An accident on Germany's A2 autobahn involving 259 cars has left 66 people injured, 10 of them seriously, but incredibly resulted in no deaths.
The pile-up occurred in the late evening, when a combination of heavy rain and a setting sun hampered the drivers' vision and made the road conditions slippery. The first accident happened near Hamelerwald, and began a cascade of other accidents that over the next two hours grew to span a 30 kilometre stretch of road. It finally took 340 emergency workers well into the next morning to finish dealing with the people and vehicles involved and the clean-up cost is expected to exceed 1.75 million Euros, i.e. $2.5 million (NY Daily News).
You may not be able to afford that "West Coast Customs" look for your ride, but how about the garage where you leave it?
Style-Your-Garage.com are offering a range of self adhesive garage-door covers that depict the contents of your garage as everything from a fighter jet to a strip joint. There's even one showing it to be completely empty. So if you fancy having an alligator, a speedboat or even a metro station in your garage, Style-Your-Garage.com have just the thing for you (Daily Mail).
A few years ago, a neighbor of my parents, a man who owned a construction company, parked a backhoe in his driveway. The surrounding neighbors nearly had a riot over how the machine was lowering the value of their property just by being there. So you can imagine how this guy's neighbors might feel. Carlos Owens of Wasilla, Alaska, a former Army mechanic, had a dream. His dream was to create a giant metal robot that could mirror the movements of its human pilot. Now the "mecha", as he calls it, has become a reality. It has taken him four years and cost approximately $25,000, but just think of all the fun you could have with one of these.
I have no idea of the provenance of this material. Is that Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd driving? Is that really Babe Ruth in the back seat? But I do know it's amazing.
An interesting statistic: "Two-thirds of all District [of Columbia] parking meters reported broken turn out to be operational when a repair crew arrives on-site."
One reason is that people falsely report meters as broken when they're not, but another explanation, according to the DC Department of Transportation, is that the meters are designed to be "self-correcting". They're not really broken. The evil little things are just pretending:
a person who parks at a meter displaying a “fail” message may return an hour later to find a working meter flashing zero time and a ticket on the windshield — a process that may repeat several times a day.
Basically, the parking cops are going to get your money, one way or another. Just resign yourself to that truth.
This would be a useful addition in ALL driver's ed courses, especially if the driver was given no warning. From Popular Science, Aug 1935:
So that the driver of a radio car will know what to do if someone darts across a street in front of his speeding machine, instructors of a police school at Hendon, England have devised an ingenious training method. The student is required to drive along a test course, and at some unannounced point a concealed catapult hurls a stuffed dummy in front of the car. Observers rate the driver on his ability to stop or swerve in time to avoid hitting the pedestrian. The catapult is operated by a spring, and a jerk on a rope releases its trigger. All drivers of London's police cars receive this training.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.