Friday Night Rants

Okay, I feel the need to vent and get a couple of things off my chest...

1. Main Stream Media

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but WHAT THE HECK is wrong with the main stream media???

Yesterday I was at the gym for about an hour. They had CNN on all the TVs. In the hour I was there, I think they spent about 50 minutes providing LIVE coverage of the ROOF of Mic hael Jac kson's bus driving through London. (Spaces inserted intentionally so my blog won't show up on Google searches for that freak's name).

It gave me flashbacks.

Suddenly, my mind was back in the Knight Out bar & grill across the street from UCF on the outskirts of Orlando. My roommate, Joe, and I liked to go to Knight Out because they had nice pool tables, real cork dartboards (all the other places in Orlando had those weird plastic computerized things), and THE BEST burgers I've EVER had (then or since).

Anyway, we were there one night shooting some pool, and I remember saying to myself, "Self, why is the news providing us continuous live coverage of some white Bronco driving slowly across the highways of Los Angeles???" Little did I know then how that slow chase and subsequent trial of O.J. would preoccupy the main stream media for a LONG time to come.

Yesterday... M.J. wasn't even WANTED for anything.

There was absolutely NOTHING interesting about watching the roof of his van.

I don't CARE if there are RUMORS he may go on tour. Count me OUT.

Must have been a slow news day I guess.

2. Clueless People Who Try to Make Rush Hour Traffic Worse Than it Already Is

So I'm driving home this afternoon along Waxpool Road (one of the main roads through Ashburn). A lady coming toward me from the other direction was holding her cell phone to her face with one hand. With her other hand, she flipped on her LEFT turn signal. This perplexed me, because:

(a) Turning left would mean she'd be turning right in front of me and she still had enough speed that it didn't appear she was going to wait until I passed.
(b) The road at that spot wasn't wide enough for her to do a U-turn, and all that was on her left (my right) was a ditch, so it wasn't like she was going anywhere in that direction.

Low and behold, much to my amazement, while still holding her cell phone to the side of her face, she spun her wheel to the left and started turning in front of me toward the ditch. She quickly came to a halt at the edge of the ditch and immediately threw her car into reverse. It was then that I figured out she was trying to do a 3-point turnaround. Unfortunately, the people who were coming up behind her were equally clueless of her intentions and were trying to continue driving along behind her as she threw her car into reverse and tried to ram the car that was driving by behind her. Luckily, the driver behind her was alert and able to swerve to miss her.

But dude, if she had hit either me or one of the cars behind her, she would have jammed up traffic across Ashburn for a LONG time.

Where do people like this get their driver's license from? As a prize in a box of Lucky Charms?