If, and that's a big if, my legs feels tomorrow like...

it feels today I may try to take a walk tomorrow.  I'm crossing my fingers.

Yesterday I was coming back from seeing a movie and I was travelling South on Westwood Boulevard.  If you're not familiar with the intersection of Westwood and National, when you're going South on Westwood and you get to the intersection with National, the street is two lanes going South.  The inner lane crosses National and the right lane must turn right (and yes, a third, "left-turn" lane forms just before the intersection).  Traffic was backed up in the lane crossing National to some degree and this black, brand-new Mercedes was coming up from behind and ducked into the empty right-turn only lane.  But when it got to the intersection, rather than turning right as required, it went across National and wove its way into the line of cars crossing National.

Now this car probably passed 15 to 20 cars with this move, and committed at least two moving violations in doing so.  Probably three.  (speeding, illegal lane change, failure to observe a posted sign).  What the hell was so important that this guy couldn't just wait his turn? Or is he just privileged because he can afford a brand new Mercedes?  I wish I'd gotten his license plate number so that if I ever see his car parked, I can let the air out of at least two of the tires.  Okay, I wouldn't do that, but I can at least imagine doing it.

Something I ponder often, and I think I've ranted about it before, is how many people don't understand the definition of, or ignore the signs that read "Compact Only" on parking spaces.  Yet again I saw an idiot who parked an oversized SUV in a compact only space, just because it happened to be the space closest to the escalator from the parking lot going into the mall.  There were plenty of non-compact spaces further down in either direction.  I'm thinking of printing up 100 copies of the definition of compact to start leaving on people's windshields.

I'm a fan of the TV show "Blue Bloods".  Last night was the season premiere, and I fell asleep about 30 minutes into it.  I hate when that happens.  Fortunately CBS has posted the episode on their website already, so kudos to them for solving this problem for me.  The only difficult part is getting past the commercials to fast forward to where I nodded off, which I can live with.

There are commercials now touting smaller needles for flu shots.  Reminds me of a wild rumor that was going around when I went to Basic Training.  We were informed officially that one of the first week's days involved getting a bunch of vaccinations.  The rumor was "one of the shots you have to get goes in your left nut, with a square needle".  Now I knew that couldn't be true.  There are shots that have to be given IM (intra-muscular) versus IV (intra-venuous) but not IN (intra-nut), but I didn't say anything to those trying to scare my friends. 

They would have been more scared if they'd known the truth.  The injections were mixed and given one shot in each arm from a pneumatic "gun" and we watched as a group of women went ahead of us and many of them fainted from the injections.  The guys joked and said women were weak and guys would never faint.  Then it was our turn and as many of the guys fainted as girls had.  Maybe more.

My car is parked on the street.  I'm going to have to get up in the middle of breakfast and walk outside to put money in the meter right around 9 a.m.  But at least I didn't have to park six blocks away last night when I got home from trivia.

Yes, I "scabbed" last night.  What does that mean?  Buzztime is an interactive form of computerized trivia played across the nation.  It's run by a company that has its headquarters in Carlsbad and it's been around for a long time.  It's also never turned a profit.  Bars and restaurants that host the game have the "blue boxes" you use to play kept in chargers and you watch the game on a TV screen and answer the questions as they come up.  For years the games were fed across the nation on one feed on which everyone competed.  This past Feburary, they split the feed.  One East Coast feed and one West Coast feed.  We can no longer play against everyone, against the best in the nightly one-hour premium games.  So we boycotted.  We no longer gather to play the premium games as a team to compete against other teams at bars and restaurants across the nation.  But sometimes we'll gather in small groups and play anyway.  Last night I joined two other players and we played one of the blue boxes each.  By not playing five boxes between us, we weren't generating a competitive location score (the game registers two sets of scores at the end of each game, a location score that's the average of the top five boxes played at the location, and an individual score).  We managed to generate the top individual score on our West zone feed, although we won' t know if it was the best in the nation until later today.  Hopefully Buzztime will end the split before the company fails altogether.

Oh, I was mentioning going to yesterday's movie.  The audience was small (it was a documentary after all) but the two women sitting closest to me talked throughout, as though they were alone in the living room.  I tried politely to get them to shut up but nothing polite worked and I wasn't going to get rude.  It dawned on me afterward why they felt so entitled.  The documentary was "The Other Dream Team", about the story of how Lithuania won its freedom from the former Soviet Union and then had its basketball team (made up of players that were part of the 1988 gold medal winning Olympic team)  go to the 1992 Olympics.  As they were leaving, they stopped speaking in English and started speaking in what I am 99% sure was Lithuanian.  So maybe they felt entitled to talk because they felt it was their story?

Almost forgot, supposed to include my twitter address, which is @cyclist1959 in my blogs, to try to boost my number of followers.

I like to go through each day having faith in our system of justice.  But it gets more and more difficult each day when I read about people being exonerated by newly uncovered DNA evidence, and now we have a chemist working in Boston who may have sent hundreds, possibly thousands to jail by falsifying lab results.  Okay, I can live with the fact she lied about not having an advanced degree.  That's a firing offense, but not a big deal.  But mixing cocaine in with samples that tested negative in order to get convictions, that's just unspeakable.  Makes me wonder how many of the millions who are behind bars actually did what they were convicted of.  The presumption of innocence has been damaged, perhaps beyond repair.

Why do networks, cable channels and others who put programming into my room on my television feel this obsessive compulstion to push the volume way up when commercials come on?  It's like they think if they make it so loud that it hurts my ears, I'm going to be more likely to not change the channel or pay attention to their ads.  I'm here to tell them, that's not the way to get my attention.  Be smart, be clever, make me laugh.  Those all have a chance.  Volume does not.

Yesterday was tax class.  Our regular instructor was not there and we had a substitute.  She's been doing taxes off and on since the 1970s, but she just doesn't have what it takes to teach.  She's impatient, she snaps at people, and she doesn't know the material.  She said at least three things to the class that were just downright wrong and since they think she was accurate, their knowledge base has been corrupted.  Worse yet, she didn't even bother teaching the California portion of the course material and there was an important area where CA doesn't conform to the federal rules.  Since she's substitute teaching on Monday I may just skip the class altogether.