One Tony Jimenez points to another reason the headlights in Canada were out more often (besides being on more often). To wit:

Cold weather causes the lights to go out more often, which would explain why you saw it all the time in Canada, but very few times in Texas. My wife was from Minnesota so there were many there. My guess is that the constant freezing and thawing makes causes the vacuum seal for the light bulb to fail more often, thus requiring a local law forcing people to get them fixed.

Works for me.

This evening was full, lemmie tell ya. We loaded down my Wife’s credit card with crap from Lowe’s, then we discovered the two large plastic lawn chairs were in fact too large to fit in my car. After a few failed attempts to flag down friends with trucks, we just tied the trunk down as best we could (as it turns out, Lowe’s gives you free string to tie your trunk down with, along with those red plastic flags). This killed most of the evening.

Because my wife had things to do I volunteered to go to the grocery store for us, as well as picking up this evening’s dinner. I wanted to hurry up and finish the shopping since I was hungry and I wanted to get some coding in before the night was shot. I got nine of the ten things on the list with no problem, then I hit the problem point: Velveeta. Crap. Without going too deep into Seinfeld mode, I have a mental block against Velveeta. That is, I can never remember where it is in the store, no matter how many times I get it. Plus, the stores tend to move it around. Once, at a different store my wife and I finally found some, and the clerk actually complimented our ability to find it, which she told us was rare for that store.

The key problem with Velveeta is that it’s not a defined food. It’s not in the cheese section (usually), since it doesn’t have to be refrigerated. However, there’s not a really logical section for “unrefrigerated cheese”, so it’s a crapshoot where the Velveeta is. I was happy since right off the bat I spotted small boxes with “Velveeta” on them. But when I got there they were Velveeta Shells and Cheese dinner. Shit. I even walked past a large can (tub is more like it) of Nacho Cheese, the kind they spread thin at band booster concession stands. Cheese? Hello? No Velveeta to be seen.

Supermarkets are laid out in such a way that you can usually narrow it down to where your food isn’t. At some point in the store, the items stop being food and tend to be things like mops and detergent, until you hit the wall where the frozen stuff is. Then on the other end of the store tend to be things like produce and the deli/florist/pharmacy. So I had the Velveeta narrowed down to a subset of rows, but I went up and down these rows repeatedly. Add to this the fact that I’m getting more hungry, tired and flustered and the situation started to really suck.

Finally I found it. In the snack section. The snack section. Who in the hell is eating Velveeta as a snack? I mean, I’m making a snack out of it, but the Velveeta itself is not a snack. Good grief.

After getting home, eating and assembling a VCR thingy (more later) I was too frayed to get any coding in. Oh well, there’s always tommorow.

Bastard Mac users, getting a new Virtual Boy emulator while the old PC ones go unupdated for years now.

This post is kinda weird, so bear with me.

When I was in my latter High School years, the ones when I was driving, there was a popular thing to do while driving at night. I was in the car with a friend of mine and he suddenly punched the ceiling of his car and shouted “SEX!”. Suffice it to say, this stopped the conversation cold. He told me, “whenever you see a car with one headlight, you call ‘sex’. If you call three in one night, you get laid.” The when, where and who of getting laid he didn’t specify.

Soon after it became a trend amongst me and my friends whenever we were driving in a group. It became a game – who could spot the one-headlight cars first. It was just like “slug bug”s, only no one had to get punched in the arm. I can tell you this much from my High School days, however – the “getting laid” portion didn’t work – not for me at least.

Suffice it to say that the game went a little bit nuts on our Senior Band bus trip to Canada. A few years prior Canada had passed a law requiring that all cars sold/manufactured in the country have their headlights on when running, even during the day. Consequently the law of averages wasn’t in the favor of a lot of Canuk headlights.

About a month back I noticed a car with no headlights and I instantly thought “SEX!” but I didn’t say or do it (it would probably have freaked out my Mother-In-Law in the back seat). And it occured to me – I was last in High School nearly seven years ago. Since then I’ve been to College, graduated, gotten married, gone off to the “real world”, an entire lifetime. And yet, I think I can count on my left hand the number of one-headlight cars I’ve seen in those seven years. Back in my High School years I saw dozens overnight, but few if any since. I don’t know why, and I don’t even know what to point to to guess about. I started to wonder about some theories, however, during a recent car trip back from Dallas – you can do some good thinking in a car with two sleeping women.

1. My first two years in the Corps (Black Belt years) I wasn’t allowed to leave the dorm at night, or not very often anyway. These last few years I’ve been married and so when I come home I’m “in for the night” and I don’t go out. This would explain a little bit of the phonomena – if I don’t go out at night, I can’t see any cars – headlights or no. However, I didn’t notice it those three years in between very often, either.
2. It was a stupid thing I did in High School. I was lucky and didn’t have a job in HS, so I didn’t have to worry about a whole lot. College was rough, academic wise, for me, so perhaps I just didn’t notice the cars. Same goes for today – I work for a living now. Perhaps I’ve just become unobservant on non-important matters.
3. Perhaps local law is more stringent on burned out headlights. Odd that I would have never heard of this by now. By this token, isn’t it a bit odd that I owned a 1990 Lumina for eight years and never had a light burn out on it?
4. Perhaps headlights have just gotten better as of late. Headlights may outlive the engine these days. By that logic, in my hometown people tended to have cars because they got them to their job and back, most of the people in this town are College Kids and many of them have nice new cars their parents gave them (as was the case for me).
5. College Station, TX is mostly centralized – I live five minutes from my office, for example. Want to go to a kickass restauraunt? You could almost walk. Perhaps what kills headlights is extended uninterrupted use – short trips are fine on them (but murder on batteries). In my hometown where people have to drive thriry minutes to get to the neighbooring town because that’s where the Paper Mill is at (like my Dad, for one) you’re more likely to burn them out. When you’re hopping across town to go get liquored up, the tax on the bulbs is less. Having written that, I realize I never see too many broken bulbs in Dallas, but then I’m usually having to drive like a madman on the highways, so perhaps this is another “observation” issue.
6. By the centralized logic, my trips are shorter. I don’t drive clear across town to go visit friends anymore – I go home to my wife. I make a quick occasional jaunt to the Albertson’s. The odds of me running into someone with a broken headlight is slim because I don’t drive much at night and when I do, it’s not for long. Even when I do drive at night for an extended period it’s usually on long highways in Texas, where there’s nary a soul around and if you are going to go driving, it won’t be with one headlight.
7. Maybe people are just more prideful of their cars here.
8. Finally, maybe I never would have noticed broken headlights at all if someone hadn’t pointed them out to me.

I don’t know what’s up with the broken headlight issue and why it went away, but I have a feeling as soon as my Wife reads this post she’ll have a quick, simple explanation for it – one I would have never thought of in a million years.