UPDATE: I had to laugh this morning when I was parking in a lot downtown. And it wasn’t a commercial truck. Figures.
I have been commuting the streets of Sioux Falls almost daily for 4 years on my E-Bikes. Certain things stick out with our traffic flows. The thing that has surprised me the most is how rude and aggressive big truck drivers are. While most of the drivers are men, it doesn’t seem to matter their gender or race they are all guilty of being very BAD drivers and rude. I’m not talking about commercial trucks, those drivers are usually good because the company they work for is plastered all over their vehicle, it is people who drive large extended cab pickups or very large 4 door SUVs for personal use. I used to think it was because of phone usage, but it is NOT, most large truck drivers will look right at you and pull in front of you. If they see you crossing the street they speed up to scare you or try to hit you. And if they fail in messing with your commute they usually roll their window down and yell profanities at you. They are RUDE as F’CK. And like I said it is ALWAYS people in large personal trucks. I don’t know if they think it is some status symbol to own a truck that costs more then the original purchase price of my home (no kidding) or if it is tiny dick disease (can women have this too?). But I don’t understand why large truck drivers are so aggressive, not just towards bicyclists and peds but other drivers. Here’s an example; I drove my car thru a little snow storm the other day to work, and the roads were pretty bad. I was going down South Cliff and all of the traffic was moving cautiously and slowly until some jackass in a King Ranch blows past everyone doing 50 MPH and blowing snow all over everyone. They are just soooo damn rude.
I know this isn’t scientific, but every time I have a close call it is always with a large personal vehicle. I don’t think visibility in those vehicles is better, I think it is worse. I saw a lady driving a Nissan Armada (they the most ridiculous SUV you have ever seen, it looks like a SWAT team armored vehicle, but bigger). All you could see was the top of her head and the way she was driving it was obvious to me she couldn’t see crap. I also think there should be weight limits on large personal vehicles. If you are a contractor hauling around equipment and tools, you need something super duty, but what is the purpose of driving a King Ranch as a commuter in town? It’s silly. And who has $600 a month to spend on gas?
I’m not sure how you make large truck drivers better, but you can certainly regulate them. I would love to force them all to drive a Mazda Miata for a year.
I inevitably giggle whenever I go into a parking lot as there is ALWAYS a giant truck moron who has no clue how to park. They will be a good three feet from the front end of the space, leaving a good portion of their ass hanging in the driving lane. And the yellow lines on the sides seem to be invisible to them.
“I once had a dream that I had a F-350 sent ahead of me to Europe, then when I got there, I toured the E.U. in it…. but guess what happened?” ……:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KA1qlzKIls
Okay, so we need to talk about the 2026 Burger Battle, because apparently there are 50 restaurants involved this time, but the Battle only lasts for 31 days, which means (Because I think you need to consume all 50 burgers before you can rightfully vote for your favorite) you have to consume like 1.68 burgers a day, and then a course there will be french fries and probably a Coke involved, too. But the questions I have are: How do you find a .68 burger and after 50 restaurant burgers in 31 days won’t you then need to then join the Ozempic Battle in February? #SuperSizeMe! #IWillGladlyPayYouOnTuesdayForABurgerToday #WhatHowMuchIsTheMinervasBurgerThisTime? #WhatDoYouMeanAPizzaShopOnceWonTheBurgerBattle? #ItsBurgerTime!
( and Woodstock adds: “Say, I think one of the restaurants should offer a burger for this Battle with beef from
Argentina…. that ought to go over good…. 🙂 #FascistPatty #NaziBurger #FalklandIslandDelight #PopeFrancisBurger…… )
VSG
Paris may have lost Brigitte Bardot, but at least Rowena still has Mamie Van Doren.
“Oh man, I used to love Brigitte Bardot ….. You know, she used to be the French Farrah Fawcett before Farrah Fawcett” ….. ( …. “If that’s possible, that is” …… 🙂 ….. #DontTellDua ) …….
I worked at DT restaurant during BB about 4 years ago. People cheat and go out with a group of 4 and hit 4 restaurants in one night, they basically eat a 1/4 burger
No wonder downtown Sioux Falls is failing. Four people are eating off a single plate. AND, I bet four women go into a boutique together, too, planning to wear the same dress, except they have to get it to fit the biggest gal in their party, and big dresses cost more to make but are priced the same as smaller ones of the same exact style…. It’s all beginning to make sense to me now…. No wonder the “boutique grocers” idea never took off….
