Pretty Much Nobody Can Operate Anything Nowadays

A summary of recent accidents follows below. All of these stories are from Action News‘ website.

• On Route 1 in Bucks County, a cabinet fell off a pickup truck and caused a six-vehicle crash.

Well, okay, that was kind of a random accident, though. At least our trained drivers are a little more careful.

• On Roosevelt Boulevard in the Northeast, an ambulance crashed after another vehicle hit it, causing it to roll over.

Well, okay, but that was a private ambulance and it was hit first. I’m sure our professional drivers — say, pilots — know what they’re doing.

• The Pinelands fire earlier this year was caused by a National Guard pilot who dropped a flare to close to the ground on a bone-dry day, though a senator from N.J. called it more of a “systematic failure.” [AP]

Okay, okay. So the National Guard messed up and caused a fire that destroyed 17,000 acres. But, you know, mistakes are mistakes. Our highest trained pilots surely are top-of-the-line.

• A bunch of astronauts flew drunk. [AP]

Forget it. Nobody should be allowed to operate anything more dangerous than a Barbie® Power Wheels car anymore. Even then, somehow some guy named Ken would probably be killed.

An army of one

A story in yesterday’s Inquirer noted that the National Guard is now now advertising on pizza boxes and offering free iTunes downloads in order to attract new recruits. Previously, the National Guard was a pretty nice option for some people, but now with the chance of being sent off to war instead of some training ground, well, the numbers in the National Guard are dropping like President Bush’s approval ratings.

I’ve seen the three free iTunes downloads if you sign up for info advertisement before, but the pizza box setup has eluded me so far. (At left is an image of a pizza shop in China, so our boys know what they’re fighting against!) The Inky says the ad has a photo of a young (presumably attractive) woman, with a message saying that if you join the Guard, they’ll pay you and help pay for college.

The boxes mainly are placed at mom-and-pop pizza joints in college towns, a strategic move due to the “well-established pizza-ingestion habit” of college kids, according to the Inquirer.

All well and good. They have pizza, iTunes and a NASCAR team. But what’s next for the new frontier of Guard advertising? A Northwestern prof has an idea: “I’d like see an ad with somebody listening to Mozart and reading Milton or Shakespeare.”

Next up: National Guard pogs!

Guard turns to pizza, iTunes for recruiting [Inky]
Sept. 29: Had I known there was a war going on…

Image by ethergo