Bumper stickers. Sometimes I wonder what a person is thinking when they decide to put a bumper sticker on their car. During my commute home yesterday, a Volvo with a “Free Tibet” and "Visualize World Peace" sticker cut off an old lady and subsequently flipped her off when it appeared as though old lady was preventing her from changing lanes in front of her. My first thought: they probably can’t point to Tibet on a world map and they went to a liberal arts college.
Promoting or opposing political positions doesn’t make you any more popular. Have fun trying to get your John Kerry for Prezident stickers off. Or, you can leave them on for-freaking-ever! But don’t fret, you won’t have to worry about taking your “No Iraq War” sticker off. That was a wise investment. Funnily enough, the gas used to fuel the car is probably doing more to keep the war going than that sticker is doing to stop the war. You might want to start scraping off your “Impeach Bush” sticker now so it is gone come November. It seems, the increased chance of vandalism to your car due to your expressed opinion is more costly than the benefit of being semi-unique.
Jesus won’t save you for having a “Jesus Saves” sticker on your car. Or maybe he will. “Stop Eating Meat” or “Go Vegan” won’t stop me from eating tacos or wearing my Jonathan Kelsey silver metallic leather pumps. As the hippie runs over a baby raccoon. Stop telling me what to do anyways.
And the stickers that are sentences long only cause cars behind them to inch up closer and closer to read, “If you can read this, you’re driving too close.”
According to studies by scientists, drivers with bumper stickers tend to have more road rage than those who do not. They tend to be more territorial. Researchers have long known that drivers who have a strong sense of personal space while in their vehicle are more likely to have road rage, and the more someone clutters their vehicle with “My child is an Honor Roll Student” bumper stickers and “Baby on Board” decals the more territorial they feel about the space inside.
It makes sense. My only suggestion is to stay away from the guy with the bumper sticker that reads, “Keep Honking While I Reload.”
Source: Territorial Markings as a Predictor of Driver Aggression and Road Rage
8 comments:
My all time favorite bumper sticker: "I'm not spoiled, I'm just a Polish princess." On a 10-year-old Toyota Cellica. Full of 5 Asian, adult men. Oh the sweet irony.
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Worse than the "Visualize World Peace" Volvo person who cut off an old lady and flipped her off: I was riding my bike to yoga class, yoga mat slung over my shoulder, making clear what a mellow, spiritual dude I am, and, after a guy in a car almost ran into me, then had the nerve to yell at me, I yelled back that he was a "stupid fucking asshole" in front of a crowd of men, women and children. Just doing my part to improve the image of yoga people!(Needless to say, I wrote a blog post about it, titled "probably not the best example of loving kindness."
Actually, though the worst bumper sticker I ever saw was the one that said "Invisible Empire Nights of the Ku Klux Klan." Apparently, the average KKK member doesn't have the brains to figure out that the "empire" isn't really "invisible" if you advertise it on your bumper.
I try not to put bumper stickers on any of my cars I think they look like crap. until a few months ago when I put one window decal on.
I would get pulled over by the cops every 6 months for "mistaken identity" or so they say. So when I was telling one of my friends that is a cop in the next town over he gave me one of his extra FOP window decals that he had.
I haven't been pulled over for a while after putting that on my car.
You've seen me out in the drivway, haven't you? Muttering under my breath and prying at that goddamn Kerry sticker with a rusty paint scraper and a blowtorch. What DID they put on the back of those things? And why couldn't they have used that same glue to put the heat tiles on the fucking space shuttle?
It's like some cosmic joke. My Obama sticker came in the mail the other day, the one I'd ordered specifically to cover the ragged shreds of Kerry that still cling to my bumper. The damned thing is too short to cover it! At this point, I'd put a Newt Gingrich sticker on if it would just cover the mess that Johnny made on my otherwise nice Subaru.
My BFF works for the Democratic Campaign Committee here in WA. He had to park his car quite far away from his house this one time so I thought it'd be funny to walk in and ask him why he had a W '04 sticker on his nice new Volvo. He was shocked and furious! I meant for him to go to his car to see I was only joking but he was so pissed off I had to tell him before he walked the three blocks to his car to find out... I guess you had to be there.
After watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries once where a sports maniac followed a guy home for having some baseball or football team logo bumper sticker he didn't like and murdered him...I just stopped using my bumper stickers. Other drivers don't need to know Sh*t about me.
Hi there --
Found your blog by following some google results on the "my boss is a Jewish Carpenter" tag that you used to title this post (you're #6 -- front page!).
Witty, clever, well-structured -- thanks for that, and I'll be checking back.
But I hope you don't take it too amiss that I found the best laugh on the page to be that, if you (sorry, "u") follow the link from MWinBiz, who "promise"s that trading links will "help u to increase ur traffic," what u get is a dead link...
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