New tactic may deter tailgating drivers

Yesterday I may have made a great discovery. I have to test it some more but given its earthshaking importance for our American culture I feel obligated to reveal it so others may test it also.

On our rural roads, there is not a lot of traffic, but there are always tailgaters. Guys with mustaches in giant pickups (always alone, truck bed always empty, does this tell us something?), people late to work or late getting home from the bar, and those who just have to be in front even though it is not feasible to go much faster. They bug me. I used to slow down deliberately to frustrate them, and even, I blush to relate, touched my brakes unnecessarily a few times when they got too close, to scare them into backing off.

In my own defense, on these roads there are commonly events that require fast stops or slowdowns, such as deer in the road, bicyclists ditto, and (that other class of aberrant drivers) people coming around a curve on the wrong side of the road. But I listened to the voice of reason (“You irritate one of these yo-yos too much and he’s liable to shoot you or force you off the road!”) and quit the punitive slowing and braking. Samuel L. Goldwyn was right, as usual, when he told us to utilize Western Union if we wanted to send a message.

In my new incarnation as rational long-suffering driver I used my familiarity with the road to pull off and let the yahoos pass me, then I might snarkle and impugn their intelligence, but not so as they would ever notice. Or, if feeling calm and compassionate, I would speculate sympathetically on what emergency forced them to drive in this manner: wife in labor, relative just been in a car wreck (ironic, that), pre-occupied with impending financial ruin due to high insurance premiums. Stuff like that.

But, as so often in this life, it was when I was not thinking about the issue at all, and in fact was feeling good and enjoying uplifting music in the car, that I stumbled upon what may be the great discovery.

The music was Tchaikovsky’s First Violin Concerto–one of those stirring “old war-horses” of the classical repertoire, and I love it. Itzhak Perlman was going at it, and some parts just made my body and soul leap up. Must have had more energy than usual because soon I was “conducting” vigorously with my right arm while driving with my left. I’ve always been prone to this, when driving alone with the right music, but it had been a while. The music called for lots of conducting, or let’s be real, rhythmic arm-waving and hand-pointing. I was having a great time. But I was not neglecting my driving, and soon I noticed in my rear-view mirror that the car behind me which had been not exactly tail-gating but close, had dropped way back. After he turned off, the next car that came up also dropped way back. I could hear their thoughts: “This loon has flipped out completely! Give her some space!”

So there it is, my discovery regarding tail-gating, inhibition thereof.

Here’s Tchaikovsky giving the evil eye to tail-gaters! [Painting: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky by Nikolay Kuznetsov, 1893. Source Wikipedia.]

Of course there are some warnings to be issued. If you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time you should not try this, and probably you should not be driving anyway. Results are not yet in on fMRI brain scans to see if this activity interferes with driving attention as much as, say, cell phone usage, but I’ll get back to you on that. Also, imitating a conductor is strenuous (ever noticed how long conductors live? it is a very healthy profession, judging by longevity [1]) and you may see unequal muscle development on the arm used.

Fiddler crab, scientific illustration (artist unknown) from the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. They may be studying me next!

It is possible to switch arms, but there isn’t enough space on the driver’s door side to give full rein to your enthusiasm. Using both arms at once is not recommended and may attract attention from the police. We never see any out where I live so no worries there.

Finally, I am not a driving expert, a real conductor of orchestras or even trains, nor an attorney. But I can recommend that you check out the music of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, as well as Tchaikovsky, for music to drive by. Even if you keep both hands on the wheel and just listen, it is a good distraction from–well, anything you need distraction from: except of course your own safe driving.

[1] That little fact-checker that lives in my brain is such a nuisance! I’ve believed this about conductors’ living long lives, probably due in part to the exercise of arm-waving, since I was in high school, but as I was putting it in writing I felt obliged to check it. Sadly, I found good reason to doubt it. See Spurious Correlations by William C. Burns. The major objection seems to be that

…there is a subtle flaw in life-expectancy comparisons: The calculation of average life expectancy includes infant deaths along with those of adults who survive for many years. Because no infant has ever conducted an orchestra, the data from infant mortalities should be excluded from the comparison standard. Well, then, what about teenagers? They also are much too young to take over a major orchestra, so their deaths should also be excluded from the general average. Carroll argued that an appropriate cutoff age for the comparison group is at least 32 years old, an estimate of the average age of appointment to a first orchestral conducting post. The mean life expectancy among U.S. males who have already reached the age of 32 is 72.0 years, so the relative advantage, if any, of being in the famous conductor category is much smaller than suggested by the previous, flawed comparison.

