While Arizona continues to sink into the giant financial black hole we have created for ourselves, our legislators argue about the important matter of texting while driving. Don't get me wrong, texting while driving is a bad idea. But a law outlawing it is pretty much unenforceable short of police checkpoints to review the recent texting history of random drivers. So what's the point? How about laws outlawing eating, drinking, putting on makeup, reading, fiddling with the radio or any of the hundreds of other things that take our minds off the task of driving? I propose a law that makes ten o'clock and two o'clock hand positioning on the steering wheel mandatory under law. At least the cops can see that. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that most people who cause traffic accidents don't do it on purpose. It seems to me that whether you kill someone's Aunt Harriet because you are texting or because you zoned out and didn't see the red light, you get about the same result. Trust me when I say the the authorities will figure out something to charge you with, either way. Then the lawyers will sue your pants off. Interstingly, as cell phone use has grown in the US over the past 20 years, traffic fatalities per 100,000,000 miles driven have fallen year over year. Last year, they hit their lowest in over 40 years, 1.27 deaths for every 100,000,000 miles driven. Statistically, that is one death for every 26,000 trips driven between New York and Los Angeles. Granting that correlation is not causation, it is not unreasonable to conclude that cell phones actually make driving safer. Just kidding. Here's something else. At the hardware store we get paid by check every other Friday morning. My buddy, the Seafood King, tells me that paying retail workers through direct deposit is more trouble than it's worth, because they tend to be a flaky bunch, bank-wise. Present company excepted, of course. What this means is that I have to go to the credit union and cash my damn check. I could drop it in the night deposit, I suppose, but I don't really trust that so much. Do you know who else goes into the bank to deal with an actual teller? People who can't keep track of what they spend and want someone to argue with about their overdrafts. This morning two of these knuckleheads managed to tie up all four teller windows with their hijinks. One guy, and I'm not making this up, said, "I just put $20 in my account." Does a person making $20 deposits really need a checking account? Really? The other joker was some sort of building contractor who kept taking one call after the other on his cell, while two tellers tried to make sense of his banking disaster. That is until someone in line, who may or not have been me, muttered, "For God's sake", kinda loudly. Evidently taking the hint, he began telling callers that he would call back. And the best news is that he didn't wait around to pummel me outside the bank. I'm waiting for my credit union to start letting people scan checks into their account from home. Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong, sometimes just full of it, but always judgmental and cranky