Category Archives: stupidity

Traffic in Chicago Is Tough on Everyone

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Traffic tip for the days ahead: If you see a motorcade with police cars, black SUVs and guys with sunglasses talking into their cuffs, don’t try to cut it off.

One couple tried to drive their tan sedan around Barack Obama’s motorcade downtown Thursday morning and found themselves looking at the barrels of Secret Service firepower.

“The [Secret Service] SUV cut the car off immediately, and the security team aimed their weapons at the car,” a reporter in the motorcade wrote in a pool report. “The driver and passenger in the sedan stopped and looked stunned — until the male driver appeared to understand what was happening (your pool reporter could see him mouth ‘Obama’).”

The president-elect was on his way to a security briefing at FBI headquarters in the Loop, when the motorcade left Lake Shore Drive and the sedan tried to drive around it on Van Buren, according to the pool reporter, P.J. Huffstutter, the Los Angeles Times’ Midwest Bureau chief.

“Some of the drivers here in Chicago do not seem to understand that a) The Chicago police car at the end of the president-elect’s motorcade is serious about having traffic pull over when the officers flash their lights and hit their sirens, and b) It’s not a great idea to jump ahead of traffic by trying to cut around the black SUV filled with five heavily-armed Secret Service CAT members,” Huffstutter wrote.

Awesome.

So apparently Websense, the filtering service that $employer uses, has determined that any and all URL’s that begin with http://community.livejournal.com are sex-related and must be blocked.

Yeah.

Hopefully that will be fixed quickly.

Two Items of Note

I almost forgot! I wanted to mention two things.

First off, Halloween is upon us. takaza went all out, ordering some nifty stuff from Oriental Trading Company to give to the trick-or-treaters. Then I checked the Village of Hainesville website: “The official trick-or-treat time is Sunday, October 28, from 1 PM to 4 PM.” Wow. Trick or treating in the daytime? Could they do anything more to sap the fun out of it? Maybe require everyone to give out coupons for healthy carrot and apple snacks instead of candy? Gah. I could rant about this so much but I just won’t. Anyway, we got all of five trick or treaters. Five. Two of those didn’t even have costumes, just stood at the door with an outthrust grocery bag, and one of those only said “Trick or Treat” when Dan asked, “Can I help you?”

I sure hope we get more kids by on Wednesday night, ’cause we sure do have a lot of candy left.

On a brighter note, I finally got around to trying the Aeropress coffee maker I picked up the other day. Oh. My. God. So good. This was really amazing coffee. It’s not really espresso as much as coffee concentrate. You brew it at 165-175 degrees F (much lower than usual) and there’s only about ten seconds of contact between the coffee grounds and the water, then you press. I used as much coffee grounds as I usually do for three mugs of coffee (my standard morning dose) and got about 2/3 of a mug. Then I got stupid and made another round. Um, yeah – the caffeine is totally still in there. I think I was vibrating slightly for a good half-hour. Anyway, the coffee is every bit as smooth and rich as they say it is. I highly recommend it!