Dear BTQ, What should I do with the rest of my life? Or how about this week?

-Dylan

Dylan, What you should do for the rest of this week is get the hell out of Houston. As for the rest of your life? My real advice for you would resemble a Milbarge post in length and probably wouldn't be well received. So, to save space and hurt feelings, I'll give the abridged version here: Stop abusing your cat, get a haircut and get a real job.

Dear BTQ, Damn. I was going to ask what they should do once they run out of names for hurricanes this year. (There IS an answer, I just wanted YOUR answer.)

- E. McPan

THE ANSWER: If NOAA runs out of names for hurricanes in a season (if more the 21 named storms arise), then the subsequent storms are named after letters of the Greek alphabet (for more info on the naming of hurricanes, check out NOAA's website).

MY ANSWER: My preference would be for NOAA to host a reality show where contestants competed for the right to have a storm named after a particularly heinous ex-girlfriend or wife. The (all male) contestants would have an allotted period of time during which they could present their stories of the worst women in their lives. I would pitch it as "American Idol" meets George Constanza, because I imagine it would resemble George Costanza's meeting with the tenant association when he competed with a survivor of the Andrea Doria for the rights to a recently-vacated apartment. A working title for the show could be "American Bitch" (not to be confused with Christie Cumming's wildly popular magazine for the lesbian purebred dog owner of the same name).

Dear BTQ, What is the scariest thing to see someone doing while you're driving next to them on the freeway? (This morning I ended up next to a bald man who spent a good 5 min combing his non-existent hair.)

-Sebastian Haff

Well, Sebastian, the absolute scariest thing to see another driver do while you're driving next to them on the freeway is smoking and playing the keyboard part to "Mess Around" on the dashboard. I've never seen that, but when it comes to scary drivers from my own experiences, two different guys come to mind.

Not long ago, a fellow commuter was engrossed in a novel, his eyes focused only on the book and no hands on the wheel. This wasn't like the extended look-away that drivers do in the movies - he didn't look up from his book for several minutes! I was truly frightened by this guy (incidentally, this is not how I recommend that you make more time for reading).

Several months ago, I passed two gentlemen in a late-80s Civic, looked over, and noticed that the driver was lighting up a fatty, sparkin' a J, you know, smoking a marijuana cigarette. The horror. It scared me because I was instantly reminded of the scene in The Big Lebowski where The Dude drops his roach clip in his lap, burns himself, freaks out, and wrecks his car into a dumpster. I didn't want to see that scene re-enacted so I took the next left and got the hell away from Cheech.

The scariest thing I've done while driving (not that you asked, but my self-absorbedness compels me to share this) is falling asleep behind the wheel. I was driving from Texas to Colorado and had been on the road for about 15 hours straight when I just kind of drifted off (probably not more than a few seconds). I don't have any idea how long I was asleep, but I was not exactly in my lane when I came to. In fact, I was driving in the grass in the median. It was a miracle that I lived. That trip shook me pretty hard and I am much more careful when I drive now.

Ladies and gents, I'm out of ideas here. I have some free time and the inclination to write, but I've got nothing to say about hurricanes or Iraq. Want to read about something else? Do you have any questions you'd like answered? Leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do.

I'm still in motion. I had a list of things to blog about if I found myself in front of a computer, but now they don't seem interesting even to me. So I'll just say hello, call out Sebastian for not posting anything in forever, get back to whatever I ought to be doing, and promise to return to normal blogging soon. In the meantime, here's someone I met along the way.