Look out, world — my Mom & Dad and Jen now have blogs.

This should be interesting.

UPDATE: In her first post, Jen notes, “I do consider Brendan one of my best friends, yet I do not look at his website often. Maybe once every few months.” She explains, “If I read the site, I would not have a reason to actually talk to Brendan.” LOL. This is very true. I swear, I never have any news to tell my friends anymore, even friends I haven’t seen or talked to in months, because every tidbit of interest from my life that I can possibly think of to talk about, they’ve already read about on my blog!

Jen adds, “I do not have a wealth of knowledge about the site, but I can tell you anything you want to know about Brendan.” Uh-oh. Is that a threat? :)

Meanwhile, my Mom has only blogging for barely 12 hours and she’s already getting into high dudgeon about Christian politicians. Again: uh-oh. I can only imagine the blog-comment wars that will develop if she starts getting political and Andrew reads it…

Heh. Now, I just have to get my Dad to post. He’s always threatening to write letters to the editor of the Hartford Courant about various issues, and then deciding not to do it after all (something I, too, have been known to do on occasion), so I’m hoping maybe the blog will be a good outlet for his creative energy.

I got my wireless Internet card working! YAY!!!

The Jeanie Johnston heads out to sea.

The Jeanie Johnston in port. It will be sailing away shortly.

Nearing Lower Manhattan.

My mom and dad on the Staten Island Ferry.

The Statue of Liberty, seen from the Staten Island Ferry.

Only in New York. :)

The Hartford Courant has published a massive front-page story detailing an analysis of traffic-accident records showing that 18-year-old are responsible for more traffic accidents (3.9% of the total) than any other single age group. The headline is “18, Age Of Accidents.”

No doubt, this will be used to justify various new forms of legal age discrimination. As always, it will not occur to anyone in the legislature that the argument about whether to restrict any given group of citizens’ freedom of movement does not begin and end with statistics showing they are marginally more likely to cause trouble than any other given group.

No, nobody will think to point out that, based on the same simplistic “statistically, it will reduce accidents” argument that’s used to justify oppressive driving restrictions on young people (not to mention curfews and other restrictions of liberty), it follows that we should simply ban driving altogether except for government-approved purposes, like going to work or school. I mean, think about it! Statistically, that would probably reduce accidents by like 75%! Let’s do it!

Seriously, imagine the outrage if the same logic that’s applied to age groups were applied to racial or ethnic groups, or genders! After all, male drivers are statistically more likely to get into accidents than female ones, right? So, why don’t we pass a law saying that men are not allowed to drive unless accompanied by a woman? That will reduce the number of accidents! And, hey, black kids in the inner city are statistically more likely to commit crime than white kids in the suburbs, so why don’t we make it illegal for black kids in the inner cities to go out of their homes after midnight? Sure it’s racist, but who cares, it will reduce crime!

Sheesh. I hate this sort of thing.

(Andrew, I await your gun-control analogy. :)

UPDATE: I just got far enough in the article to find this hilarious quote from State Senator William Aniskovich, explaining why restrictions on 18-year-olds are unlikely: “Legislators are preternaturally disposed to avoid class warfare and age warfare.” Oh, sure they are — when the people whose ages are involved actually have the right to vote! But nobody minds “age warfare” when they aren’t dealing with people (16- and 17-year-olds) who could vote them out of office!

From a quick skim (I’ll read it more thoroughly on the way to New York), the article appears to be extremely slanted. The only quotes that I found suggesting anything other than an 18-year-olds-are-terrible-drivers-who-should-be-shot thesis are very short, not terribly substantive (one is “If you want a job, you have to have a car”), and buried fairly deep in the article. They also come from — guess who? — 18-year-olds; apparently the Courant was unable to dig up any “experts” who disagree with the paper’s anti-youth agenda.

Thirteen posts since yesterday evening, yet no comments. What happened? Did you all suddenly get lives or something? :)

Don’t expect much substantive blogging during the day tomorrow (possibly some cell-phone Moblogging, but that’s probably it), since I’ll be travelling down to New York City, then going with my parents to see the Jeanie Johnston, an Irish famine ship presently docked in New York Harbor.