This is an open letter to those people on the toll road who get in the EZPass lane without having an EZPass, only to realize too late that they have no way to get through the toll booth in good conscience.

This is an open letter to those people who find themselves in that situation and decide to stop all EZPass lane traffic and wait for a toll booth attendant to leave their booth and accept their money.

There are three scenarios that you may find yourself in when trapped in such a situation. I will discuss them here along with the proper response to each.

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1) If the toll bar is up, then you are to keep going. Yes, I realize this may result in a hefty fine for you, but you should really just consider it a stupid tax.

If you are too unobservant to notice the giant purple sign above your lane; or you are too stupid to know that you don’t really have an EZPass — then you have earned yourself a fine. Accept that, move on.

Who are you to assume that your money is worth more than my time? I don’t want to compare salaries or anything, but I’m not the one stupid enough to ignore a giant purple sign so I’m going to assume I’m winning this one.

Just keep driving. If you’re lucky, the toll authority won’t fine you and you will have gotten a free toll. I’m ok with you getting a free toll if it means you have decided to be a decent human being.

2) The other case is the one in which the toll bar is down. This one is a bit trickier. Although I could easily point out that your stupidity has gotten you into the situation and I don’t really care about the condition of your car, I’ll give you a little bit of a respite on this one.

I don’t expect you to drive through the toll bar; not only because it may damage your car, but it may also be dangerous. Although I think you’re stupid, I don’t want you to die.

So now we have to turn to the toll booth workers and blame them. If you are a toll booth attendant and you see that this has happened, raise the damn bar. Let them pass free of charge.

Take their picture, memorize their license plate, or shoot a paintball at their car. I don’t really care, but get the lane moving. There is absolutely no reason to hold up traffic because of the stupidity of one person.

To the driver: Do not expect change if you do this. If the attendant comes out to take your money, throw a $20 at her and drive. Consider it part of your stupid tax.

3) The most extreme case is that you are even stupider than previously discussed, and you think it’s a good idea to slam on your brakes when you notice that you’re in the wrong lane.

The people behind you are going 50+ mph and are accustomed to not having to slow down to get through this lane. Contrary to your beliefs, that is the reason this lane exists.

Not only is it annoying and stupid for you to slam on your brakes when you are in this situation, you are being extremely wreckless and endangering the lives and property of all of those commuters behind you.

Don’t do this. Ever. In most rush hour scenarios, Rule #1 applies. Follow it. There are no other options. Accept the fine. Be a decent human being and see how much better you sleep at night.

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There you have it. To anyone driving the toll roads of the Washington DC metroplex, please follow these simple instructions. You will be a better human being because of it.

Sincerely,

The guy behind you who should have honked but wrote this blog instead

Okay. Maybe I don’t really hate it. I just hate to watch year after year and see the best contestants get voted off.

I’m pretty anti-social and my general stance on people other than myself (and those few who have proven otherwise) is that they’re all morons.

American Idol proves how moronic America really is. Every single year.

The only seasons that America had even half a brain were Seasons one & four.

I’m not a big fan of Kelly Clarkson, but I’ll admit she’s a bona fide artist at this point.

And, of course, I think the world of Carrie Underwood who is — by my estimation — the most worthy American Idol winner ever.

The year after Carrie, Chris Daughtry got an early boot when he should have won. And who won instead? Taylor Hicks.

Seriously, I don’t understand the reasoning people use when voting for these contestants. I’m willing to concede that not every one has to have the same taste in music, but it’s not always about musical genre.

It’s about actual talent. There are haves and have-nots when it comes to a fantastic singing voice, and the division is generally very very clear.

But apparently no one’s ears work as well as mine, because I’m continually disappointed by the decisions made by the loyal viewers of idol.

This year we had a final six of Jason Castro, Syesha Mercado, Brooke White, David Cook, David Archuleta and Carly Smithson.

That’s a solid final six, but let’s face facts. Both Syesha and Jason are amateurs compared to the other four. Their voices are weak, their choices are boring, and they have no real chance in the world of music.

Yet somehow, Carly got voted out. Carly; the woman who has the best female vocals by far in this year’s competition.

Brooke couldn’t even sing her song right, yet somehow she got voted through. She’s a snotty, arrogant little brat who constantly interrupts the judges and is in all other ways rude from what I’ve seen on Idol.

Yet America persists. Bunch of morons.

I don’t usually talk about Politics (or Religion) on my blog, and I’ll keep this one short and without much of my own opinion.

As many know, Mitt Romney gave a speech yesterday on his LDS faith and how it may or may not affect his presidency. It was a fine speech which I think got his point across.

I have seen some criticism that is valid, but what I’m most dumbfounded over is the comments people are leaving with these articles.

One such commenter was arguing that the official church website was a biased source, and instead offers:

I strongly suggest anyone interested in the history of the Mormon religion … check out the South Park factual episode on the history of the religion; it’s spot on.

