America's New Pastime?

Is it my imagination, or didn’t we just conquer a middle-eastern country that has a shitload of oil not too long ago?
You would think that would make a difference at the gas pump. I mean, don’t we pretty much have our own personal oil reserves in the form of Iraq? Isn’t that why we decided to bomb it into submission in the first place?
Oh wait, never mind. We didn’t go there for oil, we went there for weapons of mass – I mean, to liberate its people (Nobody ever said anything about weapons of mass destruction, which is why we didn’t find any...but if we do find them, man are we ever going to rub it in France’s face...even though we didn't go there to find weapons of mass destruction. Who told you we were looking for weapons of mass destruction?).
And that’s what we did. We liberated it. We didn’t conquer it. Because if we conquered Iraq in an effort to get out hands on its oil that would be like when Iraq invaded Kuwait for its oil, which was wrong, so…you know, maybe I should just get to my point, which is to say that gas is too goddamned expensive.
Despite the fact that it’s small and gutless, my car really doesn’t get the greatest gas mileage. The only reason I don’t have to spend more on gas than I do is that I so seldom go anywhere. However, because I can now look at the gas gauge and see how much I have, on my way home from JavaScript class I realized that I needed to fill up for the weekend, and I found that it cost way more than it really ought to cost.
Speaking of driving home from class, when I was doing so the road ended up turning into some sort of impromptu collision-avoidance obstacle course.
Honestly, if the other drivers on the road had been in radio contact with each other and were coordinating their efforts to slow me to a crawl it could not possibly have looked any different from what I saw as I was driving. I can’t imagine how people can work so well in concert with each other without actually intending to. Most organizations that are designed to work together lack that kind of teamwork.
There were even people who waited at intersections until I was close enough to almost hit them before deciding to turn onto the road. I don’t know if they were sitting there oblivious to the fact that they had time to make their turns or if they just thought they needed some kind of adrenaline rush and so they let their chances pass by and waited until making the turn had a greater chance of resulting in a fatal collision.
Nothing like a near-miss to get the heart pumping, I guess.
Still, it reallyfelt more like some kind of sick game that everyone was playing with me. I could almost hear an announcer in my head:
“Hello fans, it’ a huimid August day as we turn our attention to the road, where we find Jon moving into the right lane to pass a slow-moving dump truck. He makes it past, but is prevented from getting back into the left lane by a van that just made an illegal U-Turn into the lane. Jon grits his teeth and punches it, hoping to get past the van, but dead ahead a cement truck is slowly lumbering on from a side road. Will he brake or – no! He’s punching it even more to squeeze in ahead of the van, narrowly avoiding a rear-end collision with an SUV that, seeing him coming, has slammed on its brakes for no apparent reason. Jon fakes right, but a pick-up hauling a horse trailer joins the game and cuts him off. Jon may be…yes! He is officially boxed in. It’s over! It’s all over! With nowhere to go, Jon hangs his head in defeat and accepts the fact that he is going to have to drive 15 miles below the speed limit the rest of the way home. What an exciting day for the Conspiracy to Piss Off Jon this has been. For the CPOJ, I’m Bob Uecker saying have a great afternoon, and remember, if you see Jon on the road…cut him off! This has been a presentation of the Conspiracy to Piss Off Jon. Any broadcast, rebroadcast, or use of any accounts, pictures, or descriptions of COPJ broadcasts without the express written consent of the COPJ is strictly prohibited.”
*Sigh*
Earlier today I checked my e-mail and found that I’d received a notification of someone posting a comment to Threshold. I looked through it, as it was an Anonymous post, to see if it was something interesting (as opposed to something “Zalfiro” would post), and discovered that it was actually a piece of spam!
At first, I didn’t know how to feel. After all, there was the possibility that this piece of sleazy marketing was a sign that I’ve arrived, that Threshold gets enough traffic that it might be worth posting ads in the comments section.
Then I realized that there’s probably just some bot that goes around looking for blogs that allow anonymous posting via the “Next Blog” function of Blogger, and then posts its crap, so I got annoyed.
I went in and deleted the comment, which was trying to get people to buy into some new product in the forest industry.
If this starts happening more frequently, I may disable anonymous posting, though I’m not sure that would be enough. After all, it’d be easy enough to create a Blogger login and have a bot do the same thing after logging in and still remain relatively anonymous.
So I guess we’ll see what happens.
In any case, my weekend, which has been busier than most, is drawing to a close. I hope that that those of you whose weekends are just about to begin get more time to relax than I did.