Atlanta's Auto Apocalyptic future

During recent travels to Savannah, TPP had no choice but to drive via Atlanta, going south on a Saturday morning, and going north at midday on Sunday. The traffic was horrible, no-good, very bad, and awful, all 12 lanes of it, and these were not working days or a rush hour, so without question the traffic was not anywhere as bad as it gets. These four, five, and six lane rivers of cars have spawned the worst traffic-weaving drivers TPP has ever seen, although granted commuting has never been part of my life.  Kept looking for the jerk driver atomizer that was surely standard equipment.  Having taken two different routes so as to sample more than one flavor, everywhere there was road construction, lanes, exchanges, extensions, bridges, Atlanta, you are being devoured by by cars, bound and beaten by highways, and you double down on making access for more?  No evidence of any mass transit existing or being constructed.  What a bleak future awaits this poor city. In a wonderful bit of counter intuitive irony (is that possible?), more roads never, ever solves traffic problems, they only make it worse by increasing the volume. What a great example of sadly misdirected planning. As for advice to drivers; avoid Atlanta. 

Blogging milestone

TPP has been blogging now for a bit more than 8 years!  Blog traffic has been tracked for the past 6 years, and went past the one millionth page view a month or so back.  It works out to an average of 500 page views a day, 15,000 page views a month for 6 years.  The two prior years were more or less shouting into the internet abyss where a stand-alone blog was hardly ever noticed. It's all still there in the archives, and for most of you new material.  The blogs used to be longer and less frequent, but that seemed to take too much time.  And for all of this TPP remains unsullied by money or advertising.  This is not actually very impressive traffic by the standards of some blogs, and this blog's readers are largely silent, not the chatter boxes of some blogs, but a lot of real content has been delivered over the years, a lot of pretty nice images (some of which get used without permission). And so there you have it.  Insane or kept sane; you decide. The Phytophactor goes on.

How to kill an iZombie

Sometime back TPP commented on iPhone zombies, but a similar affliction can also occur due to ear buds and whatever they are delivering from an iPod, so the result is an iZombie. Like all zombies, you have to know the right way to kill them, but based on recent events that may not be too difficult. You turn an ordinary person, often a student around here, into an iZombie by giving them a smart phone and a set of ear buds either attached to the iphone or an ipod, either or both transform the user into an iZombie. To kill an iZombie, you simply must steer them gently into an intersection or actually any urban street at all and in no time at all the traffic will claim another iZombie. So much easier than axes or swords or shotguns. Yes, why they might even get hit by a bicycle going at a good clip. Now this concerns TPP, the bicyclist could get hurt seriously, particularly when they are a senior citizen. So it is quite lucky, although no small amount of bicycling skill was involved, that TPP was able to avoid narrowly such a collision not because of his concern for the iZombie, but who wants to get a broken bone in the process?  And who but an iZombie would walk down a driveway and into the street without a single hesitation or a glance in either direction?  But maybe it would be wise to find that old Chinese meat cleaver built rather like a heavy-duty machete and mount it on the handle bars.  Abe Lincoln would approve.

Home again

The Phactor likes to travel, but hates traveling.  Going new and/or different places is great; getting there is a pain.  Unfortunately out trip home set a new travel record from southeastern most NC to its border with TN on rt 40;  It took eight and a half hours!  With no diddling around!  The problem was simply too many people in too many cars rendering our intra- and interstate road system wholly inadequate, then you compound that with hot weather, the attendant car breakdowns, poor driving habits, and short tempers, and you have near gridlock appearing at the slightest provocation that increased our usual trip by nearly 2 hours mostly spent standing still in traffic, and none of it was due to road construction.  It tried our patience and endurance.  On the good news front our cat-plant sitter did a great job and things looked well-watered and well-nourished, although something ate half our zucchini plants.  The plans for the garden moat and mine field must get completed if our wildlife friendly yard is going to stay that way.