Some things I noticed in the neighborhood:
– Some dude driving an official (I assume) truck of some kind along the path in the park. It looks like some kinda street sweeper thing but of course all it’s doing is making a lot of noise, belching smoke, and spewing dust into the air. We see these things all the time, also in the fall the leafblowers on campus where some dude is carrying a large loud device, polluting, and chasing 2 leaves around into the air.
– The streets are really wide! Riverside Drive is 6 lanes wide plus a median, Broadway is 8 lanes plus a median, even the narrowest streets are 3 lanes wide. That all takes up a lot of space.
– Police cars. Not a bunch all in one place, they just come by with a high frequency. I saw two today after just being outside for a few minutes.
– Also of course the usual pleasant sight of people strolling on the sidewalks.
If you count the parking lanes on Broadway, why not count the median?
Median can be as misleading as mean usually is, if reported without a range.
Roughly speaking, I used to live a lot closer to Riverside Drive than I do today (about 10 versus 1000 miles currently). Back then, the phrase,
“Them’s the breaks”
was common currency in the United States but has faded since. However, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, born in NYC in 1964 and a Classics scholar from Oxford, has lit up the literary world by using that casual phrase in his resignation speech because it is relatively unknown in England.
For the record, he gave up his birthright American citizenship in 2016 because of U.S. tax laws. He is more often seen biking rather than strolling. For his sake, I trust his bike is in better shape than mine is.
Paul:
Yeah, I have mixed feelings on Johnson as a politician. On one hand, he’s a racist and a big-time liar; on the other hand, he rides a bike, which I like.
He only rides a bike for photo opportunities.
Simon:
Maybe so, but even if he only rides the bike for photo ops, that’s a plus: at least he’s signaling something positive.
I thought this factoid was worthy of this blog but didn’t know where else to put it:
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=130497
So if 61% of the Republican respondents consider Jan. 6 a legit protest and 45% consider it a riot, does that mean some 6% consider rioting as a legit form of protest?
Or maybe it’s just that rioting is legit only when “(1)forces loyal to Satan are stealing political power in rigged elections (2) on behalf of a global conspiracy masterminded by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, and Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli public intellectual, and (3) that the cabal has fabricated the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to mandate dangerous vaccines, which (4) make people sick and may secretly turn them into “transhumans” under the conspiracy’s remote control.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/michael-flynn-conspiracy-theories-january-6-trump/661439/
Or maybe it’s just that polling is a somewhat inexact science?
Scary.