First thing I would have done is put that bitch in reverse and got the Hell away from that thing no matter how screwed up my car was- Lord knows what was about to start leaking out of that tank.

I've got some stories that I'll tell further down, but first about deer/elk strikes. I always liked to Drive (vs. drive) at night if possible, so after 3 and a half million miles or so in thirty years I've seen a lot of accidents. I was talking to a cop at the scene of one many years ago while waiting for the tow truck to get there and get the mess out of the way so we could continue on, and he said it's almost always the second car to the scene that gets the worst of it (as in this case- I knew a fellow Driver who was killed exactly this way- normally in a Semi deer/elk are just a major inconvenience, they'll do a bunch of body damage and maybe push the Radiator into the Fan, but most times you can still drive away).

The First Car hits it and it bounces off or rolls up over the top of the car after its legs get taken out, but then it's laying in the road. The Second Car arrives and either hits it and launches into The Ditch, or it swerves so violently at the last minute it either rolls or just drives into The Ditch, but either way somebody's going to the Hospital. So if you're driving at night and you see a car pulled over with it's Flashers on, watch out, you may very well be the Second Car....

I was looking around for a story about a 747 they found crash-landed on a beach in Northern Mexico that had the entire interior stripped out and completely empty except for a bunch of 55 gal. drums of jet fuel (I wonder what they were hauling/where they were going?). I never found that story, but I did find this:
http://www.gadling.com/2011/08/09/ghostscrapers-t...

Yippie! Congrats to the Space-X folks, that was excellent!

Truck Stops are always the best to find Pinball Machines because they're some of the last places that people actually play them. When I drove Over-The-Road, I only did four things; I slept, I worked, I ate, and I played Pinball (every once in a while I would shower and/or shave).

There was one of the coolest Truck Stops in the World in Laurel, MS where they had this fantastic food and a bunch of old-timers playing on a whole bank of these weird-ass ancient old tables that were kind of like pachinko machines that were laying down almost flat instead of standing upright. No flippers, just gravity and the minor bit of jostling that these old folks could manage, but it was awesome. There was one of those new-fangled Sky-Lab machines like the Spirit of 76 one above with the flippers and rotary dial scoreboards for the whipper-snappers like me, but it was obvious that the Purists thought this was a travesty.

When I was Fleet Manager for a small trucking company, every time I went to a Parts Store I'd get a Circuit Tester or two and just through them under the Driver's seat at eye level when you opened the door. Like the Hookie-Pokies (picks) that's not a tool you want to carry around in your pocket, but will use all the time.

Any tool you get to hit with a hammer is cool, and an Manual Impact Driver is no exception. I've only used mine about 15 times in as many years, but each time it was the only tool that would actually work.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/...

They (and New Yorkers, too) would find these really cool places in The West and say, "I simply must live here, how much for your Ranch?"

"Uhh... I don't know... It's been in my family for generations... It's not really for sale..."

"How about Five Million Dollars?"

"Yippee!!!!"

Well this worked out pretty good for the first few Sellers, but as soon as couple of gazillion dollar Mansions went up it made the property taxes on any adjacent land worth millions as well, even if you were just grazing a few cows and growing hay like your family always did. You get behind, the government threatens to seize, then the Low-Ballers swoop in and offer "..to take this burden off your hands..." If you're smart you sell everything all at once and move into a mobile home park down in Rio Rancho, but if you fight to hold on to your ancestors land you will be crushed. First you sell a little piece, a mansion goes up on it instantly, raising the value of your remaining property (and your taxes) even more, so you sell another piece, and then..... you get the idea. Pretty soon you're on a street corner begging for change from people who are parking Escalades on land that has been in your family for five hundred years.

That's why they don't like Californians.

There's that whole stretch of southern Colorado where all the Spanish names are pronounced all screwy seemingly just to annoy the New Mexicans just a short distance away.

I lived in New Mexico for a number of years and was always explaining to the Locals, "Hey, I'm From Arizona!", because they have a deep-seated grudge against Colorado and Texas because both thought it would be better to fight the Civil War there (in NM) rather than in their respective states. And they detest Californians for all the obvious reasons, but Arizonans are somewhat tolerated.

Re: Autonomous Vehicle Conference.

As a Truck Driver, I've seen the writing on the wall since the instant I heard about that Google car that was driving itself around on public highways. Even with GPS tracking, we're still the largest unsupervised workforce in the country, and some of the highest paid blue collar workers that Business would do almost anything to fire each and every one of us.

Imagine a UPS truck that just pulled up to your business, alerted you by text message that it was there and you needed to send somebody out to unload your packages, dispensed like sodas in a vending machine after some sort of retinal scan. Thousands of Teamsters down at the Unemployment Office, giddiness in The Boardroom, and all ten years from now at the outside.

Hint: It's hidden behind the stroller.