Comments

  1. John Morales says

    Mmmm. Amusing, I grant.

    Thing is, vikings didn’t wear helmets for transportation safety; they wore them because people would otherwise bash their heads in.

    (Also, being weighed-down with metal on a boat seems rather perverse.

    K.Swamy, I very much like that video. Very Indian, lovely iconography.

    (Thing is, those are headpieces, not helmets. Different things)

  2. Who Cares says

    Need something like that in the Netherlands. And a serious culture change. I have a helmet and I use it when I go on extended bike trips, just not for the reason of reduced head injury. I use it to signal to the rest of traffic that I’m a speedy biker (that is doing 30 km/h+) because only the racers wear them, and people know to look out for single helmets since it tends to signal that a group of racers is nearby of which I’m most likely a straggler (I’m not) and groups tend to behave not exactly nice in traffic in an attempt to stay together. But when I go to my parents who live 15 minutes away at a more sedate speed it doesn’t even occur to me to wear it.

  3. rockwhisperer says

    Back in the Pleistocene (well, okay, the 1980s), when it was possible to pick a time of the weekend when traffic was light in the South San Francisco Bay Area and thus pleasant for a motorcycle ride, Husband and I would go exploring on his mid-1970s Norton Commando. We always wore helmets, called them ‘brain buckets’, and asserted that those who didn’t wear them had nothing to put in them.

    Fast forward to our current century. Nephew, living further north in the Bay Area, did his commuting by motorcycle. He, too, always wore a helmet, but also good protective clothing from helmet to toes. Near the end of a bridge (over a parking lot, not water, thank Loki) a car or SUV driver pulled up too close behind him and touched his rear wheel with that vehicle’s front bumper. Nephew’s bike went out of control, slammed into the guardrail, and he flew over it and onto a vehicle parked below. Major injuries, hospitalization, rehab. He still rides, though after that he took to commuting by automobile. He is adamant that his helmet and protective clothing saved his life, and his ER team agreed.

  4. Mano Singham says

    rockwhisperer @#6

    I am really sorry to hear about that accident. It sounds awful.

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