500 swings wide

Despite the distance between her car’s wheels being a mere eight (8) feet, Fiat 500 owner Gita L. Dietz enthusiastically swung her car into oncoming traffic in order to make right-hand turns seven times on her way to work (and seven times on her way back from work, later the same evening). Having apparently seen via a video application loaded onto her mobile phone the maneuver performed by a professional driver operating a vehicle with multiple wheelbases (a rig towing a trailer), Gita immediately decided to start doing the same every time she turned her car (which has a single wheelbase).

Friends and neighbors are concerned about the mental wellbeing of Ms Dietz; she tends to signal a turn in one direction before moving her car in the complete opposite direction, which is a lethally dangerous and totally asshole way to conduct oneself as the driver of a compact passenger vehicle. Competent drivers eschew such behavior and simply turn their cars in the direction they want to go without countersteering first. (For more information about some guidelines for how to turn vehicles, consider reading this page from the California DMV.)

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 20 Jan 2019

They shape tomorrow

And turn kids into adults.

Let’s stand with teachers

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

haiku 19 Apr 2018

Using modern tools 
Unruly kids can be turned 
Into fine humans 

[ americanifesto / 場黑麥 / jpr / urbanartopia / whorphan ]

goddess alights

Without fanfare – without plume of smoke, clap of thunder, or blinding bolt of light – goddess Athena made landfall in a town in the Mid-Atlantic region of the republic of America. She looked into homes, offices, and shops, but found little to hold her attention. Cloaked in the guise of a world-weary old man, she tried to buy a drink from a store with a red-and-green-striped sign.

Broke and hung-over from a friend's bachelor party, the store clerk stared at the thick gold disc the old bum had just given him, palming it as he dropped three Sacajawea coins onto the rest of the change. Pallas Athena, she who blesses the labors of artist and warrior alike, feeling spited and ill-received, stood her ground – she threw back the worthless tender and demanded the return of her golden coin. After a while, the police arrived, summoned by a silent alarm. Before they could arrest the strange old man, however, he escaped into the store's cramped rear storage-quarters, from which, strangely, no door leads to the outside.

Brave and majestic Athena, she who lifts the hearts of flagging friends, having made herself invisible so as to escape the clutches of what she could tell were bad people bent on doing her harm, had already folded the Gorgon's head to the fore of her Aegis breastplate when mercy stayed her hand; one last turn of the endlessly shifting cloth and that dreadful weapon would have peeked forth. Instead of turning her assailants to stone, however, the goddess relented. She erased the police officers' memories and cursed the clerk to a pitiful life of abject wage-slavery devoid of pleasure, in which direction she figured he was heading, anyway.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