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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Daskalos, Batman and Construction Zones

By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
       Just a few things ...
    Kathy's solution to the Daskalos thing; why it's so hard to slow down for construction zones; and Stephenye, who has the same job she had when I talked to her last week. She didn't move to a new job. I moved her, and I need to move her back today.
    The district attorney says she is taking to the grand jury the charges against developer Jason Daskalos that were thrown out by a judge. Since 1990, the developer and amateur car racer has gotten 39 traffic citations in Bernalillo County, half of which were dismissed. The current charges involve an August 2006 traffic stop in which he was charged with DWI and in which a police officer allegedly helped sneak him out of APD's BATmobile.
    Kathy, a reader, writes: "If this were Gotham City, Batman would take care of Daskalos."
    Alas, that would be a different Batmobile, wouldn't it?
    But then Batman is never around when you really need him anyway. It would have been nice to see him swoop down on I-40 over the weekend.
    I spent Saturday and Sunday working in Acoma, driving back and forth each day, doing my best (I swear I was) to stay out of the way of those who just can't abide poking along at 75. I am known in my house as La Tortuga when it comes to speed limits, and 75 is just fine with me. My cruise control is at ease with it.
    Others are not. I try to be understanding about this when I'm on the road, and I do my best to accommodate them, accommodation more or less translating to getting the hell out of the way as much as possible.
    I just don't understand them, that's all. It used to be that if you were going to put the pedal to the metal, you at least had some decent metal. Not anymore. Now it's the same dreary procession of minivans, a Ford Focus, a Kia and some faded green thing, a four-door piece of Detroit iron being driven by somebody's grandparents.
    I'm locked on 75, and they go by me like I'm in a school zone.
    Then we come to the construction areas. We had them coming and going, both directions between Albuquerque and Acoma. Lanes squeezed down to one apiece, speed limit 45 and let the tailgating begin.
    Traffic camera enforcement citations in the first six months of the year are up from 53,447 to 65,595. An APD spokesman said: "We have received a tremendous amount of complaints from construction workers, and we have addressed it. We are getting fewer complaints since we started parking the (speed vans) out there."
    It can't be that we don't understand construction zones. I refuse to believe that, though it's been only three years since we had to pass a Move Over Law to encourage drivers to get out of the way of a police car or firetruck or ambulance.
    I would have thought we knew how to do that, but then it was about that same time that a health professional begged me to write a column explaining that blind people often use white canes.
    So I suppose there's a case for ignorance. But I think we don't slow down for construction zones because we are full of ourselves. We have somehow got it into our heads that 45-mile-an-hour construction zones are an affront to us.
    This has to be the reason we don't care if those construction workers are endangered by us. We are just too full of ourselves.
    Finally, I need to move Stephenye Avery from Four Hills Country Club back to Tanoan, which she never actually left until I moved her.
    Last week, while writing about the Phoenix Country Club and its archaic rule forbidding women to eat in the same room with men, I spoke with Stephenye, director of sales at Tanoan, to see if any such rules existed there. (They don't.) But I managed to make her the director of sales at Four Hills, not Tanoan. Apologies for the error. I'm just glad Batman isn't a member.
    Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone — 823-3930; e-mail — jbelshaw@abqjournal.com