road rage
A woman on NPR complains about agist "discrimination" at the DMV:
"I'll I have to do is be over 80 years old, with macular degeneration, and if i get into a little fender-bender, who's fault do you think they're going to say it is?"
As she persists in her scathing cratique of "biases against older drivers," i reflect that i have about as much sympathy for 80-year-olds who want to drive as i do for Paris Hilton saying, "I'm so rich and pretty that no one will take me seriously!"
When i lived in Santa Monica an old guy plowed down the promenade killing 12 people. He confused the gas with the break. It wasn't the first time he had gotten in such an accident. If discrimination will keep elderly people off the road, i say bring it on.
music to my ears
For my birthday last year Leah gave me an iPod, and it was a great little thing till it stopped working. Then I kind of forgot about for a while, till an Apple Store opened up at the Burlington Mall; that made it pretty much impossible for me to avoid doing anything about my poor late music player, so today I took it in to see if I could get it fixed.
Imagine my suprise, then, when the fine gentleman at the genius bar took one look (listen) to the machine, agreed with my conclusion that the problem was with the hard drive, and handed over a brand new iPod! Now that's service! Admittedly, I would have been happier with an upgrade to maybe a 30 gig player, maybe with some of those color screens they got now, but I'm sure not complaining. The only downside of the whole thing was that Leah had gotten the back of the iPod engraved for me: it read, 'To Dan, my musical bunny. Your love is like a rap song.' Obviously, the new machine is not so marked.
Still, it provided a chance for the genius to show off his wit: after I told him that the iPod had been broken for some time and he had glanced at the engraving, he asked me, 'so, are you a sad bunny now?' How well they know me!