Hey Come Here, Let Me Whisper In Your Ear

Ever notice how a lot of new trucks & SUVs have those sort of weird upturned snouts and big, angry looking faces? That’s not a coincidence.

The upturned snouts are a regulatory trick to make them qualify as off-road or heavy-duty vehicles so they have lower fuel economy and safety requirements. It’s the same phenomenon as putting seats into the back of the Subaru Brat was designed to get around a tax on light trucks known, for complex reasons, as the Chicken Tax.

The angry face is mostly aesthetic, an appeal to buyers who want a truck to look tough. Both design trends result in higher bumpers, greater mass, and reduced forward visibility, and those in turn lead to excess deaths, just like the Subaru Brat killed or maimed more than a few of its fun-loving truck-bed passengers.

Slate, ever the hot-take machine, went ahead and made that subtext explicit:

Whether you bought a Sierra… or a Ram or a Silverado or a Jeep Gladiator or any other megatruck or monster SUV, you’re making an announcement to the world. It’s not the announcement you think it is, though. It’s not about your wealth or your toughness or your masculinity. No, you’ve announced, very clearly, that you don’t care if you accidentally kill a stranger. You’re saying: “I’m totally cool with someone else dying because of a decision I made.”

That’s not theoretical. The NHTSA just released their 2020 stats, and despite decreased vehicle miles traveled (VMT) due to the pandemic, 38,824 people died in traffic, the most since ’07. 

Of course, I also just responded to a recent survey about cycling by saying that the main reason I don’t ride my bike is that I have nowhere to go.

Half of It Is Innocent

99 Percent Invisible covers the rise and diversification of the Chinese factory art scene in Dafen Village, Shenzen. It’s pretty cool.

Half of It Is Wise

Back in the 70s and 80s, right-wingers used to say that environmentalists were like watermelons: Green on the outside, Red on the inside. With the arrival of undeniable climate change impacts, argues a new thinktank policy paper, we’re about to see some avocados: green on the outside, Brownshirt on the inside. It sounds kind of surprising until you recall that in the early 2000s the Sierra Club was nearly taken over by anti-immigrant groups who argued that America had limited resources and should reserve them for native-born whites.

Meanwhile, in some untidy spot, a 2012 interview with former advisor Gleb Pavlovsky about Putin seems prescient.

The Whole Damn Thing Makes No Sense

Me: *sigh* not my monkeys, not my circus

Ringmaster: that’s right. And the hat, give me back the hat.

cap’n watsisname (@capnwatsisname) June 16, 2019

Joy

This dog.
Perhaps this one.
Or maybe this cat.
Or this one.
Regardless, I think I may have found the only good parking lot.
Definitely take a look at this owl trying to act dignified despite being loopy as hell coming out of anesthesia.