by Adam Carolla
That’s why I’m naming as Secretary of Energy the Dyson vacuum guy. I feel like we need some new brains on this problem. Someone without opinions or the need to blog about them who is just going to crunch some numbers, invent some new technologies, and get us away from the people who burn us in effigy every day. Hell, maybe he can come up with a way to extract natural gas without hurting the environment or losing suction.
I know what many of you are thinking. What about solar, wind, biodiesel, etc.? I’m fine with all that alternative energy stuff on paper, but it never adds up to shit on planet Earth. Solar might work if you’re in the Nevada desert, but what about everyone up in not-so-sunny Seattle? Biodiesel sounds good but I think it will be bad for childhood obesity because the VW microbus you’re driving behind is pouring the smell of fries from its exhaust, reminding all the kids it’s time to hit the drive-thru. And as with solar, wind power needs to be captured in batteries and we certainly don’t have our battery technology sorted out.
ASSAULTED BY BATTERIES
Shit, never mind the industrial batteries for wind and solar, we can’t even get our household battery shit sorted out. My house, like many of yours, has the battery drawer. The other day I needed some new batteries in the remote. So I went to the drawer and found that my wife had recently stocked up. Sounds good, right? Except that what I saw when I opened the drawer were literally nineteen nine-volts; forty-nine of the second least useful, the C battery; and forty brand-new, still-in-the-package size Ds. There aren’t enough flashlights in the world to need that many Ds. But no AAs. Zero. Then just for salt in the wound there was a bushel of assorted small, flat batteries that looked like pocket change. You know, the kind that if you go to Home Depot looking for them they tell you to head over to the hearing aid store.
Not only do I have issues with the batteries, I’ve got issues with the battery hatch. There’s the simple design where you have to push your index finger in and the window just pops open. Then there’s the one that takes the micro Phillips-head screwdriver to open. If you took it to an optometrist, he’d say, “Sorry, I don’t have a screwdriver that small.” Why do the batteries have to be locked away in a vault?
My kids are out of the phase where their toys take AAs; they’re now in the AAA phase with all the small electronic stuff. Do we really need AA and AAA? That’s like creating a bra size between A and B. Anyway, there were many nights when they wanted their dinosaur to walk around or whatever and the batteries were dead. After using a steak knife to pry open the battery hatch and figure out what kind it took, I headed to the battery drawer to come up double-A dry. The rug rats were freaking out, so I was facing the moment all men fear. I had to take the AAs out of the universal remote. It’s the same feeling as putting a dog down. You’re on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry, brother, I’ve got to power you down. It’s Sophie’s choice, I don’t want to do it, but I have to. As soon as those little shits fall asleep they’ll be back in your belly in no time and we’ll be watching SportsCenter.”
My point is that if we can’t even figure out the best battery plan for my kid’s toy truck, why do we think we can develop it for our national alternative-energy needs? So we remain tethered to the Middle East. It’s like we have the greatest arcade in the world but the switch that powers it is on the other side of the planet being watched by a guy who hates us. It’s a sad statement that in terms of bad ideas that stuck around way too long, the Berlin Wall has fallen but we’re still lining the pockets of the Saudis—if they even have pockets in those robes they wear.
WASTING OUR MOST PRECIOUS RESOURCE
But, in closing, the real energy being wasted in this fine land is the mental energy. We’re all just wasting our brainpower on Hollywood gossip, pampering our pets, or figuring out ways to get more government checks. If we could all just wake up and take care of shit, I wouldn’t have to spend my life turning off your lights and irons, and we could all put our mental energy toward solving our literal energy problems.
3
THE DEPARTMENT OF
TRANSPORTATION
Buckle up for some anger. I have a LOT of thoughts about our transportation system and what to do to get traffic moving again. Of course I do. No one who lives in Los Angeles could feel anything but outrage when it comes to traffic-related issues. But it’s bigger than that, it applies to our country as a whole. This nation was built on the automobile. Our economy is tied to our ability to commute to work and to move products efficiently. When the government slows us down, it slows down our economy. Our roads are our nation’s veins and our cars are its lifeblood and the government is stopping our economic heartbeat.
