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Police know that the first sign of affiliation into a new gang is a change in the subject's vocabulary. New words. Unfamiliar names. Did little Johnny never mention the words "locating datum" before he suddenly blurted it out by accident one night at dinner? It may be time to have a conversation with his teacher, to find out more about who he spends his time with at school. If you can get to it early enough, you can nip it in the bud.

In a similar vein, it's important to figure out where all their money is going. Kids who get hooked on the machinist lifestyle will often buy ridiculous things in order to "prove" their affiliation with the gang. One mother of two in Rhode Island came home to find a bunch of strange metallic cylinders on her doorstep, shipped overnight from FedEx to her youngest child. Round stock. She thought it was "just a phase." Her child is doing time in a federal penitentiary, after getting all fucked up on DYKEM markers and stabbing an engineer for submitting an insufficiently dimensioned drawing.

Last, an obsession with precision is often your last chance to have a talk with a wayward child. Are things in your house suddenly becoming rigidly aligned to an invisible grid system? Are you noticing things becoming burnished or otherwise polished, that weren't before? A trusted adult's timely intervention when your kid is micrometering a piece of sheet metal found in the alley may be all that is saving your kid from a lifetime of obsessing over thousandths.

It's easy to discredit their opinions entirely, get on your motorcycle, and ride off into the sunset. For many of us, however, societal approval is still necessary for things like gainful employment and having a place to store your motorcycle. This forces people who would otherwise be hardcore bike-jigglers into a car, just so everyone will leave them alone.

Lots of automakers have made weird three-wheeled things to try and close this gap, but they only make you look like some kind of middle-aged clown fetishist (and not a successful one) instead of a cool badass biker. As your trusted friend and future beneficiary of your will, I recommend you not buy any of these.

Sure, we're all guilty of hoarding tools. I myself have several dozen fancy single-purpose specialty tools that have never come out of their package. They're ready for action, as soon as the perfect circumstance occurs. Those of you who saw The Brave Little Toaster too many times (i.e. at least once) will immediately feel bad for these tools trapped in their plastic prisons, and insist upon starting a new project just to use them.

This is, in itself, also a trap. Even if you have the most pared-down set of tools, eventually you are going to get suckered into buying something like a Honda valve adjuster because it's in the clearance bin at the store. And don't tell me you won't: you just said you felt bad for some tools not getting used before. The clearance bin is basically hospice for them. You can't just leave them there.

So now you need a Honda, and ideally one that needs valve adjustment. It's very unlikely that Honda has only one problem with it, because it is a car, and all used cars are simply bundles of problems that you have yet to discover. This then leads into more Honda-specific tools, and inevitably you'll buy too many of those while passing the clearance bin while picking up a specialty disc-brake-backer-offer or fancy electrical disconnect tool. Shit, if I had a BMW motorcycle, this would come in handy all the time.

Perhaps you're not sure if you're a good candidate for venture capitalist takeover. Sure, you've done some labour abuses, sometimes a little bit of cheque kiting, and you're just not getting paid big-leaguely enough from the hard work of other people. Maybe your other CEO buddies have gotten multi-billion-dollar buyouts and started doing cocaine on yachts. That would make anyone jealous. Why not you, right? Thing is, we do have some standards.

If you've worked hard on your business, struggled through late nights, and made a small but loyal base of beloved customers, we don't give a flying shit about you. What we want are some brands, baby, and the current environment is chock full of dead brands to fill full of money juice. Your name is George Toys-R-Us? We'll buy your shares at a price that would have set an SEC regulator on fire thirty years ago, and rip the copper out of the walls until it pays us for that.

Safety warnings have been getting wilder as our world becomes more intricately dangerous. I've spoken about this before: fifty years ago, most warning signs were like "don't put your cigarette out in this." Nowadays there's a ton of cautions about radio interference with your Xbox controllers if you eat a cupcake the wrong way after having major dental surgery.

Part of this is because the demands of the customer have become more sophisticated. Every day, we're doing shit that would have pissed off a NASA scientist, and not even thinking about it too hard. Last week, I got mad that the free wifi on an airplane wasn't very fast. My buddy made some kind of special collar that lets us hear the thoughts of dogs, and then he threw it out with the other clutter on his desk when his in-laws were visiting.

