Nobrainer’s Think Tank

At some point I passed a car with the bumper sticker “US out of Iraq, into New Orleans.” And first thing that popped into my head was, “they must really hate New Orleans!”

After a 1000+ miles of driving, I found myself amused and frustrated. As usual.

- At one point on the way to Clemson, we passed a little, beat-up red car that said “SWEETRIDE” and myspace.com/sweetride. It is amusing by itself. It is worthy of mention because as soon as I saw it realized that we passed the exact same car in February when we drove from C-ville to Athens, GA.

- Just north of Charlottesville, I was stuck behind a vehicle with the license plate H20 PIPE. Maybe the guy/girl/thing was a major hippie pot head douchebag, or he/she/it is actually somehow involved in irrigation or some such thing and is completely oblivious to the drug references on the license plate. Speaking of oblivious, here’s a hint for the driver when actually driving. In simple terms: get the fuck out of the way. More importantly: GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY! More specifically, planning to turn left in 10 miles is not a justification to cruise along in the left lane at the exact same speed as traffic in the right lane. If you are in the left lane and there is no one ahead of you and you aren’t actually passing the cars on your right, you are doing something wrong and need to get over (and failing to realize so might mean that you are too dumb to live).

- Speaking of people who won’t get out of the way, I am thoroughly frustrated by slowpokes in sports cars. Today I realized that I am even more frustrated by slowpokes in sports cars that have racing stripes.

- Just before I got home, I heard Katie Couric on some radio show (Kolb?). She was, with all seriousness, defending the umm seriousness of the Today Show. There’s a very good reason why the writers of South Park decided that mass of human feces should be measured in a unit called the Couric (pronounced kyoor-ick).

- On a nice note, many thanks to Evan and Bear of OrangeCoat for their hospitality on Saturday. The tailgating was excellent.

- Somewhere north of Greenville, SC, I nearly shat my pants. I am pretty good about checking my mirrors and knowing when cars are approaching from behind me. Friday night, I was doing about 70 in the right-hand lane. By the time I sensed headlights beside me, the black police car in the left lane was already past me. He had to have been doing 100 miles per hour without his blue lights on.

Eating carrots makes me hungry.

So what’s going on in and around my world? Let’s explore:

• UVA football is surprisingly, um, uh — “good” is not the word for it — uh, successful. They’re 6-1, leading the Coastal Division and, I apparently predicted as much. Who will win the Coastal?
  

  I have to be contrary out of principle. Since I can’t really think of a team better than Virginia Tech, I’ll say Virginia. Why UVA? Because, much like a ninja attack, no one sees them coming.

• I’ll be in Clemson this weekend for Homecoming. If you will be there and need someone to come eat your food and drink your beer, please contact my secretary and schedule a time for me to visit.
• As we all know Algore won the Nobel Peace Prize. Why? Beats the fuck out of me. And it beats the fuck out of everyone else with even the slightest modicum of intelligence. The people in charge are giving away millions of dollars but they can’t buy a clue. Apparently they decided that maybe, perhaps, somehow, someway climate change could possibly lead to non-peace. So by fighting against climate change Algore is fighting for peace. If it sounds like a load, it is. It’s pure, steamy, methane-emitting, global-warming-causing, Grade-A bullshit

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• Work is good. I’m not sure why so many of you miss college so much. My work now is much more interesting than anything I did in college, and the salary is many times higher. Although I do occasionally wish I had more opportunities to play beer pong.
• Let me speculate out-loud about oil. For a long time I’ve been bearish on oil prices. Now I’m changing my mind. In ‘06 summer oil prices were much higher than they were in the winter. I fully expected the same thing to happen in ‘07. Such has not been the case. I hypothesize that many people were thinking the same thing I was while, at the the same time, spare capacity shrank even further. That means that stockpiles aren’t as built up this year and that the trough between peaks will be much shallower. In other words, don’t look for oil to go below $70/barrel any time soon. And before you start wishing for oil to go way down, I can imagine only 2 scenarios which would cause such a situation, and one of them isn’t good. It is possible that OPEC will get greedy and produce over quota thereby lowering prices. It is also possible that we will see a major, global economic slowdown. But we shall see what really happens.

If you own a car, it is not acceptable to add something to your car’s exterior which identifies the kind of car your car is.

I will grant some exceptions:
- If the add-on is graphically attractive or appealing; I’ll let this stand as artwork.
- If the add-on was intended to and succeeds in making me laugh.
- If the add-on is a logo without words, this may pass under the first provision above provided it is a good distance away from the car’s real logo or badge.

That means it is not acceptable to have a license plate frame that says Porsche on your Porsche just below where the bumper says, in huge letters, Porsche. Of course I also recommend that when your Porsche is more than 20 years old and looks like crap that you not take too much pride in it.

It is also not acceptable to drive a Boxster with a license plate that is some plain variant of BOXSTER. If you drive that car, I also recommend you not drive like a fucking idiot. I’m not sure if you just like to cut through parking lots on your way to work, or if you think you’re saving time by cutting through parking lots near my office (hint: you definitely aren’t saving time). But I will say that if you insist upon driving like an idiot and pulling out in front of me, I won’t be too upset if I hit and destroy your precious little car with its unoriginal little license plate.

I’m watching that new show with Cavemen. It’s been on and I’ve almost laughed.

Well, I thought about laughing.

Really I thought about the absence of laughter and how much I miss laughing.

UPDATE: Ok, I just laughed. It was for a commercial for the next show.

UPDATE 2: The main character, of this episode at least, is horrible. One of the other characters has the potential to be funny.