Several years ago — OK, it was a long, long time ago — I was attending college as a non-traditional student, finishing up my degree while working full-time. George Herbert Walker Bush was the president of the United States, and Al Gore was a United States Senator who hadn’t invented the internet yet.

One of the classes I was in was college algebra. It was the first college class I had ever taken that required a calculator—the only calculator I had used in high school had been a slide rule.

The airhead I was sitting behind struggled to get the answers and kept asking the professor how to do the calculations for the problems on the blackboard.

Exasperated, the professor finally asked, “What kind of calculator do you have? It’s supposed to be a scientific calculator.”

The airhead replied, “Well, of course it’s scientific — it’s a solar calculator!”

Odds & Ends 013

What are you legally required to do when a traffic light turns yellow?

There’s a common belief that if you’re still in the intersection when the light turns red, you’ve run a red light.

In Arkansas, that’s not what the law says.

Arkansas Code §27-52-107 says a steady yellow light warns that the red signal is about to appear. It then says:

“vehicular traffic shall not enter the intersection when the red or ‘STOP’ signal is exhibited.”

Notice the word enter.

If you enter the intersection while the light is yellow and it turns red while you’re still crossing the intersection, you haven’t violated that particular provision.

And that wording isn’t an accident.

Arkansas deliberately changed the law

Until 2001, Arkansas law was more restrictive. It said motorists could not “enter or be crossing the intersection” when the light was red.

The Arkansas General Assembly passed Act 1606 of 2001 specifically to remove the part about crossing the intersection.

The legislature’s official summary explained exactly what the act did: it removed the language warning drivers about “crossing” the intersection when the traffic light turns red.

That left us with the law we have today.

The important question is therefore not:

Was the light red while my car was in the intersection?

It’s:

What color was the light when I entered the intersection?

If it was yellow, Arkansas law permitted you to enter.

If it was already red, you were required to stop.

But should you go through a yellow?

That’s a different question.

A yellow light isn’t an invitation to accelerate and beat the red light. If you can stop normally and safely, stopping is the prudent thing to do.

But neither should you panic and slam on the brakes because the light changed to yellow when you’re already close to the intersection.

Yellow means exactly what Arkansas law says it means:

The light is about to turn red.

And in Arkansas, the legal line is drawn when you enter the intersection, not when you finish crossing it.

Sources

• Arkansas Code §27-52-107
• Arkansas Act 1606 of 2001 (HB2550)
• Arkansas General Assembly, General Summary — 2001 Regular Session

Odds & Ends 012

Odds & Ends 011

Odds & Ends 010

For most of my life, replacing a car battery meant loosening two cables, swapping batteries, and driving away.

Then came start-stop systems.

Many modern vehicles have a second battery—an auxiliary (start-stop) battery—that keeps the electronics alive and helps restart the engine after it shuts off at stoplights. It’s surprisingly small, which makes it easy to underestimate.

The irony is that the battery may cost less than the labor to replace it.

On some vehicles, mechanics have to remove air intake parts, wiring, brackets, and other engine components just to reach a battery that’s barely larger than a motorcycle battery. You look at the pile of parts and wonder if they rebuilt the engine.

Nope.

They just replaced a little battery.

There’s a good engineering reason for this. Modern engine compartments are packed with emissions equipment, electronics, safety features, and plumbing. Something has to occupy the hard-to-reach spaces, and sometimes that’s the auxiliary battery.

So if your vehicle has a start-stop system, don’t forget there’s probably a second battery hiding somewhere. It may be one of the smallest parts under the hood—but when it fails, it can create one of the biggest repair surprises.

Note: One of the first things I did with my Gladiator was install a start-stop eliminator or memory module. It is reversible, requires no ritual at every startup, and does not depend on fooling hood switches or disconnecting wiring. One important distinction: disabling engine stop-start does not make a weak auxiliary battery harmless. The battery remains electrically connected and can still discharge or damage the main battery.

Odds & Ends 009

Arkansas Senator John Boozman found himself in a rather strange position last week.

He was voting for Mitch McConnell.

Literally.

McConnell has been absent from the Senate for weeks while dealing with health problems. But that didn’t stop Boozman, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, from announcing that he had talked with McConnell the night before and had McConnell’s permission to cast proxy votes for him during the committee meeting.

And, to be fair, proxy voting is allowed for some things in Senate committees.

