I’m Feeling: Random
I’m Listening To: 10,000 Maniacs – In My Tribe
Daylight Savings – I love Daylight Savings. I like coming home from work to a house still well-lit by the sun, and the other night I had to run back out to the store, and the sun was just setting. It was beautiful. So Daylight Savings is like a little slice of heaven for me.
Having said all that: I have been responsible for my own clocks for about 10 years now, and this past weekend was the first time I’ve ever missed a clock change. We got up Sunday morning, got ready to go to church (we even made it out the door early!), and when we walked in to church, the first service was still going. This was way longer than usual, and we just chalked it up to a heavy sermon, and that maybe there was some other special event that changed the schedule or something. Then we realized that we had not walked in at 10:30 for the 10:45 service, but rather had walked in at 11:30, ready to worship, all dressed up with no place to go. Harumph.
NASCAR – I’ve never really understood
NASCAR. I mean, I understand the idea of racing; I just don’t understand the appeal of watching it on TV. No idea why this is a televisable sport. We were at Hannah’s parents’ house for a little bit last Sunday, and her dad was watching whatever race was going on. Now, there are some technological things going on in the telecast that I appreciate for their geek-factor, like the transponders that allow them to superimpose a car’s number, driver, and position information in a little box over the rear window of the car. But otherwise, snoozers. It makes me want to get one of
these shirts. Admittedly, there may be an apparent double standard here, as I claim that NASCAR is boring, when I’ve
already sung the praises of Curling.
The Critic – I am borrowing the DVD complete series of
The Critic. I haven’t seen this show in a long time, and after watching a couple of episodes, I realize two things: first, this was a pretty funny show; second, I’m not at all surprised that it folded after a season-and-a-half. Nevertheless, I’m enjoying it and look forward to watching the rest.
Weather – Last Sunday we had a pretty bad storm. We were still at Hannah’s folks’ when it happened. We had to go in the basement and everything. It was bad enough that when we tried to go to a movie that evening, we got to the theater and had to leave, because the theater didn’t have any power. In fact, the next morning there were still 75,000 people in St. Louis without power. Fortunately (and uncharacteristically), we were not among them.
Traffic Lights – Following the storm, I was frustrated Monday morning. Like I said, there were power failures all over St. Louis. This included a traffic light near our house. Monday morning, the power had been restored to it, but traffic was still about the worst I’ve seen it in the year we’ve been in our house. In fact, traffic was bad all the way until I got on the highway. I think I’ve figured it out: dark traffic lights are like little epicenters of bad traffic. They create a multiblock radius of pain. If you happen to drive anywhere within that area, you suffer the wrath of bad traffic. I’ve illustrated this in the following diagram:

The tangent-ish line is my (or your) car moving through the radius of pain. You can’t see, and may in fact be nowhere near, the traffic light that went out, but you deal with the ripple effect anyway. It takes like a whole day for everything to right itself. No sir, I don’t like it.
Note: Modified this post 11 April, changing the word “tagent” to “tangent-ish” in the previous paragraph on Mark Kamil’s observation that the line – or
ray, actually – is not a tangent, as it does not touch the circle at only one point. My apologies to you, the reader, to Mark, to my freshman year geometry teacher, and the mathematics community at large.
Second Modification: Per Mark, the type of line of which I was thinking is a
secant.