It was a serendipitous thing, given the various circumstances and miscarriages and difficulties. Bark’s son and my clone are best friends. They’re very different kids; John is bigger than Kevin despite being fourteen months younger, he is more physical, more outgoing. Kevin, on the other hand, reads at a much higher level than his cousin, plays much more complex video games, and displays the kind of natural leadership that has John following him around most of the time.
Last night, Kevin’s soccer team had an indoor scrimmage and they let John play. Kevin’s already the youngest kid on his team — it’s mostly nine-year-olds — but his teammates know they can rely on him to magically appear between the ball and the goal. John has very little soccer experience but he’s good at knocking older children over, which he set about doing. One of the kids was a head taller than either of the cousins and the third time John put him on the ground I started to have some concerns. Luckily today’s children are more placid than their predecessors.
John was not happy to leave his cousins and come back home, but when your dad is still on crutches sometimes you have to let the old man get some rest in his own bed. Alright, let’s see what John’s dad, and Kevin’s dad, managed to accomplish this past week.
As most of you know already, this week R&T put my Performance Car Of The Year article up. After reading some of the commentary online, I was inspired to write about That Forum Guy and how it’s frustrating to read what the average jamoke on the web thinks about things.
At TTAC, I discussed the potential drawbacks to the Tesla’s jump seats and the ethical aspects of spending $350,000 on some old Porsche 964.
Brother Bark spent some time this week looking into the various programs and promotions offered by Ford and GM and came up with the scoop on the Ford ‘friends and family’ pricing scheme that debuted recently.
This week I’ll finally be putting some weight on my bolted-up left leg and asking TTAC’s readers to help me figure out why I saw an old Taurus driving around Columbus with radar guns bolted on all four corners… see you then!
When I was young ‘ jamoke ‘ meant a hot cuppa coffee .
It’s heartening to hear your two boys get along .
I have many Cousins but they always lived in other States .
-Nate
License plate recognition cameras do look suspiciously like radar cameras and I bet that is what you saw. Virginia has gone in heavy on using the things and I see them around the outskirts of richmond all the time,usually with four cameras front and rear.
For reasons I don’t care to disclose, other than because I know a lot of other people who have worked on a lot of projects in IT, Virginia and Ohio were two of four states that were pilot states for the Feds for an interstate licensing checking program, long ago and far away. Someone I knew well was involved in that project, which was both a prototype for keeping chronic drunk drivers from skipping from state to state to get a new license when suspended for DUI, but was also a pre-cursor to the commercial driver license system.
It would not surprise me a bit, given the success (by governmental standards, at least) of those two programs, that those two states might by preferred partners for the Feds for other transportation related projects…VA both because of proximity to DC and because for years it enjoyed a good reputation compared to DMV’s and MVA’s in other states, and OH at least in part because it too was an easy hop, at least by air, and because it has a sizable population.
I am too far removed from all that now to have any line into what kind of project might be cooking now, but it would not surprise me at all if it is some sort of pilot program for another planned transportation system related to over the road vehicles of one kind or another.
The two I know of both seem to have returned more good than harm, so I wouldn’t automatically be paranoid about this. But I would like to know what they are up to.
The agency that ran one of those pilots was once headed by Joan Claybrook, who proposed mandatory seat belts for motorcycle riders, though she was not there at the time the project I mentioned was being conducted.
I would note that they might be radar rather than license plate readers…perhaps a study of traffic speeds in several directions simultaneously. Or they might be video cams designed to recognize, for example, the use of phones, texting, or other distractions.
If anyone cares enough to really want to know, the method for finding out is called a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act request, and the agency is probably either NHTSA within the DOT, or the FHWA, the Federal Highway Administration, also part of the DOT, IIRC.
A simple request for all funded studies involving joint state-federal participation would probably turn up enough material for at least a couple of TTAC or RIverside Green articles.
You could also poke around for a website for a traffic engineering institute that is loosely connected with the UVA, which often participates in, or generates ideas for, such studies. Should be an easy google, though it has been well over a decade since I was interested enough to read anything that they were doing. But they were already doing preliminary studies on autonomous vehicle feasibility a couple of decades ago, or more, again if my aging brain has not started short-circuiting.
I believe you might be referring to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, which is pretty heavily connected with VT rather than UVA. They do get a lot of press related to driving safety research, but I don’t think they’ve specifically done work with plate recognition systems.
I had read somewhere that states were collecting plate data and sharing it with the DEA to track vehicles along drug running corridors.
@CDotson VaTech would make sense for such a center, but I know that there is or was one at UVa as well, as I went there once on a site visit as part of a project I was a consultant on. So it could be both.
