Peeves: Security Checks in the LRT and Malls
First, I welcome me back to active blogging. Or something like that. Hope this continues.
Second, I welcome me back to my first WordPress blog. About time I got back to this place, and since this is basically a rant, I think it appropriate that I do it here.
I’ve actually wanted to blog about this for a LONG time now.
See, security has been a major issue since at least 9-11. It doesn’t help that you have shows over NatGeo that displays the latest techniques and gadgets terrorists use to slip one past all that security so something can go boom again.
As someone long involved in security matters – it was my task for more than five years, after all, to protect the leaders of more than a dozen student councils – I can appreciate the little inconveniences that come with such measures as waiting in line as people sift through your stuff, or having to go naked because something in you triggered the detectors.
I actually had to go through that last one (although not to the point of being completely naked) when I got home from the IAF in 2003 because my shoes (as we would eventually find out) triggered the metal detectors in Hong Kong’s airport. But it was a fun, if confusing, time for all of us there, and being sure that I wasn’t a terrorist gave me the confidence and patience to go through everything the security personnel did.
Besides, I knew those guys were professionals. They treated me well despite having triggered the alarms, and were not invasive even as they bodysearched me head-to-toe. It was even they who realized that it must be the steel-toed shoes that triggered everything. They were courteous and efficient and I was cooperative and thanked them profusely as well all laughed at the “false positive.”
The same, though, cannot be said of my experiences everyday with L/MRT Security.
Like I said, I have dealt with Security before, the professional kind that oversees everything from national to local-event handling. I respect the guys who do the security checks for Level Up! Live every year because they act professionally, courteously (if firmly) and know what they’re doing. They show you that they know what they’re doing and what they’re going to do to you if you’re a snot-nosed brat about NOT going through the security procedures. I give those guys the same level of respect I give the Presidential Security Group in all the activities I’ve had the honor to be on the same area with those fine men and women. I even took it in stride when one of the PSG gave me a drubbing after breaching their security lines (unintentionally). Haha, I forgot my protocol and their protocol, and I forgot how efficient my systems can be, hahahaha.
Which is why I HATE it when I have to go through the sorry excuse for security checks they do in our L/MRTs, or even the Malls.
First is the baggage check. These so-called security guards would just prod and pull stuff in your opened bag with their stick. I was tempted to ask one time whether they knew how a REAL bomb looked like. Hell, they don’t even insist that you open the OTHER zippers in your bag. Which they should. But then, really, like I said: do they know what a REAL bomb looks like?
Second is the body check. When the PSG body checks you, they do if effectively, efficiently and quickly. And most of all, it is non-invasive. Aside from making it clear to you that you do not carry weapons lethal to the President, you do not feel as if someone felt you up.
Contrast this with the way L/MRT guards bodycheck you. Not only is it ineffective and inefficient – most of the time, they only check your belt area – but they do it in such a way that can, if you pay attention to it, violate your person.
I always say that, in a democracy, you can only inconvenience people if the inconvenience serves a purpose. A good purpose. And since, post-Obama, no democracy worth the appellation should surrender the fundamental rights of a citizen in defense of those rights, then you’d better have a damned good reason why you’re inconveniencing your citizenry.
Why writers should be careful of their headlines
While doing my usual rounds of monitoring, mine eyes happened upon the headline in Inquirer.net for a story on the situation in Nigeria. It caught my attention because of the way it was constructed:
“Filipino seaman dies in Nigeria attack; 18 others due Friday.”
Ok. If you read it hard enough, you’ll come to understand what the title is saying. Indeed, the lead paragraph focuses more on the topic after the semi-colon than the first, more attention-grabbing one.
Still, one of the principles drilled into your mind during journ and writing class is the need to compress essential ideas in both the headline and the lead paragraph. This is because of the well-known adage that not everyone has a CEO’s luxury of poring through the morning paper for the whole of the morning. Your average man-off-the-street probably has enough time to read only a few articles in full. Most will simply skim the collection of writeups by looking at the headline and the lead paragraph. Most times, they will only read an article in its entirety if that writeup is (a) interesting and, (b) interests them.