After Antonio Villaraigosa (a.k.a. Tony Villar) ended his tenure as L.A.’s mayor, Barbara Boxer, one of our senators, had the balls to say that he would be a “terrific” transportation secretary. She actually used the word “terrific.” Someone needs to buy that bitch a dictionary. She’s off her fucking rocker. Unless she meant it in an over-the-top way like when an adult with special needs ties his first shoelace: “That’s terrific, Eugene. Terrific.” Is she high? This would be like announcing Chris Christie would do a bang-up job as the head of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Or maybe he spent so many years humping Telemundo reporters and not focusing on traffic that he’s fresh for the job. He hasn’t run out of ideas because he’s never had any in the first place, like a slot machine that hasn’t paid out for ten years. Either way this is another in my long line of examples of “Stupid or Liar?” Barbara, are you a complete bullshitter who is saying this because you and Tony are both Democrats and you want some cred with the Hispanic community, or have you had major head trauma?
List after list names Los Angeles as the worst city for traffic. One named it as not the worst in California, not even the worst in the country. The worst in North America. The entire fucking continent. Nothing in America should be worse than anything in Mexico. But we managed to find something. Go, team!
You want to know another statistic about how bad it is to drive here? Nationwide, hit and runs account for 10 percent of accidents. In L.A. it’s 50 percent. Half the accidents here are hit and runs. At first I didn’t believe this, but then I realized everyone I know has been hit at some point and the guy has taken off. So if I’m a little fired up about the topic, now you know why. Let me take you through the hit list of traffic-related issues that my Department of Transportation will tackle immediately.
ROAD SIGNS
The first thing my Department of Transportation will do to speed shit up will be to stop slowing shit down. This is especially bad in L.A., but is a pretty universal problem. Drivers spend so much time rubbernecking at stupid road signs and people being pulled over for nothing violations just to fill the coffers of the city government that traffic is constantly slow or at a standstill. If we could eliminate those distractions, we’d all get to work on time and get this economy going again. This is no joke. Think about all the lost productivity that comes with people going zero miles per hour listening to “Asscrack and Backsack in the Morning” on their daily commute. We should all be out there driving like champions.
Here’s one way to tell if you’re driving how I want you to—nay, how America needs you to. Whenever I drive my dad around, I see him mashing his feet into the floor mat. The old man is using imaginary brakes because I’m driving so hard. When your passenger is trying to stop the vehicle with his feet like Fred Flintstone, this is the ultimate tip of the cap. That’s how we all could be driving and should be driving if The Man would stop slowing us down with his bullshit.
When it comes to slowing down, one of the sources of my outrage is the signs warning about construction. I have no beef with the signs themselves. I’d like to know that there is construction coming up. I would just like to know about it before it’s too late. The placement of these signs is moronic. If you have a sign that says there is construction coming up, it needs to be placed BEFORE the exit you could take to avoid getting mired in it. It does n
o good to warn me about the construction while I’m sitting in the traffic caused by said construction. This would be like hitting someone in the face with a football, counting to ten, and then saying “heads up.”
Another sign that I often see is the unknowingly ironic WATCH THE ROAD. There is a giant electronic sign twenty feet above the road telling you to look at what’s twenty feet below it. Which is it? Should I read your distracting sign or do what the distracting sign is commanding me to?
I’m not sure if this has made its way across the nation yet but we have a new sign in SoCal that is both superdepressing and superuseless. All along the roads you’ll see digital signs reading HIDE IT, LOCK IT, KEEP IT. We have used taxpayer dollars to remind our citizens to take their phones, laptops, etc. and hide them under the seat or in their jacket and then lock their car. Thus they’ll be able to keep these valuables out of the hands of the animals that roam this city. That’s where we are here in L.A. Public-service campaigns about how to prevent assholes from breaking your window and stealing your GPS. I saw one of these signs in front of North Hollywood High, by the way. My alma mater. Good message for the kids: “If you’re one of the three students at North Hollywood High who is not already headed for a life of crime and would like to keep your stuff from getting stolen, here’s how.” This sign should just read FUCK IT. YOU’RE ON YOUR OWN. Hey LAPD, I have a sign I’m going to put in front of your police station that reads PREVENT CRIME. DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.
