There are two big historical events to remember next week, the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and the 50th Anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was going to call it “The Kennedy Assassination, but his brother Bobby was also killed by an assassin so there were two Kennedy assassinations.
If you get a call from a guy with an Indian accent who uses an Americanized name like Jack or Roger and he tells you he’s from Microsoft Windows Service Center, or some other official sounding group, it’s a scam. Don’t fall for it. I just put the words “windows phone scam” into Google and came up with 58.7 million hits. I told the latest one that if he knows what is happening with my computer he must be with the NSA and that I’m running Linux so leave me alone. Maybe that will stop the calls. Nothing else has.
If you head west across the George Washington Bridge and intend to pick up NJ Route 4 West, your Garmin Nuvi will tell you that exit 72A is on the left, even after it’s on the right. So watch out, or you’ll wind up in Oakland, California when all you want to do is go to Paramus, New Jersey.
Also, someone ought to tell the lady inside that little GPS on my dash that the “W” in New York State Route 9W doesn’t mean the road heads west. It means the road is on the west side of the Hudson River. So, its name is Route 9W, not Route 9 West.
If I were in charge of the world, the New York State Thruway and the Northway would be I-95 because they head north and south. The road that heads east and west through Connecticut would have another name, maybe I-80, since it doesn’t go north and south. It’s confusing because east-west interstate highways are supposed to end in zero, like I-40, I-80 and I-90. So, the phrase, “head west on I-95” if used for any extended period of time, ought to be an oxymoron, except there’s Connecticut and part of Rhode Island too.
