How to Play Traffic

REQUIRED TO PLAY: One serviceable automobile, one valid driver's license. Paranoid friends and relatives add to the fun.

OBJECT OF THE GAME: To obtain the highest possible number of points over a set period of time by completing certain objectives, usually involving tacky violations of road law and/or etiquette, written and unwritten.

HOW TO PLAY: This game is as much a pastime as a sport. You can play anywhere, any time: driving to work, dropping the kids off at soccer, going on a joy ride with friends, moving your father-in-law's jaguar around the block for him. Try to complete as many objectives as possible in the shortest possible time. Style points figure big in this game, as do making up your own objectives on the spur of the moment. Success requires quick thinking, situational awareness, and the sort of mind that brings you to FCN in the first place.

Scoring and objective verification is based on the honor system.

OBJECTIVES (An incomplete list):

Fake forward. While stopped at a red light, edge forward a few inches, then stop.

2 points: Make the car behind you edge forward as well.
4 points: Make the car next to you edge forward.
6 points: Make the car next to you run the light.
9 points: Make the car next to you drive into oncoming traffic.
13 points: Make the car behind you rear-end you. Sue the driver out of house and home.

Zone of Control. Throw a left turn signal indicating a merge into the fast lane, but stay in your current lane indefinitely.

1 point: Make a passing car fall back.
2 points: Make a passing hummer fall back.
4 points: Make a sports car follow behind you indefinitely.
13 points: Make a police car follow behind you indefinitely.

I'm from Europe. Drive a donut in the middle of an intersection.

2 points: Learn a new word from a fellow motorist.
7 points: Learn a new word from a nun.

Litter bug. While stopped at a red light, exit the car to collect a piece of trash lying on the side of the road, then return to the vehicle before the light turns green.

3 points: Get a Spock eyebrow from the driver behind you.
5 points: Collect the litter that the driver behind you just tossed out his window.
9 points: Sell the litter on eBay.
11 points: Catch the litter before it hits the ground.
14 points: Appear on the Village Roadshow with the litter.

Chicken Little. Roll down your window and gesture emphatically skyward.

1 point: Make someone look.
2 points: Catch them looking and laugh at them.
4 points: Make someone leap from their car and run for cover.
8 points: Make everyone in sight leap from their car and run for cover.
15 points: Reverse the flow of traffic.

My favorite song. Roll down your window and sing along with the radio of an adjacent motorist who also has his/her windows down.

2 points: Make the fellow motorist turn his music up.
3 points: Make the fellow motorist turn his music down.
5 points: The song is "Riding Dirty."

Actually, it can be done. Parallel park from across the street by sawing a hard left and closing the hand brake.

2 points: Complete this stunt without damaging anything.
3 points: Complete this stunt and damage a jaguar.
5 points: Complete this stunt and damage your father-in-law's jaguar.
8 points: Complete this stunt in your father-in-law's jaguar.
10 points: Complete this stunt in your prospective father-in-law's jaguar with your sweetheart in the passenger seat.
16 points: Complete this stunt in your prospective father-in-law's jaguar with your prospective mother-in-law in the passenger seat.

Gotcha Going. Rev your engine as a pedestrian passes in front of you on a crosswalk.

-1 point: Get a Spock eyebrow from said pedestrian.
3 points: Get a scream.
5 points: Make said pedestrian break and run.
7 points: Make said pedestrian break and run into oncoming traffic.
12 points: Make an adjacent motorist drive into oncoming traffic.
15 points: The pedestrian is wearing an orange vest and holding a KIDS XING sign.

Cut! Drive off a cliff just before something explodes.

40 points.

Gotcha!

Give people a chance to speak their minds, give them a public forum and this sort of thing is bound to happen. A few weeks ago, FCN gave readers the opportunity to write their own posts on Wednesdays. We relinquished control over our very carefully policed post creation policy and let readers create their own content. We disregarded our own lengthy training and intense qualifications as bloggers and gave the faithful few the floor.

The result? Our own readers caught a slight discrepancy between fact and the reported reader statistic on our sidebar. The sidebar clearly says visitor #11 since 2006, a fact first noticed by Unique #11. Big Mo, Sarah and FCNisFake jumped on the bandwagon revealing what appears to be, at first rush of blood to the face, a bald-faced lie.