Given that context, it behooves people in the profession of journalism to not only make headers that jive with their leads (at least), but make sense given the article it precedes. In fact, from what I understand and underwent in all my journ and writing classes in college, the proficiency in making a good and appropriate header is part and parcel of good journalism.
Heh. If I was the journ prof of the person who wrote that article on Nigeria – hell, if I was his editor – I’d fail the article then and there. Because the whole header sends the wrong message to the receiver. Oh, sure, I understand what was meant, but… just look at it:
“Filipino seaman dies in Nigeria attack; 18 others due Friday.”
Read in a cursory manner and not with the attention to detail for writeups that Communication majors and editors have, that header screams to me that a Filipino seaman has died in an attack in Nigeria (no misinterpretation there) and – this is where the misinterpretation can occur – 18 others are going to die on Friday.
Because whoever wrote that header used a semi-colon (which suggests a close connection between the concepts separated by the semi-colon). And you’re trained in all those years of reading classes in Primary and Secondary to instinctively make a more-or-less direct connection between the concept(s) before the semi-colon and the one(s) after.
You cannot expect a casual reader to make that leap of logic for the proper interpretation of what the writer originally intended. Most people who will see that header will most likely make the same misinterpretation I pointed out.
Hm. But then, that’d make you read the article, yes? What attracts more attention than news about people potentially going to get killed?
I guess, if I was his editor, and I wasn’t that concerned about the Code of Journalism Ethics, the writer didn’t exactly fail, after all.
Proof that the Philippine educ system JUST SUCKS BIG TIME
You’re probably wondering why a post titled that way is in Phoenix Musings and not in Phoenix Eyrie, Reloaded. Is Rob’ just making a post here so Phoenix Musings can be updated?! Crassness!
Ha, ha. No, no. It’s just that, well… I don’t think I’ll be treating the subject matter in a “Mentat” fashion, since this is basically a… rant. Oh yes, bloody frigging HELL this is a rant!
Actually, this is a long overdue rant. Anyone who has seen me in action as EIC outside of the elite circle of writers that used to contribute to Liberal Philippines would know this. Oh yes, if those unlucky enough to have had me as their Editor for KALIPI press releases and other writeups, even for seminars and workshops, are reading this, they know this all too well.
First, I shall give new readers who don’t know me, or enough about me, a bit of context: I am quite fluent in the English language, despite what some people without any credentials to comment on my capability whatsoever think. I am an English Merit Student of the Ateneo de Manila University. I graduated from grade school Best in English. I was one of the semi-finalists during the Public Speaking Contest of the 19th World Universities Debating Championships.
As such, I have quite the… discerning eye for the English language. Just as having choral training makes me wince at offkey singing (to put it lightly) so do I find it quite the… trial to read stuff whose English is plain… horrible.
Perhaps if the writer was a child, it would have been quite fine. In fact, I’ve seen writeups by kindergartens and grade schoolers and, by God’s Most Sacred Light, their English is damned fine, thank you. The kids aren’t just capable of making sentences (and proper spelling, too!) but able to properly express themselves! Amazing, isn’t it?
Which is why it just… astounds me when so-called college students submit to me such poorly made work. I’m so sorry, but let’s call a spade a godamned spade: it’s really horrible writing! I’ve had writeups where I left it spotless, not because it was an excellent piece of work but because it sucked to the point that even my ability to comprehend even the most haphazardly written piece fails to make heads or tails of the article submitted to me! There is just one note on such a piece: “iho/iha… please rewrite. I just cannot understand a thing.”
What infuriates me is the fact that these are kids who, supposedly, went through six years of basic education and a further four of secondary. At least. God help the farking moron who went through more – not because his/her school had more years in Basic or Secondary Educ, but due to repeats – and still can’t spell right or even make a coherent sentence in English! I mean, Good Lord and a Half! This isn’t the dark heart of Africa; this is the Republic of the farking Philippines! The only overseas possession of the Americans! We bandy our supposed advantage in being able to coherently converse in English to the farking world, remember?!