The Burger Battle is stupid.
Yeah, one night an 8 top came in and confessed to me they were hitting 8 restaurants in that night and try 8 different burgers. They all ordered water and their bill was $20, they left me $2. They even said to me, ‘Are we taking up your big table, were sorry.’ I wanted to say YES and if you are all going to have one bite, why didn’t you just order the 8 burgers on Door Dash and have a party at your house. Losers. I hated special events or promotions from DTSF when I worked at different DT restaurants because it would always bring the riff raff cheapskates who would act like you should be grateful they came and gave you business. Used to crack me. Clems, and you can see them a mile away with their Fox Racing coats and a baseball cap that looks like it is stored in an oil can. Some folks say DTSF can be a little stuck up (mainly because the prices DTSF are usually double of what other restaurants are, but you get what you pay for). I like it that way, I have no interest at looking at Fat Trump supporters. I think I suggested to DTSF years ago, probably 20 years ago, that they do a ‘Taste of Sioux Falls’. We had something similar that the Ronald McDonald house put on. While the event was awesome I think it was cancelled after a couple of years because I don’t think people understood it. When I lived in Seattle in the late 80’s every small town from the Canadian border to the Oregon Coast would put these events on and it is a way to showcase and market your restaurant. When GermanFest was on Phillips, it was kind of like that. But basically how it works is all the DTSF restaurants would set up booths in front of their restaurants and give people a ‘taste’ of one of their specialties. You buy ‘bite tickets’ and each of those tickets is worth a sample. Most samples were like one or two bites, but it was great. You would get full on 8 tickets and there was a beer garden. We would go to the ‘Taste of Vancouver’ it was a blast. Those French Canadians know how to eat! I think this would have a bigger impact on sales DTSF then selling a couple of hamburgers, but this of course would be during the summer and I would encourage them to do it EVERY first Friday. I usually read all the descriptions and pick my top 3. I think the Duck Fat Croissant Burger looks the best, and the Choke Cherry Elk Burger looks interesting, but probably weird. I had a friend marinate burgers in Merlot one time. It didn’t turn out so well.
What I think is stupid about the Burger Battle is not the event itself, but rather the amount of local media attention it receives. Local journalists should be embarrassed by the amount of time they put into mentioning and doing news features about it. As long as local journalists are not willing to hang out at the SF airport every time a member of our congressional delegation flies back to South Dakota to ask them serious questions about Trump, his policies, and the state of our country, then I really do not know how most of our local journalists can call themselves journalists when they fail to do this, but yet find time to report on a local Burger Battle. Such journalist tendencies are very sophomoric and reflect an attitude and aptitude expected of a high school newspaper journalist, or of an article to be found in a ‘Weekly Reader’ that is distributed to elementary schools.
“Oh, ‘Fat Trump supporters’ are the worst!” ….. “AND, many of them are on food stamps, but yet they loathe government waste” ….. “AND, the only skinny Trump supporters, unless they are really dumb and malnourished white Southerners, tend to end up in Trump’s Playmate Cabinet” ……
I would agree, it is ridiculous. A few years back I asked Mike at Haskett’s to look into hosting an event idea I had ‘Cabbage Fest’. I’ll tell you about it sometime. I still want to do it.
Funny you bring up journalism in this town. I just posted about the Mt. Pleasant fiasco. I tipped off two reporters last week about this. One of them didn’t give a rat’s ass and the other started working on a story. Then nothing.
I also think it is funny you bring up HS paper. My senior year I was on the newspaper staff for the school. I cropped photography, laid out the weekly page (Parkston paper printed once a week and they would give us a full page to talk about school news) and did a political cartoon. My teacher, Mrs. Bailey ok’d a cartoon for the paper without informing the principal. Let’s just say I was getting a good ass chewing from the principal over the cartoon when the paper showed up in his mailbox the day before, I think Mrs. Bailey told me she got one too 🙂 So our principal banned personal locks on our lockers so he could rifle thru them looking for cigs and at a pep rally he proceeded to chew us out because our lockers were pig styes and when he opened one locker the books fell on him (I knew the student, he did it on purpose). So I did a cartoon of Mr. Chapman getting taken out by books at a locker. Mrs Bailey told me the ass chewing was worth it.
Mr. Chapman nicknamed me ‘Patrick Swayze’ because I did some dirty dancing at a pep rally to a Poison song in front of the whole school. Man I thot I was cool. LOL.
