Daily Mail – Bumbling Bees

Ain’t no rest for the wicked

Bumbling Bees loves you. You know that. And Bumbling Bees is good to you. Other web sites are phoning it in this time of year — wasting your time with boring retrospectives and "Best of 2016" lists, as though said lists don’t begin and end with the utter annihilation of Hillary Clinton. Well, you’ll have none of that here. We’ll be soldiering boldly onward into 2017, because the weird don’t rest, so neither do we.

And neither does Slate, which has just published the absolute worst opinion piece of the year. I know what you’re thinking: mighty bold claim for January second. Still and all, I am confident this piece will survive 363 days of challenges. It’s a piece about a big problem with self-driving cars. Now, let’s play a little game. Take a minute or so and think about what this piece could possibly be saying. What could be this big problem with self-driving cars? What mind-bogglingly stupid thing do you suppose Slate has chosen to ring in the new year? Think of the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine, and then check and see how close you were.

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Clearly outplayed

The saucy Brits writing for the Daily Mail think I can’t tell what they’re up to. Their plan, quite clearly, is that if they just publish the most comprehensively weird article of all time, Last Week in Weird will overload and break, and I’ll never be able to make fun of them again. Well, I’m pleased to report that their plan only almost worked; I did, against all odds, manage to survive the onslaught from the Mail’s masterpiece: "Pedestrians are baffled by gay traffic lights as little green man is still replaced by same-sex symbols three months after London Pride." I promise I’m not making any of this up.

Transport For London replaced the traditional ‘go’ sign in 50 traffic lights in June around the Trafalgar Square area as a nod to those taking part in London Pride, and they are still in place almost three months on.

However, because the gender symbols happen to look like arrows, some pedestrians are confused which direction they should be walking in and even whether only men or women are allowed to cross at one point, according to The Express.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m not even sure who to make fun of first here. I guess I should start with Transport For London; one would think that the purpose of traffic signals is to control the flow of traffic, no? While I’ll allow that there’s plenty of room to argue about whether or not that’s a viable goal, it’s clearly the reason. Yet somehow Transport For London — a government agency, of course — has decided that selling people the social justice war is so important that the whole entire traffic control system can be subjugated to it. If you’re the kind of person who believes in government traffic control, is this a good use of your money?

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