“Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you want to meet him.”
On a church sign.
“Driving Miss Daisy” is one of my favorite movies and so much so that it is one of the few movies that I care to watch over and over without losing its appeal.
Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for Best Actress and I believe Morgan Freeman should have won an Oscar for Best Actor. No blood and guts like the zombie movies of today which have a plot with the same substance that’s in my septic tank.
For me that movie gets into human emotions and besides, I love old cars. As a side note, my other favorite movie is “The Thing From Another World,” which was first released as “The Thing” in 1951. Many people didn’t realize that the alien monster in the original movie was, in fact, James Arness of “Gunsmoke” fame.
Every six months or so I love to do a column about driving and where that driving takes place is almost totally irrelevant today. I thank the Windham Police Department for patrolling the recently reconstructed River Road and it is unfortunate that they can’t do more radar stops. Maybe one of these days Windham can get another grant to help fund some extra hours for police officers to do that. Make no doubt about it, River Road shows what modern technology and hard work can accomplish these days, although some companies complain that they can’t find competent workers.
Modern technology has allowed cars to have small engines that are powerful even though they don’t have the cubic inches of the muscle cars of late 1960s and 1970s. I have a 2002 Toyota that has so much horsepower compared to its weight that I have to be careful when I start to go somewhere because, if I don’t, the tires will easily spin and tires aren’t cheap anymore.
Since it is a light vehicle I would never attempt to find out what its top speed is. Unfortunately that doesn’t prevent other drivers in attempting to do just that and lately it appears that some are doing just that on the River Road.
I have written numerous columns noting that the speed limit on River Road at the intersection of Newhall and Gambo roads is 30 mph, although most drivers are going much faster with some going more than double that. It’s bad enough for cars but now it is easy to witness commercial vehicles, including very heavy ones, doing the same.
I have already seen the results of one accident and it was nothing less than a miracle that someone wasn’t killed. With winter weather coming one of these days I can’t imagine what will happen on that road. I don’t like speed bumps but in the end I am beginning to believe that they might be necessary. I hated driving on it when it was in bad condition and now I fear it even more.
Perhaps even worse are all the distractions caused by our electronic world of today. My wife’s car has a computer-like system that can do many things like telling you how far she can go before running out of gas but one has to take their eyes off the road to do that. I think all us have to admit seeing many people driving and either talking on cell phones or texting. I don’t see any solution unless they can disable any such devices while driving. But maybe there is an answer.
I was first opposed to the so-called driverless vehicles like Google has recently designed. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hasty because that means us humans could do anything we want inside the vehicle because we are not driving it. OK, let me change that to many but not all things we might want to do. I don’t know who or what is responsible if an accident occurs but somehow that will be decided as more of those vehicles hit the road.
Lane Hiltunen of Windham wonders if government will take control of driverless vehicles.
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