Friday, November 19, 2004
People in Cars
A couple weeks ago I had what stands for me as a landmark moment.
I was driving in the car over to Omaha, and this young lady in an SUV was riding my tail, hard. I was speeding a little, and in the passing lane heading out of town, but I apparently couldn't get around cars fast enough for her. But she was also one of these rubber band drivers who speeds up and slows down, so one second she'd be right on my butt, and the next she'd be two hundred yards behind me, and then I'd look again and her SUV would be swallowing my whole rear-view mirror. Her driving is really inconsequential--fact is, she had me watching her closely.
I was able to see that she was listening to the radio, and just tapping her hand. Any time I witness someone going nuts to their music in the car, I always get a little bit of a chuckle out of them. I'm also always watching to see if I can figure out if they're listening to the same thing I am, because I had always thought that would be cool. But this never really happens, so I tend to watch long enough to figure out they're tapping to a different beat, or singing a different song.
The lady was rubber-banding me particularly close when I saw her hand tapping, so I start wondering what she's hearing in the car. In the middle of this thought the DJ comes on and announces that Rod Stewart is singing his song about Maggie next, and the radio kicks right into the song. At that very moment, the lady behind me, who is now so close I see the car behind her clearly through her rear window, just kicks it into overdrive, singing and throwing her hair and banging on the steering wheel like she's Rod herself, or like she wrote the song and loved Rod's version the best.
Maybe her name was Maggie.
I began wondering if there were any pictures on the web that people had taken of other folks in their cars, picking their noses or doing the white man head bob to Rod Stewart. I spent way too much time combing the internet to come up with the conclusion that, in fact, all the websites containing such pictures are hidden, except one from The Plug, and the pictures there aren't even very entertaining.
I did find some interesting stuff along the way, though, like you do. Many of them, like the Truck Driver's Gear Change songs (wtf?) were only tangentially related to people in cars. Many more of them, strangely, had very little to do with either people or cars, like the inexplicable appearance of the online picture gallery from the Toronto '03 Zeppfest, which features utterly classic pictures of the buffoons in the Led Zeppelin cover band, Zeppelinesque, like this one here:
Then, out of frustration, I thought I would find one of my favorite amateur movies on the internet to soothe my soul, "405". I have known about this movie from time immemorial, though strangely, I don't think I've ever blogged about it. I'm not sure it's worth all the hype the website gives it (originally I found it on an Italian website, and it was much cooler out of this self-important context), but it had everything I was looking for: people driving in cars, people listening to music while driving in cars, and pictures of people who are driving next to you while you're driving in your car. I remembered while I was watching it that it also had people flicking other people off while they are in their cars. Well, more specifically, one person flicking another off.
Come to think of it, that reminds me of another site that seems, as far as I can tell, to be centered wholly around the idea of flicking off and being flicked off, MasaManiA. Coincidentally, MasaManiA also has a picture of a man in a car doing something stupid, driving his car while scratching his armpit and talking on his cell phone. Unfortunately, this picture's flicking off largely blocks the armpit scratching.
Of course, the English is part of what makes MasaManiA such a funny site. I mean, just check out the entry on Micky Yanai, for crying out loud! It's hysterical! But read long enough, and you'll start to decode that behind all the flicking off and truly funny commentary, there's an aching heart and some bitter invective at play in MasaManiA. It seems that many of the moron Westerners who post comments really fail to understand how they're indicted by this person's reaction to our cultural infiltration. Take, for instance, the piece on George Bush or the one where he flicks off the boy for eating McDonald's on the train.
The commentary doesn't even spare his countrypeople, who have adopted the American "peace" sign as the standard pose to strike for pictures. This is from the post where he flicks off a group of young Japanese ladies who are giving the peace sign:
"So why do I get frustration ? I don’t know. But anyway I dislike doing piece sign. Japanese people have few gesture, few body language. I know sometime, this poor expression scare other country people. This poor expression make misunderstanding with other country people.
"This is the reason, we got atomic bomb two times !"
So, as an American, what can you say to that? Well, let me see. My grandpa fought in that war, and gave a leg fighting the Japanese in the Philippines. And one of my best friends, a Japanese-American soldier who recruits for the National Guard, is the son of a fine man, a patent-holding chemist. That fine man was born in the dirt, his mother panting in a hovel as America's prisoner in a Californian internment camp for the Japanese. The Japanese who came to America looking for a better life.
