The Fast and the Furious

So, The Mrs. and I were out driving on what passes for a road in Alaska. We saw the sign above, and I had to take the picture. Now, I'm not one to promote the defacing of public property, but I must admit I liked (not licked) the ingenuity of those that defaced this one. Being older than 12, I would not have thought of this one myself.

Recently, there have been a spate of commercials on the radio advertising that if you do not wear a seat belt while driving a car you will:

1. get a ticket
2. gain 46 pounds
3. be forced to have Paris Hilton over to cook dinner and you be forced to eat it
4. possibly spontaneously explode
5. die a hideous instantaneous death if you hit something as small as a mosquito in your car.

I heard the commercials, then saw signs like the one above spring up like flowers after the snow melted.

One of the local radio hosts made a comment that he thought that there had been more people drown in the last year than die as a result of not wearing seat belts. I must confirm that (by doing no research whatsoever, just agreeing because it suits me) he is correct.

So, the solution may be to make all Alaskans wear life vests whenever they leave their beds. It would save a life, so, could it be wrong? I assume that they would fit under the seat belts.

Another leading cause of death in Alaska is wildlife. Wildlife generally has two ends, the pointy one and the soft one. If you shoot the pointy bits off, you generally don't get treated as a chew toy for one of the Berenstain Bears Gone Wild (now that would be a DVD). So, in addition to the seat belt and the life preserver, why not an option here - either require full chain mail or a 12 ga. shotgun loaded with slugs? I think most Alaskans already have the 12 ga., so that might be popular. After all, it might save one life . . .

Actually, I just actually checked the real statistics, and it looks like suicide is a big killer up here, too. Now, chain mail won't help, so, probably the only solution would be some sort of happy medicine that you would have to take or a personal therapist hanging around. So, as a compromise you could have an I-Pod playing affirmations continually in a pocket in your life preserver . . . .

Yet another cause of death in Alaska is heart disease. Perhaps if we all had those paddles George Clooney used on ER, and had them welded to our chain mail, we could save another life or two.

Let's make all of this mandatory, because it's worth it to save just one life.

The radio talk show host noted that this was part of some sort of Federal enforcement effort, where they send money to states to have them help us help ourselves by wearing seat belts. As I am too lazy to check this either, so I will again confirm it as possibly an actual fact.

I think that seat belt laws particularly rankle Alaskans. You've just moved to a state with a population of about one person per square mile. That's closer to the population density of the Moon (0 per square mile) than to that of New Jersey (750,000 per square mile), although I hear that the Moon is still slightly more hospitable than Trenton.

So, you're here, in the middle of this vast wilderness where just walking around there are:

• bears more hostile than an Ozzy Osbourne crowd forced to listen to a Michael Bolton medley wanting to eat you,
• low temperatures so extreme that being caught out in them without proper gear can freeze you more solid than Ted Williams' head in 10 minutes
• Natasha and Boris still chasing Moose und Squirr-el with all sorts of explosives and fiendishly overcomplicated plots,
  

and someone, who is not your mom, is telling you to put on your seat belt to be safer. You're taking personal responsiblity with your life on (potentially) a day-to-day basis, making the incongruity of this message is absolute.

Anyway, all of you residents of New Hampshire who sent your Federal tax money up here to buy radio airtime on the local radio station to tell me to wear my seat belt, thanks. I'll put it on, over my life preserver and my chain mail suit.