Walking into work, I also walked into an angry rant by Greg. Seems Ogre had been the opening driver and had taken a delivery forty minutes earlier, he hadn’t gotten back. I inquired where he’d gone — some of the addresses are fairly far away, and Ogre isn’t exactly Mr. Speedy.

Turns out the address he went to - or was supposed to go to - is about a mile round trip. Taking more than five minutes to deliver there and get back is “taking your time.” Anyway, Ogre wasn’t answering his phone, so we all assumed he was just driving around bobbing his head as he does all the time.

Ogre finally showed up some twenty minutes later. “Where the hell have you been?” Greg demanded, angry.

“I’m sorry, Greg,” Ogre apologized. “I had some trouble finding the address.”

“It’s half a mile down the road! Clearly marked!”

“Yeah, but the street sign pronounces the name different than I do.”

That really does say it all about him, doesn’t it?

Writing about this article, Lee gets it absolutely right.

A few people will agree with this dick. A larger number will agree with me. And there will be two or three people who will leave a comment saying, “I’m a Christian, and these people don’t represent mainstream Christians.” But the fact is, when it comes to general public perception, these people are exactly representative of mainstream Christians. No “normal” Christian leader is going to come out and denounce this idiocy, of course. And therefore, by proxy, all Christians are going to be seen as agreeing with it.

Chalk it up to the “liberal media” or whatever scapegoat you feel like, but this is a very real situation, and the more that mainstream Christians allow this crap to be done in their name, the worse it’s going to get. Because the way I see it, there’s very little difference between this and “Jews should be forced to wear yellow triangles.”

Authorities patrolling U.S. highways tend to give motorists a cushion of up to 10 miles per hour above the speed limit before pulling them over, says a survey by a group of state traffic safety officials.

Yeah, but didn’t we all know this … already?

This practice creates an unsafe comfort level at high speeds and is a potential safety hazard, according to the report being released Monday by the Governors Highway Safety Association. The group found that 42 states allow drivers to regularly exceed the speed limit before they are stopped.

“This cushion truly exists across this country and in some cases is more than 10 mph above posted limits,” said Jim Champagne, the association’s chairman.

“Law enforcement needs to be given the political will to enforce speed limits and the public must get the message that speeding will not be tolerated,” said Champagne, who also is executive director of the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission.

This sounds all well and good. But is it possible? I don’t think so. Police departments simply don’t have the manpower to pull over every single individual who speeds. I did a ride along several years ago with the Cockeysville precinct of the Baltimore County police department, and most traffic stops were done to kill time between calls — I think that if Mr. Champagne’s suggestion would be taken to heart, police departments would have to schedule large-scale speed traps utilizing numerous officers and varying locations throughout the week, meaning a massive increase in hiring or overtime or both, because in addition to having officers out there only looking for speeders, you’d still need officers to respond to the every-day things that police do - alarms, accidents, shooting, etcetra.

The ten mph cushion, while Mr. Champagne may not like it, isn’t the problem (as I see it). I would say the problem is aggressive drivers — folks who view driving as a contact sport, and like to weave their way through traffic in manuevers which leave guardian angels sweating buckets. And if the police departments get the “political will” to set up massive “aggressive driving” traps - hey, awesome.

There a lot of things about people’s behavior that I don’t get. Like, just now, the woman in the Acura Integra who knew she had to get in the left lane to make her turn, but waited until she was two car-lengths from the light to try to merge — finding my vehicle and two behind me blocking her, she slammed on her brakes and damn near caused the guy behind her to crash into her rear. I mean, why risk an accident when you could just get into the lane earlier? Or find a place to turn around?

Likewise, this story, which I was going to do a bit more about. I heard about it on WHFS’ afternoon show “Out to Lunch”. But one of the two guys - I can’t tell Big O from Dukes - made a comment that just had me slam my hand into my steering wheel and exclaim, “Yes! That’s true!”

It seems a woman was afraid of her pit bulls. So she went out to run some errands, and instructed her son to lock himself in their basement and either have a shovel at hand or use a shovel to reinforce the door. When she got back she

found her son’s body in a bedroom. He was covered in blood from several wounds, including a major head injury.

One of the two OTL guys hates pit bulls and doesn’t understand why people keeps them. He made very good points to the cons of pit bull ownership, and of course people called up to defend owning pit bulls. One man (an owner himself) said that pit bull ownership required doing homework on the species, and that he would never keep kids and pit bulls in the same house. So, anyone, whichever of the two OTL guys hates the dogs started bitching about how all pit bull owners band together to defend their dog-owning choices. Then he said, “They’re like Jeep owners! Those guys wave to each other!”

Anyway, that last bit made my day.