Musing of one thinking about the extraordinarily beautiful Iowa girl who, on a visit to Southern California, started across the street at Hollywood

and Vine, created a monstrous traffic jam and got a ticket for obstructing traffic...

The following is just a story. It has no particular moral or point. It is simply a bit of history provided for the edification of young people who may not be knowledgeable about the 1930s and the Great Depression.

One night in the mid-1930s, when our family lived in Alta Dena, California, my brother and I decided to drive over to Hollywood. So we borrowed the family car (at that time, very few families owned 2 cars and many families didn't own a car at all) and set out for TinselTown. A little while later, we were driving through the Los Feliz district when we came to a four-way stop.

At this point I should describe the milieu in which drivers operated in those days. There were no left turn lanes, and automobiles did not have any directional signals. A driver signified his intention by sticking his left arm out the window and pointing it in a certain direction. Straight up meant right turn, straight out (horizontal) meant left turn, straight down meant stop. If the arm pointed at 45 degrees, everybody had to guess. Left turns were made from the regular lanes. In this case all 4 streets comprising the intersection were all 4 lanes, so left turns were to be made from the inside lane.

Traffic was fairly heavy and when we arrived at the stop sign, a number of other cars arrived at the same time from the other streets. For some reason, nobody noticed the forest of arms sticking straight out the windows. By coincidence, all the cars in the left hand lanes started at once to make their left turns, and all arrived smack in the middle of the intersection and got stuck there.

At this point, I should note that Los Angeles drivers always had a propensity for following as close as possible on the bumper of the car in front and not yielding to anything unless it had a red light and siren (there were no flashing red lights, the emergency lights were simply bigger).

Anyhow, of course all lanes in the intersection became blocked and there we sat. Some people got out of their cars and looked around and I imagine the atmosphere was permeated with various expletives. I also imagine people walking on the sidewalk were doubled over with laughter. Eventually the police came and untangled us and we all proceeded on our merry (?) ways.

In view of the vastly greater number of vehicles on the road today, it is a good thing that traffic control has kept up fairly well. We have left-turn lanes, directional signals on cars, computerized traffic signals, GPS, etc. So that's a good thing.

However, in spite of all this, we haven't solved the problem of traffic jams.

And so one of the frustrations of driving is still with us.

Musing of one thinking about the guy hiking through the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest who encountered Bigfoot, challenged him to a game of...

...hopscotch and lost.

A Fable
One bright Saturday, when Congress had adjourned for the weekend, two Congressmen were sitting in a bar trying to decide what to do for the day. One of them said, "let's go down to the river and rent a boat and paddle down a ways and back." The other guy said, "good idea." So they went to the river, found a boat rental place, and rented a canoe. Since they were both big city boys, neither one of them knew how to paddle a canoe. So the owner gave them a rudimentary lesson, then shoved the canoe out into the current. They were paddling away when a piece of floating debris hit the paddle of the one in the bow, knocking it from his grasp. It floated away and the one in the stern paddled furiously trying to keep up with it. However, as a novice, he kept paddling on one side of the canoe, with the result that it went in circles. Shortly afterwards, his hands got so sweaty that his paddle slipped from his grasp to go find the other one. They drifted helplessly down the river until it disgorged them in a small branch of the river that went off to somewhere. They drifted down the branch until the canoe struck a sunken log and lodged there. One of them said, "Here we are...up a creek without a paddle. What do we do now?" The other one happened to glance towards the shore and saw an elderly man standing there. "Hey Pops," he yelled, "could you help us figure out how to get to shore?" The elderly man said, "Well, if I were you, I'd wade because it's only 2 feet deep. But I would take off my shoes and trousers first." So they removed all their clothing below the waist, rolled it into a ball, and managed to fall out of the canoe and wade to land. The elderly man led them to a clearing where the sun was shining brightly so they could dry off. After they dressed, he took them to his car, which was only a couple hundred yards away, and drove them back to the boat place. He refused any kind of payment, and drove off after giving them a parting admonition, "when you don't know what you're doing, sometimes it's wise not to do it." They paid the boat owner for the lost paddles plus the cost of retrieving the canoe and headed back to the city.

The next week when Congress was in session again, they introduced a bill requiring every rental boat to be equipped with an extra set of oars or paddles plus a battery-driven flashing red light as an emergency signal.

The bill passed 433-2. The 2 nay votes were from 2 Congressmen who happen to own interest in boat rental businesses.

The moral of this fable is in the mind of the reader.