Ms Austen’s Continuing Guide To The Safe Conduction Of Motorized Vehicles

The fact that the other driver did not intend, through their habitual incompetence behind the wheel, to kill you, will in no manner minimize the inconvenience of your early demise.

Image credit: Time Magazine

It is a lamentable fact that at least 99% of drivers on the road are reprehensibly lacking in the basic skills and mental fortitude necessary for the safe conduction of motorized vehicles. Although these 99% (and this figure may, dear reader, be an under-estimate of the true percentage of lethal incompetents who daily demonstrate their unsuitability for any position behind the steering-wheel of a motorized vehicle) believe themselves eternally to be “above average” drivers, the truth is quite otherwise. Very few of those who assume the driver’s seat have even the intellectual capacity of a dead snail and are thus not well-equipped to confront the many challenges the highway may present to them upon occasion.

At this point, dear reader, you may justly feel that I am being somewhat unkind. Dead snails, after all, do have the singular merit of doing no harm and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a few such deceased gastropods may indeed score more highly on IQ tests than a great many human beings. I shall speak no more of such matters except to say that should evidence be presented to me regarding the cognitive superiority of snails viz-a-vis people, I for one shall certainly not be surprised.

It is my heavy duty, therefore, to continue in my series concerning the basic elements pertaining to the conduction of motorized vehicles, in the hope — albeit an extremely slender one — that it may in some small way influence one or two people in the world and thereby extend the lives of those whom I will never know. In this world of darkling plains we must, after all, conjure into existence some fictions by means of which to enable ourselves to continue stolidly towards the inevitable grave without entirely despairing en route. And thus must I address you, dear reader, by such means as are within my reach.

I shall not make mention of such abstruse things as polar moment, pitch, and yaw, for, dear reader, I strongly suspect such…