Ris' dumpster fire

- Had zero stations for water on the 26 mile (42 km) course

- Accidentally gave North American competitor Tom Hicks a cocktail made of egg whites, brandy, and actual fucking rat poison

- Had a guy come into the race late wearing a beret and cutoff slacks, sneak into an apple orchard during the race because no food had been given to him for 40 hours, eat rotten apples, projectile vomit onto the track, fall asleep for hours, and finish in fourth place OVERALL because most of the other runners collapsed of exhaustion or injuries

- Conducted the race on a dusty road, which caused so much dust to be kicked into the air that an American runner somehow inhaled enough to tear his STOMACH LINING open

- Accidentally released feral dogs onto the track

There are no problems with this whatsoever.

--

TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

the good news: I know my process enough to recognize this as the slump that I hit in everything I write when it's like three-quarters-ish done

the bad news: the only way out is through

the good news: I do know the way out!

This is a not-car:

It drives at amazing max-speeds of 40km/h, and can be driven by teenagers.

What this effectively means is that someone turns 16, gets one of these, turns 18, gets an actual car.

(For anyone counting, that's a product lifespan of about 2 years.)

This is Sweden's (Europe's?) solution to non-walkable suburbs. (Which are of course also used in densely populated cities.)

They're advertised as being "safer" than mopeds (for a variety of reasons, this is highly questionable), and "more efficient" than public transit.

Because these things drive at 40km/h, on roads where speed-limits often range from 80-110km/h, they're also incredibly common causes for massive traffic-jams.

Also, notice that the not-car doesn't have a registration-number. They obviously don't need those (I think they used to have them? But I've seen so many of them without any that I can only assume that it's legal), because they're not-cars and aren't in fact often actual cars that have been modified to be speed-limited.

(And obviously, if someone modified an actual car into a not-car, they definitely wouldn't make the transition easily reversible by flipping a switch. Because that would be really easy to hide from the police, and would therefore be super-uncool of them.)

(What do you mean most of the single-car crashes for not-cars are done at +100km/h? That's illegal.)

But yeah, because they're so prone to causing traffic to slow to a crawl, a lot of drivers get really fucking reckless in overtaking them. Meaning that their mere existence makes traffic less safe. Which is crazy.

Also, because they're primarily actually a penis-measuring-thing, they will be highly modified.

What this means is that it's very common to find not-cars set so low that they throw off sparks. And almost impossible to find one without a Massive Sound System, that they can use to blast shitty music and increase noise-pollution for literally everyone in the area.

(How do I know that the music is shitty? If it needs to be that loud to be good, it must be fucking garbage.)

Circling back onto the topic of safety, it should be noted that these things are designed to drive at 40km/h, so they're only really required to handle crashes at 40km/h. But they're driving on roads in close proximity to traffic going much faster than that.

In fact, the perceived safety of the not-car makes it a lot more tempting to take these types of roads than it would be a for someone with a moped. But they're also so much bigger that it's a lot harder for someone coming up on them too fast to actually swerve around them and not hit them.

And as anyone can tell you, the safest car is the one that doesn't crash in the first place.

So.

Increased teenage-mobility? Debatable.

Traffic safety? Negatively impacted.

Safety for the driver? Fake news.

Noise-pollution? Like you wouldn't believe.

Actual pollution? Lots of that too.

Conclusion:

Ghost Dad: WE LITERALLY CHANGED OUR VOWS BECAUSE WE DIDN'T LIKE "TILL DEATH DO US PART"