WORLD'S WORST ATTEMPT AT PARALLEL PARKING - EVEN THE SEAGULLS ARE LAUGHING - WEEK FIVE!

Courtesy of a young gentleman in Belfast comes a video of staggering dimension. Be very grateful that it doesn't involve an aircraft carrier. It features a woman with incredible fortitude and commendable stubbornness trying, desperately trying, struggling, fighting valiantly, nay, engaged in an existential conflict with the fates, to park her car on a quiet street in Belfast.

NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER SURRENDER!

Belfast is an exciting place. Parking spots open up so rarely within a two-hour hike of where you need to be that when you find one, you leap at it, and pound it into quivering submission.
And time is a flexible concept there.
It's rather like Poland or Mexico.
Dimensionally transcendent.


'WORLD'S WORST ATTEMPT AT PARALLEL PARKING, ENJOY'


[Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf4TIWECZ30. And thank you, Ciarán Shannon, for sharing!]


The unidentified female personage driving the getaway vehicle is a ruddy genius of four-wheeled entertainment.
Bless you, ma'am you've made many of us incredibly happy. We are cheered by your efforts. Our faith in existence has been re-affirmed.
You are loved.


Really, I shouldn't laugh. It's unkind of me. My ex-girlfriend hates parallel parking..... on steep San Francisco hillsides, when there's some out-of-towner also aiming for the space. Why, I've spent agonizing half or even whole minutes as she sweats blood to get her vehicle aligned. Some of those sloped streets start moving on their own, wiggling around to confound the hapless woman. Trees will appear out of nowhere, and bicyclists will rocket past at frightening speed!
It might take as much as TWO whole minutes! An eternity!

But Belfast streets are much much worse. They're level. And do not twist.
They proceed along the countours of the land (flat and even) in darkly suggestive ways (straight as a ruler) toward a baffling horizon (a perfect ninety degree angle with another street).
It's terrifying.


My ex-girlfriend has no self-confidence in her motorvehicle abilities. She is tense and fully alert when behind the wheel, and aware of everything around her. No, not adrenaline, but something darn close (there's a gland in the female body that produces a natural analogue to caffeine).
And parallel parking is, she freely admits, her worst nightmare. She prefers spaces that she can just back into, because they're at a right angle to the street. There have been times when getting out on the passenger side meant I was staring into a chasm because of the angle of the hill, and she had to clamber up and heave herself out of the driver's side like a sewer-worker popping out of a manhole. But anything is better than a parallel parking spot. On a bad day in a rainstorm on a busy street, with buses going up and downhill and suburban drivers doing baffling things in all lanes, parallel parking might be three or four minutes of absolute agony!

She'll gladly drive around a bit to find a better space.


Another lady I know who lives in San Francisco maintains her fluency in her parents' native tongue because of parallel parking. She swears in Russian. Admittedly, it's only for a minute and half or so, but it happens often enough that whole paragraphs of vile Slavic expletivity can be constructed within a comparatively short time. She doesn't like to be repetitive, you see. It's a neurotic female thing; there is no art to simply saying the same nasty phrases over and over again. Such rehash is uninspiring, don't you think?
The pattern is in the grammar, not the vocabulary.

To me it sounds like normal Russian at those times. Multiple consonant clusters, and harsh yowled syllables ending in "niok!" or a prolonged choking fit. Quite unlike the dulcet tones of my own native tongue.
Which is Dutch. A smoothly melodic language.


I simply double-park.

Takes me almost no time at all.


Or it wouldn't take me any time, if I still parked. But I haven't driven a car in over three decades, since rocketing my vehicle off a hillside in Moraga at ninety miles an hour.

It's a question of style, I guess.


"She hett tha' black cor thray taims!"

As someone (Kiernan?) said "noooo way"!
Pull up, ge' 'er ane, gooo on, ye.

No animals were hurt in the making of this video.




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