One of the minor entertainments of the past few days, as a major blast of ice, snow, and freezing temperatures made its way across the whole country, was to watch the endless preoccupation of the news media with weather reporting.
A subset of that was the occurrence of several multi-car pileups on major highways around the country. One in particular attracted my attention: A film clip (by the way, who are these people who are always standing around these days with a phonecam, photographing completely uneventful scenes until something suddenly happens?) ...
Er, as I was saying, a film clip of a pile-up occurring in Wisconsin. A few cars involved at first, with more and more careening into those first ones. It's tragic, because I believe people died in that pileup, but ...
People seem not to behave very sensibly. In this particular clip, one person was seen out of his vehicle, wandering around on the highway amongst the bumper cars sliding around. Maybe he was dazed from an impact. More to the point, it was evident that those who later joined the fray were all traveling at a very high rate of speed - far too fast for prudent driving on a sheet of ice. Did they know they were on a sheet of ice? They may not have known for sure, but they ought to have been expecting it. This was the epitome of reckless driving (not "aggressive," ladies - and sadly, not "wreckless" either) .
In our Washington DC area, people originally from places like Wisconsin like to pooh-pooh the idea that two inches of snow here can shut down traffic. There are many reasons why that is so, but the northerners like to brag that they "know how to drive in winter." The Wisconsin film certainly puts paid to that fiction. Unless of course all those recklessly speeding drivers just happened to be people originally from Alabama?
Postscript for regular readers: If you thought you missed posts recently, you probably didn't. There haven't been any since Thanksgiving. Looks like the transition to chilly weather kept the cold-blooded Lizard deep in his burrow for a while. But T.L. seems to have acquired a glassed-in heated terrarium or something, and has promised more frequent dispatches in future.
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