A 3,000 Mile Journey

One of the (many?) strange things about me is that I always have numbers flying around inside of my head.

When I walk somewhere, I often count the number of steps that I take. When I see numbers on road signs, I often add or subtract them without thinking about it. When I go running, I often translate my pace into MPH. Yeah, I already admitted that it was strange.

The other day, on the way home from work, I discovered that I had picked up a hitchhiker—a little spider was on my hood, clinging on for dear life.

The distance from the church building to my apartment is about 8 miles, and it got me to thinking—in spider terms, how far of a trip were we making?

After estimating the size of the spider and comparing it to my own size, and making several tedious conversions from inches to feet to miles, I determined that for the spider, the trip to my apartment was roughly the equivalent of a 3,000 mile journey for me (it’s a ballpark figure—I did the calculations in my head while driving and listening to thumping techno music).

I was just reflecting on how traumatic it would be for me to be unwittingly deposited somewhere 3,000 miles away, when I looked down to discover that the spider was no longer on my car—sometime during my calculations he had apparently lost his grip and been blown away (speaking of traumatic).

Yeah, this is what life is like inside of my head.

The Kinship Of Speeders

Yesterday on the way to work a minivan coming the other way flashed his headlights at me repeatedly.

After I checked to make sure that I didn’t have my brights on, I surmised that the minivan driver must have been warning me about a police car lurking up ahead. Sure enough, as I turned the corner I saw one waiting in a side street looking to catch speeders.

The phenomenon of drivers feeling compelled to warn others about the presence of cops has always been intriguing to me. On some level, I know that it’s not necessarily a good thing to help other people avoid being caught by the law, but at the same time, I like the feeling of camaraderie that I experience every time someone flashes their headlights at me in warning.

In that spirit of camaraderie, I present the following picture from FAIL Blog, which I thought was hilarious:

Your Speed Is…

For the last several weeks there has been a Your Speed Radar Gun Thingy on the road that runs by my apartment.

For those of you who don’t know, a YSRGT (perhaps not the technical name for it) displays the posted speed limit for a given road, and then displays your speed as you pass by.

I’m fairly certain that YSRGTs were developed to act as a deterrent to speeding, but based on my own reaction to them, I’m not entirely sure how effective they are (especially when left up for two months or so, as the one by my apartment was).

The speed limit on the road by my apartment is 25 mph, and apparently this had been violated enough that it became necessary for a YSRGT to be deployed to curb the speeding.

Over the years, my reaction to YSRGTs has basically followed three clear stages:

Fear: When I first came across these as a driver, they scared me to death. I was convinced that my speed data was being immediately transmitted to a cop car just around the bend who was waiting to pull over anyone who upset the YSRGT’s delicate sense of right and wrong.

Fascination: After a while, I realized that no one was pulling me over for speeding past a YSRGT, and so I started to cautiously experiment with them. Sometimes, whenever I saw one, I would try to drive the speed limit according to my speedometer and then see if it matched the YSRGT display. Other times, I would see how many mph over the limit I could go before the YSRGT started flashing a warning at me (usually about 3 mph is all you can get away with).

Exploitation: Finally I decided that not only did the presence of a YSRGT not automatically indicate the presence of a patrol car nearby, it actually indicated the absence of one. At this point, I realized that my experiments could be more daring. Now I would see how soon after first spotting the YSRGT I could get it to flash at me in warning, or see how much I could accelerate between two given spots, or, while driving the speed limit, see how close I could get to the YSRGT and then still manage to exceed the speed limit by 5, 10, or 15 mph by the time I passed it.

As I said before, I’m pretty sure that YSRGTs don’t actually encourage people to slow down.


In case my lawyer-sister is reading this and is concerned about my tendency to have speed-related legal entanglements, rest assured: I’ll be resisting all exploitative urges for the next year or so.