Yet, look at young people in college. And I’m not talking about students from so-called “other” colleges and universities; imagine my horror when I asked where a particularly dismal article came from… No, I won’t name the university here. Good Lord, I could see it even among my fellows in the UCSC, and those were supposedly some of the most elite young leaders of the Republic, and from the supposedly-English-speaking private schools, too.
It’s just… so wrong.
Okay. Let’s say the situation is crappy enough with the way teachers in most schools seem to take learning for granted. I suppose you can’t blame the teachers: young people these days seem to think of school as drudgery, or a place to strut. Some of the students these days probably take heart with all these call centers, since the old job requirements appear to not really matter anymore, and you can take any stupid course in college and then get into a call center for a decent salary. Plato would die of horror at the way education has been trivialized in this country.
But despite such a poor foundation in the system, there’s quite a bit of literature out there to salvage quite a bit. Let’s set aside the riff-raff and focus instead on those students that show even a bit of interest in doing justice to their education in college. I see these kids pick up the newspapers. I see them surf the Net (whose lingua franca, after all, is English), and I sometimes see sites that have good English, like top-of-the-line sports and news sites, even ones that deal with fashion and soft porn. Given all this, the level of command of the language should at least be “passable”, by which I mean that I don’t have to sprain my brain cells to understand what the bloody hell a single sentence meant to tell me! And believe me, to sprain a Mentat’s brain cells is quite the achievement! And some of them supposedly write for a school paper!
I tell kids I train, there is no big secret to learning how to write well (for pete’s sake!). If you read regularly, and not just asinine stuff like those thin romance novels, you have half the “secret technique” down pat. Practice is the other half. The stuff you read is your manual, your guidelines for how things could be done, while practice – usually, we recommend having a diary – allows the wannabe writer to develop not just basic proficiencies and confidence in writing but their own style as well.
Yet, still…
Want to see samples? Here’s a whole slew of samples. Hope your brain can take it.
Do I sound harsh, callous and bloody arrogant? So farking what? Any person who enters college in the Philippines is assumed to have passed several tests for particular proficiencies, one of which, if I recall correctly, is English! ENGLISH! Yet kids in college, some of which are supposedly smarter than your average student, some of which even have the gall to write for a college paper, practically suck in even the most basic of sentence constructions!
And you know what’s insane? They keep expressing themselves in English! And it… it makes one’s nose BLEED! Has no one bothered to correct these people? Wait: has their horribly made sentences not bother these people? I mean, Good God and a Half, English has one rule for dummies: if it sounds right, then it most likely is right. Like with aeronautics, where a plane that looks good most probably flies good, too. Poor sentence construction, bad tenses… they all sound wrong. Yet people in this farking country keep doing it! And the Philippine Daily Inquirer, with its impeccable English, has millions of readers? Don’t these people get it?
*sigh* Now I feel bad.
But it’s the truth, yes? We pride ourselves with being able to speak at least conversational English. Heck, certainly my lola could, sometimes with an accent better than mine (and she’s fluent in both Spanish and Nihongo, too! Amazing, that generation). There was this really old crone in Batanes that engaged Dr. Ronald Meinardus in a long conversation in perfect English! We were all laughing and having fun with her, that amazing old Ivatan.
So what happened? Why do young Filipinos today suck so badly in a language they are supposedly conversant with? With all the Harry Potter hoopla, did they even understand half of what was written, I mean really understand it and not just read through it so they can be part of the “in” crowd?
Call me evil. Call me a grammar nazi. But my English is impeccable. How’s yours?
Reflections on the Virginia Tech killings
It’s not the first time it happened over there. We all know about Columbine, after all. But, despite seeing it happen before – and even more incredulous, given Columbine was virtually done by kids – it still manages to horrify you and make you face that question that seems to have no real answers when asked in a situation like this: why?
Right now, the killings at Virginia Tech have created two very unfortunate situations: a… “re-heating” of the Gun-ownership laws of the Americans, and a fear in the resurgence of anti-South Korean feeling in the States.
