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flipped off in Oakville

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

St. Catharines, 2020.02.15

We're in St. Catharines visiting with Grandma. On the way down on the QEW I made a special friend who was tailgating because he wanted to go faster. As we slowly overtook the car in the next-right lane he "punish passed" us, passing too close on the rear-right and then again on the front-right. As he sailed by he flipped me off for quite a while. He then promptly took the next exit. Ken wanted to know all about what was happening there. I didn't have a lot of answers but cruise control is cruise control. I couldn't remember having a rude gesture like that since a time when Opa and I were heading home from work and some tool decided to pass everyone lined up in an off-ramp; at that time both Opa and I returned the gesture. 😆

Overall, it was a much less stressful trip than the white-knuckle experience last time, in a snowstorm. But I sure as hell won't miss this culture for however long I'm in Japan.

Anyway, it was nice to get away from the city and enjoy some wine and shepherd's pie and company.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)