As I was digging up some assorted factoids for a rant about the H1N1 hysteria, I came across a bit of information that actually caught me by surprise: Massachusetts has the lowest motor vehicle accident fatality rate in the United States and has held that distinction since at least 2004. If you scroll down the page on that second link, you’ll see that this is true even in DUI-related accidents.
Quite honestly, that’s not what I’d expect given the way people drive around here. The Reuters article in that first link says that the highest fatality rates are in the South, then offers the speculation that the rates are higher because people have to drive longer distances to get from place to place. My own theory is that we spend so much time snarled in traffic that it prevents all those aggro drivers from causing more deadly accidents than if they could get about unimpeded. If we had miles of open road, they’d be littered with corpses, and not from all those people dying of the Swine Flu…which, as I originally intended to post about, they aren’t.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
