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For a trip earlier this year we ended up borrowing a vehicle. The vehicle and I got along in most things, but we did not get along in one particular area: the door kept attacking my leg.

After a week, I ended up with 3 gashes in my leg.

The reason was that the door had a bottom section that curved, so there was a sharp edge protruding. Anything that is right next to the door while it is moving will get sliced.

Here is the offending part of the Ford Expedition:

For contrast, here is what the doors look like on the vehicles I typically drive.

As you can see, the door does have a corner but the corner is in the same plane as the rest of the door edge, so it’s not going to catch your leg as you’re standing next to it. Maybe if you angle your leg under the door, but that’s not normal.

What happens is that the part of the door that deviates from the vertical ends up sticking out as the door moves, so anything right next to the door edge will be fine when the door edge goes by, but then it will be caught by the protrusion. Here’s a diagram that shows it.

No one else in my family – or in the family that owns the vehicle – got their leg scraped. I must be the most impatient one of the bunch, closing the door before I’ve moved far enough away from it. Ah well, I still say it’s a poor design, and if I actually owned the vehicle I would be modifying those corners somehow.

I was poking about the website of Cedarville University and came upon this.

Apparently when your child is applying to go to college there, you have to know which of you is the better parent. Maybe the kid gets to decide. Who is the best parent – mom or dad?

I recommend putting in the house phone number, to avoid conflict.

A lot of newer vehicle now come with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), which uses radar to follow the car in front of you. So all you have to do (in general) is steer, as your car will automatically slow down if you catch up to a slower car. And it will automatically speed up once the coast is clear.

I’ve had a rental car or two with the feature, and I preferred normal cruise control because I zoned out too much with the ACC.

But I now have an idea of a new feature which will improve my life. I got this idea when I was going 55 mph down a road and came upon someone going 42 mph.

My idea is this: cars should have a radar facing backwards. Then a slow car would get notified of traffic coming up behind them and the cruise control could kick in and accelerate the car to a reasonable speed.

This is, of course, the desire of all tailgaters. And as such it would probably be abused. And the driver of the slow car might not know what was happening. It’s probably a bad idea.

Alternate method: instead of accelerating the slow car, the rear radar would put on the hazards and pull the car onto the shoulder, allowing the faster traffic to pass.

That’s probably a bad idea too.

When I am walking somewhere, whether it’s in a store or an amusement park or just about anywhere, I walk faster than most people (“I walk with purpose” is my usual phrase).

If I end up stuck behind someone who is ambling or meandering, and I am forced to walk at their pace, I will amuse myself by pretending to go in slow motion. Maybe “pretending” is the wrong word, because I really will be moving in slow motion. But it takes my mind off the problem at hand (slow moving people blocking my way) and it’s usually only for a few steps (say until we get to the end of the aisle and the path opens up).

What I need to do is find the vehicular equivalent of moving my legs and arms in slow motion. What could I do with my car to pretend to go in slow motion? I haven’t come up with any good ideas. The only options are slowing way down then speeding up, which might come across as too aggressive, or weaving back and forth, which might get me pulled over for DUI.

What usually ends up happening is my wife sings the “Herbert the Snail” song at me. Not to me, at me.

Why does someone else’s spot seem warmer than your spot? Like sitting on a couch or whatever, if someone leaves and you move into that spot, it feels warmer.

I propose that we can get free energy that way. If you trade seats with someone, you’ll each feel warmer. Then trade again, it’ll feel warmer again. Keep going back and forth, and the seats will keep heating up.

The only problem is how to harness that energy before the couch catches on fire.

The “privilege walk” is an group exercise that started about 10 years ago, from what I can tell. It had a bout of popularity, but I have no idea how much it is still used. It seems to have had a wide spread, as far as various organizations using it. I first heard of it being used in educational settings, specifically universities.

And I think that’s a good place to use it, and high schools, and maybe even middle schools. But their focus is on the wrong things.

I looked at the privilege walk instructions from a few organizations, and they were fairly similar, so I’m going to summarize them here.

First of all – the goal/purpose: to be aware of the intersections of privileges and socioeconomic variables.

