GarageGuy's Blog

Front page news in the Greeley Tribune...

Looking to Avoid Aggressive Drivers? Check Those Bumpers

 

Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2008; Page A02

Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of "are-we-there-yet?" -- and the road rage of fellow drivers. Divine intervention might be needed for the first two problems, but science has discovered a solution for the third.

 Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

That's the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

 It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love -- "Visualize World Peace," "My Kid Is an Honor Student" -- or angry and in your face -- "Don't Mess With Texas," "My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student."

 Hey, you clown! This ain't funny! Aggressive driving might be responsible for up to two-thirds of all U.S. traffic accidents that involve injuries.

 Szlemko and his colleagues at Fort Collins found that people who personalize their cars acknowledge that they are aggressive drivers, but usually do not realize that they are reporting much higher levels of aggression than people whose cars do not have visible markers on their vehicles.

Drivers who do not personalize their cars get angry, too, Szlemko and his colleagues concluded in a paper they recently published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, but they don't act out their anger. They fume, mentally call the other driver a jerk, and move on.

"The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked," Szlemko said. "Just the presence of territory markers predicts the tendency to be an aggressive driver."

The key to the phenomenon apparently lies in the idea of territoriality. Drivers with road rage tend to think of public streets and highways as "my street" and "my lane" -- in other words, they think they "own the road."

 Why would bumper stickers predict which people are likely to view public roadways as private property?

 Social scientists such as Szlemko say that people carry around three kinds of territorial spaces in their heads. One is personal territory -- like a home, or a bedroom. The second kind involves space that is temporarily yours -- an office cubicle or a gym locker. The third kind is public territory: park benches, walking trails -- and roads

 Previous research has shown that these different territorial spaces evoke distinct emotional responses. People are willing to physically defend private territory in ways they would never do with public territory. And people personalize private territory with various kinds of markers -- in their homes, for example, they hang paintings, alter the decor and carry out renovations.

 "Territoriality is hard-wired into our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago," said Paul Bell, a co-author of the study at Colorado State. "Animals are territorial because it had survival value. If you could keep others away from your hunting groups, you had more game to spear . . . it becomes part of the biology."

 Drivers who individualize their cars using bumper stickers, window decals and personalized license plates, the researchers hypothesized, see their cars in the same way as they see their homes and bedrooms -- as deeply personal space, or primary territory.

 Unlike any environment our evolutionary ancestors might have confronted, driving a car simultaneously places people in both private territory -- their cars -- and public territory -- the road. Drivers who personalize their cars with bumper stickers and other markers of private territory, the researchers argue, forget when they are on the road that they are in public territory because the immediate cues surrounding them tell them that they are in a deeply private space.

"If you are in a vehicle that you identify as a primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space," Bell added. "What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway -- you lose sight of the fact you are in a public area and you don't own the road."

Szlemko said that, in an as-yet-unpublished experiment, he conducted tests of road rage in actual traffic. He had one researcher sit in a car in a left-turn lane. When the light turned green, the researcher simply stayed still, blocking the car behind.

Another researcher, meanwhile, examined whether the blocked car had bumper stickers and other markers of territoriality. The experimental question was how long it would take for the driver of the blocked car to honk in frustration.

Szlemko said that drivers of cars with decals, bumper stickers and personalized license plates honked at the offending vehicle nearly two full seconds faster than drivers of cars without any territorial markers.

One of the dumbest damn things I've read so far this week.....

Lawmakers that is...

One morning last week...

So there I was, minding my own business driving down CSH 60 on the shoulder of the road, blowing past one of those canned hybrids that apparently can’t wind up faster than 40 mph when I decided to pull over for a very understanding State Trooper. He informed me that creating your own lane to work is illegal. So I handed him my drivers license with a mug picture that looked like Brad Pitt going through withdraws in a drunk tank with an outdated address and an expired insurance card. To avoid more tickets, I just simply didn’t explain to him why I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt. I got away with only a $22.00 fine for not wrapping a seatbelt around me. Sure as hell, I drove away with no seatbelt. Pretty damn awesome to watch my tax dollars at work.
Now I’m not complaining, but if lawmakers are going to go out of their way to pass laws to protect us from ourselves, such as seatbelts, helmets, etc. then I have just one question for them.
WHY THE HELL DO YOU ALLOW A BATTERY OPERATED BOX OF P!SS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN PANCAKED INTO A CONCRETE WALL BY MY ¾ TON CHEVY TRUCK ON THE ROADS. That can opener has no right being on the road. Yet this fishing weight is what you feel-good snobs are pushing Automakers to sell us. I supposed to start that roller-skate strap on, ya'll just pull the string outa the a$s end and hope to hell ya make it 2 miles before the string winds itself back into its own a$s. Hell, I’d be safer pushin’ my daughters’ scooter backwards with a seeing eye dog down the middle of I-25 around 5:00 on a Friday afternoon than peddling around in that barrel of BLEEP ya’ll call a hybrid.