Unfortunately, human brains are still basically the same as fifty years ago. Most of us would still be considered "kinda weird" in the 70s. There is a much wider gap of knowledge that has to be expressed to your average run-of-the-mill ding-dong in order to explain to them just how much trouble they are in. That's where the warnings are coming from: you practically have to include an undergraduate lecture to get people up to speed with the concepts involved, before you tell them not to put those concepts in their mouth.

Around these parts, the only appropriate honking is angry, intense stabs of the button. This is done whenever someone pisses you off, but is only appropriate for certain kinds of pissing-off. Cut off? You bet. Near crash? Uh-huh. Going a little slow in the passing lane? Surprisingly, this is not acceptable. This points to the moral bankruptcy of our civilization. Sometimes a slowpoke needs to get honked at; they are holding everyone else up and maybe even creating an accident.

So, now that we've discovered the root of all degeneracy in society, what do we do about it? The good news is this. Cultural norms are created by repetition. Your parents do some wacky shit, then they teach it to you as normal, then you teach it to your kids. For instance, in France they have never invented the moonwalk. It's true, look it up.

In the same way, I believe we can deprogram society from thinking it's "rude" to roll up on the bumper of some dude only doing 115 in a 100 and then lay on the horn. Lots of shit was rude until we fixed it. Women voting used to be rude. We can change our world, but I need your help to do it.

Why? We got a viewer letter. Someone just like you, assuming that you're six years old and named Julie-Anne. She wanted to know "do fish have dreams?" After asking everyone at the Bullshit offices, it was determined that: who cares? Even so, we thought it would make a good episode, and here it is.

This sucker is Hiram Worthington III. He works at the town aquarium, in the department of making kids not tap on the glass. We figured he'd be as good a candidate as any to pose Julie-Anne's question to. What we didn't expect was that, after macing our producer and camera crew, he'd run for it. A short foot chase ensued, followed by a high-speed highway pursuit between the Channel 5 news van and the fleeing Lexus of Mr. Worthington. He lost us by driving through the middle of an abandoned Borders, where our illiterate key grip managed to get confused by an errant dictionary and roll the van.

Over time, we lose this beginner's mindset. It's no longer a challenge to figure out which way around a lowercase P goes, for instance. You cannot recall that simple joy. At this point, a lot of people get nervous about what other people think of them.

You've made it this long and you don't know how to pitch a tent, drive a manual transmission, make a dry martini, or demagnetize a floppy drive head? Everyone knows that. What have you been doing with your time on this cursed earth? The important thing is not to let them get to you. Don't get set in your ways, and keep on learning.

As long as you don't get good at anything, they can't judge you, right? You are capable of learning so much in your lifetime. Become a Renaissance Asshole. It's your first day learning how to plot orbital trajectories, and tomorrow it will be your first day learning how to drive a stolen city bus. Like a shark, you can't ever stop moving (they won't die; other sharks would make fun of them.)

First, there's the obvious task of falling behind on vehicle maintenance. This Valiant, for instance, has had a cooling system problem for the better part of the current century. If I had done literally any investigation during those years, I'd have figured out it was a bad line on the transmission cooler. Now, I've lost all the don't-stop juice from the transmission, and overheated the engine. This gives me a lot to think about on the many miles walk back to my place.

You also want to pick location carefully. Amateurs break down on the Trans-Canada, where there are no continuously-connected bike lanes or even sidewalks for most of its span. Walking on the highway, while dipshits in oncoming Dodge Rams look up from Snapchat only every 10 km or so, is not relaxing in the least. Pick an idyllic nature cruise. Stick to the B-roads. Another bonus: you might come across another car for sale, and you can add it to your hoard while ignoring the problem that got you here in the first place.

Two of the magpies were holding down a third magpie, and a fourth magpie was wearing what looked like little robes and a powered wig. I don't know where they got that from, but it was adorable. They were all squawking at each other, and pecking at the one on the ground. When this kind of thing happens, you feel like you should step in. Abandon your crude justice system, birds! Listen not to this corrupt "justice," who was probably appointed by a bird not operating in your best interests.