Partly, I would say Media is to blame. One reader/reactor in the International Herald Tribune site was right in saying that the presentation of the killer, particularly in headlines, was bordering on the irresponsible. “South Korean student kills 32.” Why the focus on the gunman’s ethnicity? As the reader pointed out, Cho Seung-Hui may be ethnically Korean, an immigrant no less, but he was virtually American. The young man, after all, received education in the United States, from Primary all the way to college. I saw a report that said Asian-American males suffer from psychological stresses more than any other ethnic group, but this is beside the point. Journalism class warns the writer that the headline and the lead are often the only ones read, as readers barely have the time to read the entirety of an article. Such racial attribution often leads to very, very unfortunate fallouts, like increased prejudice against the race in question.
It would have been more prudent to say, “college student kills co-eds in worst shooting in the US” or something like that. All the important and necessary facts are in that hypothetical header: the who, and the what (has been done). Cho was a college student, he killed his schoolmates via gunfire, and it was done in the US and is really, really, horrific. His ethnicity should not have been an important enough fact to merit being part of the header, unless this is the mid- to late-1930s and we’re in Nazi Germany. Stating his ethnicity so squarely in headlines, and emphasized further in news reports, will make the wrong people make all sorts of wrong conclusions that would lead to so many very unfortunate events.
And then there’s the issue of gun ownership in the United States, virtually a right codified in that country’s Constitution itself. Anti-ownership advocates say that the ease in which Cho gained access to the high-power firearms used in the killings again points to the danger in that supposed right. Meanwhile, pro-ownership people say its the person pulling the trigger that kills, not the gun itself.
That debate I will not join in because its a discussion that has rather deep roots and deserves a more thorough treatment somewhere else.
But I do believe that the ownership issue dilutes the main point of concern here: the killer himself, and how come someone like him went off like that and was not noticed sooner? Dwelling on the gun-ownership issue is like putting the blame on the tools and not the user. Tools are mindless. A chopstick is utensil used for eating, but in the hands of an expert, it becomes a deadly tool for killing.
I don’t understand the coverage done on Cho; the guy is obviously wonkers. Delusional, at the very least. The bastard compares himself to Jesus? Geez. He calls his classmates rich brats who live hedonistic lives? One Virginia Tech student said that this was surprising, since V-Tech studes generally view themselves as blue-collar family kids. Cho even called the Columbine killers martyrs.
He was a very disturbed person who seemed to revel in his isolation and constantly rebuffed attempts by the people around him to “re-connect” him to the flow of Humanity. Cho, if his words in his so-called “manifesto” are to be believed, chose the path he trod and stubbornly kept to it. His words are a total disconnect to the reality around him, concocted perhaps to give him justification for his acts.
We were taught in morality class that those who consider themselves “human” usually do heinous acts against their fellows after they have removed the aspect of humanity from their victims. “Dehumanization”, I think was the term. When my proteges used to ask me how can genocides happen and be conducted so easily, I ask them when was the last time they whacked a cockroach and did they feel remorse over it?
I grieve for the Virginia Tech community. Campuses, especially sprawling ones, are sanctuaries for the young minds that live in them. Those of us who have passed through the halls of our colleges and universities and called them home can imagine how it must feel to have that home violated in such a horrible way.
But I am also awed by the strength of their community, by the way the students, faculty and administration have worked hard to put meaning to tragedy and begin healing from the pain of loss. This, more than anything, showed how disconnected Cho was from his community, how much of a deviant he was.
Meanwhile, as I track the news reports, I am appalled by the way the media has covered this incident. It is almost as if there is a fascination over Cho, the way he made a multimedia presentation for his madness, neatly packed and postage-stamped.
He was a sick bastard, with all due respect to his parents. People who committed such a horrific act should only be examined as part of a profile to prevent future incidents, not set up as if he was some anti-hero.
Observations on Lent 2007
That was perhaps one of the longest “Lenten holidays” in recent memory. Because the Prez declared today, Monday, 9 April 2007, as a holiday due to Araw ng Kagitingan, everyone gets a day extra to the usual 4-5 day “Lenten Break.” So, instead of packing the bags for the long trip back to Manila from wherever Pinoys spent their Holy Week, most are probably still sleeping off last night’s last luau right now. Instead of Easter Sunday being the traditional traffic jam day, post Lent, its going to be today.
