Mon, January 26, 2004
Dude, You Boinked My Weasel
Let's start a slang trend – it's a project we can do together!
I've got nowhere to put this, but I thought of it and I think it's a phrase worth coining, so here is probably my shortest column ever. Driving on the freeway this afternoon, I wanted to dub the Jeep Cherokee with the bicycles on its roof rack the "Urban Dimetrodon." Surely, with your help, I can work that into the lexicon.
In the interest of padding out the column a bit, I'll share a few other brief observations about driving. Now that I've been playing the Burnout game on GameCube for a few days, I've started to notice how it affects my driving on real streets. Firstly, it shortens the patience a tad, since I can't go over 100 mph like I can on the virtual freeway, but over the last few years I've been working to temper the impatience. (Stop laughing! I have, a little!) So, that's not too much of an effect. And the lanes in real life are considerably narrower than those in Burnout, so it's pretty difficult to squeeze between cars, at least on the surface streets I face during my commute.
However, one benefit that I'm noticing is that it really improves the reaction time. Once you get used to surviving opposing traffic at top speed, it allows you to react much more quickly to bozos pulling out in front of you. (And believe me, LA has plenty of those.) The hard part is remembering that, on real streets, you don't get a "do over" after a spectacular crash.
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