excessive car mods

["Rich Andrews" <rich@xpony.its.smu.edu>]

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You all know about the Darwin Awards

It's an annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest
service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way before
reproducing.  Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke
machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free
soda out of it.  And this year's Darwin Award nominee is:

	The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal
embedded
125 feet above the roadway in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the
apex of a curve.  The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it
was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene.  The lab finally
figured out what it was and what had happened.  It seems that a guy had
somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take  Off - actually a solid
fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra
"push" for taking off from short airfields.

	He had driven his Chevy Impala
out into the desert and found a long, straight  stretch of road. Then he
attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up  some speed and fired off
the JATO!  The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator of
the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles
from the crash site. This was established by the prominent scorched and melted
asphalt  at that location. The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached
maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in
excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an additional 20-25
seconds.

	The driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have experienced
G-forces usually reserved for dog-fighting F-18 jocks under full afterburners,
basically causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the event.
However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles
(15-20) seconds before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes,
blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then
becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at
a height  of 125 feet and leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.

Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however, small fragments of
bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone
shards were removed from steering wheel.





-- 
Rich Andrews                        |  "I will not be stamped, indexed,
UNIX Systems Administrator          |  filed, briefed, debriefed or numbered.
Southern Methodist University       |  My life is my own."  
214-768-3564
PGP public key 99834061: [ 93 8D EF 91 12 F6 18 8D  F0 E9 66 5D 10 27 0B 31 ]