I have something against the way Holy Week has become just an excuse for a trip to “summer capitals.” We’ve already bastardized Christmas by equating it more with that obscene fat man in a red suit than with Christ’s coming into the world for our sins. And, oh, don’t get me started with Valentines; here in the Philippines, the day that motels truly make a killing is on Feb. 14. It’s also the day that roses cost a pretty penny, and fancy diners are per reservation only.
I’m not being pious here; I’m simply pointing out that our holidays are losing the essence of what they are.
It’s quite fine to give presents during the yuletide. But as parents enjoin their kids to hang up their stockings in order to perpetuate the lie about some mythical obese gift giver that comes in the still of the night of Dec. 24, the children should also be reminded why the world – Christians and not Christians alike – celebrate this day. It should be easy in the Philippines; there are still so many belens around.
It’s quite fine to express one’s love in the one day in the whole calendar where a person is allowed to profess his feelings without (much) negative repercussion. And if lovers want to, ah, physically express their feelings, too, I’m liberal enough to tell them that’s okay, too, and minors better heed the sign outside Victoria Court. But I hope amidst the ratcheting of prices of commodities connected to love, people remember the essence of the whole emotion, the point of the whole day. Its a celebration of love, goodness’ sake. There are far more better and meaningful ways to show your Beloved how much he/she means to you other than the cliche teddy bear and bouquet of roses, or the fancy dinner. And maybe Significant Others shouldn’t be so materialistic, too.
I don’t think there’s nothing actually wrong with leaving the office at 12 noon on Holy Wednesday, getting packed and leaving the Metro on the Maundy Thursday for Bora, Galera, Baguio or wherever else. But people should find… I don’t know. Lent has always been the… most demanding of holidays in the Christian calendar. Fasting. Ashes on the foreheads. Retreats. Confessions. The pabasa and countless processions and Ways of the Cross. Bisita Iglesia. The hours-long Easter Vigil and the uber early Salubong. Some people even have themselves flogged, and an elite few allow themselves to be crucified as part of a panata, or sacred vow to God.
Amidst the sun and the surf, or the cool mountain breezes, people should find the time to reflect. It’s why its so long, this “holiday.” It gives us the time to pause and ask a lot of things.
At the very least, people should find a nice Church somewhere where they’re vacationing and attend the Easter Vigil. Or drop by a church or two. Or sit on the sand at sundown and have a little talk with God.
At least, I’m happy to see lots of people still attending Lenten activities, even in this oh-so-cosmopolitan Metro. The parish church here in Pandacan was jam-packed during the Easter Vigil. And I bet a lot of churches were also full of people during the Bisita. When I last went on one two or three years ago, I was amazed and delighted to see a lot of young people taking part in a tradition that was done by their ancestors. It has its Gen-X twists, of course – the laughter, the treatment of it as one big gimmick – but the kids know enough to stay solemn when they enter a church and pay God the proper respects.
Well. I hope the Call Center people got a bit of time to appreciate Holy Week, too. COMELEC virtually halted political activity with its Holy Week campaign ban, but the Call Centers kept going and going and going…
Oh well. Happy Easter to the other side of the world. Hope next year’s Lent is more meaningful than this one.
There should be more weekend days
I mean… am I right, or am I right?
Anyone who’s ever woken up on a Monday knows this sentiment. There should really be one extra day to the bloody frakkin’ weekend.
You’d think 48 hours should be enough for anybody. Maybe during the Industrial Revolution, yes, or even at the tailend of the “innocent” ’80s. But this is the 21st century, where the boundaries of work, home and leisure time gets blurred with the Internet and digital communications. 8-5s are essentially meaningless in a world where your boss can call you anytime and anywhere. And since most yuppies have access to a computer – what with the proliferation of 24-hour computer shops – you don’t have the excuse of “sorry sir, but the office is closed (remember? kasi nga 8-5 lang office hours?)” when your taskmaster asks you to do a writeup or something.
