Anyone involved in the debacle that was central New Jersey’s morning commute today knows that it was horrendous. The rain came down like a flood and visibility was all but nonexistent. So what would you do in such a situation when you had to go to work in this weather? Clearly, if you were a moron driving a white, Acura SUV this morning you would be riding everyone’s tail and swerving in and out of traffic! Look, I don’t know what this asshole in the white Acura was trying to accomplish, but I watched in my rear view mirror as he zoomed in and out of the two lanes of traffic until he reached where I was on the road. And then, almost unbelievably, this guy came to within less than a foot of distance between his car and mine. Seriously! Who does that when you’re driving in a torrential downpour? An idiot does that, that’s who…

Almost as bad was this woman driving in a little Volkswagon Cabrio. I’ve never driven a small VW so I don’t know how these things handle in that type of rain, but this woman had her emergency lights on and was cruising at about 30 miles per hour. If I had a direct line into her car I would have said, “Hey, honey, you create more problems than you solve when you do that!”

Look, I understand that some people are horrified of driving in the rain. It can be a very scary event. In my mind, you have two scenarios when it’s torrential outside – don’t drive at all or, if you have to drive and you get caught in a monsoon, pull over and wait for it to die down.

But for the love of all that’s good, don’t put your blinkers on and smoothly sail away at 30 miles per hour on a major, two-lane highway when everyone around you is going at 60 – 80 miles per hour. If you don’t “know” that doing this is going to create major problems, you probably shouldn’t have a license in the first place.

Forget about just sitting back and watching an episode of Family Guy any more. The marketing geniuses at TBS actually PAUSE the show to allow Bill Engvall to talk for 15 seconds about his new show. Then the bastards have the unmitigated gall to say, “Back to the show,” before the show unpauses and we get literally 2 seconds of crap before going to commercial. If TBS was ever looking for a way to get their fans to hate them – they found it!

This is a horrible trend and I hope some television executives get a chance to read this post because this BS has to end…now!

I also darkened the background of the site because I didn’t really care for the bright off-white color any more. It’s boring, you know?

Plus, you’ll notice the stagnant “JerseySmarts.com” 468×80 banner has been moved from right above the first blog entry to the bottom of the main page. That site (which is essentially this blog in a different format) is ranked higher than this blog by some rankings! What total BS! I think that Joe’s Journal is hurt by not having a specific “.com” name, but since joesjournal.com appears to be owned by a marketing company, I think purchasing that domain is out of the question. Anyway, the Google ad above is an adequate replacement and what’s better – it pays!

For those of you who are tech-heads out there, Joe’s Journal is still operated on the WordPress 2.3.3 database system. JerseySmarts.com is operating on the new 2.5.1 system and the internal Control Panel is a complete disaster. The engineers at WordPress ruined the posting page so that you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find certain options. Garbage. I have no intention of changing the Joe’s Journal internal structure until WordPress fixes the debacle that is 2.5.1.

The only other change that I made was to make one of the stock text advertisements at the very bottom of this page a little bit smaller. Truthfully, it looks better with smaller text. I might set it off in it’s own box, too.

I hope you enjoy.