May 04, 2008
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CB monitoring pays off
I don't usually monitor the squawky CB but this afternoon I had it on for a while and I got lucky. As I was approaching Dayton OH eastbound on I-70 conversation began to center on a tie-up just east of the I-75 interchange. When it began to dawn on me I could spend the next hour or so creeping through the mess or I could spend it in my livingroom (ah, the joys of having a home on your back) with a cup of coffee I pulled off at the next exit.
A little Googling turned up a couple of traffic cameras that showed traffic backed up. Bleck! It might take a while for traffic to get moving again and at 4:30 in the afternoon the alternate routes don't much appeal to me. Generally I don't like to backtrack but it's only 3 miles back to the Wal-Mart in Englewood, OH. It's time to call it a day.
A meijer hypermarket
By chance when I exited I-70 I ended up at the meijer hypermarket in Englewood. Put Wal-Mart Superstores in a design competition with this meijer hypermarket and the meijer wins hands down. This is one good looking design. While cut from the same hypermarket cloth this is a nice fresh store with nice fresh produce in a larger grocery section than Wal-Mart's. These stores are so similar in concept one might wonder which came first - who's borrowing from whom here?
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Englewood, Ohio
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.