And then, there’s the stress of the hypertime-speeds of the 21st century workspace. It gives new meaning to the term, Thank God It’s Friday, and the need for the Workman of the Bloody Future for unwinding time on the fifth day of the week has allowed the leisure business to flourish, for places like Greenbelt in Makati, Eastwood in Pasig and Metrowalk in Ortigas to be feasible and earn their owners big bucks.
So then: the modern shaikujin works very hard so he/she parties harder. Most yuppies probably wake at around past lunch every Saturday and Sunday, and since this is the Philippines – and unless you live alone and much away from the ‘rents – Sunday will be strongly recommended by your family to be reserved for them.
This inevitably leads to a life lived in a sort of daze. Everything happens in hypertime; there is so much to do – both the “what needs to be done” and”what you want to be done” – so you go through what you can in the time available. And since the human body, even young human bodies, require rest somehow, you can only move so far, so fast, so much before the inevitable crash happens and you flop down on your bed to wake up more than 8 hours later.
There should be one extra weekend day. Party till you drop on the night before the weekend, and on first day’s night. Go to Mass on the second (since that’s a Sunday), go out with the family. But you still have that extra 24 hours to do stuff that might really matter to you. Like go sit in some quiet cafe somewhere and read a book. Or go to an art gallery or museum. Or take a walk in the park with your special someone, be it the one on two legs or the variant with four.
An extra day. To do anything that isn’t compensation for the harried work week or the demands of blood relations and religion. To do something for one’s self and remember, even for a single day, your place and direction in the whole scheme of things. To remember yourself, actually.
When the world industrialized sometime during the 19th century, the reaction of the workmen of that time was three eights: 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours play. I can’t remember when the weekend thingy started, but the conditions of the time were sufficient for those demands. The same innovations that make the 21st century what it is has also created a situation where its workers are fast losing themselves. 8-8-8 doesn’t mean a thing to a world of cellular phones and telecommuting.
So join the Monday as a Weekend Movement, and stop the hate.
Why one shouldn’t watch Air Crash Investigations
So there I was, walking to the office and thinking – seriously thinking – whether to go to the Academy (the International Academy for Leadership of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation), at least for one last time. There’s this nifty seminar on new media at the end of the year – end of the year?! SNOOOOOWWWWW!!!!! – and, professionally and personally, I would REALLY love to go. Might be the last time I get to go to Europe in a loooonngggg while. Add to that a definite plus of possibly seeing Steph and I really feel like, yeah, why the heck not?
Of course, there were all these considerations: big event over at the “other” job at the end of the year (assuming, I’m still with the “other” job by then), it being the yuletide season, and my homesickness.
But, perhaps foremost among the things that keep me landbound is that fear of flying I so try my hardest to keep down.
Well, no. Its not exactly fear of flying. I mean, I do know the science – all of them, really – behind aeronautics. I know that you have a higher statistical possibility of being killed as you cross the street than dying of a plane crash. I know its the safest form of travel around (well, I still think boats are safer, since you can jump out of the side to water and sharks really aren’t that aggressive unless you’re bleeding).
It’s just that…
Anybody here watch National Geographic? They have this series called “Air Crash Investigation.” It makes you think. Because, at the end of most of the shows, the problems were about faulty or careless safety procedures. Human error. The people, be they ground crew and/or the flight crew, who, because they’re human, took a moment to be less disciplined about their work. Thus, hundreds of lives were lost.
It makes you scared. Because you also know that, even if statistics say otherwise, there’s also the fact that even the most statistically insignificant chance has a real possibility of happening overtime. It’s like with RF eh: there’s a 20% chance to crit? 20% only? But that means 1 of 5 strikes should go critical.
I’d rather have a terrorist on board. THAT I was trained to handle. Yes, even if the bastard has a grenade (Why be a martyr when you can make HIM the martyr? There’s no need to shield everyone with your body when you can use the terrorist’s to minimize the grenade blast. He said he’s ready to die, anyway).