Quoted from Statistics as Principled Argument, by Robert P Abelson

We were carefree and having such fun…

Until those stuffy old fact-checkers came along! [Both of these delightful “cuts” are from the blog BibliOdyssey, a treasure trove of antique illustrations and ornaments. Thanks to ‘peacay’ for his work in finding them and putting them online (and to his other contributors too).

A short comment on the economic bailout

So many bloggers and talking heads comment on big political issues that I have steered clear of them; believe me, I rant a-plenty in our living room! But in my lifetime only two other distinct events have stood out, at the time of occurrence, as of such great importance for the future. The first was the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the second was 9-11 (though most of the disaster that has followed it has been chosen and created by the Bush administration). And this is the third.

I’ll keep my comment short. Here’s the email I just sent to Nancy Pelosi.

Dear Madam Speaker,

My husband and I, lifelong Democrats, commend you for your courage and good judgment in standing against the bailout bill. I also heard your interview last Thursday on NPR and was well impressed with your arguments and articulate presentation. I wish we could vote for you.

But be assured that many out here agree with your position. I do not know if you share my belief, that our economic structure is not just tilted drastically in favor of big interests–everyone knows that–but is unsound at its core, based on speculation and unending growth that cannot continue. Hence a series of bubbles that burst. The citizen always gets hurt whether by mortgage foreclosures that can devastate a family for decades, or by inflation, paying for bailouts, increasing the national debt, and so on. The war may be a distraction, as one of its purposes, from all this.

There is no “free market” when the biggest players set the rules and then are bailed out when they break them. At this point in history a free market is neither desirable nor possible. Let’s start changing it to a market that benefits the majority of people (not just by providing low-wage jobs) and benefits the planet and our succeeding generations.

Respectfully,

[me]

rural southern Oregon

Feminism, from the ground up

Progress toward equal rights for women. Toward women being human beings first, broads/gals/chattels not at all.

How do we measure it? Women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s have soared over the past 56 years, from 63.9% to 77.8%! [This is for year-round, full-time work, figures from U.S. Women's Bureau and the National Committee on Pay Equity.] In another 56 years we’ll reach just over 90% at that rate. Or participation in Congress? 91 women serve in the 110th Congress: 75 in the House (55 Democrats and 20 Republicans) and 16 in the Senate (11 Democrats and 5 Republicans). Actually the 110th started out with 94 women but 3 died, frail creatures that we are. And that is a new record! 94 out of 535, or 17.5%.

Okay, all these statistics are depressing and boring. How about something easier? I’ve got it! As long as I open the newspaper and the big sale at, say, Macy’s, is selling shoes that all look like this

then I know we are not doing well.

That imposing black number bottom left, the lady paratrooper model, has a heel four and one-half inches high. A third of a foot. Gives the girl soldier that added height that commands respect, and she can also rip the enemy’s throat out with a heel swing, or maybe just step on his toe and butt-stroke him with her rifle stock. She’ll be a career soldier, too, because after wearing shoes with 4.5 inch heels for 4 years, she will no longer be able to wear anything else.

The little silver pump bottom right may not add so much height to its wearer, only three inches or so, but everyone should give her a lot of respect for the suffering she smilingly endures, jamming a roughly square-ended human foot into a leather funnel as pointy-ended as an icing-squirter, for eight to ten hours a day.

And every single one of these designs sings out the same paeans to femininity with which Western poets have garlanded us for centuries: our grace and beauty, our delicacy, our nurturing tenderness, our oh so many gentle virtues…

The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men – from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Woman-Soul leadeth us
Upward and on!
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Lead on, women, but ditch the fetishistic footwear, eh?

[All ugly shoes shown are trademarked by their manufacturers who are completely responsible for such triumphs of function and design. As a trade-off for not having permission to use the photos, I won't embarrass the companies by identifying the brands depicted. Seems fair to me.]

I saw it in print, it must be right!

Exercise your ear for language. Of these quotations, which was not written or uttered by Thomas Jefferson? [some irregular spellings are contained, they aren’t typos but represent the flexibility of orthography in earlier centuries.]

