During an important emergency response drill on Saturday, top White House officials participated with other federal agencies to test the response of the U.S. federal government during a simulated terrorist attack against ten U.S. cities. During this morning drill, President George W. Bush went on a bike ride. Via .
If more people started their day with a bicycle ride, this world might be a better place. Then again, the bike ride didn't end so well for these folks: "Three suspected Pakistani militants were blown to pieces by their explosives on Saturday when they rode over a bump on a bicycle outside a town in the central province of Punjab." According to police, none of these cyclists wore a helmet, clearly proving that helmet use should be mandatory for bike-riding bombers.
I found the story about Bush after creating my latest handy bike-searching tool using Yahoo Pipes. This feed combines the data from many of the most popular blogs and searches for mentions of bicycling related topics. This way, I don't need to read all of these high-volume blogs just to find the occasional mention of a bicycling story.
Other finds via this tool: MAKE visits Cyclecide and How to knit bike helmet ear warmers.
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Nice segue into the helmet legislation issue Fritz.
ReplyDeleteI actually wrote a whole post on the John Stossel 20/20 helmet segment but trashed it.
Anyway, I'll leave a short thought on that here.
In Oz, our experience is that after the initial decline in participation, something that took years to recover, helmets are no longer seen as an objection, just a part of the kit. We've moved on, but it is amusing to see the discourse over there. The anti's are wrong.
I've never see legislation as the issue some folks make it out to be, but then that's me. Govt's legislate on all kinds of things, so why not helmets? I know, I know, I've heard all the arguments.
However, national and cultural differences do apply, so in the case of the US public education on helmets rather than legislation is the way to go.
Reading so many US cycling blogs it's apparent that cycling is on the up, so I'd be cautious regarding anything that would disrupt the trajectory, the end goal is more folks on bikes, and the risk assessment on your side of the pond favours letting sleeping dogs lie.
Re the Pakistani would be bombers: All three guys on the one bike carrying home made explosives, nutty. An early candidate for the Darwin Awards 2007.