Chuck D pays winter visit to the U&R

[smackaholic]

It seems like chuckie likes to winter in the U&L, what with big mountains, huge snowfalls and lost chinksicles all being in abundance there.

Well, nice to see he stopped in to thin the herd a bit here in the U&R the other day.

http://www.wfsb.com/news/14856004/detail.html

This is about twenty minutes up I-84 from me. Kinda middle of nowhere. Everybody and their brother takes their sleds on all manner of public road around here because unlike vermont and NH, we have shit for designated snowmobile trails.

What I want to know is how does a tractor trailer score a hit on a snowmobile? It's like a 380 lb lineman taking down reggie bush in the open field. It just shouldn't happen.

My guess is that a little bit of alcohol just might figure into the equation here. The fact that the dude is a french canuck (judging by the name) pretty much assures it.

Rack chuck!!!! thanks for showing a little love to the U&R. you may now get back to freezing gooks in the U&L.

[BSmack]

Everybody and their brother takes their sleds on all manner of public road around here because unlike vermont and NH, we have shit for designated snowmobile trails.

They don't have shit for snowmobile trails around here. But the number of times I've seen a snowmobile on the local Interstates is exactly ZERO.

[Adelpiero]

Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Poor snowmobiler. He didn't realize until it was too late that...

...911 is a joke.

[Dinsdale]

...911 is a joke.

You mean a system that makes the government responsible for every last detail of your life, including your safety, is at its very core flawed?

Color me shocked.


I'm sure the shift to socialism, beginning with health care(and if you think it will end there, you're a fucking idiot), will make all of those governmental babysitting services run like clockwork, though.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

Jeeezus....



Don't you have a Ron Paul poster to hand-paint or something?

[Dinsdale]

Don't you have a Ron Paul poster to hand-paint or something?

I'm waiting to hear back from the federal government about whether I've been granted permission to exercise Freedom of Expression or not.

[Adelpiero]

marty


the Public enemy reference went way over duncedales head.

[Dinsdale]

I'll wear my unfamiliarity with hip-hop ghetto culture like a badge of honor, thank you very much.

[smackaholic]

Everybody and their brother takes their sleds on all manner of public road around here because unlike vermont and NH, we have shit for designated snowmobile trails.

They don't have shit for snowmobile trails around here. But the number of times I've seen a snowmobile on the local Interstates is exactly ZERO.

that's because the tolls are too high. here in the land of "free"ways, we take every opportunity to use them.

[Mikey]

Michael Bordeau, 36, of Charlton, was riding his snowmobile eastbound in the westbound center lane of the highway

Chuck D indeed.

[smackaholic]

it's not so much that he was headed east on the west lane or vice versa. It is that he was on a fukking snowmobile and he let himself get tackled by a fukking 18 wheeler. That stretch of road is rural, 2, maybe three lanes, wide shoulders both sides. How the fukk do you get run down by a big ass truck?

That storm hit pretty early in the day and the roads should have been in pretty good shape by 1 AM. Why the fukk wasn't he up on the shoulder where there is better snow and less fukking tractor trailer?

[smackaholic]

how're things in local? yard/house not threatening to leave yet, are they?

[smackaholic]

i missed it too. looks like we're the only middle age non whiggers in the place, dins.

rack us.

[Dinsdale]

I'm quite certain you could slip all kinds of nog references past me.

[socal]

81 pedestrians killed on SoCal freeways last year.

December 11, 2007

He didn't know it, but when John Tun stepped from the Honda Accord onto the shoulder of Interstate 5, he entered a realm where flesh and blood are no match for the kinetic fate dealt by the freeway.

As Tun's wife and two children huddled in the back seat, he and a friend examined a flat tire near Santa Clarita. It was about 1:40 a.m., too dark to see broken bits of vehicles scattered about. Too dark to see the Toyota pickup bearing down on them.

"He didn't have a chance," said Tun's widow, Rumchoul Ok.

Ok heard a scream. The car's side window exploded. Tun, 27, was dragged 150 feet. His friend, Thoung Pok, dropped to the ground, her body shattered. The driver, who is serving time for vehicular manslaughter, kept going and later told authorities she thought she hit a pole.