Are you kidding me?

If you are ever in an argument where you cite South Park as your source for … well, anything … you lose the argument. Automatically. There will be no more debate. The discussion is over.

It’s like Godwin’s law, only about South Park. We’ll call it Kenny’s law.

So I was going to post about a dream I had last night, but my morning sucked so bad that I decided to rant instead about my bad morning. It probably doesn’t really matter to most people, but oh well.

First off, I hate my cat. He woke me up at 4:30am this morning. This has become a 3-4 night/week ritual in which he decides to meow incessantly. If I call for him, he’ll come up in the bed and be quiet for 5-10 minutes before jumping down and meowing again. The toll it’s taking on my sleep is beginning to become unbearable and I really don’t know what to do to make him stop.

Since I wasn’t being allowed to sleep, I went downstairs to log into WoW. I had time on my hands afterall, because going to work at 5:30am isn’t exactly a fun thing to do.

That brings us to what I hate next: large mobs. It seems that Blizzard thinks that the higher in level we get, the bigger mobs need to get. It’s getting to the point that its near unplayable in some places. You simply cannot see anything at all when fighting some of these mobs. If you get another, you can’t tell. If you try to run away, you can’t see what’s in front of you. It’s very annoying when you’ve been woken up at 4:30am by a stupid cat.

Next up: Rascal Flatts (playing on my radio when I got in the car this morning).

If you don’t listen to country music, you may not know who this group is. Country radio seems to want to have their babies. I want them to die in a fire. I simply hate this group. It is the worse musical group in the history of the world and I don’t understand why they get any attention or album sales at all.

Their songs are extremely trite, and the lead singer’s voice is more grating than fingernails on a chalkboard. I’d rather listen to Paris Hilton explain quantum physics than listen to Rascal Flatts. Unfortunately, my local radio station insists on playing their crap every other song.

Which brings me to my local radio station. I hate them too. They play a grand total of 5 different country songs on repeat all day long. I miss Texas where they understand the genre and aren’t catering to these wannabe cowboys who think they’re cool if they listen to Rascal frickin’ Flatts.

Then there’re stupid drivers. Most people will tell you that they hate people talking on their cell phones while driving. I don’t hate that. I hate people who are incapable of doing it effectively.

Case in point: a Toyota FJ Cruiser this morning who literally was swerving back and forth between lanes, without signaling, while talking on his cell phone and varying his speed greatly. Passing him was dicey due to his sudden and inexplicable lane switches.

Furthermore, he had 3 bags of concrete on his luggage rack. This isn’t so alarming in most cases, but this gentlemen seems to think there is no need to tie these things to his vehicle. One slam on the brakes and someone’s getting a concrete bag in the windshield. Luckily, that wasn’t me this morning.

So far, that’s all I hate this morning. Having woken up at 4:30am, though, I’m bound to find more. Consider this a warning. If you’re reading this, don’t be something I hate today.

As my readership will know, I recently acquired a Tivo Series 3. The Comcast people came to install the two CableCards that it takes yesterday and guess what? I still can’t watch cable on my TiVo.

How did he screw up? Let me count the ways. First off, he was apparently allergic to my cats. That’s unfortunate, but not really my problem. Perhaps they should have a pet pre-screening question on the phone to send out a tech who isn’t eager to go because he can barely breathe or see.

It took him 3 hours to install cable to three televisions, one of which doesn’t work. Why it took him that long, I can’t really say. I’m not a cable tech so maybe it’s just that hard.

Let’s focus on the main television with the TiVo, though, because that’s where all the weirdness occurred. In preparation for Comcast’s arrival, we hooked up the TiVo, made sure it worked through our network and hooked up our over-the-air antenna to one of its many inputs.

He unhooked the antenna with a grumbling along the lines of “When are you ever going to use your antenna?” My wife didn’t question his assumption because she figured we’d just hook it right back up after he left.

This proved harder than expected since he STOLE our coax that was going from the wall to the TiVo. That’s right – not only did he unhook it from the TiVo, he also unhooked it from the wall and took it with him. WTF?

He then proceeded to install the CableCards one by one, waiting 20+ minutes between each because Comcast had to do some mojo on their end that took a long long long time to do. After that, he set the CableCards to “Acquire Program Information” which is just a little spinny thing that seems to take a really long time.

He got restless, apparently, and being tired of allergic reactions from the hell-demons that are my cats, he informed my wife that he was leaving and that everything would work fine. Wrong. Nothing worked fine. The spinny thing ended with an error that the CableCards weren’t responding properly.

A lot of tinkering on our part and two calls to Comcast later, it would appear that Comcast is unable to send a signal to the CableCards and they don’t know what’s wrong.

So what’s the answer to that? Send another inept technician out to fix the problem. Yippee! At least they’re coming on Saturday this time…