Let us start off by saying that we miswrote our stat counter script in December of 2006. We had heard reports of eleven readers but none came to visit during the "corkscrew-style" diagnostic test period which formed the template for future measurement. Now, it is possible in the most recent instance in which we discussed this that we misspoke with regard to, you know, the hit counter. The facts are clear from contemporaneous news accounts that we were entering a potentially dangerous situation, and we have written about this before, we have talked about this before and there you have it.

There were reports of visitors in the hills who never actually made it to the site. That is what we wrote on FCN, that is what we have said many, many times. And on this one occasion we misspoke, but it’s — the record is clear in terms what we have said before on this topic.

We had not slept for several hours straight, our schedules had been really hectic and our memory was clouded by the events in our lives. Our love lives were wrecks, we were sleep deprived and our memories were clouded. We regret having misrepresented the truth, but remain confident in the general facts.

A second analysis, this time looking more closely at the relevant data and ignoring information which would distract from the goal of an accurate count, reveals that the actual number of visitors to this site since December of 2006 is 12. Older evidence showing our unique reader count at eleven may have been fabricated - or even an outright lie - but other, unnamed evidence is incontrovertible. We promise. The total number of readers is 12. That you can take to the bank or stuff it in your mattress.



Or is it more like this:

Tire Rotation

Like women, cars need maintenance. That's a fact that found its place firmly ensconced in the back of my mind when I first took up driving, but it moved to the front like a bad headache when I first had to change the oil. Or rather, had to pay to change the oil. Greasy hands and the smell of a car's underbelly are deemed too pedestrian for starving college students who work at General Mills, so we hire that sort of thing out to uniformed professionals who can afford to eat.

If changing the oil was a headache, tire rotation was Gusii Trepanation. For those of you who are deathly curious, but for some reason don't want to click on the link (get DSL, you dial-up Baby Boomer), a Gusii Trepanation is a surgery designed to relieve cranial stress wherein (and this is where it gets gross) a hole is drilled in the skull. The practice is based on the same ideology as the blood leeches that killed our first president, except that it is still used today.

So maybe tire rotation isn't Gusii Trepanation, but it isn't Office Supplies either.

Please tell me that one doesn't need any explanation. Thank you.

I found myself at my local mechanics shop, watching as my precious wheels were lifted slowly above an oily cement surface and as several young men looking like the bumpkins in a Rodney Atkins music video (minus the Skoal cans) scrambled around like a pitt stop in slow motion. Very slow motion. I sat in the establishment's under-furnished waiting room for just under an hour, occupied only by a game show so stupid it was picked up by the Discovery Channel and some car magazines that depress readers with all the horsepower they don't and never will have.

When an front desk attendant finally mispronounced my name, I got up with a relieved sigh and extended my had to a young man who looked too young to support the hair on his chin but compensated for his youth with a very earnest demeanor. The complimentary tire rotation was complete, but the mechanics had discovered a number of problems with my car in the process of moving the rubber. Apparently my brakes were worn down almost to nothing, my alignment more crooked than Jessica Simpson's pre-surgery nose (my words, not the attendant's) and my shocks were, well, shot. The entire situation could be resolved for the whopping sum of five hundred bucks.

Deep breath. A pain that was almost physical started tingling in my toes, exactly the way Colbie Caillat didn't intend. The car had run so well on the way in. The rotation was supposed to be routine. I hadn't felt anything wrong with the alignment and my shocks had given me no static when I took the hill where Peltier meets the train tracks at eighty. I had the funds, but the money, in my mind, was already spent elsewhere. Why did cars have to be so expensive? First the Saudis and their gas gouging and now mechanic's mania.

"Would you like to take care of this now?"

I turned to Goatee Boy with a tight smile, glancing down at his nametag in the same motion.

"Actually...Tony...I think I'll shop this around. Thanks for the rotation."

I walked out of the building and to my waiting car with all the confidence I didn't have. On my way home I noticed my car had a new rattle, I could feel an alignment error and my brakes were not as responsive as they used to be - all problems I hadn't noticed an hour and a half earlier. Sigh. "Free" tire rotation, indeed.

Or maybe it's all in my head and these problems were there all along and only now has my attention been drawn to it. Maybe the mechanic had altruistically pointed out a flaw in my car that, if unattended, would have been a danger to me or others on the road. But I think not. Something about Tony's goatee shouted "hood tinkerer" and I don't mean that as a compliment.