The need for speed.... and the bigger need for intelligence.

Two people died within a couple miles of our home the other night.

They were riding in a pack of five souped-up motorcycles affectionately known as "crotch rockets," heading east along the 290 a few miles further west in Tonawanda, when a cop spotted them and put his rack on. They were going so fast, he made the prudent decision not to give chase. The cyclists made the less prudent choice to speed up and try outrunning the non-pursuing cop. When their speeds hit the 100-120 mph range, somebody hit something  in the road, or somebody swerved as the pack went around a less speedy semi, and two of the bikes went out of control- one of them, driver and passenger, going under the rig.  The passenger survived; the driver, and the guy on the other bike, died at the scene.

These were not criminals, nor lice-infested Hells Angels. They were late-twenty-something kids, who were likely heading out to a straight abandoned stretch of highway someplace. Yet there's something in the testosterone-filled world of the young male psyche that just flooded their brains with stupid, and at the moment they started to speed, and the even more reckless one when they decided to outrun a cop, the stupid took over for good.

According to news reports, at least some friends of the deceased are blaming the cop for threatening to give chase. I can't see that somehow.

I also can't see the thrill in it. Granted, I've never ridden; I lost a kidney when I was 13, and one of the things on my No-Bucket list is that I can never ride a motorcycle. About the only place I get any jollies out of going fast is about a mile-long stretch of Route 17/I-86 that actually dips into Pennsylvania, with the "state border" boundaries clearly marked. It's known as the "DMZ" and I do take my speed up into the 80s for those brief seconds just for the pleasure of doing it with impunity; that's way more a left-brain thing for me, not the pure-hypothalamus pleasure of flooring it for its own sake that these guys were experiencing.

Emphasis on "were."

----

The second half of this story is far less tragic, and far more speculative, but it's mine and I'm sticking with it.

I first read about this accident around this time yesterday. A couple of hours later, I went to my office and did my bank run; one deposit might have needed an explanation, so I went into the branch. Next to me in the parking lot was a Ford Explorer-looking vehicle, with R.I.P. JOSE AND RICH YOU ARE GONE BUT NEVER FORGOTTEN scribbled in That New Car Dealer yellow ink on the back window. I knew from the story that those were the names of the riders who had gone paws-up.

Inside, a  few customers were ahead of me in line waiting for the three working tellers. One of them was getting a ration of shit from a guy, I'd say early 30s (around the same age as the two deceased riders), trying to cash a check. Best as I could hear it (and, he was so loud about it, you might have been able to hear it), his mother had been charged $20 to certify a check to him, which they now wanted to charge him another 10 bucks, as a non-account holder, to cash. He was demanding copies of "the rules where it says that," so he could "take it to my attorney." When they proposed to just short the cash by the 10 bucks, he demanded a receipt. It was that same me-first, f-you attitude I saw and heard in that texting in the theater Youtube from the other day.  When I got called, I rolled my eyes to the teller, who knows (duh, from the deposit slips) what I do for a living, and I said, "I'm an attorney, and if he came to me with this drek I'd pitch him right out of my office."

I finished long before his tirade did, but I considered sitting in the car park to confirm my suspicion- that he was the R.I.P-toting driver who has probably been on the business end of a crotch rocket himself at some point. In hindsight, I should've just handed him the 10 bucks and told him to shut up, but with that ragey of a mentality, who knows how he would have reacted?

Be kind. Do unto others. And for crysake, slow down.

For the girl with the code in her node:

A very dear friend
has been struggling no end
To conquer the iOS beast

She's spent most of the day
Sending updates my way
(It's no bother, no not in the least)

Yet I finally felt dumber
When a sequenced-by-number
Set of icons, they just wouldn't roll

So I sat down and chose
Some sequences of rows
In the hopes that THOSE maybe would scroll

Would first five rows of three
And then 4-by-4 be
A solution this coder could try?

Yet I got to 19
-Those prime numbers are mean-
And could only end up with this....

Watch on YouTube

...pi!

(We loveya, Kate. Never give up, never surrender!)