8/24/05: Problem Solved

I.

Editor's Note: The following is another example of an idea that came to me without ever hearing it anywhere else. A completely original, if not necessarily brilliant, thought. Yet I'm sure if you looked it up on the internet you'd find 1000 other jokers who had thought of it first. Is it still an original thought?  Whatevs, here goes:

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote a term paper on The Drinking Age.* The nationwide age of 21 had just gone into effect, with the government threatening to withhold highway funding from any states that did not comply by a certain date. I did the bare minimum research, saw some statistics that seemed to clearly indicate that:

a) drinking and driving = bad news, makes lots of people go crunchity-crunch on the highway
b) people under 21 are less experienced with drinking, less experienced with driving, and are thus less likely to make sound decisions regarding drinking and driving.  For this reason, they tend to go crunchity-crunch on the highway more often than people over 21.

My conclusion, as a 15 year-old: the decision to move to a 21 year-old drinking age was a judicious one. Sorry all you Libertarians. Of course, when I started drinking a year or so later, I rethunk my position.

Now, looking back, the correct plan seems obvious:

Drinking Age = 16
Driving Age = 21

Duh!

My logic is this:

1. Nobody really observes the 21 year-old drinking age anyway; it's pretty much unenforceable. Enforcing a minimum driving age is easier and the penalties would be stiffer.
2. Of all the stupid shit that drunk people between the ages of 16 and 21 are capable of, the only stuff that regularly turns fatal involves automobiles**. The other stuff is actually hugely entertaining. You know it is. 
3. Therefore I say cars, not booze, are the problem.  You never see anybody getting peeled out of a bottle of Johnnie Walker with the Jaws of Life. Plus, a kid is way more likely to do harm to another human if he's behind the wheel than he is if he's sitting in his basement playing three man.  So I say keep the cars out of the hands of those crazy drunk kids.

Sure, we'll lose the played-out if entertaining cat and mouse game of adolescence, where the kids try to hide their drinking from the parents, who pretend they're fooled. But that's just a lot of wasted energy, isn't it? Wouldn't my suggestion be a great way to get kids and parents talking? Almost every parent drank when they were 16. The way it is now, they have to pretend like they lived a monk's life. In my system, with 16 the accepted age to pour back the delicious liquor, honesty would reign. If you got too drunk over at Mickey's house, you could call your dad to come pick you up without looking like a wuss, because none of your friends could drive, either. Then the next morning your dad could laughingly tell you all the dumb stuff you said the night before, even sharing a hangover story or two from his own youth, before passing along an honest message about moderation. And you'd have FIVE YEARS to learn this lesson before you ever sat down in one of them deathmobiles.

We had the solution right in front of us all along, we just messed up our approach.

Thank you.

II.

There is a really nice couple that moved into our building on the same day as we did, and they had a kid like a week after ours. We talk to them in the hall and stuff and they seem very friendly. But today, we took it to another level, and I'm not altogether comfortable with that. Today, gentle readers, we did the unthinkable: we made dinner plans with them.

I guess I'm just at a place in life where I really am not interested in making any more friends. Enough already. I got a solid 20 or so, that should cover me for the next ten years. Then I'll worry about it. This couple seems very nice, and I think it's great that my wife might have a fellow mom to hang out and commiserate with, but I still worry. Why?

1) Because I think they might be very religious. Which in itself is totally fine, but once they start pitching you on it, I am out the door like Edwin Moses out of the starter's block. And in my experience, that can indeed happen. It happened to me last week.
2) Because I am inherently suspicious of anyone who is willing to make social plans with strangers.  Like, don't they have their own 20 friends? Why aren't they hanging out with the 20 friends? Maybe they don't have other friends, which makes me fear #3 even more.
3) What if they want this to become a regular thing? I don't want a regular thing, I can tell them that right now. I like watching the Yankees, hanging with the wife, eating various cheese-flavored snacks, and updating the website. That's it as far as weeknights, and weekends are like precious baby kittens that must be treated with maximum care. Can't be blowing a Saturday on your new quasi-buddy.

But we'll give it a shot.

III.

Toilet Update: our cracked Crane Two-piece is gone and it's been replaced by a sleek little Kohler One-piece. That's big-time. Unfortunately, though, the Kohler is really low to the ground, forcing you to crouch into a weird squat when you're doing your biz. I end up not knowing whether I should take a dook or throw down two fingers for the curve. Hopefully I'll get used to it.

IV.

Proud to see Wisconsin atop the party school board once again. I remember freshman year, Playboy came out with its rankings, and somehow Wisconsin hadn't cracked the top 20. I was all mad for a second, but then I read the intro to the article*** where it mentioned that UW-Madison was so far ahead of all the other schools that it could no longer be included in the rankings. Like we had taken it to such a serious level that we had to give up our amateur status. That always made me happy.

Pete's been saying the same thing about UVM. I'll take his word for it.

Whodat? (17 points)

* which I recently found. Hoo Boy was it bad.
** except I guess the binge drinking deaths. But those are rare compared to highway DWI fatalities, I reckon.
*** someone else's copy of the magazine, I assure you.