The BMW and the Potholes

[Ironclad Alibi]

There is a road near us that has a very bad pothole problem for about a block. The speed limit there is 35 mph. Mrs. IA was driving on this road the other day. Behind her was a guy in a BMW. As she approached the pothole area, she slowed down so she could start swerving to miss the worse potholes. She looked in the rearview mirror and saw that the BMW guy was becoming visibly impatient with her slow speed. Then he hit the first pothole, immediately slowed down and started copying my wife's swerves as she negotiated the rest of the potholes.

[Shalom]

My brother saw something like that, lo these many years ago. (Has to be about 1990 or so.) They'd ripped up one of the E-W cross streets, right down to the subfoundation, preparatory to repaving it, and there was a drop of maybe three inches from the street level on the N-S street to the level on the cross-street, except for the manholes, which stuck out as high as the old pavement and had to be dodged. {Here's a picture of the intersection in question; bro was traveling south) Now my brother drove this route every day, so was familiar with this particular hazard. Some moron was tailgating him, though, and got annoyed at the delay of a few seconds occasioned by my brother not wanting to break his car. Said moron suddenly pulls around him into the opposing lane of traffic, ROARS into the intersection, SLAMS into the lip at the far edge, and blows a tire. He pulled over to the side, and bro cruised past him, like

[mharbourgirl]

Nova Scotia roads don't last very long. Rigid asphalt and winters that are a continual freeze-thaw cycle see to that. I maintain that every spring the police have to redefine their criteria for identifying impaired drivers in this manner: The people swerving all over the road are the ones who are alert enough to avoid the potholes. Anyone driving in a straight line MUST be drunk/high/otherwise mentally compromised.

But I'm a very weird person with a strange sense of humor.

[Kogarashi]

Mharbourgirl, that sounds similar to how Hubby and I could tell the drunk folks apart from the sober ones on the one cruise we went on. They had to turn off the stabilizers or something on the first day to make up for a ridiculously late start (turn them off so they could go faster, apparently), which made the ship rock more. We joked that the sober folks were the ones weaving all over the hallways, while the drunk folks were the ones able to walk a straight line.

[Chromatix]

Stabilisers on a ship are essentially stubby fins which work like the ailerons on an airliner. I wouldn't be surprised if they caused a bit of drag when deployed. I think they are usually folded into the side of the hull for docking, so they don't get damaged.

[Kogarashi]

Stabilisers on a ship are essentially stubby fins which work like the ailerons on an airliner. I wouldn't be surprised if they caused a bit of drag when deployed. I think they are usually folded into the side of the hull for docking, so they don't get damaged.

Yeah, figured it was something like that. Essentially they told us passengers that they had to take them off to go faster, but it would make everything wobblier. And it did. And that's when I discovered that even though I get awfully carsick, and a bit airsick since having kids, and even seasick on smaller boats if I'm not looking out at the water, I apparently don't get seasick on ridiculously wobbly cruise liners. Go figure.