Black Lives Matter wants LAPD to stop responding to minor traffic incidents https://t.co/zHvBVAJnDI — O.C. Register (@ocregister) January 17, 2023 Well, the Law of Unintended Consequences has already kicked in on this one. I feel like if I know this, someone at BLM should know it. In the aftermath of George Floyd and Defund the Police, cops — the ones who were still funded — didn’t engage with Black citizens because, you know, if that’s the way you feel about cops, go ahead and do whatever you want. One result, as you can see in the chart, is a spike in traffic fatalities for both Black men and women. The same unintended consequence affected the murder rate: Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Cars
Does Money Buy Happiness?
Does money buy happiness? I’ve never seen any evidence of this but the girl cutting my hair today said it does. “It allows my husband and I to have a house so it gives us freedom.” I should have delved into this a little bit more for a couple of reasons. When I’ve owned a house, I’ve found that it gave me less freedom. If I’m renting a place, even a house, and I decide that I don’t want to be there anymore, I can just leave, which I can’t do if I own a house. Of course, there would still be the issue of moving all of my possessions. Owning things is problematic. Do I own my stuff or does my stuff own me? I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t really want to own anything: houses, cars, furniture. That would be real freedom. That still leaves the… Read more →
Paul Pelosi DUI Charges Dropped
White privilege! Although unlike Ted Kennedy, Paul Pelosi didn't actually kill anyone in his DUI accident. Democrats are getting better at drunk driving. https://t.co/VdCaOAsagD — Paul Epps (@paulepps) June 8, 2022 Read more →
See You in Hell, Henry Ruggs III
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Greetings mortals — A (now former) Las Vegas Raiders football player named Henry Ruggs III was driving around town at over 150 mph with a blood alcohol content twice the legal limit when — 150 mph?! God damn that’s a fast car! Where was I? Oh yes — when he smashed the car into another car, killing a woman and her dog. It’s my observation that Ruggs is not getting one percent of the nationwide vilification that another former member of the Raiders organization, Jon Gruden, has gotten. Gruden didn’t kill anyone but he did write some emails 10 years ago in which he used provocative language about homosexuals and people with big lips. To paraphrase Dave Chappelle, “You can kill a woman and nobody cares but you better not hurt the feelings of a gay… Read more →
Traffic Stops and Swimming Pools
We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow When I was younger (we’re all very well-behaved now 🙂 ), I had several friends and family members who had unpleasant run-ins with police, where they were cuffed or arrested or beaten, the common thread being not that they were black (they were all white), but they were all wise-asses who didn’t respect authority and couldn’t find it within themselves to be compliant to a police officer. One day my 9th-grade gym teacher told us (again, all white boys) to be excessively polite to police officers — yes sir, no sir — have your day in court if it came to that, but better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. In my experience, the narrative that only… Read more →
People I Thought Were Dead
Mario Andretti, auto racer Leslie Caron, actress Mitzi Gaynor, actress/singer/dancer Marla Gibbs, actress Bobby Goldsboro, singer Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the USSR Howard Hesseman, actor Sally Kellerman, actress Peter Lupus, actor Gavin MacLeod, actor Robert MacNeil, TV journalist Jackie Mason, comedian Lee Meriweather, actress, former Miss America George Mitchell, U.S. Senator Jaye P. Morgan, singer/game show panelist Bill Moyers, journalist Charley Pride, singer Dean Stockwell, actor Fred Williamson, athlete/actor Updates Mikhail Gorbachev, died 8/30/2022, age 91 Howard Hesseman, died 1/29/2022, age 81 Sally Kellerman, died 2/24/2022, age 84 Gavin MacLeod, died 5/29/2021, age 90 Jackie Mason, died 7/24/2021, age 93 Charley Pride, died 12/12/2020, age 86 Robert MacNeil, died 4/12/2024, age 93 Dean Stockwell, died 11/7/2021, age 85 Read more →
Skyrocketing Pedestrians
New technology shows promise reducing skyrocketing pedestrian fatalities — CNBC I thought from the headline and the photo that the article was about fatalities involving skyrocketing pedestrians . . . Read more →
Bucket List: Total a Car and Walk Away From It
Clerks at rental car counters always use the same phrase to push the collision damage waiver: You can total the car and walk away from it. Unless totaling the car renders me unable to walk. I’ve added that to my bucket list: total a car and walk away from it . . . Read more →
Internal Dialogue While Driving to Work
This car is a mess. I’ve been meaning to get it washed for weeks and I never do. What is wrong with me? I’m just drifting aimlessly through life. (It starts to rain.) I am a genius. Read more →
A Close Encounter with Burt Reynolds’ Legacy
I’m having dinner at a Japanese restaurant . . . in the booth behind me are a couple straight out of Sons of Anarchy. The man is about 45, large, with a shaved head, tattoos and a motorcycle jacket. Same description for the woman, except for the shaved head. Her jacket is emblazoned with PROPERTY OF TROG (or FROG or ????, couldn’t make it out clearly), which I assume is the name of either a motorcycle gang or the gentleman sitting across from her. Midway through the meal, Trog wonders aloud if Smokey and the Bandit is available on Netflix. To his chagrin, the movie doesn’t seem to register with his girlfriend, so to jog her memory, he pulls up the “Eastbound and Down” song on his phone and plays it loudly enough to be heard by everyone in the vicinity. He then launches into an analysis of the film… Read more →
All Cars Look the Same
I’m not a car guy but I do miss the days when every car on the road didn’t look like every other car. This occurred to me today as I was driving behind a Maserati that, if not for the Maserati logo, would have been indistinguishable from a Hyundai Sonata. Also, if you Photoshop a BMW grill onto a Kia, you really can’t tell them apart. Read more →
West Coast Tsunami Warning
Those of us who live on the west coast, including Alaska and Hawaii, got a tsunami warning yesterday morning, following a 7.9 earthquake in Alaska. My first thought was “This is going to make me look like a genius for not getting my car washed last weekend.” Read more →
What Does a Programmer Do?