I was driving in the car over to Omaha, and this young lady in an SUV was riding my tail, hard. I was speeding a little, and in the passing lane heading out of town, but I apparently couldn't get around cars fast enough for her. But she was also one of these rubber band drivers who speeds up and slows down, so one second she'd be right on my butt, and the next she'd be two hundred yards behind me, and then I'd look again and her SUV would be swallowing my whole rear-view mirror. Her driving is really inconsequential--fact is, she had me watching her closely.
I was able to see that she was listening to the radio, and just tapping her hand. Any time I witness someone going nuts to their music in the car, I always get a little bit of a chuckle out of them. I'm also always watching to see if I can figure out if they're listening to the same thing I am, because I had always thought that would be cool. But this never really happens, so I tend to watch long enough to figure out they're tapping to a different beat, or singing a different song.
The lady was rubber-banding me particularly close when I saw her hand tapping, so I start wondering what she's hearing in the car. In the middle of this thought the DJ comes on and announces that Rod Stewart is singing his song about Maggie next, and the radio kicks right into the song. At that very moment, the lady behind me, who is now so close I see the car behind her clearly through her rear window, just kicks it into overdrive, singing and throwing her hair and banging on the steering wheel like she's Rod herself, or like she wrote the song and loved Rod's version the best.
Maybe her name was Maggie.
I began wondering if there were any pictures on the web that people had taken of other folks in their cars, picking their noses or doing the white man head bob to Rod Stewart. I spent way too much time combing the internet to come up with the conclusion that, in fact, all the websites containing such pictures are hidden, except one from The Plug, and the pictures there aren't even very entertaining.
I did find some interesting stuff along the way, though, like you do. Many of them, like the Truck Driver's Gear Change songs (wtf?) were only tangentially related to people in cars. Many more of them, strangely, had very little to do with either people or cars, like the inexplicable appearance of the online picture gallery from the Toronto '03 Zeppfest, which features utterly classic pictures of the buffoons in the Led Zeppelin cover band, Zeppelinesque, like this one here:
Then, out of frustration, I thought I would find one of my favorite amateur movies on the internet to soothe my soul, "405". I have known about this movie from time immemorial, though strangely, I don't think I've ever blogged about it. I'm not sure it's worth all the hype the website gives it (originally I found it on an Italian website, and it was much cooler out of this self-important context), but it had everything I was looking for: people driving in cars, people listening to music while driving in cars, and pictures of people who are driving next to you while you're driving in your car. I remembered while I was watching it that it also had people flicking other people off while they are in their cars. Well, more specifically, one person flicking another off.
Come to think of it, that reminds me of another site that seems, as far as I can tell, to be centered wholly around the idea of flicking off and being flicked off, MasaManiA. Coincidentally, MasaManiA also has a picture of a man in a car doing something stupid, driving his car while scratching his armpit and talking on his cell phone. Unfortunately, this picture's flicking off largely blocks the armpit scratching.
Of course, the English is part of what makes MasaManiA such a funny site. I mean, just check out the entry on Micky Yanai, for crying out loud! It's hysterical! But read long enough, and you'll start to decode that behind all the flicking off and truly funny commentary, there's an aching heart and some bitter invective at play in MasaManiA. It seems that many of the moron Westerners who post comments really fail to understand how they're indicted by this person's reaction to our cultural infiltration. Take, for instance, the piece on George Bush or the one where he flicks off the boy for eating McDonald's on the train.
The commentary doesn't even spare his countrypeople, who have adopted the American "peace" sign as the standard pose to strike for pictures. This is from the post where he flicks off a group of young Japanese ladies who are giving the peace sign:
"So why do I get frustration ? I don’t know. But anyway I dislike doing piece sign. Japanese people have few gesture, few body language. I know sometime, this poor expression scare other country people. This poor expression make misunderstanding with other country people.
"This is the reason, we got atomic bomb two times !"
So, as an American, what can you say to that? Well, let me see. My grandpa fought in that war, and gave a leg fighting the Japanese in the Philippines. And one of my best friends, a Japanese-American soldier who recruits for the National Guard, is the son of a fine man, a patent-holding chemist. That fine man was born in the dirt, his mother panting in a hovel as America's prisoner in a Californian internment camp for the Japanese. The Japanese who came to America looking for a better life.
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