Consider the following two examples.\u00a0 I-376 in Pennsylvania (below left) heads south from Hermitage, PA for 55 miles and then turns eastward toward Monroeville, PA for 31 miles.\u00a0 But the entire route is signed EAST-WEST.\u00a0 The logical way to sign this would have been NORTH-SOUTH from Hermitage to Moon and EAST-WEST from Moon to Monroeville.<\/p>\n
\u2022 If only I had been given some vocational guidance when I was young, I might have had more adventure in my life<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2022 I am not a hermit or pariah, but I really have no friends here in town.\u00a0 In fact, I haven’t made a lasting friend in 40 years.\u00a0 I follow our local Meetup<\/a> site but few of those groups interest me.\u00a0 (Men’s nude yoga<\/a>?\u00a0 Don’t think so.)\u00a0 I considered starting a Meetup myself, for people who have trouble making friends.\u00a0 But who would sign up?\u00a0 Would I attend?\u00a0 What kind of people can’t make friends?\u00a0 Just sad and lonely losers!\u00a0 I’ll stay home.<\/p>\n \u2022 Seriously, there is a local Meetup called Asheville Social Introverts Group<\/a>.\u00a0 They have weekly get-togethers in which they sit on opposite sides of a large room for an hour and read quietly to themselves.\u00a0 OK, that last part wasn’t true.\u00a0 Actually they play backgammon and chess — which interests me only slightly more than men’s nude yoga.\u00a0 Maybe I should attend one of their events and bring along Yahtzee to amp up the excitement.<\/p>\n \u2022 Same old Donkeys.\u00a0 Democrats are once again managing to shoot themselves in the foot, this time over standards of conduct<\/a>, of all things.\u00a0 They forced Al Franken to resign (who was probably more guilty of being a jerk than a sexual predator but we don’t really know) and stomped their feet in pharisaic unison trying to drive Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam out of office (who is definitely guilty of clumsy insensitivity).\u00a0 The Dems obviously hope to make themselves look as squeaky-clean as possible so they can attack Donald Trump from the moral high ground.\u00a0 What is amusing is that neither side of the electorate cares who is the holiest — certainly not Republicans, who will embrace anyone who is good for business and will stack the Supreme Court with righties, and not even Democrats, who would vote for Stormy Daniels if they thought she could beat Trump.\u00a0 (Hey, she did once<\/a>.)<\/p>\n \u2022 I found a recent malapropism in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette comment section to be uncannily accurate: “The truth will be reviled.”<\/p>\n \u2022 It is annoying when an online article about a time-sensitive topic (e.g., upcoming event or product review) bears no publication date.\u00a0 Why would a site withhold this information? I would argue that — other than fiction, and even then — there is no writing that does not involve a time element; hence, to omit or conceal its date is disingenuous.<\/p>\n \u2022 What-Goes-Around-Stays-There Department:\u00a0 Ironic how the money I used to spend on vodka every month now goes toward my prescription for Eliquis.\u00a0 Different drug makers, similar profit margins (19%<\/a> and 22%<\/a> respectively).<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0Windows 10 offers users a “high contrast” mode, supposedly to improve text readability.\u00a0 On my laptop, the only thing this does is switch colors to black-and-white and make some lines thicker.\u00a0 It has no effect on the contrast of text, not even the text in its own software.\u00a0 Just one of the new things I\u00a0keep discovering about getting older.<\/p>\n \u2022 I look and feel like I’ve aged a lot in the last year.\u00a0 But clocks don’t run backwards and neither can I.\u00a0 So I have started to paint again.\u00a0 After several hours of work on just the background of my first project, I decided it was ugly and I painted over the whole thing.\u00a0 Then I botched the next try and now I have to sand it all down.\u00a0 I feel younger already.<\/p>\n \u2022 An old high-school friend recently sent me a list of our classmates who have passed away. I was stunned to see how many of our African-American peers were on the list, relative to their numbers in our class.\u00a0\u00a0 This led me to look up U.S. life expectancies<\/a> for the year we were born: for white men and women, the figures were 67 and 73 years; for black men and women, 59 and 64 years.\u00a0 I am still shocked by those numbers.<\/p>\n Today, though the situation has improved<\/a>, the difference in life expectancy between whites and blacks is still 3.5 years.\u00a0 Blacks aged 18-49 are twice as likely<\/a> as non-Hispanic whites to die from heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and black infant mortality is twice as high<\/a>.\u00a0 And blacks are 50% more likely<\/a> than whites to have no health insurance.<\/p>\n Affordable health care is not only an economic issue, it is a social justice issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2022 Advice to children:\u00a0 Tell Mommy that the biggest cookies in the jar disappeared first\u00a0 because they were the easiest to grab.\u00a0 Mommy will be forced to admire your reasoning. \u2022 A taxi is a taxi, no matter how it … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-content\/uploads\/roadgeek.jpg\")
<\/a> Or consider I-26 (at right) heading south-southeast from Kingsport, TN to Charleston, SC.\u00a0 This highway runs seventeen miles south for every ten miles east.\u00a0 Yet I-26 is also tagged EAST-WEST in its entirety, which gets especially confusing near Asheville, NC.\u00a0 The signs should say NORTH-SOUTH at least as far southward as Spartanburg, SC, and preferably along its full extent.\u00a0 There, I’ve had my say.\u00a0 I can retire from AASHTO a happy man.<\/p>\n