Freeways course through California's landscape like raging rivers, each with its own danger level based on flow and volume, hidden hazards and seemingly safe eddies that belie swift undertows.

The 405, wide and powerful as the Mississippi; the Pasadena Freeway, one treacherous serpentine canyon after another; the 5, furious and full from bank to bank; the 15 over Cajon Pass, a crushing waterfall of speeding cars and 18-wheelers.

Falling out of the raft -- finding oneself on foot on the freeway -- is a primordial fear endemic to Southern California's car culture. It's a horror almost everyone has witnessed, accidents waiting to happen: the middle-aged couple huddled around a callbox; the man talking on a cellphone in the fast lane behind his disabled SUV, cars and trucks flowing around him as if he were a boulder; the family outside a broken-down van, Dad under the hood, Mom herding the kids away from traffic.

Meeting one's maker as a pedestrian on a freeway occurs with surprising regularity. About 1 in 10 freeway deaths is a pedestrian.

Last year in Southern California, 81 pedestrians, ranging in age from 14 to 83, were struck down on freeways -- 14 of them on the 5 through Los Angeles County, the region's most unforgiving highway.

The circumstances that land people in this forbidding environment over the years range from the prosaic (involved in a fender-bender, stopping to switch drivers) to the bizarre.

What was a naked man doing walking on the Golden State Freeway? What are the odds that another naked man would be hit on the 105 just three months later? Why was a 91-year-old woman pushing a shopping cart on the 10?

The man who said goodnight to his 53-year-old wife can't explain how she ended up hours later walking on the Antelope Valley Freeway three miles from their home. The man who stood up in a convertible to remove his shirt probably would have waited if he knew he'd be blown onto the 15. And the 22-year-old skateboarder who decided to cross the 10 near downtown might have reconsidered had he known what awaited.

For some, including John Tun of Long Beach, destiny arrives with a flat tire.

"Before, I didn't drive. My husband drove me everywhere," his widow said. "Now I have to. But I only take regular roads. The freeway scares me."

Seeing the freeway's power up close shatters any doubt of its danger. Behind the wheel, ensconced in a metal cocoon and lulled by the radio, one's sense of threat is muted by familiarity and a feeling of control.

To someone on foot, the freeway reveals its true self. It is alien, industrial, violent. Roaring engines, shifting transmissions and rolling rubber wrack the brain stem. The air is sweet with gasoline and oil. Eyes tear up processing the constant motion. Asphalt and dirt coat the tongue.

"Rule No. 1 out here: You never take your eyes off the traffic," said Tim Hernandez, a tow truck driver who plies the freeways, a rolling trauma center for stranded motorists.

Hernandez, 37, drives for the Freeway Service Patrol, a free, government-funded service. With his muscled build, short-cropped hair and wrap-around black sunglasses, Hernandez looks like a commando on patrol. His is a dangerous job that earns him combat pay: a few extra bucks an hour and $50,000 in life insurance.

Hunched down inches away from a torrent of rushing vehicles, Hernandez is a study in focus, even when some knucklehead driving by shouts "Look out!" hoping to see him flinch.

Sometimes he wades into the fray, as he did one recent evening when he stopped traffic on the 605 with nothing more than his outstretched arms as a tow truck pushed a disabled bus to safety.

Once, while removing lug nuts from a flat tire on the 91, Hernandez spied a car drifting onto the median and heading straight toward him.

"I could see he was yakking on the phone," he said of the driver. "I thought, I hope he notices me."

He didn't. Hernandez dived under the jacked-up vehicle's front end. The car flew by, nearly clipped the jack and crashed into the center divider.

Hernandez's wife wants him to quit. His mother and young daughter make it three.

"We're kind of like the Green Berets of tow truck drivers," he said. "You see it all out here."

Two men on a narrow shoulder engaged in a fistfight. A man chased by a swarm of bees, running across the 210 dodging cars and madly flapping his arms. People who wandered away from convalescent homes.

"You ask, 'Where are you going?' " Hernandez said, "and they look at you like they have no clue what's going on."

