The year 2026 is right around the corner and I know I am paid to rend flesh and entrails over the myriad of civilization-ending issues facing us. But, right now? I am currently concerned with what my fellow eighth-grade male chums used to snickeringly refer to as, “Your high beams are on.”
No. Not THOSE high beams. The automotive headlights. Well. The newer ones.
I admit. I’m flirting with entering The By Cracky! Generation, or, as some say South of the Border —“¡El Generación Por Cracky!” But, every time I’m motoring about at night, it’s like half the people out there are driving with their high beams on.
Dear Mr. SCV:
Are you referring to when it’s cold out and a young lady is walking down the stree … (EDITOR’S NOTE: Letter edited for content.)
Sincerely,
Jason Gibbs,
But Not THAT Jason Gibbs
Thank you, Jason. But I was referring to my ongoing experience of being caught up in my own, personal SciFi movie in which a UFO spacecraft, posing as an oncoming Audi Q5 SUV, is racing at you and their headlights turn nighttime into a solar flare. From 3 feet away. It’s blinding. Worse. I believe I should be entitled to some financial compensation from Audi and the godless Valencia yuppie no one asked to move here because their headlights are so powerful, they melted my windshield so I can broil a rib roast on it three days later.
These modern automobile cars are equipped with lumination devices scientists call, “LED.” Stands for Light Emitting Diode. Cripes they’re bright. I am sometimes tempted to blast MY high beams right back at oncoming traffic, but, frankly, I’m scared. I heard someone mistakenly flashed the high beams from their 1959 LeSabre back at a modern car and the offending driver then upped the ante, flashing their actual, Death Star High Beams back at the Buick, incinerating the entire vehicle and vaporizing a family of 11, which was OK because they were here illegally. From Switzerland. Of course, on the other hand, I had a friend, a little older than me, who got high-beam flashed by a 2026 Nissan Flotilla (the 84-passenger extended cab model) and had their cataracts miraculously cured, along with a long-suffering bout of ED.
Ed’s Disease.
According to Wikipedia, LED lighting is defined as the following: “In electrical engineering, a light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, thereby releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (corresponding to the energy of the photons) is determined by the energy required for electrons to cross the band gap of the semiconductor. White light is obtained by using multiple semiconductors or a layer of light-emitting phosphor on the semiconductor device.”
Two thoughts. First? “Electron Holes” is a great band name. Second and third? Am I being zapped by Photon Torpedoes a la Star Trek and, if so, shouldn’t I be compensated like the Democratic state Legislature is suggesting in their ongoing attempt to sink California into a bankruptcy deeper than the Pacific?
It’s still kind of Christmas so I probably shouldn’t be entertaining such thoughts. But, I wonder how many Rosaries it would cost me next confession if I rigged some retaliatory response to the LED Crisis? The most powerful searchlight in the world is in Las Vegas at the Luxor Hotel. That baby pumps about 13,650,000 lumens from 39 7kW xenon lamps. It creates a beam with about 42.3 billion candela. Melts. Your Damn. Sister’s. Eyeballs. And She Lives. In Montana.
That’d fix that jack-asterisk’s wagon in the new Land Rover. I’d bolt my Luxor search light on the roof of my Prius, on a swivel, so that I could spin it 180 degrees at one of our many Santa Clarita Valley stoplights. Of course, there might be collateral damage in that not only would it vaporize the guy behind in the Land Rover, but probably every other vehicle, tree stump and fire hydrant for 200 miles on both sides of the street.
I’d probably have trouble navigating my Prius through the car wash with the 4-ton Luxor searchlight atop the roof. Might up my insurance rates, too, although, I could threaten to turn the Luxor light on my car insurance salesman’s home should he even joke about raising the already nosebleed premium and I’m on the Ain’t Nobody’s Fault/Will Flee Back To My Country Of Origin If You Rat To The CHP plan. Perhaps an automated machine gun in the trunk would be more practical. Push a button, a .50-caliber anti-aircraft weapon pops out and shoots out the guy’s fancy pants headlights.
Perhaps I’m overthinking this. Forget the search light or machine gun. Just keep some well-fed little people or orphans in your trunk. Some knucklehead in the SUV already levitating 15 yards above ground behind you is reconstructing the atoms of your rear view mirror. Pop the trunk and the abbreviated commando team waddles comically out with baseball bats and busts their grill, headlights and the wife’s interior vanity mirror.
Maybe I’m just being old fashioned.
There’s probably a good reason to have such powerful headlights, especially here in California where they’ve outlawed streetlights to save the Newsom Endangered Underground Mole Squirrel. With these modern LED headlights, parents can take their children out to the wilderness and put on puppet shows from 46 miles away. Seeing that Caltrans no longer feels it necessary to shed a bit of sparkle on our freeways after sunset, the motorist might be able to spot a well-camouflaged offramp. Again, I know it’s California, but having headlights that powerful, you can hunt deer or ex-spouses into the pre-dawn hours.
Heavens. With these new, hyper-bright LED headlamps, a hungry driver can pull over any time just to roast some weenies …
“Naked Came the Novelist,” Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” is on sale at JohnBoston-Books.com. So are other fine books. Lifelong SCV resident John Boston, with 119 major writing awards, is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