The other thing we use these digital signs for is to show drivers how fast they are going. You know those ones that say SPEED LIMIT and, below that, YOUR SPEED. If only there were some way within the car to tell me how fast I’m going! Maybe I should invent a “pace-ometer” or “speed gauge” of some kind that could go in the headrest. No, wait, in the dashboard. Shit, I’m going to be a billionaire with this idea! Idiots. This is what we’re spending our money on, stupid signs everywhere telling me I’m going four miles an hour faster than the speed limit, which was set in 1939? I already know how fast I’m going, thanks. Actually going above the speed limit happens so infrequently in this town that when it does, my mind is blown and I always make note of it.
I used to take the 10 Freeway to the 110 Freeway to the 101 Freeway home from Loveline in Culver City every day. But every once in a while when I got to the 10–110 exchange, traffic would come to a standstill because for whatever goddamn reason the 110 was closed. All the traffic would eventually be dumped off in South Central. For those of you not familiar with the area, think Boyz in the Hood or the L.A. riots. The thing that drives me crazy is that on the way there I passed three big electric freeway signs with a bunch of the aforementioned bullshit slogans, or worse, nothing at all. There was ample opportunity for me to be warned that the 110 was closed, but I was not. Signs exist to pass on information. That is their purpose. They could tell me that the 110 was closed, but instead they’re used to make sure that I know BUZZED DRIVING IS DRUNK DRIVING. (By the way, I’d argue that if buzzed driving is drunk driving, then sober driving is buzzed driving.)
The granddaddy of all time-wasting, slow-everyone-down road signs are the ones for the Click It or Ticket campaign. This is how fucking stupid our traffic officials are. We’ve got traffic in entire cities ground to a halt and we’re reminding everyone to put their seat belts on. First off, whether you decide to go headfirst through your windshield in an accident is your fucking business. Second, this multimillion-dollar campaign is totally unnecessary because every car produced or imported in the United States after 1973 is mandated to have a light-up placard and a chime that goes off every three seconds when your seat belts are not fastened. If every pair of slacks produced in the last thirty years had a buzzer and a light that went off when the fly was down and somebody floated the idea of Zip It or Clip It, I would crack him with a folding chair. Yet we have lighted road signs all over our freeways telling us to do something that puts our car into an epileptic seizure if we don’t. I want to find the guy who came up with this and give him a prison-style beating with a pillowcase full of soap bars. Hold him down, Private Pyle–style, and just beat the hell out of him. We don’t need a Click It or Ticket campaign. We need a Move It or Lose It campaign for the road.
Ironically the one sign that would speed everything up is the one that appears in many other parts of the country but not in Los Angeles, where we really need it. A fan from Portland tweeted me a picture of a road sign he sees on his commute. It features two cars that look like they’re from the fifties that have gotten into an accident, and reads “Fender Bender? Move Vehicles to Shoulder.” I later heard that in Houston they have a similar message on their big lighted signs, the ones that we in L.A. use to tell people inaccurate information about how long it’s going to take them to get somewhere they’re not heading. (“Oh, it’s fifteen minutes to Topanga Canyon? Great. I’m not going there but thanks for slowing everyone down to look at that message.”) In Houston the slogan is “If It Steers, It Clears.” This is a simple solution to a ubiquitous problem: a minor fender bender causing major rubbernecking, slowing everything down. Usually it isn’t even a fender bender. It’s a bumper thumper. No one is hurt, merely two dickheads doing eleven dollars’ worth of damage to each other’s “Who Rescued Who?” license-plate frames. But they’ve decided the world must come to a stop while they take pictures of the crime scene. First off, if we are all going to slow down for this nonsense, we should have the right to egg the people when we drive by and see that our commute has been lengthened for no fucking reason. I’m a two-time winner of the Toyota Celebrity Grand Prix of Long Beach. I’ve seen more than my share of accidents and been involved in a number of them as well. One racer will plow into the wall and the ten cars behind him will then smash into each other. Well, the race is then over, right? Nope. Everyone pops it into reverse, untangles their bumpers, and finishes the race. Or think about the police chases you see on the news. Eventually the cops throw down the spike strip and the gangbangers try to get away with sparks flying off their spinner rims. With that in mind, I think that the two Honda Civics that traded a little paint going 14 mph can pull over to the side and let the rest of us get to our destination.
