[blml] By the pricking of my thumbs

[Adam Beneschan]

Eric wrote:
 
> >I'm tooling down the highway at the posted speed limit. A car
> >approaches from behind me at high relative speed, parks himself about
> >ten feet off my rear bumper, and starts honking his horn. I speed up.
> >Am I to be absolved of the offense of speeding because he caused the
> >problem?
> 
> Not quite absolved, but you *should* have been allowed to get away with 
> it -- because the cop who wrote you the speeding ticket really should 
> have been spending the time chasing down and ticketing the other guy, 
> who is far more of a danger on the road.  (Unless, of course, you were 
> tooling along in the leftmost lane(*), forcing the prevailing 
> above-the-limit traffic to get around you on the right, in which case 
> he should have just shot you.)

Back when the national speed limit was still 55, I heard a true story
about a man driving exactly 55 in the left lane of the freeway near
Sacramento.  He got pulled over by a California state policeman, who
started writing a ticket for obstruction.

While he was writing the ticket, the driver told the cop, "You know, I
didn't realize that what I was doing was illegal--can you cite the law
that makes this illegal?"

The cop thought this was no problem.  He confidently pulled out his
copy of the Vehicle Code and started looking---then looked somewhere
else in the book---then somewhere else---

The driver told him, "Maybe you should try Section 306.1?"  [I just
made that number up---I don't remember the real number.]

So the policeman turned to that section, and he found where it talked
about obstruction---but he couldn't see anything about impeding the
flow of traffic in the fast lane, so he kept looking---

Now he was starting to get nervous.  So while he was still trying to
find what he was looking for in his Vehicle Code, he tried to make
conversation.  "What do you do for a living?"

"I'm a teacher."

"Oh, where do you teach?"

"I teach at the CHP [California Highway Patrol] Academy.  I teach
traffic law."  Really.  The man was quite renowned in his field, such
that police departments from other states would call *him* to ask him
his interpretations of *their* states' traffic laws.  And here some
poor cop had pulled him over for violating a law that didn't exist.

The moral of the story is, of course, that it's helpful for players to
know the Laws by chapter and verse, so that they can gently correct
less-experienced directors who are about to give them a bad ruling.
Well, I had to make this about bridge somehow.  Did you think I was
going to say the moral was that it's perfectly fine to drive at the
speed limit in the left lane when Eric is behind you?  No.  Get out of
his way.  Mine too, for that matter.

                                -- Adam