What this world really needs is a bagel that's easily converted into a hand grenade, so that when you are in the middle of eating it on your drive to work and you are cut off by a cell-phone-gabbing lunatic, it's no trouble to sidle up next to him in the breakdown lane, lob your breakfast ordnance through the open window of his Ford Intrusion, and blissfully speed ahead as an explosion sends the guy to Bad Driving Tourist hell.
No one's invented this yet, though, so I had to settle for throwing my regular ol' bagel at the guy.
If anyone sees a large black Ford SUV with Ohio plates in the region, please stop the driver and ask "if he'd like more cream cheese with that."
Posted by Michael Genrich at August 01, 2003 10:03 AMThis isn't the first time I've been involved in the aerodynamics of food thrown from moving vehicles. From an older blog-thing:
October 24, 2000
I swear this actually happened.
I was driving around doing errands all day. For lunch, I stopped off at a local burger joint that I hadn't been to in a while. I bought a nice greasy burger and some onion rings. Since my house was a 15-minute drive away, I decided to start munching on the onion rings in the car.
Here in New England, we've got these roadway implements called "rotaries" -- the English call them "roundabouts" -- where several roads converge in the same spot. Instead of a stoplight or traffic officer, the roads coverge upon a perfect circle of asphalt. Although the laws say that traffic already in the rotary has the right of way, this fact is lost upon every single person who encounters them.
I had managed to find my way into this particular rotary without incident, but the car immediately to my right (yes, many rotaries have two lanes to add to the accident potential) was lucky to avoid a collision thanks to a minivan that asserted its traffic position without regard to our local laws. Instinctively, the driver to my right immediately raised a one-finger salute to the offending minivan.
Today was a lovely fall day in Boston, with temperatures in the 60's. It was a nice enough day for me to have all the windows in the Explorer rolled down. See the picture painted in front of you: I have an onion ring in my hand, the windows are all open, and there's an upright finger not ten feet away from me. If any driving situation has ever screamed "Ring Toss" louder than this, I'd love to hear about it. And sure, I may be 29 years old, but every ounce of adulthood was wholly forgotten as I let the crispy, deep-fried projectile loose.
And -- can you believe it -- I actually hit the thing.
Well, the "thing" was the car next to me. This isn't an episode of "Macgyver," for God's sake.
Posted by: mg on August 1, 2003 10:32 AM