And this morning, one of the very first news I see is about a mid-air collision in Europe. a plane and a helo. Eight people dead. When modern tech should have prevented something like that. You’d think that in a world of GPS tracking, pulse-Doppler radar, digital communications, and computer-assisted flight, something so simple as avoiding turning a helicopter and a plane becoming the latest example of the Pauli Exclusion Principle wouldn’t happen.
But it did.
And now…
Hm. I’ll probably get homesick anyway. And miss somebody. There’s no one like her anywhere in the world, anyway, except here in Manila (ah, my beautiful city… even Berlin just barely manages to equal you in my heart…). I’ve seen the Europeans and the South Americans and… no… she beats them, hands down.
Anyway.
Haha.
Whatever. I have several events to plan. I’ll think about the Academy later
Peeves: Irresponsible Motorcyclists
It can’t be denied that one of the latest, rather undocumented crazes in the country today is that of the motorcycle, particularly the scooter variety. You see them nearly everywhere in the Metro. I’ve also seen bikers congregating in what might be the IRL genesis of the “Go-Gangs” in Shadowrun. Haha. Pinoy Go-Gangers. Well, at the rate some of them are acting just because they have wheels – nevermind its just two and just has a good casing but lacking in power – that may just be true.
But what really gets my ire about today’s bikers is their utter disregard for most traffic rules. Perhaps its got something to do with the bloody machine itself, its innate design – i.e. the two wheels and the small frame – that allows any biker to weave through traffic jams, that encourages such behavior. You’ll often see bikers zooming in-between vehicles even in freeways, which can be a hazard because, first and foremost, traffic rules dictate you overtake from the left, not the right. Bikers don’t seem to care; if there’s a space in between, its something that can be passed through.
The manong who drove the taxi I was riding in told me how one biker managed to get banged up because of this mentality. Manong’s passenger at the time was dropping down. Naturally, most passengers would debark from the right side of the vehicle. And since nothing the size of a car can fit in the space between the taxi’s door and the sidewalk, any person would feel absolutely confident when opening the car’s doors.
One biker – and since bikers come from a long tradition of daredevils – decided to pass through this small space. Next thing he knew, he was on the pavement. And since said biker also did not follow basic safety precautions when riding a bike… he didn’t have a crash helmet on. I forgot to ask manong if he ever found out how many stitches the gash on that biker’s head took. Or the nasty scrape on the biker’s left knuckle where it connected with the opened taxi door.
Even more… fascinating, as manong related it, the biker wanted compensation from the taxi driver and the passenger. I was like: what the hell? Manong said he decided to end the debate as to who was wrong or right in the accident when he called a policeman to the site. The officer of the law promptly gave the biker a dressing down for not knowing the rules of the road, essentially telling the poor bastard tha, actually, he was at fault for his little mishap.
There have also been so many instances where I nearly got ran over by a PUJ or SUV when crossing even a small stretch of road with slow-moving traffic like the Stop & Shop intersection. I mean, you see the PUJ or the SUV, so you make calculations for its speed when you cross. But you didn’t see the zooming bike. You see it too late when you get past the front of the PUJ/ SUV and it cuts across your path. So you stop. And you get a big, angry beep from the larger vehicle as well as the scare of your life.
Should we pass laws on proper motorcycle use? Maybe. But that wouldn’t be the point. Proper education and information dissemination beats enforcement anytime.
But the big question is… will bikers even listen when its so much nicer and cooler to rocket past all those lumbering vehicles?
The Phoenix invades WordPress
Mmmm… to think I have so very little time and/or inclination to blog these days…
But… Donna has been soooo… insistent on how good WordPress is… And I DO need a place to put those thoughts of mine that exist between the “I-am-a-Mentat” posts in my blogger, and the uber-personal ones in my Multiply.
So this is that place for now. A place to put the “in-between” thoughts. Musings, casual raves and rants… that body of material in my head and Soul that deals little with my being a Guardian (oh yeah: ex-Guardian) or with my personal life.
Welcome. Hope you enjoy the ride.
