AT HOME HE'S A TOURIST (2012 EDITION): KILLING MORE DEER THAN TED F***ING NUGENT

I rent cars.

Sometimes they're not cars so much as pick-up trucks.



I should stress it was the only thing available. But it is handy when yr renting a car in East Tennessee, because you just blend right in (provided you put a Tennessee Vols logo and a window sticker praising Jesus on it).

Anyway, I hit a deer with it on I-40 East.



 

You should see the deer.

In a weird way, I was lucky on just about all counts except for the part about actually hitting the deer. For a start, it happened at 1:30am in the middle of nowhere, which meant no nearby traffic, so I had all the room in the world to swerve and avoid a head-on collision, albeit not enough time to miss it completely – I clipped it with the right front corner of the truck. You see the result.

Apart from that, I was lucky that I was able to drive away from it, and that I was driving a truck in the first place. (Ford trucks really are Built Ford Tough™, you know.) If I’d been driving (say) a Chevy Aveo, even a glancing blow like that could have potentially crippled it (and possibly me). I speak from experience – I hit a deer with a 1988 Subaru Justy on a two-lane blacktop at 60mph. The repair bill was $3,500.

So all in all, I got off light.

But then again, maybe not. I have no car insurance (as I don’t own a car), and after forgetting to sign up for the cheap full-coverage plan offered by Priceline, I was dumb/cheap enough to opt for the lowest insurance plan offered by the rental car company – which, I’m told will probably only cover the cost of a new grille. I’m also told that car rental companies can be pretty ruthless about this kind of thing. So I’m expecting the worst, and to be a lot poorer before all this is over.

Fucking deer. Where’s Ted Nugent when you need him?

BONUS TRACK: Oh, and when I came back to HK last night, United Airlines was kind enough to lose my luggage. 

Again. 

The hits keep on coming,

This is dF

WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT IT, TED NUGENT IS THERE

Speaking of Ted Nugent …

Spotted last month at Kam Tin Country Park in Yuen Long up in the New Territories:



They have an archery range there, you see. I don’t know that Nugent has anything directly to do with it. I suspect not.

It does make me wonder if the people who got those stickers know that Ted Nugent the Archer is the same guy as Ted Nugent the Motor City Madman (to say nothing of Ted Nugent the Batshit Commentator who wants Hillary Clinton to have sex with his automatic rifle – metaphorically, of course).

Go wild in the country,

This is dF

YOUTUBE SURVIVOR SERIES #126: WE’RE THE HOT GENERATION

And now, for no real reason, The Pandoras, who were doing the garage-rock revival thing all the way back in the 80s.

Hot rocks,

This is dF

NORTH CAROLINA: WE LEGISLATE MORALITY AND SCIENCE

Yr Atavistic Science headline of the day:



io9 sums up the story nicely:

Faced with predictions that sea levels in the coastal areas of North Carolina will rise by a meter in the next century, legislators are considering bold action: making those predictions illegal. A bill being circulated in the Tarheel state would force scientists to estimate future sea levels on a linear path based on trends since 1900 — in other words, based on the simple assumption that trends always move in a straight line, no matter what.

All of this is because a coastal economic development group called NC-20 claims the report is flawed because it includes climate change science. If it used only the linear-path method, the sea rise level would be much lower – which would be much more convenient for their coastal development plans. State Republicans agree, and are keen to help out.

See what they did there?

Scientific American has a pretty good rant about it here, and I can’t add anything except to say that when yr resorting to making certain scientific methods illegal for blatantly obvious reasons of economic convenience, you’ve pretty much lost the argument about climate change.

According to my calculations,

This is dF