Eighteen Bicycle Pileup on Diag
Transportation Incompetence Finally Reaches Boiling Point
ANN ARBOR-In an event that can only be described as easily predictable, eighteen ultrasonic, unstoppable student cyclists collided on the Diag yesterday afternoon, causing extensive property damage, serious injuries and general discontentment but, strangely, no neurological damage.
"I don't know what happened," said LSA sophomore Becky Carter, one of the cyclists involved in the catastrophe. "I was doing a reasonable 80 mph, adhering to the generally accepted Ann Arbor rule of 'do not slow down or stop for anything short of the Virgin Mary', and so was everyone else?I can't really see what went wrong."
"I'm baffled, myself," said aerospace engineering/physics major and masochist David Jones, also involved in the accident. "We all should have created inverse gravity columns and repelled each other, given the average speed of 186,000 miles per second. I suppose someone wasn't going fast enough to create the full slingshot effect."
After intense questioning, DPS officials urged the bikers to attend a bicycle safety seminar. Apparently, when shown the handle-mounted braking system and told of the backpedaling method of bike stoppage, 80 percent of the students showed at best vague memories of their existence.
"Yeah, I knew about 'em," said Kinesiology junior Kevin Anderson. "I just thought they were emergency failsafe devices, you know? Like somethin' I'd use if I came across a bear or an ostrich or something. But that hasn't happened yet, so?"
Other students were slightly less informed. "Are you trying to tell me that I can actually slow down?" senior cricket-flicking major Harriet Winslow gasped. "I thought once you got up to speed you could only stop by deploying a parachute or running into a tree, like I usually do. Wow, this could really make my cricket-flicking expeditions more easier like n stuff."
When asked what exactly cricket-flicking was, Winslow put her fingers in her ears and began singing "America the Beautiful".
A number of the students said that they thought the mechanism on the handle was a horn, or surface-to-surface laser of some sort. Others thought it provided "extra grip" for "really wicked off-road action."
Some of the bikers exhibited knowledge of the concepts of braking, but claimed their excessive speed was justified in some way.
"I was trying to circle the world really fast, so I could make time go backwards like in Superman 2," twelfth-year senior EECS major John Rothschild said. "Then I would take my midterms again and not fail them. But I hit somebody before I could make my first circle. Guess I'll try again at night, or early in the morning, when people on Earth are usually asleep."
Rehabilitation and re-acquaintance with bicycle safety, the laws of physics and the concept of motion itself await the participants of the pileup. They will be taken to a facility outside Ann Arbor, where people ride bikes at speeds other than warp 13.