Darrell Ross

Starting last year, it became illegal in California to hold a cell phone to your ear while driving a motor vehicle. Then in an addendum, they added sending text-messages to the list of no-no’s. If speaking on your cell phone while driving was the culprit, then the law should have made it illegal to talk on the phone. But no, it’s a “hands free” law. A huge boon for head-set manufacturers who have the law on their side. I bet their sales jumped when that law went into effect.

Distractions while driving? What about friends chatting with you and laughing or taunting you from the back seat? How about normal activities like changing your CD player? Adjusting the radio? Reading billboards? Or how about what some people do and other things I’ve heard people do regularly like eating? Applying makeup!? Reading newspapers!? Shaving!?

This is a perfect example of treating the symptom and not the disease. The disease here is poor education and poor emphasis on safe driving. I took a defensive drivers class a year or so ago and it was four hours of instruction on safe driving. I didn’t particularly enjoy it since I feel I’m a pretty safe driver anyway and took the class to get my Defensive Driver’s Card. But the class was a fantastic example of what should be done. I came out of there thinking, “Wow! That should be REQUIRED for EVERY driver.” For me it was about 75% known and 25% new material but I know many people would see it vice-versa.

It’s mildly entertaining to read articles like Ore. teens largely ignoring cell phone driving ban in which studies are quoted as not showing improvements.

This law is a distraction; a useless piece of legislation to quiet the masses and to say “Look, we’re doing something!” I hope we having smarter law makers some day who can stand up to the masses and point out what is really bothering them rather than having knee-jerk reactions and writing dumb laws.

—- BEGIN RANT —-
If I am driving down the freeway in traffic and I am on my cell to my Dad and suddenly there are brake lights everywhere, I yell “GOTTA DRIVE!” into the phone and chuck it to the passenger seat, immediately directing my full attention to the road. When things have cooled down, I pick up the phone and continue my conversation. I do not send text-messages while driving or email, I don’t read newspapers or shave. I do eat quite often. An apple makes a nice driving snack; heck changing gears is tougher than eating an apple.

Frankly, I am more concerned about the complete lack of understanding at least 50% of drivers seem to have for how to proceed at a 4-way stop sign. Signaling is a courtesy yes; would it kill you to be courteous? Blind spots are called blind spots for a reason. If you are on a curvy road and your phone falls just out of your reach, please use your brain. Pull over, retrieve the phone (feel free to swear about it), and then continue.

I am pissed off that my safe driving experience is now interrupted by me having to put on and off a headset when I get in and out of the car. Or if I forgot my headset, I just make sure it’s night time when you cannot tell I’m on the phone or I put the phone on speaker phone. Unless an officer is looking down into my car from above, they are not going to be able to see if I am on my cell phone. Officially I believe speaker-phone does not count as “hands free”. WTF is up with that? Talk about a law made by head-set companies!?
—- END RANT —-

When I worked for a time as a dish washer at the Saturn Cafe in Santa Cruz, we would have these meetings where all employees would talk. During the meetings, if one employee said something that explained your feelings, instead of repeating what they said, you could say “Eric is my ambassador.”

I spend a great deal of time reading news blogs and while many of them are lacking in insight and detail, there are some gems that are so well written (or at least are to me anyway). I felt that over time, my writing on this blog would improve and I feel it has somewhat but linking other articles together and stringing together insightful information seems to be out of my reach for now.

When I find these articles, I want to show them to others but mostly I just want to save copies of them so that I can refer to them later.  So I’m creating a category called “Ambassadors” where I can kind of save a links to articles and posts that I really like.

To start it off, here’s an article I was reading and felt was a great critique. It wasn’t until near the end of the post that I noticed it was from a non-US source, “Away from her friends on Fox, Palin folds like a cheap suit” by Kevin Cullen:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2008/1009/1223445617076.html

And a “Commentary: Why Ayers case is risky for McCain-Palin” by Roland Martin:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/07/martin.townhall/

I just read this article about MSNBC dropping Olberman and Matthews as news anchors from live political events. The constant whine from the republicans for the last decade has been about the “liberal media”. The tactic has paid off handsomely I’d say.

The Populous:
Plays right along. Hit constantly with news articles and quickly changing ideas, the USA population tends to be easily fooled in the “Hey look at that!!!” game. They also tend to believe what they hear before researching it. Add to that a dose of poor education and you’ve got the recipe down. When the Republican propaganda machine yells “that newspaper is a left-wing think tank!”, it flies around inside the Republican echo-chamber (Fox, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and other misinformed right-wing media outlets) for a week or so and a large chunk of folks in the USA believe it. Amazing!  

The Media:
Plays right along. Now that the people have been turned against the media, the media quickly toes the line. “Oh I’m sorry! I sounded almost like I wanted universal health care there for a moment! Way too liberal!”

Me:
Why the f*** can’t mainstream editors grow some spine and fight back against the misinformation being fed into the system constantly. FactCheck.org sure has a busy time fixing things and Jon Stewart on the Daily Show has loads of fodder to play with.

Seems to me the Karl Rove era is just coming into it’s prime. Too bad USA citizens are too blinded by hollywood and their own willful ignorance to see it.