Friday, July 14, 2017

Living The Simulated Life

A couple of mornings ago, I was browsing social media and came across a video of a bicyclist being clipped by a car. The rider was okay and all were in full dudgeon to catch the driver and see him punished. An odd thing I noticed about the video is that the biker was within an arms-length of the center of what looked like a kind of highway. Not saying it is okay to run people over, but WTF is a cyclist doing out in the middle of a high speed roadway? He may have a right to do this (or may not) but getting hit by a car is predictable, inevitable and he might not be so lucky to walk away from the next instance. There will be a next instance if he habitually rides in the middle of a road.

That very day, I was driving to work in our Yukon XL and there is a place where I make a left turn, which is something of a hard-left, say 100 degrees rather than the usual 90. Making it worse is that this is a busy main road and right after that intersection, the continuing road curves to the right. You have to do the whole turn pretty fast and/or be prepared to stop suddenly if an oncoming car appears from around the corner. With my turn signal on and half-way through the turn, I saw something to my left out of the corner of my eye--a bicyclist! He was going about 25 mph and cut in front of me! I had hardly reached the brake and he had already gone past me into the main road. I suspect he had the timing down and figured there would be space between us since we were both turning left. Still, I don't cut through corners and this is a large vehicle, so I doubt he cleared me by even two feet. Since he was to my left, he could likely see down the main road better than I could and cars move fast through there, so he could easily have been flattened by an oncoming car.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

A Perfect Moment

It was the perfect little moment:

Wimbledon quarterfinal 5th set with Murray v. Querrey. Understandably, given the venue, the crowd was on the side of the Scottish player. Querrey had just made another of his amazing points and the camera panned to the crowd. A lady was clapping, but most people were not. She stopped, looked around and put up her hands. She used no words, but could not have been more clear: What? We all know it was a terrific point.