The Random Ness Monster

[captainsblog]

A few fast-moving stories from recent days.

I ended my week in a suburban town traffic court, which I have no expertise in whatsoever but I'll still go out to for various clients. Usually, I get them the same deal they could get themselves, but lawyers get to jump the queue and therefore I save the client hours of wait-around time.

This one got better than that. When I sashayed in ahead of the infinite line segment of unrepresented defendants, they couldn't find my client's file, despite the case duly appearing on the docket. While they rooted around for it, I got to listen to about a half dozen of the next few to appear: all were offered reductions from a moving violation to a parking ticket (a cynical ploy, because towns have to share moving fines with the State but not parking ones); and all but one were sent to weekend traffic school (the exception being one whose employer, likely, was paying both the ticket and the insurance and he didn't care how much it cost as long as he didn't have to go learn how to parallel park all over again).

Then they found my client's stuff, accidentally clipped to somebody else's paperwork.  The offense? 76 MPH in a 45 zone- a Southtown strip-mall state highway, indistinguishable from the Sheridan Drive that is three stop signs from this house.  Eight point violation.

But, because they'd made me wait? Two parking tickets, a whopping $70 fine, no points, no school.

I should try brain surgery sometime, since I seem to do better when I have no idea what I'm doing.

----

Recounting this tale with my trainer this morning, she topped me. Her son is Emily's age, and he, his brother, his parents and both boys' girlfriends all went out to dinner downtown, in two separate cars, on a recent occasion. L. begged Mom and Dad to let him drive their car home with his GF. 

Their car would be a black Porsche 911, so you know where, and how quickly, this is going.

The rest of the entourage got home ahead of Speedy, but moments later, his younger brother noticed the trooper in the driveway. She'd been sitting at the main intersection where their street joins the then-merging major state highways (almost certainly from a vantage point in a Tim Hortons parking lot;), and she clocked L. at 65 making the turn. She then followed him and gunned him getting it up to near 80 in the maybe half mile between there and their driveway.

Oops.

Knowing it was his first (and likely last) time behind that wheel, the cop wrote him for 60-in-a-45 and left it at that. The 'rents asked, WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?, but I'm sure they full well knew that "thinking," at least with his brain, was physically impossible the first time he got into that car.

----

Then we have the non-moving violation of Just Plain Wrong. This awaited me in the Wegmans parking lot on a run of errands late today:



I'll stick with my initial assessment of that as I was foto'ing and Facebooking it from the parking lot (part of a crowd of people taking the picture at the same time):

The War on Christmas is escalating. Baby Jesus is fighting back with weapons of mass destruction.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Frosty smiles down on Baby Jesus in the creche, while Rudolph joins the ox and ass in keeping time ba-rum-pa-bum-bum...

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

When I was in law school here, through our first few years after we moved here a decade later, one of the really over the top "Christmas houses" was on a very tony street, known for bar leaders and bank presidents, a few miles east of us. We'd take Emily through to ooh and ahh while I just groaned at the wretched excess of it all.

It was Clark Griswold in scope, always new crap getting added, even crowd control was needed some years, but my favorite part was the token display of menorahs and dreidels on a strip between their four-car garage and the lot line.

"That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown- apartheid."

[ellettra.livejournal.com]

That SUV is off the hook, man.