Britney Spears and Snow

So Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta has scolded Britney Spears for driving around with her baby in her lap, saying this sets a bad example to her American fans. I agree with his critical assessment. Being a Britney Spears fan myself, a few years ago I even planned on living in a trailer park and raising pigs for a living, just to experience the joy of being Britney Spears firsthand, thats how big a fan I am. And also since I look to her for all my vehicular regulatory needs, the moment I saw her driving around with a baby in her lap, I said to myself, hell, if Britney Spears is doing it, that's gotta be legal. And then I spread the word around, letting people know that those baby seats were just a nuisance, and why bother with them when you could drive and change your baby's diaper all at the same time? In fact, I won't be surprised if figures show that millions of American women fall prey this year to teenaged pregnancies after this incident 'cause they all wanted to be like Britney and drive around with a baby in their laps since it was the in-thing. These were probably the same women who took up stripping as a career after seeing Demi Moore in Striptease.

Great job, Norman Mineta. Now we know who to blame if infant fatalities in car accidents suddenly show a sharp spike.

And speaking of shit falling from the sky, we had a huge fucking snowstorm over the weekend. When I woke up sunday morning, this is what my car looked like.



And pretty much everyone else's car as well.



So this woman, probably a neighbour of mine, emerged from her apartment and started shovelling at freakin' 9:00 in the morning. That too, before it had even stopped snowing. She cleared some snow around her car, worked for about an hour, then went back inside. After watching her toil in the cold, I felt guilty and I ran out to shovel my own car out of the snow.

I am pretty efficient at shovelling. All you need is a game plan and the right techniques. Now when you shovel your car out of the snow, this is what you need to do first, before you do anything else. Clear all the snow from the side of your car that faces the road. Because if you don't do that, the snow plows will come in and pile up all the snow against your car, compressing it against the side of your car. So I shovelled out all that snow, cleared up the front and back of my car, thus creating a path for it to drive out of it's parking spot, then went back inside after about half an hour's worth of shovelling.

Then, the woman who I had seen shovelling outside, again came back out and began to shovel. This time she shovelled the back-side of her car, throwing all the snow into her neighbour's parking space. After another hour's worth of work, she went back inside.

After a couple of hours, she again came out and shovelled the side of her car. Then she climbed into her car, drove it in reverse and into the parking spot that had just been vacated by her neighbour. She got out, and, this is no exaggeration, she cleared the snow on the road underneath her car. Why would she do that unless she planned to spend the night curled up in that spot? It just didn't make any sense.

And then, all day long, the woman kept coming out and shovelling various parts of her parking spot till it was cleaner than it had been even before the snowstorm. And I spent all day watching her do her thing. Man, there's nothing more enjoyably lazy than watching other people work in the cold while you sit in your apartment drinking beer. She looked pretty obsessed with her parking spot. But hey, some people are just plain weird.