Fun With Pedestrians

Published in the Desert Valley Times
June 21, 2005

Here’s a tip for any budding humor columnists out there.
When that inevitable writer’s block rears its ugly head, simply turn on your TV.
It’s like the toy box for playful minds.
Don’t bother with watching sit-coms or mindless reality shows.
Use your TIVO to skip through to the commercials.
They represent the cerebral gold mine for humorists.
While enjoying the fruits of my Father’s Day labor, which involved exploring the multitude of comfortable positions in my La-Z-Boy chair and surfing channels like Laird Hamilton on a weekend bender, I came across an ad for Honda.
It was ironic that the ad should appear on the same day that I had caught a piece of a Dateline report which intimated that car manufacturers had gone about as far as they can go in passenger safety.
The Honda ad exalted the newest safety feature of their cars:
Pedestrian safety.
Apparently, Honda engineers have developed a way that you can hit people with your car while causing a minimum of injuries.
It involves a lot of technical yadda yadda about hood angles and front frame construction, but most of it was lost on me.
I was too busy imagining the benefits of this latest feature.
First, you really have to hand it to the Honda engineers for recognizing one of the most desperate needs of American drivers, which is a way to run over people without excessive lawsuit exposure.
My mind immediately drifted to a vision of sitting behind the wheel at a crosswalk in Las Vegas, where drunken gamblers paraded in front of my Honda wearing bulls-eyes and silly grins.
If the car lived up to the hype, you might be able to hit three or four inebriated pedestrians at a throw without invoking serious injury.
I also considered the benefits of this technology when pulling into your mother-in-law’s driveway.
The sports writer in me also reared its ugly head, with visions of new vehicular sports that don’t involve racing around an oval track.
“Pedestrian Bowling” was one of the first ideas that came to mind, followed closely by “Bumper Tag.”
I suspect this new feature will make Honda the number-one seller in California, where steering wheel-challenged drivers in a hurry to get everywhere have turned hitting pedestrians into an art form.
I also pondered what the Honda engineers might be able to come up with next.
Cars with a safety feature that keeps drivers from running over family pets would be a nice option.
Making automobiles bicycle-proof would be another, since bike riders are even more susceptible to broken body parts than pedestrians.
As part of the technology, Honda developed a new pedestrian crash-test dummy which is designed to measure the damage when a jogger has an unfortunate encounter with a Prelude.
If they can come up with a way to mass-produce the dummies at a reasonable price, I’m sure a contingent of American drivers will line up to buy them for target practice.
After all, if you’re going to hit someone with your car, you want to be good at it.
In fact, I can see a new Olympic event on the horizon.
Since we can’t seem to beat anybody in Olympic basketball or archery, this might give us a chance to up our medal count.
I would write more about this, but the commercial with the wedding party falling into the lake is on again, and I just can’t wait to find out what Enzyte Bob is “up” to next.