This somewhat falls into my old post of raising awareness. What good is raising awareness? In this case, they usually pair being aware with improving relationships with other people. Not a bad goal, but that’s not going to improve people’s lives much.

Secondly – the questions. There are a lot of questions, the lists I saw ranged from 25-45 questions. Here’s a sample:

• If one or both of your parents graduated from college, take one step forward.
• If anyone in your immediate family has ever been addicted to drugs or alcohol, take one step back.
• If you have been divorced or impacted by divorce, take one step backward.
• If you came from a supportive family environment, take one step forward.
• If you have more than fifty books in your household, take one step forward.
• If anyone in your immediate family has ever served time in a state or federal penitentiary, take one step back.

There are a bunch more questions, but you get the idea. Half of the questions in the lists I reviewed seemed to be various ways of asking “if you are a white male, step forward”. I’m ignoring those questions though, for reasons you’ll understand by the end of this post.

And last – the assessment. The standard practice is for the privilege walk leaders to ask the participants some review questions after the walking part. The purpose of the walk seems to be to get people to be introspective, to get them to see how they fit in society and compare that to how others fit in. And thus have more understanding for others’ situations.

Things like

• What did you feel like being in the front of the group? In the back? In the middle?
• Were certain sentences more impactful than others?
• What question made you think most? If you could add a question, what would it be?
• What happened during the exercise? Were you surprised by anything?

But what good is that, and how does that help other people?

I’m more of a practical person – less talking and more doing. So this exercise seems pointless to me because the goal is talking and there’s no doing.

My take – there needs to be another section: improving things for the next generation.

This applies more to privilege walks that occur at high schools and especially colleges. Because that’s when people are planning their future and making life decisions.

For this section, the action would be to look at the questions and see what you can do so that the next generation of students have as few steps back as possible. Because where does the next generation of students come from? From the current generation of students, several years down the road. But the time to get people thinking about how to live their adult lives is just before they establish their adult lives.

For some of the questions, there’s nothing that can be done, because it’s based on ethnicity. But let’s look at what can be done.

Main things I saw:

• Get your degree. Your kids can take a step forward because you finished college.
• Get married. Kids of single parents take a step back. Don’t have kids if you’re not married.
• Stay married. Divorce causes a lot of problems, and has a large impact on kids in the family.
• Be a good parent. Be there for your kids, and support them. Not just financially, but emotionally by telling them positive things.
• Stay out of trouble. Addiction or jail take you away from your kids. Live your life right and it will improve not just your life but others’ lives too.

There are some other concrete actions you could get out of the questions, but I like those because they’re free (other than getting your degree). But since I’m picturing most privilege walks happening at colleges, those people are already in the process of getting their degrees.

And weddings might be expensive, but getting married is not expensive. Just go to your local courthouse and have the judge perform the ceremony. Being a supportive parent and staying out of trouble don’t cost any money, but they may cost you time and effort. Really, much of these boil down to “don’t be selfish”.

All that to say – the privilege walk can be redeemed and focus some attention on getting people to live their lives better. And the more “rightly” the current generation lives, the better off the next generation will be.

Now it is time for another PSALM.

Gamma made this one, like last time. This one was titled “2001 A Space Odyssey” by him. It is supposed to re-create part of the opening sequence of that movie.

Now only 139 more to go.

I just watched the Spider-Man movie from 2002 with the boys, and the slight change in origin story got me thinking about art imitating life.

The traditional Spider-Man origin story has Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider. That’s because it was written in the 1960’s when nuclear and radioactive stuff was front and center in the news and the schools and everyone’s minds.

The 2002 Spider-Man movie (with Maguire and Dunst) changed the story so that the spider was not radioactive but rather it was a genetically-modified spider. Why was that? Because genetic modification is the topic that was front and center in the news and the schools and everyone’s minds.

The 2012 Amazing Spider-Man movie retells the story and keeps the spider as GMO rather than radioactive.

The 2017 MCU Spider-Man doesn’t give much of the origin story at all, so we get no details on the spider.

Based on what I see front and center in the national stage, if a Spider-Man movie were made now, it would be a AI spider. I’m not sure how an AI spider could bite someone, or even exist physically, but I’m sure people who get paid to write scripts could come up with something clever.