Founded in 1761, it is a friendly, well-ordered, prettily-steepled community with a big central green, an old-fashioned Main Street, and a rich and prestigious university, Dartmouth College, whose benignly dominant presence gives the town a backdrop of graceful buildings, an air of privileged endeavor, and the presence of five thousand students, not one who can be trusted to cross a road in safety.I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson
I've been there. It's true. Those stupidly self-entitled students will cross a street without checking to see whether or not that 25,000lb truck is going to stop.
10 comments:
So Darwin wins a LOT up there... :-)
Hmm. They do that around the UC Berkeley campus also. We always thought it was something about Berkeley, but now I wonder...
-Doug in Oakland
They're our future, when automatic-driven vehicles will stop for them :-(
NFO, you'd think so, but folks know those Special Snowflakes are all Ivy-League grade fools.
ahhhh, it's prolly that way in most college towns. New Paltz, one of the better SUNYs, has those same headphone zombies that cross the street oblivious to traffic.
I had an aunt who lived to a ripe old age there...guess it's a generational thing.
I always thought this Mindless Zombie behavior came about at the same time as The Pedestrian Has The Right Of Way thing, which totally ignores physics.
The mindless zombie thing came along in big numbers pretty much with the invention of the smart phone. What's more important, staying alive, or seeing who tweeted what?
Walking while holding a cell phone ought to be a felony, along with driving.
Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank
Coincidentally, I was sitting at a Light Rail station in Denver a couple of hours ago when a guy came walking briskly past holding a phone to his cheek. He kept repeating "Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you..." Nothing else, just the same repetition. At the same time, his gait gradually increased to a lope, then a dead run. Then he hung a hard right and dashed out into busy traffic, dodging cars, cars dodging him, lots of screeching and honking...couldn't hear him any more, but he made it across and disappeared around a building, phone still in his ear.
Let's see, moon phase...nope, first quarter. Something else must be going on.
I'm still trying to figure out why some people walk down the middle of the street like it's the sidewalk. I think it happened relatively quickly about 8 years ago.
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