I was asked to give a talk last week to a high school computer science class on “What Does a Programmer Do?” (I’m indebted to Jim McCarthy for the “lords and ladies of logic” section.) Programming is problem solving. At the highest level, the problem that programmers solve is that people want to be able to do things with computers that they can’t do. And by computers, I don’t mean just the kind of computers you have on the desks here, I mean phones, watches, cars . . . more and more different kinds of devices are running software. So one good thing about being a programmer is that pretty much every field of endeavor now uses software and data. You can work at a tech company like Microsoft or Google or Twitter or Facebook, but you can also work in healthcare, finance, education, sports . . . you… Read more →
See You in Hell
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] Driving a vehicle into a crowd of people is the new black. Will the lane assist feature that comes with a lot of new vehicles help prevent this? It won’t? Oh well . . . See you in Hell . . . Read more →
Mistaken Identity
I’m walking through the parking lot at Kohl’s when all of a sudden, the rear hatch on an SUV pops open next to me, even though there’s no one in or around the vehicle. Then I notice several cars further down is a similar-looking SUV and a woman with an armful of parcels trying to figure out why it won’t open. Read more →
Amber Alerts
I got an Amber Alert on my phone last night. The same Amber Alert is posted today on those lighted freeway billboards. How did we decide that child abduction is the one activity that merits a notification to the entire country? In this case, the woman in the photo, Kandice Johnson, stole a car at gunpoint with a 16-year-old boy in the back seat. I’m going to feel ridiculously bad if this ends poorly, but for a 16-year-old boy, being kidnapped by a femme fatale like Kandice Johnson is maybe not the worst way to spend a few hours of your life . . . Read more →
Michigan Man Dies in Crash While Masturbating to Porn Video
Michigan man dies in crash while driving and masturbating to porn on his phone — NY Daily News Years ago, I was in a public restroom stall in an office building when I felt a mild earthquake. It occurred to me that a bad way to die would be to have a building collapse on you while sitting on a toilet, only to be pulled out of the rubble on the evening news with your pants around your ankles, covered in excrement. But even that ignominious scenario pales in comparison to the egress of Clifford Ray Jones, age 58, who was driving down I-75 in Detroit with his pants off, watching a pornographic video on his phone. His hands were somewhere other than at the recommended position of 10 and 2 on the steering wheel when he crashed his 1996 Toyota and was hurled out the sunroof. It’s embarrassing enough… Read more →
Moving Back
Our boy was home recently for a visit . . . he lives in San Francisco now . . . we were driving to dinner one night and his mom, from the back seat, said to him, “You can move back if you want to.” “I don’t think I would move back to Irvine,” the boy said matter-of-factly. “I meant you can move the seat back. I have plenty of room back here.” Read more →
God: “I Gave Him a Sign”
I hope I don’t die some cartoonish death like skiing into a tree or being launched out of my car and flattened against a freeway sign. It’s funny when it happens to other people though. The only thing funnier would be if he’d left a spread-eagle person-shaped hole in the sign and then died when he hit a second sign. When reached for comment, God said, “I gave him a sign.” Read more →
Walking in San Francisco
Our boy is working and living in San Francisco now, We went to visit him last weekend . . . It’s hard to drive and park in SF so a lot of people walk to where they need to go. Our hotel was a few blocks from the boy’s apartment but for the most part, we left the car in the parking garage and walked everywhere. On a couple of occasions, we met one of his co-workers walking past us in the other direction. (His office is nearby, 7-8 blocks from his apartment, but it’s a startup, not a huge company like Transamerica with lots of employees.) On another occasion, we met a couple of his college classmates from Cal sitting near us at a local eatery. This is not to mention the friends, classmates and co-workers that we planned to meet up with because they also live in the… Read more →