A schediastic hootenanny

The scene: the ChickWagon, around 4PM Christmas Day. I am on my way to a screening of Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and, because I live in San Antonio where it is 68 degrees out in late December, I have my passenger-side window open.

The action: a navy blue late-model family sedan – a Caddy, I'm pretty sure – pulls up alongside me. It is piloted by a dead ringer for Philip Seymour Hoffman, and is crowded with besuited middle-aged men and what I presume are their elderly mothers. The rear passenger window goes down and one of the ancient women calls out to me.

OLD LADY: "Thank you!"

ME: "Uh…you're welcome."

(Awkward pause.)

OLD LADY: "Aren't you wearing fatigues?"

ME: (Looks at Marc Ecko hoodie, which features a camo pattern) "Oh! I see. No, it's just a jacket."

OLD LADY: "Oh."

ME: "Sorry."

OLD LADY: "Well, Merry Christmas!"

ME: "Merry Christmas to you, too!"

- fin -

As you may know, I have long been fascinated with the unique bad driving habits of people in the various cities in which I have lived. From the raw incompetence of the Chicago driver to the terrifying naked aggression of the Los Angeles driver to the life-hating insanity of the Phoenix driver, I have sampled many rotten meats in our nation's automotive stew.

Surprisingly, San Antonio drivers are not particularly bad. In fact, they probably tie with Twin Cities drivers as the least ragingly awful drivers I have ever encountered; their sole irksome characteristic is tailgating, which is doubly unnerving because approximately 75% of them drive SUVs or pickup trucks roughly the size of a convenience store. However, this still makes them less nerve-wracking than the drivers of Dallas or Austin, who have the same crowding tendencies and also seem to consider it a sign of effeminacy to let their speedometers drop below 80.

So, really, I don't have that much of a problem with the drivers here. The roads, on the other hand, are an unending nightmare of depravity and madness. It isn't even so much the traffic, which is much less awful than L.A. or Chicago or even Austin; it's just that the roads themselves seem to have been designed by a consortium of angry, half-paralyzed, one-eyed apes in the direct employ of Satan. I've said many times that this is the most poorly-designed city I've ever seen, and nowhere is this more evident than on the roads. Here are a few examples:

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It's a holiday tradition around LiveJournal way to look at your year in review. My 2007 wasn't the best on record, so I'll just do what I normally do: recap the posts from each month that got the most comments*. I do this because it makes me look popular and it makes you people look lame, and that's what this journal is all about.

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*: By the way, I have heard rumors that there is now a way to display all comments for a thread on a single page, instead of collapsing them into an unnavigable mess after 50 comments. Anyone know how to do this?