Fresh from being rewarded with a wage freeze for maintaining one of the safest communities in America (in exchange for no cop layoffs), Irvine police officers conduct a sobriety/driver's license checkpoint during the Saturday evening hours.
That means the men and women in blue on that detail won't take any of your shit, won't give a shit or both.
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There I go projecting again.
Actually, it sounds oh-so polite. The checkpoint, the police vehicles and the police themselves will be clearly marked. They will greet you with a hi-diddly-do and hand you literature that is not the latest edition of The Watchtower (drats, I wanted to see how that end-of-the-world chapter ends), but information on how funked-up it is to be driving drunk, stoned or stone drunk.
Officers will politely ask to see your drivers license, in the unlikely event it's not current, you forgot it or you forgot to swing by Ellis Island on the way into the country.
If you appear to be Dean Martin on a Foster Brooks' bender (ask Grandma, Scooter), you will be very nicely directed to a secondary checkpoint location, where even friendlier police personnel will have you do fun tests that are much like playing Twister–with Sailor Jerry!
Crap, forgot the most important part: this love-in goes down at the corner of Jeffrey Road and Barranca Parkway.
Like those performed by more dickish agencies, the operation is funded by a grant from the state traffic safety office through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.