Others know where they are, but are still clueless to the danger.

"There are some places where we won't attempt to repair a flat and we'll ask them if they can move to a safer location," Hernandez said. "Some people say, 'What about my $3,500 rims?' I say, "What about your life?' "

He pulls over and parks in front of a beat-up Civic near Whittier. A rear tire is flat. So is the spare.

Inside Nancy Parga, 33, and her 3-year-old son Shawn watch as 18-wheelers zoom by just feet away, blowing gusts of wind that rock their car. The boy seems excited by the commotion. His mom seems frazzled.

"Just to get out and go to the call box scared me," she said. "I was so nervous."

She had good reason: Her cousin was killed a decade ago running across a freeway to get to an emergency phone.

The freeway's sensory overload interferes with sound decision-making. Never is that more obvious than when someone, even in light traffic, decides it's safe to cross four or five lanes. Odds are strong that it will end badly.

"People underestimate the danger," said Jerry Eubanks, an accident reconstruction expert who investigated numerous freeway pedestrian fatalities while he was a San Diego police officer.

It's impossible to gauge the speed of oncoming traffic from road level. A car that's 500 feet away, for instance, will appear to be going much slower than it is. At that distance, the car's size doesn't appear to be getting bigger.

But that changes quickly the closer the car gets. At 250 feet, the perception of its speed changes. At 125 feet, a person in the roadway finally understands the car is approaching fast -- but it's too late to react. At 65 mph, impact is just 1.3 seconds away.

It's the same optical trick that leads to many rural train-car accidents. From the ground, a driver perceives he can beat an oncoming train because, at a distance, it doesn't appear to be going fast.

At impact, physics takes over. A 4,000-pound car slamming into a human at 65 mph will slow less than 2 mph. The pedestrian, on the other hand, absorbs the full brunt -- a body accelerating from zero to 65 in one-tenth of a second.

"There's a lot of G-force involved when you accelerate at such a startling rate," said Ken Libbrecht, chairman of Caltech's physics department. "It would be like falling off the Empire State Building."

A 1996 report by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety found pedestrians accounted for 12% of all interstate highway deaths. Most happened at night. Less than 1% of victims were highway construction workers. Nearly a third were "unintended pedestrians" such as motorists with disabled cars.

But 40% of accidents involved people deliberately walking onto the freeway -- either as a shortcut, or because of irrational or suicidal behavior.

How Pamela Williams came to be strolling across an industrial-strength ugly stretch of the 10 Freeway in Colton at midnight will never be known, or whether she saw the Prelude bearing down on her at 70 mph.

What is known is that Williams, 48, lived on the streets of San Bernardino County and suffered for decades with epilepsy. On April 20, 2006, she collapsed from a seizure and was taken by ambulance to Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton. She was treated overnight with phenobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. At daybreak, a hospital worker called a friend of Williams' but got a busy signal. Within minutes, Williams was released.

Seventeen hours later she was dead, literally cut in half. Her torso smashed through the car's windshield and landed in the back seat. The driver kept going, got off at the next exit and discarded the body in a trash bin. When police arrested him, he was covered in blood. Last month he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and is awaiting sentencing.

"I could have hit her. You could have hit her. I don't blame him for the incident, although he definitely doesn't have clean hands here," said Diane Heliotes, Williams' cousin. "What in the world was she thinking? Obviously she wasn't. She was disoriented."

But not suicidal. "This is a woman who was desperately trying to put her life back together," said Bradley Thrasher, a paralegal who befriended Williams and was working to get her government disability benefits. "She had a lot of integrity."

Her gruesome death on the freeway still tugs at Thrasher. Williams had given him her meager belongings for safekeeping: size 4 1/2 work boots tied to a child's Scooby Doo backpack. Inside were bottles of shampoo and conditioner, mascara, a Christmas tree decoration and a framed picture of a unicorn and saber-toothed tiger. There were several bottles of prescription medicine; the one for phenobarbital, which kept her seizures in check, is empty. Jailhouse letters from her son. Unpaid hospital bills and a collection notice.