“An honest heart being the first blessing, a knowing head is the second.” 1

“But though an old man, I am but a young gardener.” 2

“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” 3

“A mind always employed is always happy…The idle are the only wretched. In a world which furnishes so many emploiments which are useful, and so many which are amusing, it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is, or if we are ever drive to the miserable resource of gaming, which corrupts our disposition, and teaches us a habit of hostility against all mankind.” 4

Probably you had no difficulty in identifying #3 as the one that doesn’t fit. It seems to stick out like a wrong note in music: inappropriate to the man and his time, both in sentiment and expression. For me, being old enough to recall the human potential movement, it clearly has a connexion to that school of folly. Spontaneity, individualism, do whatever feels right to you (regardless of consequences to others, or even yourself), were exalted above all else. Impulse over reason. All self-expression is good. Learning, self-restraint, and practice are by implication unnecessary, and a cruel blow to one’s inner child.

“…you just get stoned, get the ideas in your head and then do ’em. And don’t bullshit. I mean that’s the thing about doin’ that guerrilla theatre. You be prepared to die to prove your point.”
Abbie Hoffman 5

“I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.”
Frederick E. Perl 6

But all over the net, I found that laissez–faire quotation #3,

“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.”

attributed to our third president, author of the Declaration of Independence, a man of such parts that John F. Kennedy famously remarked, upon the occasion of a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize Winners, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Thomas Jefferson was a gentleman of 32 who could calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet.” [Please indulge me while I point out the obvious, that Thomas Jefferson did not acquire any of these abilities by simply expressing himself and “doing his thing.”]

The mis-attributed quotation came to me a few weeks ago from some newsletter list I got on, and it seemed so anachronistic to me that I started looking for who really said it. Well, according to most websources, it was Thomas Jefferson. Google it and see. I did find another person credited with it, but the Jefferson attributions were far more numerous. But truth isn’t established by majority vote, so I kept looking.

Finally I discovered The Jefferson Encyclopedia which has a page of “Spurious Quotations” but I did not find “Don’t ask. Act!” there, so I wrote to them. This, now, is a reliable source, part of the foundation which protects and restores Jefferson’s estate at Monticello and sponsors educational and research programs. The encyclopedia site is described as “Trustworthy information on Thomas Jefferson and his world by Monticello researchers and respected Jefferson scholars.” I got a prompt reply; the experts there have had more than one inquiry on the subject, and mine must have been the last straw, as they decided to add a page concerning the “Do you want to know who you are?” quotation to their informational wiki-encyclopedia.

The true author of those words? Witold Gombrowicz, of course! He was (1904-1969 ) a Polish novelist and dramatist. As Anna Berkes, the Monticello researcher who kindly answered my email query, put it:

“Also, most people would much rather put “Thomas Jefferson” on their signature line or plaque or bumpersticker than, say,
Witold Gombrowicz; so it’s often an uphill battle to try to
dis-associate Jefferson from quotations like these.”

This painting is a copy of the second life portrait of Jefferson (1805) by Rembrandt Peale. Source.

The web is the best example to date of how something can get written once, and then copied by dozens of others who rely on the authority of the first.

The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay on the phenomenon, about how someone’s questionable comparison of the size of the earliest horses (Eohippus, when I was in school) to the size of a fox-terrier, was repeated by textbook publishers from 1904 to 1988 when Gould’s “The case for the creeping fox terrier clone” appeared in Natural History Magazine. (You can also find it in Bully for Brontosaurus, a collection of Gould’s essays, and in Google’s online digitization of same.) Gould’s point was the failure of textbook writers (compilers?) to consult original sources and use fresh material, instead of doing what, in a student, would be condemned as plagiarism. The only fox-terrier familiar to very many people is Asta in the Thin Man movies, but probably few people born after 1950 would know about William Powell’s debonair canine sidekick. Thus, as an aid to understanding, the metaphor has outlived its effectiveness.

And copying blindly leads also—as in the case of the Jefferson mis-attribution—to just plain wrong information. The Eohippus/fox-terrier comparison may be such a case. The AKC standard for the Wire(haired) Fox Terrier prescribes a height of 15.5 inches at the withers—roughly the shoulder—for the male. Wikipedia states that Hyracotherium (formerly Eohippus) “averaged 8 to 9 inches (20 cm) high at the shoulder.”

And why did I write this post? I admire Jefferson, and I wanted to help set the record straight. So, Google, find this: Thomas Jefferson did not say or write “Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” It was Witold Gombrowicz.