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Is that a zebra in the road?
The other night as I was cooling out the horse, I stopped to talk to another rider who said she couldn’t believe I was wearing a t-shirt.
I kind of laughed; I had just been thinking how perfect the weather was: cool enough that I didn’t have to worry about overheating, not so cold that I had to worry about frostbite. Somewhere in the 50-60 degree range. It’s what I consider ideal riding weather, and I was really enjoying the fact that the temps had finally dropped somewhere reasonable.
This is the point where people start saying, “If you think that’s reasonable, why the heck did you move to Texas?” and I change the subject.
Like this: a couple weeks ago, I was driving down the street and saw a zebra on the road. Actually, the first thing I saw was a tiki bar, and then I saw a zebra. And no, drinking was not involved. Apparently there was some car art exhibition going on somewhere, so there was an entire cavalcade of decorated cars: the tiki bar, one covered in what looked like ping pong balls on wires (why?), a car painted like… I don’t know what. I’d guess it would make sense if it were parked and you had time to walk around it. And the zebra.
The zebra was kind of cute. It was a jeep-like vehicle and the tail was bolted to the roof rack, so it waved back and forth as the car moved. It looked like two ears were fixed to either side of the windshield, too, because I could just see the tips flipping in the breeze.
I thought about taking pictures—I had my cell phone with me—but then the idiot in front of me dived down into the passenger seat of his car and almost side-swiped the ping pong ball car. A few seconds later he popped back up and almost rear-ended the car in front of him while wildly waving his camera out the window, trying to take pictures. Or get videos. Or kill someone. I wasn’t really sure which.
Fortunately, we all—Doofus driver, me, the cavalcade—got caught at a red light, so I thought the idiot would get the pictures he wanted and we could all be on our way, right? I mean, the zebra car was cute and all, but we’d been driving 5 mph on a road where the speed limit was 40, and I was really over it. I was really hoping that he would turn back into a normal driver when the light turned green.
All of a sudden, Doofus with the Camera darts forward. Squealing tires and everything. I check the light, because I was pretty sure it was red. Yup, still red. I turned my radio down, thinking maybe Doofus heard sirens somewhere. No sirens. I check the red light again. Is it blinking? Maybe it’s a four-way stop and I missed it. Nope. Solid red. So… Doofus stopped for the light and then ran it? Why?
More tire squealing up the road answered the mystery: Doofus swung a hard right into a school parking lot, whipped the car around, and about fell over himself trying to get out of the car. Ah. He wanted to film the cavalcade again. I guess that’s a good reason to run a red light at an intersection with cameras on it. I hope the pictures were worth the ticket he probably got.
Fortunately for me, that meant he was no longer ahead of me, and that meant I could resume normal driving speeds Yay!
And the joke turned out to be on him, because a couple miles up the road I saw some other decorated cars turning into a parking lot, where there was clearly some sort of event going on. If Doofus had only been patient enough to wait… but then, given his reaction at seeing just these four cars, it’s probably best that he didn’t know. I think the excitement might have killed him.
But since I don’t have pictures of the actual zebra car I saw due to having to keep two eyes on a guy who could barely keep his car pointing in the right direction (forget about maintaining speed or staying in the same lane), check out pictures of other zebra cars I found around the web:
I like this one best; be sure to check out the detail shot.
A collection of zebra cars. I don’t know; after the first one I linked to, painting stripes on a car and calling it a zebra car feels about like throwing a sheet over your head for halloween and entering the best costume contest. Yawn. (Speaking of which… I think I’ll be a ghost for halloween).
Here’s another one, with little zebras glued on top.
I was going to find a picture of a lion art car and make a clever joke about having the lion car chase the zebra car, but apparently, while zebra cars are a dime a dozen, lion cars are not very popular.
There’s probably a metaphor here about wild horsepower and men who love metaphors, but if there is, it couldn’t be anywhere near as funny as this.
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