Humor mag The Onion is known for picking apart the news of the day, and the news business, in often satirically cutting fashion — in a story published years ago in its pages it ran a picture of an orange-jumpsuited prisoner wearing a crown of thorns with the headline “Christ kills two in abortion-clinic bombing.” It picked up on the ironies inherent in last week’s ban on the practice of texting while driving in this faux man-on-the-street series of comments to the question “The U.S. government will no longer allow drivers of large trucks and buses to text while they are driving. What do you think?”
A “systems analyst” plays the straight man: “”Texting and driving is irresponsible, but it probably gets pretty lonely out there on the road…” The “commentaries” get progressively sillier, as can be expected, ending with word from the “truck driver” Arch Harris: “But sometimes you just want to send out a quick ‘breaker breaker one-nine’ to your buddies without starting up a whole long CB conversation.”…
UPDATE: In the last Channel 19 post on the subject, I noted an no-injuries accident on the West Coast that happened in mid-January when a driver choked on his lunch in the cab. Since then, readers have notified me of remarkably similar incidents occuring in the Midwest and Northeast. Find them in the comments to the post here.
