🚀 go-pugleaf

Mike Cohen, who'd rather be in New York, said:
> I find that much less frightening that attempting to cross Ventura Blvd.
> I'm always amazed when I make it across alive.  I've been hit by cars 3
> times since I've moved here and have had countless near misses.

Now it's certainly possible that Mike is just unlucky -- there are
plenty of bad drivers out there.  But this does remind me of an incident
I witnessed (and participated in) ...

    I attended an early Unix User's Group conference (I think it may
    have been before the name USENIX was coined, but I'm not sure -- it
    was probably right around 1980), at Columbia University.  For those
    unfamiliar with New York City, Columbia is right next to Broadway, a
    large (famous, even!) street with lots of small cross streets.  Many
    of these cross streets have stoplights.

    A group of eight of us conference attendees were walking out to
    dinner on Broadway; four were Californians, four were New Yorkers.
    Walking briskly down Broadway, we came to a side street, and the
    stoplight there was red.  We four Californians stopped dead, at the
    curb, as all four New Yorkers did not even slow down a bit.

I think that the respect that California drivers (used to?)
give to pedestrians is/was due in part to the respect that
pedestrians gave drivers.

So, another possibility is that Mike is just applying New York reflexes
and behaviors in an inappropriate setting.

The third possibility is that all those damn New Yorkers that have
flooded into LA and dropped the average IQ of both cities are simply
seeing Mike's "I <heart> New York" T-shirt and getting back into a