So God bless you, Portland and Houston and all the other cities that have these signs. In my administration this message will be made into a national campaign. Why, you ask, isn’t this nationwide already? I’ll tell you. Because it’s not something a politician can run on in an election. They can’t brag about them like they can about crime statistics. So they don’t care. When I had lieutenant governor of California Gavin Newsom on the podcast, I asked him why we did not have these signs in California. Not only did he not have a good excuse, he readily admitted he hadn’t even heard of them. You are the lieutenant governor of a state where, and this is a true statistic, $1,300 a year is wasted in productivity and fuel per driver because of traffic. He never heard of them?! This is what government does! This is a larger issue than just slowing me down on my way to the strip club. This is about waste. We have plenty of multimillion-dollar campaigns that do nothing. This is the essence of government. We’ll take your money and still do nothing to solve your problems.
Our current government doesn’t give a fuck about transportation. They only give a fuck about making money. When it comes to synchronizing the traffic lights and cutting down on that lost time sitting in traffic, they don’t have the IQ for that. But when it comes to stuff that makes them money—chickenshit tickets, parking meters, and speed traps—they’re all Lex Luthor. They turn into diabolical mad geniuses.
The prime examples of this are the so-called smart parking meters. These were recently installed in Santa Monica, and have sensors to detect when you’ve pulled away so they can reset and not allow the next person to take advantage of the three minutes you have left on the meter. Why is it that the streetlights are the same ones our grandparents enjoyed while driving their Hudsons but parking meters are something that came out of the mind of Steve Jobs? Improvements that he
lp us are too tall an order, but stuff that makes them money keeps getting smarter? When are we going to say enough is enough? The government is putting its collective brainpower into the metal poles we’re being raped with. That’s what meters should be called from now on, “rape sticks.” There is a news story every month and a half about new parking meters. We’re not paying you tax money to think of ways to get more money from us. If there is time left on the meter because I overpaid, that’s my money to do what I please with. I have purchased that time. If I choose to pay it forward to the next guy pulling up to the Starbucks, that’s my choice. This is theft. The government is stealing the time and space I rented from them.
They know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve done the math on the meters and how much change we carry around. I parked in Hollywood recently, put in a quarter, and got nine minutes. Why nine? They thought of this intentionally. There was an algorithm figured out to determine how long it takes people to accomplish the task they’ve parked for; after determining that, they shaved off a minute so people are more likely to go over that time and get a ticket. I’m not paranoid, I just know our government and that when it was time to program the meters they decided to bust out the abacus and figure out how to fuck us.
When they don’t have robot rape sticks to do their bidding, the government relies on old-fashioned cunts and dicks known as meter maids. Here’s how you know meter maids have quotas. They do their job. Every government employee is slow as fucking glaciers and horribly inefficient at their job. If you need the Department of Water or Department of Power to come out to your house, they give you an eight-hour window. In L.A., you can get a ticket on your windshield during the time it takes to get out of your car to walk around to the meter. Everyone else on the city payroll moves like a tree sloth on a Quaalude. Except for the meter maids. They’re hummingbirds on a double cappuccino. You think this is a coincidence? Do you think this profession attracts highly motivated self-starters? No. They move so fast because of quotas. And by the way, do you notice I don’t refer to them as parking enforcement personnel? That’s way too much respect for a job where you make nineteen bucks an hour ruining people’s days. And to all of you who say, “But it’s not their fault, they’re just doing their job,” I say, this: Shut the fuck up. That defense didn’t work at Nuremberg and it’s not going to work on me. You think someone got them in a headlock and dragged them out of high school and put them in meter-maid academy? They had choices. They could have taken paths with more dignity. Like crack whore or human trafficker. They chose to do this. Thus meter maids should garner none of our sympathy.