Oh, your school stories are better than mine, but there was this time in middle school (We called it Junior High back then), when some kids from Washington High, who were on the debate team there, visited our language arts class for a week and taught us how to perform a debate, and some of us, including myself then performed a debate before our class with a debate partner. There were only eight of us who did this and believe it or not I came up with the idea of debating in favor of the legalization of marijuana (Yeah, I know, strange coming from me, huh?) and man, you should have seen the look on my language art’s teacher face when my partner started to read off our affirmative case advocating the legalization of Maryjane. Now, let’s just say it was priceless, and this was in the spring of ’74, too. We were ahead of our time! But what was even funnier was that the other affirmative team was struggling with a topic to debate until I encouraged them to debate in favor of abortion rights. Oh man, the teacher then really had a crazed look on her face, while I could not help but notice a joyful smirk coming from the Washington students who were present for our debate performances.
AND, then there was the time back in the spring of ’73, when I was just an innocent six grader at Laura Wilder Elementary, and my class was studying South Dakota history while the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee was receiving much national attention, that my elderly, soon to retire (It was her last year of teaching), sixth-grade teacher went off on this rant one day about how the Natives who started the standoff at WK were not from here, but rather from Minnesota and California and they should just go back home and cause trouble in their neck of the woods, but then I raised my hand and asked the teacher the following question (I’m serious, this really happened): “If these Indians should not be in South Dakota right now, then what are we doing in Vietnam right now?” ….. Oh man, you should have seen the look on my teacher’s face after I asked that question. She looked like a Mac truck was headed for her, and she had no response to my question…. 😉 #GoodTrouble #FreeSpeechIndeed!
Funny, when I went to SE TECH I had electives because it is a 2-Year Associate Degree and I had a speech class with my friend Dave whose only hobby was collecting Grateful Dead shirts. He did a speech on the legalization of MJ. I was astonished when he talked about the how MJ got criminalized in the US (1937) because of the end of prohibition. It was also a way to punish blacks during Jim Crow.
One last story about my Journalism class. Mrs. Bailey was my favorite teacher because she was sassy and each week we would do the quiz in Newsweek and Bailey would go over the answers. One question was. ‘What is the average size of a man’s penis?’ The answers were; 3″, 5″ and 6″. The answer was 6″ but Mrs. Bailey said she thot it was 3″. We laughed and I blurted out, “I feel sorry for you.” The class was dying, I think my friend Tom fell out of chair. I have never seen her face so red. She smiled at me and said, ‘You got me.’
Oh, and later in the day I was walking past the teacher’s lounge and I could hear Mrs. Bailey telling the other teachers and they were all laughing.
“Say, during this Burger Battle, are any of the restaurants also offering ‘Freedom Fries?'” ….. “Cuz, that would be very Trumpian of them and fitting”….. 🙂 ….. ( ….. “‘Patrick Swayze’?” …. “Okay, let’s watch this one more time 😉 …..” ) …..:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypKSbnYOrwE
It was the fall of ’80, World Politics class with Professor Tom Lobe at USD, and this was during the Iranian hostage situation, and one of my classmates purposely asked in an intended naive and innocent way the following question: “Say, if the Russians (They were called the Soviets back then) invade Iran in the rear, would Greece help?” …. 😉
And as far as the Jim Crow reference, well, I don’t doubt it. Many years after Nixon started the War on Drugs, his former aide, John D. Haldeman, admitted that part of the reason for the War on Drugs was to find a way to incarcerate minorities, give them a felony, and then make them ineligible in many states to vote.
But if you legalize MJ today, I don’t think you solve this problem, because what you are really talking about is the poor people’s economy*, regardless of race, and if you legalize MJ, then other drugs will be the new drug of choice for that economy and for poor people to financially survive with and get into legal trouble with, which means that MJ in a very unique way (And not the way it is normally argued) is a gateway drug because its potential absence in the illegal market will make other drugs then more prevalent and used as the new offering.
* It’s analogous to how people often say, and I believe this to be true, that immigrants, regardless of race, have always historically done the work that Americans will not do, but yet Americans (Which means many whites) enjoy the product results of that type of work, do they not?
Six inches is also known as Two Trumps…. #JustAskStormy
Oh, and I once went to a city council meeting and witnessed David Z. advocate MJ legalization and he also claimed that it was false that MJ makes white women want to sleep with black men… 🙂 …..But do any of you remember that video David made a couple of years ago where he showed his girlfriend still in bed, and what color was she? ….Are you guys thinking what I’m thinking?