"I don't know why I've kept it," Thrasher said. "I guess I wasn't ready to let go of that little girl."

For Julie Bessenbacher, the death of her son Steven on the 55 was a cleansing baptism for a troubled soul.

Steven Murray was 29 when he died. Half his life was spent in juvenile and adult jails, much of the rest on the streets of Long Beach. He was 6-foot-3, 250 pounds and thick with tattoos. He liked to fight, and drugs and booze ignited a smoldering anger.

A parole violation sent him back to prison when he was 25. When released, he told his mother he found religion behind bars. She was skeptical. But he moved back in with her, abandoned his old friends, stayed sober and got a job working as a courier. She framed a poem he wrote to her.

I know I've let you down in many ways.

We both know this is true. But I've finally got a worthwhile future.

And this I'll show you soon

Murray was out of prison nine months when police came knocking on his mother's door. She figured he'd let her down again.

Instead, they told her Murray had died on his way to work. He stopped on the freeway where a pickup had rear-ended a Cherokee. He got out to ask if anyone needed help. As he stood in a northbound lane, a car slammed into the pickup, pinning Murray between two vehicles.

"When I looked back and thought about it, I could see how God had orchestrated things," Bessenbacher said. "What better way of dying than to lay down your own life trying to help someone else?"

Our Good Samaritan is etched on Murray's gravestone.

"God vindicated Steven in his death," she said. "He was no longer known as just a criminal. It was a miracle. Something God gave to me."

At least it's safe for snowmobilers here.

[BSmack]

i missed it too. looks like we're the only middle age non mvscals in the place, dins.

rack us.

Fear of a Black Planet came out in 1990. But I'm sure you were too busy listening to White Lion and Warrant to remember.

[Mister Bushice]

Poor snowmobiler. He didn't realize until it was too late that...

...911 is a joke.

Rack Marty for rolling in the double Chuck D ref.

First post worth a mention of his, probably since ever.

[Dinsdale]

What do you call 81 dead californians laying on the side of the freeway?







A good start.

[Dinsdale]

Fear of a Black Planet came out in 1990. But I'm sure you were too busy listening to White Lion and Warrant to remember.

While you were pretending to be down with the homies and gaining street-cred vicariously by listening to non-music...


I was selling drugs and avoiding the PO-lice, and all that shit that you thought made you cool by listening to on the radio.


The lifestyle you embraced with music purchases, I was living... Dawg.

Except I was listening to Alice In Chains and Jerry Garcia while I was doing it.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

I was selling drugs and avoiding the PO-lice, and all that shit that you thought made you cool by listening to on the radio.


The lifestyle you embraced with music purchases, I was living... Dawg.

I've seen some shameless self-pimping over the years on the smack boards, but you should absolutely be
ashamed of yourself.

Well, at least I now know who the owner of the Vanilla Ice troll was.

[Dinsdale]

I've seen some shameless self-pimping over the years on the smack boards, but you should absolutely be
ashamed of yourself.

Huh?

The members of this board frequently pimp themselves as intelligent people... and I should be ashamed?

[BSmack]

Fear of a Black Planet came out in 1990. But I'm sure you were too busy listening to White Lion and Warrant to remember.

While you were pretending to be down with the homies and gaining street-cred vicariously by listening to non-music...

I was selling drugs and avoiding the PO-lice, and all that shit that you thought made you cool by listening to on the radio.

The lifestyle you embraced with music purchases, I was living... Dawg.

Go ahead and find me the PE song that glorifies selling drugs.

I'll cue up the crickets while you search.

Except I was listening to Alice In Chains and Jerry Garcia while I was doing it.

Nothing wrong with AiC or Jerry. But you might want to broaden those horizons every once in a while.

[Dinsdale]

I much prefer music to "urban poetry."

[smackaholic]

i missed it too. looks like we're the only middle age non mvscals in the place, dins.

rack us.

