I hesitate to use the term ‘first world problem’ because it may dismiss something just because it affects someone who is affluent and lives in a wealthy country.
But I think that this story qualifies for the label
I am astonished that anyone would order home delivery of a cup of coffee in the first place.
New cars have many features that seek to prevent you from causing an accident due to a momentary lapse in concentration. Many of the most recent ones I do not have since my car is 12 years old and even then was not a top-of-the-line model. But it does have one feature that I really like and that is the rear view camera, which is of great help especially when parallel parking into tight spaces. There are other features that I have seen on other cars, such as giving an alert when you seem to be drifting into the next lane and another that alerts you when you are getting too close to a stationary obstacle or the moving car ahead and even triggers the brakes to slow you down.
But what these things cannot take into account is other idiot drivers on the road. Someone was telling me the other days that she was stuck on the highway where traffic was crawling along at about two miles per hour when the man behind her started honking. Puzzled, she looked in the mirror and he was angrily gesturing to her to close the small gap between her and the car in front. But the sufficiency of the size of the gap between her car and the one in front for the speed at which they were traveling had been determined by her car’s computer and sensors and it had determined that her car was close enough. To get closer would have made the alarm system keep beeping.
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At the beginning of every month, I will repost my comments policy for those who started visiting this site the previous month.
As long time readers know, I used to moderate the comments with a very light hand, assuming that mature adults would know how to behave in a public space. It took outright hate speech targeting marginalized groups to cause me to ban people, and that happened very rarely. But I got increasingly irritated by the tedious and hostile exchanges among a few commenters that tended to fill up the comment thread with repeated posts about petty or off-topic issues. We sometimes had absurdly repetitive exchanges seemingly based on the childish belief that having the last word means that you have won the argument or with increasingly angry posts sprinkled with puerile justifications like “They started it!”
So here is one rule: No one will be able to make more than three comments in response to any blog post. Violation of that rule will result in banning.
But I also want to address a couple of deeper concerns for which a solution cannot be quantified but will require me to exercise my judgment.
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I too used to wonder what the point of this sign was. I think that what they are really warning about is that you should look out for rocks that have fallen on the road.
So why not say something like “Look out for fallen rocks”?
Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.
Jaida Rivera’s 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.
But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York’s subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.
Back in 2017, I had a post arguing that a good personal motto to live by is ‘Don’t Be a Jerk’. While it does not have the high-minded elegance of other axioms to live by like the Golden Rule that one should behave towards others as one would like them to behave towards you or Kant’s Categorical Imperative, those need to be unpacked more and it is not always clear how to apply them in specific situations. I did not even try to define who a jerk is. I assumed that all of us have an intuitive sense of what constitutes jerk behavior and and can recognize it when we see it, and that a jerk is someone who routinely exhibits such behavior.
But while my post was a superficial take on this topic, I was amused to find that Eric Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy, has gone into this much more closely and published an essay A theory of jerks. He says that the older use of the term was to label a fool or a chump, like the naive Steve Martin character, seen here at the beginning of the 1979 film The Jerk.
I have not felt the desire to blog the least few days because the news has been so relentlessly depressing. With Israel seeming to be determined to start a war with Iran, Trump and his gang’s assault on immigrants and his use of the National Guard and federal troops to suppress protest, his stupid vanity project of a military parade, and the tragedy of the Air India plane crash, it feels like writing about any single thing is avoiding everything else.
So I invite people to use this post as an open thread to vent about anything they like.
I tend not to do anything that others would find interesting. Many of the acquaintances of my age like to do things like travel, go dancing, see films, eat out, and so on. I, on the other hand, forego such excitement and enjoy being at home by myself, with just occasional interactions with other people. You could call me a dull person.
So I was interested in this article that spoke of a Dull Men’s Club that has apparently several million members online.
In this club, they wear their dullness with pride. The duller the better. This is where the nerds of the world unite.
“Posts that contain bitmoji-avatar-things are far too exciting, and will probably get deleted,” warn the rules of the Dull Men’s Club (Australian branch).
…This is the place for quirky hobbies, obscure interests, the examination of small, ordinary things. It is a place to celebrate the mundane, the quotidian. It is a gentle antidote to pouting influencers and the often toxic internet; a bastion of civility; a polite clarion call to reclaim the ordinary. Above all, it is whimsical, deeply ironic, self-effacing and sarcastic humour.
There is an art to being both dull and droll. “It’s tongue-in-cheek humour,” says founder Grover Click (a pseudonym chosen for its dullness). “A safe place to comment on daily things.”Exclamation marks, he says, “are far too exciting.” (On his site, ridicule is against the rules, as is politics, religion, and swearing.)
