Donnie: You and me both. However, Simon does have a point, and that is there are a lot of stupid, ignorant people out there to watch out for.

Peter: Helvetica and Arial are nice, legible fonts but Lucida Grande seems to have more style to it.

Sprons: It’s an expensive habit (or addiction), isn’t it? I don’t smoke but a few family members of mine do and they are always complaining about how expensive cigarettes are.

Aaron: I’ve seen something similar before and it always amazes me that people make up their own rules while driving.

Thanks for that post. I’m reading it at the end of a crazy day, with hours to go before I sleep, as the poet said. It’s a great hit of perspective.

ps: I can’t believe I chose helvetica. lucidia grande looks SO much better.

Apparently, there’s not such a thing like cell phones and spontaneous combustion at gas stations. It’s all made up.

That may indeed be true, but I wonder if the same tests have been applied with the walkie-talkie-style phones. Put it this way — when I’m standing in a pool of gasoline next to a sign that says “don’t use cell phones because we’ll all blow up”, I’m inclined to get a bit peeved if Mr. Nextel is having a conversation with his bookie.

That, however, won’t stop the gas station attendants from making funny faces at me if I’m seen waving my cell phone.

Back on topic, there is a saying that goes more or less by the lines of “The man gets old too soon and sage too late”. How (sorely) true this is! The man you refer to in here had this very clear. I just wished some of my overstressed (and in turn, overstressing) work colleagues realized this and stop taking themselves and everything around them too seriously.

I never want to read the words “Anus” and “Burger” in the same comment ever again.

And while I’m thinking about gas stations, let me rant for a moment. I’ve always been told that using a cellular phone in a gas station is a very bad idea, yet not a day passes that I don’t see people pumping gas with one hand and jawing on the phone with the other. Recently, a blatant example of this featured one of those incredibly annoying Nextel walkie-talkie phones that make these beeping noise before emitting the garbled voice of some half-witted moron who thinks they’re cool.

Following this train of thought for a moment (sorry about hijacking your post, Erik), I noticed someone using one of these infernal things while sitting on the crapper in a service plaza. Incredibly, this guy was talking to a woman (presumably his wife, since he referred to her as “honey”) while his anus was making as much noise as his mouth.

Anyway, it is nice to see that some people have their priorities in order. Your white-haired sage was quite correct. You don’t have long on this Earth, relatively speaking, so you need to make the most of it. I’m going to be buying a grill this weekend, and I plan to spend much of the summer grilling meat to consume on my new back deck. When you see me stuffing a cheeseburger-with-onions into my mouth, cooked over my very own flames, you’ll see that my smile will be just as genuine as the one the guy in the gas station had.