Inanimate objects don’t kill people, stupidity does!

If there is one thing guaranteed to get my goat, it is the continuing tendency of people – often people employed in the media – to immediately blame the state of the road for fatalities. You know what people; highways don’t lurk about in the dark, plotting and scheming before cunningly setting about to “claim victims”. If the road DOES happen to be dodgy, show more bloody caution!

On this theme, it is about time we got rid of this word ‘accident’ from the reporting of car crashes. Someone falling asleep at the wheel and running headlong into another car is not an ‘accident’. Someone four times over the legal limit flying off a cliff because they can no longer see straight is not an ‘accident’. Someone doing 175 kilometres an hour in an 80 zone losing control and hitting a wall is not an ‘accident’.

To my mind, an ‘accident’ is a quite specific, identifiable, unexpected and unusual external event, without apparent or deliberate cause but with marked effects. The person that drives 22 straight hours; the person that gets drunk and hops behind the wheel; or the person that guns it down the street hell for leather should not consider crashing an “unexpected and unusual external event”. It is a crash, not an accident.

That is why today’s report from the NSW coroner gladdens my heart. Hopefully the press are paying notice.

Rant over. Back to work.

Comments

Anonymous said…

This post was most interesting. I also liked the one yesterday about word clouds.

13 June 2008 at 20:59

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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