I’ve been riding Bike 2.0 around a lot – partly to break it in, and partly because of an ear infection that’s keeping me out of the pool until after Thanksgiving.

Since I ride on the Pacific Coast Highway and through Westwood Village quite a bit, I see a lot of really stupid driver behavior when it comes to dealing with bicyclists.

Mostly it’s obvious stuff like failing to check a frakkin’ bike lane for oncoming bikes before opening car doors into them, or weaving all over the place when there are a) bikers everywhere and b) tons of “SHARE THE ROAD” signs indicating that even if you don’t see them now, there are lots of bikers who use this road.

Once in a while, something will stand out as particularly stupid. Monday, I thought it was going to be the woman who looked me straight in the eye as she opened her car door right into my path. But no, I found a much, much greater stupidity.

I was coming up PCH right around here, headed back towards the Santa Monica pier to go home. There was a homeless guy pushing about four shopping carts up the shoulder. He was walking against traffic, which basically meant right at me.

The shoulder at this point is not wide enough to accommodate parked cars, me on my bike, and a homeless guy pushing four shopping carts, so I looked over my shoulder to see oncoming traffic in the lane I would have to briefly pull into. There was one car, but after that, my lane was clear.

I made a hand signal as I approached the homeless guy, pulled very slightly into the lane, and then WHOOSH. A mid ’90s beater of a Ford Taurus that had apparently been in the other lane comes flying by me, missing me by about a foot.

That’s pretty damn stupid on its own, but here’s the really stupid part: This car’s passenger door swings WIDE open. If it had come open about a second earlier, it would easily have knocked me off my bike and probably injured me fairly seriously.

The door just swung there in the breeze for about ten seconds, an empty garbage bag fluttering in the breeze from the passenger seat, and then a hand from the passenger seat nonchalantly reached over and pulled it shut as the car zipped along at 50mph, like this shit happens all the time.

I really couldn’t think of anything to do but just shout at the car, “ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?!” at the top of my lungs, and then start laughing.

I mean really, if the door had hit me the chances that a) they would have even stopped or b) they would have had insurance if they had stopped were pretty  low. If you can’t even get your car fixed so your door doesn’t swing open when you change lanes, odds are you’re too broke to buy insurance.

And the only reason I was anywhere near that door was that some homeless dude decided it’d be a grand idea to push a bunch of shopping carts several miles up from the nearest store that actually HAS shopping carts.

The odds of those two bits of stupidity happening to converge at one specific point in time are minuscule, and I’m lucky that the even more minuscule chance that it would have wound up with my ass splattered all over the pavement (again) didn’t wind up happening.

But sometimes, you just have to laugh at how incredibly, dangerously, hilariously stupid people are.

Clearly, I’m ready to start school  next week with the goal of getting a Masters’ in Computer Science when I failed so hard at researching my new monitor/TV combo for the bedroom that I ordered one that can’t be controlled by a goddamn remote.

I took one guy’s statement in a review about being able to control the volume with the remote to mean it was the volume on the monitor, but after trying and failing to get my remote set up, I went back and realized he was controlling the volume through his Home Theater PC, not his actual monitor. The monitor doesn’t even have an IR receiver. Oops.

I’m super, super excited to pay the return shipping and restocking fees that dumbass move earned. I’m still debating if I want to order a different one online or break down and rejoin Costco for their far more generous return policy.

At least I had two better pieces of technology news today, which helped mitigate my expensive stupidity:

1) I got my iPhone replaced for free after the lock button finally died completely, 10 days before the warranty ran out. I won’t go into the details because it got a bit complicated, but hey, brand refurbished phone!

2) I got my new dual-network setup up and running with a minimum of issues, so now I have my regular network and my N-Only network ,which is SUPER fast and means I can transfer files about three times faster than I could before. Basically, I can transfer an SD episode of Futurama in its entirety in 2 minutes. Win!

A screencap from the Northwestern Online Store, who were apparently just as surprised as the rest of us by the upgrade to the Outback bowl:

To be fair, the email they sent out that I clicked on to get to that page had the properly photoshopped hat with the Outback logo on it….though all the shirts had the date a little off:

Dude, we totally got to the Outback bowl last year! Go tell Missouri they have to re-play last year’s Alamo bowl against Iowa now!

I recently bought a new shredder after thoroughly destroying my old one, and in doing some research I realized that part of the problem was that the shredder was never properly lubricated. Apparently, it helps to put oil on moving metal parts. Who knew?

Anyway, I wound up buying some shredder oil off Amazon because Staples (where I bought the shredder) wanted an arm and a leg for their house-brand shredder lubricant.

So because I bought shredder oil from them, Amazon sent me the following email on how to accessorize my purchase (click to enlarge):

Yes, that’s right, they encouraged me to accessorize a $10 bottle of shredder oil with a two thousand dollar shredder.

I’d hate to see how they’d encourage me to accessorize a quart of motor oil (“We think you’d like a new Mercedes-Benz!”) or a new remote control (“Wouldn’t you rather just buy a new TV?”).