And I’m just getting’ started….but you get the point, so I’ll shut up for now.

guess I kind of went off there.......BUT, I'm over that now!

Rush Limbaugh appears to have the Midas touch.

 

 

The conservative radio talk-show host turned an inflammatory letter written by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and signed by 41 of his fellow Democrats into a more than $4.2 million gold mine for the kids of Marines and law enforcement personnel killed in the line of duty, all courtesy of eBay.

 

Betty Casey, described as a loyal listener to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, coughed up more than $2.1 million to be the sole owner of the letter sent to the radio host's boss demanding that Limbaugh be reprimanded for a "phony soldier" comment he made on air. Limbaugh has pledged to match whatever was paid for the letter.

 

“She gives significant sums to hospitals, hospices, colleges and private schools,” Limbaugh said during his radio show Friday afternoon, just after the eBay auction ended. “Betty has been a listener to my program since its inception, and we can't thank her enough for her support. This was kind of the last straw for her, what Harry Reid did here.”

 

The letter, sent by Reid and signed by his Democratic colleagues, was delivered Oct. 2 to Mark P. Mays, president of Clear Channel, the parent company of the conservative talk show host’s radio broadcast.

 

Click here to read the letter sent by Reid to Clear Channel's Mark Mays.

 

In exchange for her $2.1 million, Casey, a trustee of the Maryland-based Eugene B. Casey Foundation, will receive the letter, the Halliburton briefcase in which the letter is secured 24 hours a day, a letter of thanks from Limbaugh and a picture of him announcing the auction at a speech in Philadelphia last week.

 

Proceeds from the auction will benefit the Maine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit that gives scholarship assistance to children of Marines and federal law enforcement personnel whose parents die in the line of duty.

 

Limbaugh has denied the term "phony soldiers" referred to former servicemen and women who served in Iraq and now oppose the war, but to those who lied about their service. A literal reading of the Sept. 26 show in question shows that the controversial host did not say that soldiers opposing the war are "phony."

 

On his Friday radio show, Limbaugh said Reid’s letter was an “abuse of power against a private citizen.”

 

“Harry Reid in a speech on the Senate floor at 12 noon today, a little over an hour ago, attempted to hone in on all this and take some credit for it, claiming that he and I had buried the hatchet, or implying that that had been the case, and then kept using the pronoun "we" in discussing how good this was, the money going to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation,” Limbaugh said on his show.

 

“Three words, that means, ‘Rush, you win,’” Reid told his colleagues on the Senate floor. “I asked Sen. Reid to match and all the other senators who can afford to do so. I haven't heard from them on that. I asked Sen. Reid to go on the program and discuss his discussion of me as "unpatriotic." He did not accept my offer to do that and now has the audacity to climb aboard this, praising the effort, saying that "he" never knew that it would get this kind of money.

 

He also announced an unknown number of certified copies of the letter signed by him will be sold on for $1,000 on his Web site, with proceeds going to the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation.

 

So did Casey get her money's worth?

 

Kieta, the vice president of AmericanMemorabilia.com who goes by only one name, said what makes the letter appealing to a buyer is all the media attention the correspondence has received, but it holds no real historical or collector value.

 

“If you compare it to an Abraham Lincoln document, there is obviously no comparison,” Kieta said. “This is strictly a promotional marketing ploy. Historically speaking, is it a historical document? I wouldn’t categorize it as a historical document.”

 

 

Recieved this in an e-mail.  Yep, cut & paste but thought it was worth sharing.

Numbers and Facts:  So often, we get caught up in a debate over political semantics and end up ignoring the hard-shell realities of what we're talking about.

   According to immigrationCounters.com, Here are some of the realities that Flake-Gutierrez Bill would airbrush out of the picture:

 Number of Illegal Aliens in the Country

20,807,645

Money Wired to Mexico City since January, 2006

$22,213,001,672.00

Cost of Social Security Services for Illegal Aliens since 1996

$397,450,739,563.00

Number of Children of Illegal Aliens in Public Schools

3,958,789

Cost of Illegal Aliens in K-12 Since 1996:

$13, 965,063,431.00

Number of Illegal Aliens Incarcerated

332,594

Cost of Incarcerations Since 2001 

$1,398,127,429.00

Number of Illegal Aliens Fugitives

642,799

Skilled Jobs Taken by Illegal Aliens

9,872,838

   Figures can trick your eyes.  Take particular note that items 2,3,5, and 7 reflect BILLION not millions of dollars and that item 3 exceeds one-third of a TRILLION dollars.  Can you imagine how much it will cost taxpayers if we triple the number of Illegals entering this country!!