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We have noticed along the highways and byways that, while we used to see an occasional trooper or local police officer waiting around the next curve with his radar alert for speed infractions, we now spot the cagy gentlemen nearly every time we drive for even a few miles. Alert to the high price of tickets and annoyed because we think being stopped, unless one is recklessly speeding, is an invasion of privacy, a new defensive principle popped into our watchful consciousness that we thought we'd share with you.

Forget the days when you used to push the speed limit and think, 'If I'm lucky, I won't get spotted by the cops.' The new way to think is, 'I better stay pretty close to the speed limit, maybe push it by three to five miles an hour at most, because the question isn't if the cops are there, tucked in somewhere around a bend. It's where are they?'

And how fast will you be going when you forget for a moment to worry about them and, understandably enough, concentrate on your driving or your love life? And you know that moment is just the one during which you'll round a curve and see one of the disguised fundraisers with his pulsed-radar gun pointed right at your convicted vehicle.

Of course, you'll feel your heart give you a life-shortening thump and, if you happened to have strayed even a tad above the limits we just suggested, you'll be looking in your rearview mirror to see if the car with the flashing bubble gum machine on top in racing after you. And there you'll be, once again, confronted with the usual passive-aggressive behavior that seems to guide most cops when they approach your open window and demand your docs.

Then you'll drive home, swearing you're not going to pay, only to eye the ticket day after day, until you finally decide the lesser disaster lies in anteing up to help support whatever local municipality the reluctant employee has been directed to hustle bucks for.