This Road Safety Video from the RSA in Ireland appears to push the message quite a bit harder than their UK counterparts.

Warning: Graphic content NSFW.

The scene begins with a young couple hugging by a stone wall in an idyllic Irish countryside setting, a horse and rider pass in the background. The girl looks into the boys eyes to a song “I can’t take my eyes off you”. Two cars appear in the lane, line abreast, the overtaking car swerves in, clips the passed car and begins to roll. The car rolls into the wall pinning the boy hard against the wall and his girlfriend who is sat on top and trapped against her boyfriend by her legs. The passed car swerves to avoid this accident and collides squarely with oncoming traffic, killing the driver of the third car outright and seriously injuring its passenger. The girl at the wall and passenger still alive in the car begin screaming as onlookers both stand in shock and run to assist.

As the scene cuts, the emergency services are on the scene, assisting the car passenger, covering the driver and leading away the shocked driver of the overtaking car who looks back at the girl, being assisted by the fire service and paramedics with her now obviously dead boyfriend still pinned to her legs as she screams in pain and shock.

The video continues with the parents and relatives identifying bodies and holding hospital vigils until we arrive at a court scene where the driver of the overtaking car, in the dock, is told by the presiding authority that he was driving too fast for the circumstances. The girl who was trapped against the wall looks on from her wheelchair. We learn that the accident began as a dog ran in front of the overtaking car.

All in all, this is a very powerful advert when shown to someone with half an imagination as to what can happen when a car crashes. I feel that I may have been shocked sufficiently as to cause me to take less risks (even tho I try not to take many) However, I suspect that a large proportion of the people who drive around at ludicrous speed with little regard for circumstance and condition have limited imagination and an advert like this may be lost on them.

Furthermore, I recall an advert which was briefly touted on television news in the UK from the DfT of a similar theme. I believe this advert may have been blocked by the censors as I have never seen it shown in an advert break. I presume there is always an awkward situation to be had with the censors as the safety agencies want to show people what can happen on the roads but what can happen on the roads is not what would normally pass the censors.

To the best of my recollection, the advert involved a red or black Vauxhall Corsa and an overtaking makeover and a crash/roll into a field, possibly as a result of oncoming traffic.

If anyone can find me a copy of that advert to refresh my mind, I would be much obliged.

A sign of YouTube coming of age perhaps? This is a impressive mix of CGI and live action from YouTube user andrewhu.

A machine with a doll face mimics images on television screen in search of a satisfactory visage. Doll Face presents a visual account of desires misplaced and identities fractured by our technological extension into the future.

…and it’s perhaps just a little bit scary with it.

UPDATED INFO:

It transpires that Doll Face is a product of Andy Huang, a student of fine arts at the University of Southern California, LA, USA. Andy’s other work, including a high quality version of Doll Face can be seen at Root Films

I accidentally happened across this video of what are, presumably farmers or farm-hands* drifting tractors and getting up to other sliding-related antics in a cold Russian winter.

*That is unless Russians buy Tractors instead of Truenos.

In a prime example of the stupidity of putting blind faith in technology at the expense of common-sense, a UK motorist has followed her GPS onto a railway line and subsequently been hit by a train. Most if not all road crossings of railway lines are at least signposted if not signal/barrier controlled in the UK so you would think that anyone who is keeping a normal level of alertness to their surroundings would be aware of their proximity to the line.

“I put my complete trust in the sat nav and it led me right into the path of a speeding train,” she said.

Now, the crossing in question was a manually operated, two-gate system. The normal state of such a crossing would be to have both gates closed to traffic, a red reflective circle being visible as a ’stop’ indicator to road traffic. When crossing, both gates are opened to the road so the red ’stop’ marks show to the railway track instead.

“I thought it was a dead end at first and then there was a little sign saying, if the light is green, open the gates and drive through.” [emphasis mine]

“So I opened the gate, drove forward, closed the gate behind me and then went to go and open the gate in front of me.”

The sign said “Open the gates”. ‘Gates’ being plural would mean both gates at the same time. However the lady in question had both gates closed with her vehicle on the track. With the gate effectively open to the railway line, there was no stop marker visible.

“Then I heard this train and I noticed there was train tracks. It was only then that I did realise I was on a train crossing.

I really despair of this country and it’s people sometimes

The woman in question survived the resulting crash so, unfortunately, no Darwin Award can be given. The train was unharmed.

Full story at the BBC News website

This new ‘Star Wars Gangsta Rap’ recently cropped up on YouTube. It is credited to Jason Brannon of the first SW Gangsta Rap fame and Joshua Shreeve. It’s certainly well put together but I can’t find any original source for the video although this may be because it is cut together from original SW source material.

NSFW! Contains strong language, nuts and scenes of Jar-Jar Binks.

I’ve finally managed to migrate not only delusionofgrandeur between two servers but also from the NucleusCMS to Wordpress software. I have to say that I’m very impressed with Wordpress’ “Web 2.0″ backend features. Especially the autosave feature which is just tremendous. I almost feel like I’m having a “lifestyle moment” (long story) every time I use it.

One minor disaster I had during the installation was when I turned on the FURL style permalinks. Wordpress wrote a .htaccess file to the webroot which then had an argument with the overly-paranoid Apache configuration and decided to display no pages at all. It really was a case of trial and error until I had it fixed.