Dear Guy Getting Out Of The Sauna While I Was Getting Out Of The Pool,

1. Your reverse mohawk with sideburns that go most of the way down your neck does not look cool, nor does it hide the fact that you’re balding. It makes you look like you fell out of 1997, and not even a cool part of 1997. The only guy who could even sort of pull off the reverse mohawk was the dude from The Prodigy, and even he looked pretty damn dumb.

2. When wearing flood pants, one might consider at least wearing the same color of loud-colored sock. And if you wore different colors on purpose because you thought it looked cool, then you’re even more delusional than your hairstyling choices would make you appear.

Love,
Me.

The illustrious Casey Newton brings us a story from the wilds of Phoenix, where the Mayor of that city decided it would be a great idea to climb a tree to clear debris from a big storm. The tree disagreed, and the Mayor took a 13-foot header, resulting in a fractured vertebrae.

My favorite section:

“It’s a dangerous job even for people who are trained and know what they’re doing,” Jason Nunemacher, an arborist and general manager of Tree Pros in north-central Phoenix. “I would definitely recommend leaving it to professionals.”

Told of the arborist’s recommendations, Gordon said, “Tell him I agree with him,” according to a spokesman.

A close second is the section dealing with his previous battle with a bougainvillea that left the Mayor with a staph infection.

Too bad he’s not a Republican: He’d immediately be qualified as a at least a Cabinet-level official for his work on both Health Care and the Interior.

To balance out my bragging in the post below, I thought I’d share a story about how unbelievably stupid I (as well as several other people I shall not name to protect their pride) felt after bar trivia on Thursday.

The last question was fairly straightforward: There are twelve state capitals that start with the letters d, m, j, and p. Name them all.

We got eleven: Denver, Dover, Des Moines, Madison, Montgomery, Montpelier, Juneau, Jackson, Jefferson City, Pierre, and Providence. We could not, for the life of us figure out the twelfth.

We started verbally going through the capitals in a sort of map of the US: “Washington’s Olympia, so no. Oregon’s Salem, so no. California’s Sacramento, so no.”

Then we hit it: “Arizona’s Phoenix, so no.” We all nodded. Eight of us, over one million dollars worth of education between us. Not one of us listened to that statement and thought, “Wait, Phoenix is not spelled with an F.”

We tried for five more minutes until answer sheets were demanded and then turned it in with the twelfth spot blank. I haven’t felt as dumb as I did when the quizmaster identified Phoenix as our missing answer in a looooooong time.

The hell of it is, we somehow still managed to win the grand prize. We’d been doing well in an extremely tough set of rounds, so getting the eleven answers was enough.

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to describe a bar trivia victory as Pyhrric, but we were so mad at ourselves, I think this qualified.

The fact that we failed in such a doofy fashion STILL bothers me four days later.

You ever have one of those moments where something stupid occurs, and you get disproportionately angry about how stupid it is? You realize you’re overreacting a bit, but it’s just SO flamingly stupid, you get a bit worked up about it?

I went to a free screening of American Gangster with a friend in the camera union, and they had security making everyone empty their pockets.

Now since this was at the Academy, I sort of understand them wanting to make sure there are no recording devices coming in. A little over the top, but I can see where they’re coming from on that.

What made NO fucking sense was their demand that I take my pocketknife and multi-tool (which, yes, I always carry on me because they have come in awfully handy on many occasions) back to my car.

If I had paid twelve bucks to walk into any theater in the country, there wouldn’t have been an issue. What was even sillier was they made a guy with a swiss army knife smaller than my pinky on his keyring take THAT back to his car.

I sarcastically told the security guard when I returned, “Gee, I didn’t realize we were getting on a plane, otherwise I would have left that in the car.” He did not see the humor in that statement.

I’m still really pissed off about that, mostly because there was zero notice posted about the policy that would have given me time during the 45 minutes my friend and I were waiting in line for them to open the doors to put the stuff in my car.

But I mean, really. What the fuck was I going to do with a knife and a multi-tool in front of a theater full of people that they were so very concerned about? Scream, “This movie sucks!” and then stab the person sitting next to me?

I don’t know, what do you guys think? How pissed off would you have been? I mean, assuming you were the type of person who constantly carries implements of stabbiness with you.

You are not the same neighbor over-alarming his 1989 Nissan. You live in the building across the alley from mine, and you park in a spot under your building that’s not walled in, directly across the alley from my window.

You have a new car, but you have purchased a very similar but infinitely louder alarm to the one has already caused me much consternation. You have not figured out how to use your new alarm. The goddamn thing goes off every five minutes.

The sound echoes through the alley, and becomes unbelievably loud in this apartment, to the point of actually being painful when I’m in the bedroom.

I am tired, I am cranky and hormonal, and I am in pain. I need sleep more than anything right now, and you, my dear neighbor, are preventing me from getting it.

If you do not learn to use your alarm properly, I may have to come across the alley and duct tape you to the hood of your car so that you can hear exactly how annoying it is.

That is all.

The next time someone asks me what it’s like to live in Los Angeles with all the celebrities you can see, I am going to direct them to this page.

The writer has perfectly captured the grand “I don’t give a fuck about these morons anymore” feeling you get after about a year here.

via Defamer