Your conjecture makes sense, as to what they might be doing.
@Nate A jamoke, short of jamocha, was also a flavor of milkshake at Arby’s. Don’t know whether or not it still is. But I have also heard it used as a sort of short hand for some J. Random Tom-Dick-or-Harry. Also, in Spanish, one might refer to un fulano, un tipo, or even un tío…no direct translation for the first, the second means “a type”, and the third means “an uncle” the way we might refer to a “cousin” or “cuz” when the person is not a relative, but just a random person. I have also heard of the term “mook” being used, though I think it has slightly more negative connotation than jamoke.
@Jack Your son sounds like he will sooner or later end up as a target for the schoolyard resident bully…as their psychology is to try to intimidate a large-ish boy who doesn’t seem to be mean, usually with the bully’s sidekick in tow.
My son ran into this in kindergarten, and he didn’t want to get involved in a full-blown fight and end up getting sent to detention or expelled. And since all the kid did was push him into a chainlink fence from behind, when he wasn’t looking, he didn’t think it amounted to more than an annoyance.
But then the bully began picking on his best friend, who was smaller than any of these other kids. At that point, my son opened up to me about what was going on.
My advice to him might help John. I taught him how to walk while turning his trunk a slight bit more than normal to each side, while turning his head a slight bit more to each side as he turned his trunk. This is called a “samurai” walk, and enables you to see 360 degrees around you without looking like you are doing so.
And I told him to do it as he was heading towards the fence, and when the bully was ready to pounce, to jump to the side. And I told him that if the bully hit him first, to hold down his end until the teachers came over.
And it worked just as I predicted…the bully ran full speed into the fence, as my son move over, and came up swinging and yelling. Matt dodged a couple of punches and got one or two in before the teachers broke it up.
And as I had hoped and expected, the other boy got suspended for three days for bullying, since it wasn’t even a fair fight, while my son was reminded that he should report such incidents to the teachers.
The bully never tried again, either to him, his friend, or anyone else.
So teach John how to do the samurai walk and how to jump aside in front of a chain link fence, if his size and gregariousness, coupled with his obvious nice disposition, makes him a target.
Basically, if he can dodge the first attack, and hold his own from there on in, in a schoolyard, he will have a winning strategy.
It is a shame that young men need to be taught this, when they aren’t by nature bullies, but bullies seem to be drawn to larger boys who try not to get in fights.
So I taught my son to let the fight come to him, and to let the other guy take the heat for so visibly being the instigator.
Without such a strategy it has been my experience that usually the kid who got hit and who strikes back, ends up being the first one the teachers turn around to see, and he ends up getting in trouble instead of the bully. But if you can dodge being pushed from behind, and duck the first angry blow when the bully starts yelling, that will usually put the focus right where it belongs.
I hope John never needs to do something like this, but bullies will be bullies, and in particular, they seem to like to pick on a bigger boy who doesn’t want to start a fight.
I’m glad the cousins get along well, in spite of their different natures and attributes. And I hope John doesn’t become a target. But if you have taught him how to do the samurai walk to see an attack from behind and to avoid it, he shouldn’t have to end up getting his face smashed into a chainlink fence.
PS to @CDotson my guess is that all but the low level runners would buy, rent, borrow or steal different vehicles, rather than continuously running the same vehicle, but I could be wrong.
I wish the world wasn’t so much like that, but it is. In my son’s case, he was in a church-run kindergarten, so I guess it can happen pretty much anywhere.
My son has never been the type to start trouble like that, but it came his way a couple of times more when he was a bit older, and he managed to stand up to it without getting in trouble each time, mostly because he had the confidence that he didn’t need to let himself get goaded into taking the first swing, even if defensive, and then ending up in the principal’s office, either with the bully, or worse yet, singled out as the problem kid.
Teach John to walk away from a tree, and to learn to walk so it doesn’t look like he is turning around, but so that he can see the tree trunk every time he turns to each side.
My guess is that they haven’t put that one in some imaginary bully manual for the bullies to watch out for…instead, it seems to be the best way to put a bully in place without looking like you started the fight.
I hope John will never need this, but it is better to know it and not need it, than it is to need it, and not have it until after something bad has happened.
Grew up in an Italian neighborhood in New Jersey.Jamoke meant jerk….slightly less pejorative than schmuck, which I later learned in Brooklyn.
Oh hey, Bark makes a cameo appearance in the last few seconds of The Smoking Tire’s latest YouTube one take on the EXR race series.
Ha. Yes, I did.
I used to not care for Cousins, but after seeing the music video it all made sense. Great song.