I'm Cheating and Predating this Post

Today is a sad day for all high school physics teachers. The greatest practical application of the effects of gravity, momentum, and force on the human body has died. Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel was a jackass who rose to pre-internet pseudo-fame in the 1970’s. Everyone knew who Evel Knievel was. One of my favorite toys as a six year old boy was an Evel Knievel motorcycle that I could rev up and send hurtling through space, just like the real thing. He never looked before he leapt. He never thought first, let alone all the way through. He just said screw it, let’s do this. I was watching a retrospective about Evel on ESPN and I forgot how stupid his stunts were. He tried stuff that had no hope of success. I don’t have a problem with him trying to jump fifteen buses to get on television, but I do think it’s funny that he tried it with a motorcycle that couldn’t go faster than seventy-five miles an hour when he needed a bike that would go at least eighty to clear bus number fifteen. He was in his late thirties and early forties when he doing this. He wasn’t your run of the mill sixteen year old wannabe X-Games rookie, so youth can’t be blamed. He had gone from a high rate of speed to no speed at all instantly before and had spent months in traction for it, so I would think spending the extra thousand dollars on a better bike with a bigger engine would have been worth it to him. No, it wasn’t. Evel bounced on bus fourteen of fifteen, his front tire caught the front of the ramp, he slammed into the ramp, and lay motionless on the ground. The laws of physics thought it was funny as hell. There had to be engineers, physicists, and anyone not named Wile E. Coyote who would look at the ridiculous carnival contraptions and know there was no way bones weren’t getting broken. Hopefully Maybe, we would see somebody die. Evel never did. He walked out with a broken pelvis, two broken ankles, a broken wrist, and his head held high – by someone else. Today is a sad day for high school physics teachers. The greatest text to world connection in the history of education is gone, moving the video of a teenage girl giving birth into the number one spot. No it’s not over, Caitlyn. It looks like the doctor is going to have to reach in, with both hands, and pull out the after-birth.