The Gloucester Clam’s Tournament of Crappy Intersections: Round 2 continues!

Another day, another faceoff! We’re almost done with round 2, folks. Hooray.

intersections

Maplewood/Prospect/Railroad vs. Pond/Eastern/Witham

In news that will astonish no one, Maplewood/Prospect/Railroad got over 90% of the votes last round over Washington/High. Apparently only like 10 people live in Lanesville and read our blog. Or, the Maplewood/Prospect clusterfuck is really that bad. Spoiler alert: it is that bad. First of all, the random buoy in the middle of the intersection. Why do we do this, Gloucester? Does this mean the general vicinity falls under maritime law? I try not to leave a wake with my Scion, but I guarantee nothing. Next, the backup. Coming from Maplewood, it’s especially onerous, because no one approaching Prospect from Railroad will let you across. This leads people turning right to cut through Shaws, who apparently hated that so much that when they re-did the parking lot, they made it harder to cut through, but people still do, even using one-ways the wrong way to do so. And again, one idiot clogs the intersection, and the whole thing gums up and everyone is stuck there until next week, beeping morosely.

Meanwhile over on the other side of town, there’s the intersection where Witham and Pond meet Eastern Ave. This beat out the Joan of Arc statue fauxrotary by ONE VOTE. Usually one side wins by a huge margin, but dang. Anyway, there’s so many reasons this intersection is not only sucky, but pretty goddamn dangerous: the speed limit is high coming from Nugent Stretch, and people are FLYING. Turning left from Witham onto Eastern has made me stool my panties on more than one occasion. Turning left onto Pond is almost as bad, but at least you after that turn you can console yourself with amazingly-priced secondhand furniture from Second Glance. Either way, this intersection blows.

[polldaddy poll=8380429]

Nation’s Pants Shitters Gather in Washington to Strategize, Fudge Slacks

The up-and-coming Pants Shitting Party met at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s Capital this week to devise strategy around key issues facing trou-crapping voters.

Gonna wanna have these steam cleaned

Gonna wanna have these steam cleaned

Heading up the docket were Ebola, immigration, ISIS and the report from a highly reliable cousin of a customs officer that ISIS agents agents are smuggling Ebola-carrying immigrants over our borders. Besides these hot topics the over 2,000 attendees from around the country also sat in on seminars to hear speakers freak their motherfucking shit out over bullshit like GMOs, vaccines and teens getting hooked on ‘Krokodil.’

Stacy McGee who had driven 18 hours from Benton Minnesota in order to avoid airplanes where she fears sitting next to someone with the deadly hemorrhagic Ebola virus which has here at home thus far infected two health care workers in Texas out of 316 million total Americans. She says at the conference she’s found some terrific new ways to be irrationally terrified by absurdly remote, essentially non-threatening or entirely fabricated dangers.

Pants-shiitting or just a shart in the shorts? A panel debates.

Pants-shiitting or just a shart in the shorts? A panel debates.

She explained how she’d found her way to this growing movement:

“I was raised in a solidly Democratic household where we’d regularly drop a bomb in our hiphuggers over this or that. But as I got older I found myself more and more identifying with the specific elements of the Republican platform that made me scream at family members about the existential peril supposedly posed by gay marriage and Fox News fabrications like the ‘Knock-Out-Game.’ But even then I felt some party leaders like Mitt Romney weren’t fully pandering to my deeply unreasonable concerns. One day I heard Pants Shitting Party founder Newt Gingrich describe as real and probable a wholly concocted figment of his imagination regarding Iran disabling the entire United States with something called an electromagnetic pulse bomb. Since that day I’ve been a full-on Pants Shitter in mind and soul. It’s been so liberating to find an ideology that only requires me to become inconsolably terrified and then lash out without ever having to worry about solving real but boring challenges like our crumbling infrastructure or ballooning student debt.”

Pants Shitting Leaders say trajectories like McGee’s are common as the almost exclusively white, downwardly mobile, formerly middle-class membership flail impotently at dealing with the all-too-real perils of a complicated world.

“It’s much easier to blame brown people or convince yourself medical professionals are lying for some reason than to actually demand change from cultural monoliths like the financial industry,” said Pants Shitting Party Chairman Bud Radcliffe. “To do so would be mean seeking impartial information sources, demanding accountability from institutions that hold the public trust and other hard things. There is also the massive inconvenience of developing appropriately scaled responses, modifying damaging behaviors and realizing there is no such thing as a risk or harm-free life. No thank you!”

“We Pants Shitters have simply come to grips with the fact that it’s simpler to glance uncritically at something on the Internet, crap your khakis, and then generate enough hysterical online activity to cause any rational person to beg for the sun to go nova in order to burn  the stupid off our planet in a massive purifying barrage of powerful gamma radiation. We think of ourselves as pragmatists.”

