Here's the first in a series of short-short vids. This first is called "death by taxi". I wrote about it a few days ago. I was annoyed at being held up by the slow moving taxi in front of me, but I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and decided against making any potentially suicidal overtaking moves. A cyclist coming up behind me thought he could safely overtake the taxi on the outside, but he was wrong. I know from experience that when cars go around this corner, they always go wide to the right. That's what this taxi did, and the cyclist almost got squished between it and a low concrete divider.
The second one shows a mum carrying a kid stepping out in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction. You can't see her head in the video - and I couldn't see it in real life either. Her kids head was blocking her view in this direction. Instead of looking around her kid, she just stepped off the tram platform. I've seen boneheads do this in the past when a tram has been coming along instead of a bike. Luckily for both of us, I saw what she was doing and guessed that she was about to step in front of me, so I stood on the brakes before she actually departed the platform. A more aggressive and less aware cyclist would have cleaned her up - along with the kid. Headlines would then blare "mother and child run down by insane cyclist", rather than "idiot steps in front of cyclist without bothering to look".
4 comments:
Hey BOAB, what settings do you make on ya camera for these videos?
Cav
Must log in!
It's one of these Oregon Scientific cameras - an early model with crappy resolution.
http://oregonscientificstore.com/oregon_scientific/category.asp?cat=6
They have some new models out now that are much, much better. I am waiting for the current one to die so I can upgrade. Trouble is, it's very tough!
Whoa! OT (heavily OT)
I just noticed that a few months ago you referred on Maralin Parker's site to something I wrote.
(I should read my anonymous comments & referrals page more often)
I feel quite chuffed, (at being referred to).
Miss Parker says my story is extremely well written (nice to hear, as I struggle to write coherently) but she says my story is nonsense. This distresses me, not so much being called a liar, as that she seems intelligent, but blocks out the fact that this sort of thing happens plenty often.
However, just as Miss Parker assumes this sort of thing doesn't happen, others on that thread make a few assumptions also.
The event could happen to anybody, and was worse than I think you assumed.
For the story happened exactly as written. None of the participants were aboriginal. The event did not happen in the outback, but at a normal Qld state high school, in a middle sized coastal town.
All of her holding of the spyglass to her blind eye aside, Miss Parker has no excuse she MUST have known and recognised what was a stock-standard reaction by the teacher's union to workplace violence against it's members. Well, the Qld teacher's union anyway.
Steve
I couldn't believe how dismissive they all were. They didn't want to know about it, so therefore you had to be making it up. I have relatives in a couple of country towns, and they tell me this sort of stuff on a regular basis. You can't all be making it up!
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