My hand was still. I didn't want to catch a contempt charge. The (human) justice who yelled at me for most of last week's ordeal told me that I was lucky to get away after turning his courtroom into a circus. Who knows what magpie jail was like? As a minority, I'd be isolated and attacked, picked on whenever I tried to get extra birdseed at the cafeteria or call my family by standing on the roof and squawking real loud. I decided not to interfere.

Sure enough, a fifth magpie soon appeared, wearing a little white tie. He already had the black robe, I guess. After presenting some evidence to the justice magpie, he consulted it for a bit. Soon, the justice rapped a little gavel on the bike path, and the accused was freed. I had seen the avian court system work yet again.

Once they had dispersed from the path, I continued my walk. Up in the trees, I heard the accused magpie complain to his friends.

"Can't believe I got busted for nest raiding, man. It's not my fault. It's all because the grocery store started locking up their dumpster to keep that asshole from stealing all the expired ramen."

Lots of folks around me complain bitterly that retail establishments are too quick to change their seasonal promos. I say: don't blame me. This is the fault of the ancient Gregorians, who put Halloween and Christmas too closely together when they invented the calendar. They knew exactly what they were getting into, and it is only fate that it is our age that the inevitable collapse has occurred to.

In a normal, healthy retail environment, these two holidays put too closely together wouldn't matter: families would still spend through the summer on hot girl summer, the fall in hot girl autumn, the winter in somewhat colder girl winter, and finally re-up for hot girl spring. Cash throughout the whole year pouring into your coffers, paying for deluxe mall real estate and maybe a BMW or two for the regional manager. Unfortunately, shit's fucked right now, in case you haven't noticed, and now the only two things that can get a wallet opened are spooky skeletons and big ol' trees with blinking lights on 'em.

Indeed, public transit makes a lot of sense as an investment. People need to get somewhere, and making it easier to get a bunch of people where they want to go, quickly, can only be a good thing. That is, unless you live in the soap opera universe, where getting somewhere quicker means that you are more likely to catch your significant other cheating on you with your identical evil twin. You expected me to be stuck in traffic, Sofia? Like a peasant? Efficient, frequent, and convenient mass transit has put the lie to your antiquated concept of congestion, just as it has to this marriage!

We know, of course, of the opposition to public transit. Used car dealerships wield a shocking amount of power in municipal government. They'd rather destroy civilization than be told that they can't sell you a 320,000-mile 2001 Neon for $11500 (with extra finance charges.) How dare they mess with our kids' ability to get on a maglev bullet train that takes them to work in nanoseconds.

For a lot of reasons, I don't really do that anymore. We'll talk about how I am actually a great moral leader and a wonderful human being later, but for now let's talk about golf carts. Golf carts are like a little car that you get to drive around the golf course. They're great, although I often felt that they didn't have enough in the way of oomph. No torque, no pluck. The more astute readers may already understand what is going on here.

Another important aspect of golf carts is that they are almost exclusively rear-wheel-drive. You know, like a drift car. Combine that with a relatively short wheelbase, and you can get some naughty skids out of them if you get the weight to transfer just right. In a theoretical case, which my attorney would like to impress upon you is hypothetical only, someone could do a pretty sick rip on a sparsely-populated golf course. That is, of course, if that someone's medication allowing him to be a functional member of society were to run out.

Now, as everyone knows, these robots aren't "smart." They're heinously overbuilt RC cars, to which some grad students stapled a circular saw. Your average luggage tug has more autonomy, mostly because nobody is particularly afraid that it will get hit by a 60,000-rpm spinning blade and ejected into the audience. Simple is better, and simple is a lot easier to turn off when things start getting hairy.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport, I think you can probably still work it out with a Swiss Chalet kids' placemat and a couple unchewed crayons. It is basically demolition derby, but with the benefit of the driver not being actively inside the car at the time it is blown to smithereens. Their (the robots, but also the owners') goal is simply to survive being sawed, flipped, burned, mulched, or folded for longer than the other guy can, and there's lots of ways to do it.

One strategy is just to be a big ol' heavy thing, like a sumo wrestler. Then you can go through life with the philosophy that walls often win, even when big pickup trucks crash into them at high speed. The other end of combat conceptualization is that you should be very tiny and fast, so as to make it very annoying for them to hit you. Then you wait, flitting around like a little asshole dragonfly, until the enemy exhausts themselves and exposes a flashing, vulnerable weak point.

