Build Date: Fri Aug 8 00:41:02 2025 UTC

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
-- John Perry Barlow

Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

by Negative Nancy

1999-09-21 12:27:26

Turns out the guy behind the wheel of the London train crash that took out six people two years ago was known for "displaying "very casual" behavior. For example, driving the 125mph train with both his feet on the dashboard, backing his "kitbag" (I think that's "backpack to you and me English speakers), and blazing through two yellow and one red light before plowing into a "goods train" 470 yards beyond the red light.

Not only did this dorkus act like he was driving a golf cart in a padded room, someone had turned off the idiot-proof automatic warning system (AWS). The AWS sounds an alarm and triggers automatic braking if the driver doesn't slow down.

Kinda like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer challenges the trucker guy to the meat eating contest and then ends up driving the guys truck, and he takes all that trucker speed to stay awake but then he takes sleeping pills too and falls asleep and the truck drives itself... hehehe that was so funny! It makes me laugh just thinking about it!

Anyway, not only was the emergency backup system turned off, the guy was also using his "kit bag" to hold down the foot-pedal that you have to press to make the breaks work,'casue his feet were on the dashboard, of course.

Over.  End of Story.  Go home now.

dunsmuir@pigdog.org

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