Dorks And Losers

Cal­i­for­nia Delta Breeze

The effect of the dry light­ning storm that struck Cal­i­for­nia last week that started some 800 wild­fires is finally start­ing to wear down. Any­one who was in any part of Cal­i­for­nia last week can attest to the ter­ri­ble air.

The haze has finally started to go away as a good delta breeze kicked in to reveal some of that pre­vi­ous blue sky that Cal­i­for­ni­ans are accus­tomed to in the summer.

The air in Sacra­mento is only mar­gin­ally bet­ter since our air sucks almost every day, except on hol­i­days.
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Cal­i­for­nia Cell Phone Ban

Tomor­row July 1, 2008 is the offi­cial start of the ban on talk­ing on cell phones while dri­ving in Cal­i­for­nia. There are sim­i­lar laws in many other states, but the mil­lions of Cal­i­for­ni­ans and their cars numer­i­cally are greatly more affected than those other states combined.

There isn’t much evi­dence that this law works, see North Car­olina.

There is much crit­i­cism of the law, espe­cially since there are tons of evi­dence that relate other dis­trac­tions such as the radio, food, drinks, etc. as also being fac­tors in car acci­dents. While not doing much research to sup­port my soon-to-be-revealed the­ory to the law’s ori­gins, I will sus­pect that MADD (Moth­ers Against Drunk Dri­ving) had much to do with the law, since they saw the num­bers of how so many teen dri­vers were get­ting hurt and killed in acci­dents while talk­ing on cell phones.

It would have been hard to jus­tify a law specif­i­cally tar­get­ing them with cell phone bans, so the law­mak­ers sim­ply made it an all-out ban. Also, enforce­ment would have been dif­fi­cult for CHP and police offi­cers to know who is a teen or not (hence dis­crim­i­na­tion issues). I will also not rule out the lob­by­ing of blue­tooth head­set man­u­fac­tur­ers in the law’s creation.

All I can say is cita­tions and tick­ets will be issued a plenty…
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Wim­ble­don 2008

[pho­tos via Ryan Pierse/Getty + Ryan Pierse/Getty]

Nicole Vaidis­ova (18) beat Anna Chakve­tadze (8) 4–6, 7–6, 6–3 to advance to the quar­ter­fi­nals of Wim­ble­don 2008.

What’s wrong Anna?

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