Radcliffe pointed to his his lapel pin featuring the Pant’s Shitting Party logo, a keyboard caps lock button with the green light lit. “Caps Lock or Get the Fuck Off! Also: Benghaaaazi!” he shouted to cheers from around the crowded conference hall.

Media outlets have been quick to cater to this expanding demographic. No end of television segments, blog posts, social media engagements and a near epoch of talk radio time has been dedicated to help Pants Shitters take the massive drawer-dumps for which they’re known.

Attendees walk the floor between Docker Dookies.

Attendees walk the floor between Docker Dookies.

“We used to mostly cater to bullshit addicts,” said CNN Senior Executive and conference presenter Jordan Walsh. “But there are only so many royal weddings and disappearing planes, know what I mean? With Pants Shitters we can cram weeks worth of airtime full of vapid speculation and hearsay without fear of the audience getting bored and changing the channel. They’re like rats in a food pellet experiment. Better, even.”

Kiosks around the hall offered a variety products for committed Pants Shitters. At one sat sixty five year old former industrial arts teacher Gregg Gains of Shreveport Alabama, who cheerfully reports he’s been deucing in his relaxed-fit Levis since the attempted introduction of the metric system in the mid 1970’s. Arrayed on the folding table front of him were souvenirs tracing the entire history of the Pants Shitting movement from axes with “Anti Saloon League” burned into the handles to Y2K-themed hats and shirts. Anti-fluoridation souvenirs were his most resilient product line, with 60’s-era anti-communist “fluoride information” pamphlets selling as briskly as “NO!” buttons shaped like teeth, popular with activists who pooed in their skinny jeans all over Portland Oregon just this past summer.

Why do you think they called him "Goldwater"?

Why do you think they called him “Goldwater”?

Experts note that as the challenges facing our nation and even species demand a level of heightened consideration and subtly beyond what a significant portion of the electorate is willing to commit, we should expect Pants Shitting to offer an ever-more attractive alternative to constructive attempts at problem solving for the indefinite future.

This observation was borne out by this years schedule of events, which had originally included a truly chino-packing presentation from leading climate researchers. Conference organizers, however, elected not to allow it in a last-minute vote. From a prepared statement a spokesman revealed global climate change was not in the realm of Pants Shitters’ typical concerns and was at best something for their constituents to mire themselves in via a cockamamie blend of denialism and absurd, hastily-concocted conspiracy theories.

“That climate shit has real-live scientists soiling themselves all over the fucking planet,” the statement read. “It’s way out of our league.”

 

Tournament of Crappy Intersections Round 2 – Day 2

Now that we’re all hungover from our Columbus Day weekend (yay for subjugation of a native population!), let’s get back to our important work: voting for the crappiest intersection in Gloucester.

intersections

Flanagan Square vs Main/Eastern

Flanagan Square beat the metric piss out of Washington/Railroad in the first round. It’s no surprise why – everyone loves a three-way stop where only one lane inexplicably doesn’t have to stop, so folks new to the intersection get creamed when they make the innocent mistake of thinking that like most responsible intersections, EVERYONE HAS TO STOP. And then there’s the folks coming from Prospect who block the box. THOSE PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLE AND SHOULD HAVE THEIR DICKS KICKED OFF. It gums up the whole awful intersection, and then two of the busiest streets in town are all fucked up. Trying to turn left is the absolute worst, though, because NO ONE LETS YOU GO. I sometimes take the 128 extension to get to East Gloucester even though it’s like 4 miles longer, just to avoid this stupid turn. Awful. If the entire square plunged into the ocean tomorrow, I’d probably cheer.

Meanwhile, Eastern/Main has its own terribleness making it a serious contender in this contest. Why on earth do tourists coming from Main think they need to stop or yield to folks coming/going from Eastern? They get a fistful of beep from me every time, but they never learn. A secondary burst of awfulness from this intersection is that about 1500 feet before the turn, if you DARE take up the middle of the lane when it’s still one lane, people assume you’re turning left and will attempt to pass you on the right, usually taking up the bike lane to do so. Then, when you try to correct your one-foot-to-the-left mistake, they look at you like you’re an idiot. Dude, wait till I actually commit – it will be like seven feet from now, seriously.

[polldaddy poll=8372625]

Longform bit on The O’Maley 3D printers

Hey Clamistas, here is the longform bit I wrote for Good Morning Gloucester about the 3D printer build at O’Maley Innovation Middle School over the weekend.

http://goodmorninggloucester.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/omaley-3d-printer-make-a-thon-an-endurance-event-for-nerds/