…It all started in New York in the early 1980s. Click, now 85, and his friends were sitting at the long bar of the New York Athletic club reading magazine articles about boxing, fencing, judo and wrestling. “One of my mates said, ‘Dude, we don’t do any of those things.’” They had to face it. They were dull. They decided to embrace their dullness.
As a joke, they started The Dull Men’s Club, which involved some very silly, dull activities. They chartered a tour bus but didn’t go anywhere. “We toured the bus. We walked around the outside of the bus a few times. And the driver explained the tyre pressures and turned on the windscreen wipers.”
…Much of the minutiae of life gets on members’ nerves, as does poor workmanship. Five hundred amused comments followed a post about coat hangers inserted into hoops on rails in hotel rooms. “That would keep me up all night,” said one person.
The over or under toilet paper debate raged (politely) for two and a half weeks. Then there was the dismantling of electronic appliances. Or photographing post boxes, the ranking of every animated movie from one to 100 – 100 being “dull and pointless”. Members judge the speed of other people’s windscreen wipers against their own, or in the case of Australia’s Simon Molina, stuff as many used toilet rolls as possible inside another. “It’s extremely dull.” There was the late John Richards who founded the Apostrophe Protection Society and 94-year-old Lee Maxwell who has fully restored 1,400 antique washing machines – that no one will ever use.
I probably won’t join this group. It may be too intense for me.
Reading the article, though, reminded me of this sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Suppose you arrive at the airport too late to board your flight and it has just left the gate. What should you do?
Normal people will kick themselves for being late and then either rebook for a later flight or just go home. But John Charles Robinson had an idea: Call in a bomb threat and have the flight delayed so that he could still board it.
According to a criminal complaint filed June 6 in U.S. District Court in Detroit, the bomb threat that led to a Spirit Airlines flight being evacuated and delayed by six hours at Metro Airport on Thursday, June 5, was a hoax. The person behind the hoax, the complaint says, is 23-year-old John Charles Robinson, of Monroe, who prosecutors say was headed to Los Angeles on Thursday morning when he missed his 7 a.m. Spirit Airlines flight and was told at the gate that he had to rebook.
Robinson, though, had another idea in mind: call in a bomb threat with the hopes of the flight being delayed long enough so that he could still make it on the plane, court records state.
…The investigation found no bombs on the airplane, or in any luggage.
But what authorities would eventually discover was a hoax, with cellphone records leading the FBI to Robinson, who had rebooked a 6:28 p.m. flight to Los Angeles.
But he didn’t make that flight either.
Robinson did arrive at the terminal on time, only FBI agents showed up to interview him.
According to the complaint, Robinson initially denied making any phone calls to Spirit Airlines. Though after he gave consent to have his cellphone searched, the complaint states, the agents discovered the hoax.
Robinson then reportedly fessed up:
“(He) stated that he made the call with the hope that it would delay the flight long enough for him to make it in time so he would not have to take a different flight,” the complaint states.
It boggles the mind that anyone would think that calling in a fake bomb threat was a good solution to being too late for a flight. Apart from seriously inconveniencing all the other passengers and crew on his flight as well as the knock-on delays for other flights, who these days does not know that calling in a fake bomb threat will result in serious trouble with the law?
Note that Robinson is just 23 years old, so file this story under the category of “Young men tend to do really stupid things”.
At my local bridge club, one member has his own coffee mug that has printed on the side “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I had never heard this before so I asked him what it meant and he said that it meant that whatever was the issue under discussion, it did not concern him and he wanted to have no part in it. I thought that it was one of those local idioms that people have. In Sri Lanka was have all manner of local idioms in the English language. “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs” and “Why don’t you grow brinjals in your back garden?” are two particularly weird ones. The former means that you are trying to teach someone something that they already know very well while the second is essentially telling someone that they are wasting your time and should go and do something else. How these came about would be fascinating (Why would grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Why would they suck eggs anyway?) but their origins are lost in the mists of time
But then two days ago I was watching the British police procedural “Dept Q” that takes place in Scotland and in one scene, the police detective starts to explain something to his superior and she cuts him off, saying “Not my circus, Not my monkeys”. I burst out laughing at hearing this and realized that it must be more than a local saying so looked it up.
It originates apparently in Polish as the literal translation of the expression “Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy”. How such a phrase could have originated is not hard to guess. A circus is a chaotic situation and monkeys are hard to control and one can well imagine that it represents wanting to wash one’s hands of a messy situation.
I don’t know that I would even use such a saying myself. It sounds a little callous and unfeeling towards whoever is trying to explain something complicated to you.
But it is amusing.