So Boozman wasn’t just making up a vote and pretending McConnell had cast it.

But then came the vote that actually mattered.

The committee was trying to advance its new farm bill. Republicans needed the votes to get it out of committee, and McConnell wasn’t there.

Boozman tried to cast McConnell’s vote by proxy.

There was just one little problem.

That vote didn’t count.

Committee rules require senators to actually be present when determining whether a majority has voted to report legislation out of committee.

Imagine that.

Apparently there are still occasions in Washington when a senator has to actually show up to be a senator.

Without McConnell’s proxy vote, the farm bill failed to advance, 10-11.

What makes the whole episode especially interesting is that McConnell hasn’t been seen publicly in nearly two months. Boozman said he spoke with him the night before the committee meeting and that McConnell authorized him to vote on his behalf.

I have no particular reason to doubt Boozman talked to him.

But the whole spectacle illustrates something increasingly strange about Washington.

Mitch McConnell is 84 years old. He’s been away from the Senate for weeks, recently left a rehabilitation hospital, and is continuing physical therapy at home.

Yet Republicans were still trying to use his vote to move major legislation through a Senate committee.

At some point you have to ask a pretty simple question:

If somebody else has to show up and vote for you, are you really doing the job anymore?

And then there is John Boozman.

Arkansas sent him to Washington to represent Arkansas.

Last week he was standing in a Senate committee meeting trying to represent Kentucky, too.

Maybe we should be impressed.

Arkansas apparently gets two senators, and John Boozman occasionally moonlights as Kentucky’s third.

Odds & Ends 008

Senator Tom Cotton voted for the 2025 budget reconciliation law — the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

There are a lot of things buried in that enormous piece of legislation, but two deserve particular attention in Arkansas: Medicaid and SNAP.

And these aren’t abstract Washington programs.

They pay doctors. They keep rural hospitals operating. Medicaid pays a huge share of nursing-home bills. SNAP buys groceries for families who don’t have enough money to buy them otherwise.

So what did Congress do?

It made major cuts and added new restrictions. [continue reading…]

The man in the picture came from Missouri.

His name apparently wasn’t recorded, or at least it didn’t make it into the caption that followed Dorothea Lange’s photograph into the archives.

What we do know isn’t much.

He was a drought refugee from Polk, Missouri.

It was November 1936.

He was in Porterville, California.

And he was waiting for the orange harvest to begin.

That’s it.

I recently took two of Lange’s black-and-white photographs and reimagined them in color, in the style of one of Norman Rockwell’s magazine illustrations. There’s something about seeing him that way that changes the photograph a little. The Depression suddenly doesn’t seem quite so safely tucked away in black-and-white history.

He looks more like a man you might actually have known. [continue reading…]

There are some injuries you read about differently after you’ve had a similar serious one yourself.

While filming The Unforgiven in Mexico in 1959, 30-year-old Audrey Hepburn was thrown from a horse during rehearsal and broke her back. Accounts vary somewhat on the exact injuries, but contemporary and biographical sources describe multiple fractured vertebrae—one detailed biography says four broken vertebrae, along with two sprained ankles, a sprained wrist, and torn lower-back muscles.

Production stopped while she recovered. Remarkably, after about six weeks she returned to the set and finished the movie, wearing a back brace beneath her costume.

There was a much sadder consequence. Hepburn was pregnant at the time and later suffered a miscarriage. The miscarriage has often been attributed to the accident, although whether the fall actually caused it is unclear.

The story caught my attention for obvious reasons.

Before my own accident, “broken back” brought to mind paralysis or somebody unable to walk. I now know firsthand that it isn’t necessarily that simple. In a fall, I fractured multiple thoracic vertebrae and cracked several ribs, yet I could still walk. A neurosurgeon in Sherwood, Arkansas, used titanium rods and screws, connecting multiple vertebrae combined with bone graft material for long-term stabilization.

So I look at Hepburn’s story differently today.

I can imagine the difficulty getting comfortable, the fatigue, the movements that suddenly aren’t simple, and the realization that recovery doesn’t happen all at once.

Then I think about Audrey Hepburn putting on a costume over a back brace and going back to work on a set in Mexico.

I am at about the same point in my recovery, and it’s hard to imagine doing that.

Broken backs have a way of changing your perspective.

Odds & Ends 005

Note: The image was generated by ChatGPT AI. It is a Norman Rockwell-style work based on 1959 black-and-white photographs.