Oh And This Too

Amanda Hess at Washington City Paper has an article today about rape. She makes a (rather weak) comparison to her boyfriend, who was recently struck by a car last month. He was in the crosswalk, in D.C. (Hess also says that he's OK!) She writes:

Now, the driver who hit him did not set out with the intention of running into a human with her car. She didn’t mean to hurt anybody. But she also knew full well that cars are required to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. She was simply so accustomed to her driving privilege that she never dreamed that this could actually happen—and that she would ever be held responsible for her habitual disregard for the law. After all, a lot of motorists act this way, and most pedestrians just stay out of their way. When a pedestrian is hit in a crosswalk, it’s not an accident. It’s the result of the motorist who has normalized her dangerous actions.

Emphasis mine. Clearly.

Just saying.

Headline: One Third of NYC Traffic Deaths are Pedestrians

Headline: One Third of NYC Traffic Deaths are Pedestrians (Gothamist)

Sufjan Stevens Interprets the BQE

Sufjan Steven's new album is inspired, and about, New York's BQE. Stevens spent nine months driving and riding the BQE to film a film to accompany his album The BQE. The project was commissionED by the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

(Presumably the album will allow Stevens to check NY off the states list for his 50 States Project. Illinois and Michigan have been completed. But maybe not, since the album is considered a soundtrack to the film. The film, by the way, was shot on super 8 mm and standard 16 mm film!)

Here's a chunk of NPR's article covering the project:

"My job as an artist is to find beauty where there is ugliness," Stevens says. "And I think this project is all about the beautification of a dilapidated object of scorn."

Stevens spent nine months meditating on that object of scorn. The result, he says, is that traffic no longer bothers him.

"I think a lot of this piece is about transcending the mundane elements of everyday life and finding inner peace," he says.

When asked if his quiet corner of solitude happened to be stuck in traffic, Stevens replies with a laugh: "Exactly. It's where I belong."

Make sure you listen to his NPR interview after you read the NPR piece here.

Seatbelt Safety Video

I saw this video earlier this year on How We Drive, and since its come up in conversation this week with two different people, I thought I would share it here. Before you watch, I want to share the warning accompanied by the video on YouTube:

ADVISORY - This video contains scenes of a graphic nature.
A disturbing new ad campaign has started to encourage people to wear their seat belts. The Government commercial shows graphic images of the fatal damage car crashes can cause to internal organs in a bid to persuade people to belt up. Thousands of people are caught in the North East without a seat belt on each year, and ministers hope the move will make the region's roads a safer place.

And here's the video:



I'm personally not opposed to seat belts. I know I've jerked on the brakes and the belt has prevented me from flying into the windshield, and I hadn't even rear-ended anybody. But that's just me.

Pedestrian Narrowily Escapes Death

I saw the above video on Buzzfeed yesterday, and [SPOILER] just as the man makes to the end of the street a bus barrels through the crosswalk and several cars begin their passage across the same intersection. And as that happened the air was sucked out of my lungs.

Buzzfeed's Peggy Wang wrote, "this guy pretty much wins at life," but I disagree. First, any success "at life," is generally an overstatement reserved for something rather mundane. For example, when the co-worker I used to carpool with would arrive with a cup of coffee for me, she won at life. She was the best co-worker ever. Etc.

This man doesn't win at life because he narrowly escaped with his life. (And conversely, if he had died, it would be devastatingly disrespectful to call him a "failure at life.") This is not FTW, this is shocking luck.

And with that, I hurl into a wastebasket and vow never to watch again.