Fear of a Black Planet came out in 1990. But I'm sure you were too busy listening to White Lion and Warrant to remember.

no, I was hoping diamond dave would get back to VH and maybe john bonham and keith moon would wander into a denny's somewhere and announce that they were back to slay big hair metal and and save us from what was to come.

alas, john and keith are still dead. big hair metal did go away, but, it's replacement sucks nearly as bad.

and I still listen to old shit and thank god that atleast I still have rush for the occasional new taste of decent material. i am equally grateful that most all hip hop references still fly wayyyy over my head.

[fix]

This bad boy of a storm's made things unbearable for even the snowplow operators out there to handle without killing someone dumb enough not to get out of the way of a plow blade but noooobody is arguing that it's time to call out the military to bail Toronto out.

I know what I'm buying myself for Christmas now... fuck shovelling this shit.

[Shlomart Ben Yisrael]

The members of this board frequently pimp themselves as intelligent people...

Oh

the

irony

[socal]

What do you call 81 dead californians laying on the side of the freeway?







A good start.

To be more accurate, according to the column, at least one-half of one of those 81 dead Calis ended up in a dumpster.

Who's to say some of them might have been from out of town? U & Lers heading home from Disneyland get a flat in the fog and don't heed DMViego's 10 and 2 advice losing their head when they saunter across 6 lanes of traffic to get to a call box. Of course, we know that anyone with your U & L street cred could have defied the laws of physics and pimpslapped any approaching vehicle back to the 'hood, Mt. Hood.

[BSmack]

I much prefer music to "urban poetry."

Hey, you were the one who claimed "I was selling drugs and avoiding the PO-lice, and all that shit that you thought made you cool by listening to on the radio."

So you were NOT saying that PE's music glorified drug dealing?

Make up your fucking mind already.

[Dinsdale]

So, you had a little thing called a snowstorm?

[BSmack]

So, you had a little thing called a snowstorm?

Ah. moving from one thing you know nothing about to another thing that you know only a little bit more about.

Here's a newsflash for you. Just because the media calls it a snowstorm doesn't mean it was. When the prime lake effect zones in Upstate are reporting only 18 inches of snow, you're not talking about much of a snowstorm. Hell, they didn't even cancel the Hanna Montana concert in Rochester.

[Dinsdale]

So, you had a little thing called a snowstorm?

Ah. moving from one thing you know nothing about to another thing that you know only a little bit more about.

Beautiful irony.

RACK it.

[PSUFAN]

I'll wear my unfamiliarity with hip-hop ghetto culture like a badge of honor, thank you very much.

Wear it like a pancake.

[smackaholic]

By southern new england standards, a foot of snow is pretty much a snow storm. I spose at 9000 ft on the slope of one of the cascades, it's a slow day. Everything is relative.

Wanna see some funny shit, check out Nashville when they get three inches. Soon after I moved there, they had the blizzard of '96. 5, maybe 6 inches of white stuff. it even fell at a good time, friday night. So they had all weekend to recover. School was still out until about thursday of the following week.

As for upstate NY, certain areas don't have snow storms, they have a snow storm. One big fuggin' snow fall that changes in intensity, but never seems to actually stop. The two times I had the displeasure of spending the better part of a week in crapchester, it never did stop completely. It's like chinese water torture, 'cept the water is a bit colder.

[BSmack]

As for upstate NY, certain areas don't have snow storms, they have a snow storm. One big fuggin' snow fall that changes in intensity, but never seems to actually stop. The two times I had the displeasure of spending the better part of a week in crapchester, it never did stop completely. It's like chinese water torture, 'cept the water is a bit colder.

What part of Rochester did you stay in? Greece? Webster?

I lived in Oswego for a year. After that experience, there's nothing a Rochester winter can do to impress me save maybe the blizzard we had in 93. Now THAT was a motherfucking snowstorm.

[smackaholic]

don't recall other than it beingfairly close to the airport. i think a good way to describe which part is to just say the bad part. what a shithole.

[BSmack]

don't recall other than it beingfairly close to the airport. i think a good way to describe which part is to just say the bad part. what a shithole.

Not many good parts near the airport. No wonder you have such a bad impression of Rochester. The westside of Rochester is where all of Jim Rome's Rochester stereotypes (IROCs, gold chains, girls with big hair) come to life.