance shots of an apartment building where, every so often, this guy would stick his head out. I was seriously disgruntled...until I realized the guy had a gun, and that something had gone terribly wrong at the Munich Olympics. I think you all know what that was.

It was maybe ten years or more before I happened to see Part Two of that episode...but time had passed and I didn't find it all that funny, certainly not as funny as I would've if I'd'a caught it then.

*****

I notice in my last post that I misspelled "braking" as "breaking," despite spelling it correctly elsewhere. Ah, well.

*****

quote:

---

Oh good. Ice skating.

---

With sticks. And running into each other.

Yep, it's all about the ice hockey.

Oh...and the skiing has been fun to watch, too.