Tues., May 25, 1999
"The report of my death was an exaggeration."
- Mark Twain"I regret to inform America that Mr. Twain apparently misspoke."
- "Coroner to the Stars" Dr. Thomas Noguchi
after exhuming the body of Twain in an attempt to
settle this long-running controversy once and for all."We believe that what the idiot found was nothing more than
the body of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Our faith in the continuing survival of Mr. Twain endures despite these on-going efforts of the federal government, the U.N., and the Martian Republic to hoodwink the common man and whatever pet women he may have." - Press Release from the Humorists Militia's "Head Huckleberry"
Although it may appear as if I've been utterly wasting my time again, I've actually been digging ever deeper into the nature of reality. All part of the necessary research for the Great American Novel I want to write - a novel I call "Car East, Car West."
"Car East, Car West" is about this guy who sits on his porch all day apparently utterly wasting his time but who's actually digging ever deeper into the nature of reality. His research focuses on the cars going by on the road in front of him - a road which just happens to run east and west, same as mine. I figured before I wrote about such a fascinating character, I better investigate his world a bit more closely, hence all the time I've been spending on my porch lately, watching the cars go by.
This was no spur of the moment, half-ass project, I assure you. I carefully mapped out my course of action in the days and weeks leading up to the official launch date of April 26 - a date many great scientists and writers have done work on.
First, I determined that half-an-hour was about as long as I could stand to watch the cars going by without my eyes going bonkers and my imaginary friend, Hans, showing up and starting to tease me. Second, I broke the standard 24-hour day into 48 half-hour periods. Third, I began to randomly sample the traffic on my road (State Route 117, if truth be told) over a period of four weeks at various times of day until virtually all 48 half-hour periods had been covered. Although I still need to sample the 7 or so half-hour periods which fall between 1:30 am and 5 am, I suspect that I'm on the verge of a mental breakthrough which will allow me to just pick some plausible numbers out of the air while simultaneously preserving my usual sleeping schedule.
To avoid having to deal with too many variables at once, I limited my painstaking research to fair weather Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Here's what I've found out:
About 6815 vehicles go by my porch in the daylight hours (6 am - 9:30 pm).
About 3522 of those (or 51.8%) are going east.
About 3282 of those (or 48.2%) are going west.
About 3872 of those (or 55.2%) are passenger cars (including station wagons, Jeeps, and rust buckets on wheels).
About 1212 of those are pick-up trucks (ranging from small, girlie Toyotas to mammoth 4-door beasts with yacht-size caps).
About 981 of those (or 14.1%) are vans - some exceeding ugly.
About 548 of those (or 7.8%) are Sports Utility Vehicles (or SUVs). I'd expected more.
About 227 of those (or 7.8%) are non-semi trucks. (I discovered that I personally prefer the Nickles bread truck to any of the dump trucks that go by.)
About 62 of those (or 0.9%) are semi-tractor trailer trucks (including a few cabs-only).
About 36 of those (or 0.5%) are school buses (all yellow).
About 29 of those (or 0.4%) are motorcycles (relatively few in packs).
About 168 of those (or 2.5%) fell into my miscellaneous category which included police cars, mail vans, heavy construction vehicles, taxis, recreational vehicles, hearses, limos, farm tractors (just 1), and street cleaners (also just 1).
Note 1: Figures slightly exceed 100% due to rounding.
Note 2: I am NOT including those vehicles I counted in the dark because of my inability to accurately categorize them by type. It is hard enough to decide whether a given hunk of metal going by at 45 mph is a small SUV or a souped-up pick-up in broad daylight (especially when it is just one of a pack of 3 going east and 5 going west) let alone in pitch blackness, so get over it.
Note 3: I would have included data regarding how many people were in each vehicle, but every time I tried to ask, the driver's answer was drowned out by otherworldly honking.To see a sexy chart on which all my counts are plotted over time, click here.
To see extremely explicit color photos of my road bathed in Ohio sunshine, click east or west.
Need a break from all this traffic? Click old or new to see explicit color photos of my two most recent furnaces.So: Not only do I now have the information I need to write a great novel, this project raises many questions which other scholars may wish to pursue in the noble effort to roll back the limits on humanity's knowledge of traffic, life, and everything.
To wit:
Why are more vehicles going east than west?
Why are they apparently not coming back?
Is it possible to find out who won't be coming back ahead of time so that we might send astronauts to go land in and ransack their houses?
Does the flow of traffic drop significantly when it's raining? Can we assume that the difference between rain traffic and normal traffic represents the difference between those who absolutely have to be out and those who have nothing better to do than drive by my house in hopes of entertaining me?
If my county's overall system of roads can be likened to the circulatory network of arteries and veins in the human body, is it possible to ascertain that system's general "blood pressure" by merely counting the number of vehicles going by the point outside my lit'l front door? And is there any correlation between the number of white SUVs going by and the number of white blood corpuscles roaming the hallways of my county's courthouse?Isn't it exceedingly strange that I can tell absolutely nothing from watching a single vehicle going by but, from watching and counting for half-an-hour, I can tell an awful lot about the world at large? Like time of day, probable destinations of the people going by, popularity of different types of vehicles in my area, overall wealth of my community, color preferences, average family size in my county, type of businesses in my area (and the proportions of each), probable school starting and ending times, average wake-up times for people in May, percentage of people who go out on Friday night, whether and where new homes may be being built, etc., etc.
If a single vehicle tells me nothing, but all the vehicles taken together tell me a lot, where does the information come from??
What is the minimum number of vehicles I need to count in order to come to some accurate conclusions about my time and place?
What is the minimum sample time required for significant information to be had?
Should the sequel to my novel be entitled "Bird East, Bird West" or "Debbie Does 117"?If you have any answers, pass 'em along. (I'm all full up on questions, so please keep those to yourself or donate them to Project CARE, which will pass them along to those poor people who are too old, weak, or sick to make up their own anymore.)
New Feature! In a cynical effort to attract more mainland Chinese surfers to this journal, I've decided to launch a new daily feature called "U.S. Nuclear Secrets You May Have Missed." Just between you and me, here's
|Today's Top Secret|
"Rude and Crude" is the code name of a BB-size thermonuclear device designed to enable American boys to blow up a targeted girl's skirt with impunity while on an unsupervised playground. For plans and details, please send your name, a stamped, self-addressed envelope, and $100,000 (U.S.) to P.O. Box 8121, Lima, Ohio, 45805. (Sorry - no C.O.D.'s)
Home To The Porch (now with Fallout Shelter)
(All Material Not An Obvious Rip-Off Of Some Other Aspect Of Western Civilization © 1999 by Dan Birtcher)