When I called the woodpecker guy about all those woodpeckers trying to peck the side of my house (which is not mostly made out of wood) I got a rude surprise. Dude just laughed at me. Nobody can make woodpeckers go away, he gasped out between giggles. All we do is sell you some crazy shit to annoy them into destroying your neighbour's house instead. I hung up immediately, and resolved to solve my problem myself. It would turn out later that his uncharacteristic honesty was due to a gas leak in the neighbourhood, but that's a story for another time (RIP Woodpecker Woody.)

Rather than fight them directly, I decided the best plan was to do as the woodpecker guy wanted. Like Steven Seagal in his acclaimed action thriller Above Lethality Under Siege, I would simply redirect their attack somewhere else. What makes a bunch of agitated birds with super-long tongues wrapped around their brains chill the fuck out for five minutes? Becoming homeowners, that's what.

Now, I've been accused of many things over the years, often credibly. One of the things that any attorney will tell you never to do in court is defend yourself. Even so, if it came down to it, I would tell that stuck-up judge and that jury full of douchebags that I was capable of building a Goddamn birdhouse. No woodworker, to be sure – there's no ornate finials or even dovetails, as I wasn't sure if woodpeckers had like a "race thing" going on with the doves – but I dutifully followed the woodpecker birdhouse plan I had downloaded from alt.woodworking.birds.birds.birds on the library computers. And it looked pretty good as I nailed it to what remained of my fence.

Here's what I hadn't thought about, though. Induced demand. As soon as I put up some affordable housing for these picidaes, all of a sudden their entire social calendar wanted to move into the same neighbourhood. Parents, cousins, grand-cousins, supernephews, you name it. Each and every one of them knew the way to get a brand-new deluxe luxury condo was to start pecking on my house when I was trying to sleep. One morning I woke up and a pair of sapsuckers were flying around my bedroom, with a hole in the wall big enough to stick a pair of Weber carbs. I was spending every waking hour constructing low-density housing for the woodpeckers, and my neighbours were beginning to wonder if I was the one luring them to destroy their homes.

On the idyllic afternoon where my policies are put into action, I switch my right turn signal on a little bit too early, and in return a woman named Neci who has never seen the outside of a Soviet work prison for more than 30 minutes takes my wing mirror off with a subsonic 50-calibre warning shot from a mile away. Her dream when released is to one day visit Subway.

Up the block, a pair of teenaged child soldiers made mostly of knives who were hardwired from birth by various French ex-governmental assassination rings have disabled a Cayenne by putting $6500 of tank killer rounds through the engine block, and pull out the driver to receive her ticket.

Behind me, I hear the distinct sounds of an Uber Eats driver doing a hit and run on a parallel-parked M35A2. In response, he receives 30,000 rounds per minute of Phalanx caseless hot loads from the nearby traffic calming emplacement.

A little girl rides her single-speed Huffy up the bike lane and meekly rings her bell at a Ford Escape blocking the crosswalk. It barely has a chance to get back into gear, before an extended-magazine Uzi comes out of the Hello Kitty basket on the front.

An absolute bear of a man comes off the sidewalk and pulls in the shattered husks of each car, leaving whatever he can easily slop out of the driver's seat in the middle of the road for the crows. The child soldiers take pot shots at him from their sidearms the whole time, and cackle about composting. It is their private joke.

Once the end to hostilities was declared, sometime around the Dreamcast, that was it. No reparations. No payment for our brave message-board posting. Not even any new games. Nobody asked us if we wanted to stop. We were told to just keep going, and not mention the war ever again. That's hard to do when you're hanging out in the veteran's affairs building with a bunch of your fellow soldiers, critically wounded by seeing Sonic the Hedgehog hug Mario.

Couple folks went on to become mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, fighting as irregulars in some distant hellhole like the Xbox. I knew one guy who, well, he got really into the Tapwave Zodiac, before all that shit went down. He closed his browser that day, and never reopened it. He's living as a deep-sea fisherman in Cape Cod, now. Bet the nightmares of GameFAQs never stopped. They don't know you gave up. They don't care.