The Facts Machine

"And I come back to you now, at the turn of the tide"

Monday, June 16, 2003

I GUESS HE "PUT THE OFF BUTTON ON"
commander-in-chief "shocked and awed" by scooter!


I'm sure by now we've all seen photos of the Boy King falling off his brand new Segway at Kennedrunkport. Oh what the hell, here they are again:



The question of the week is: How do you fall off a device that is ever so intricately designed to ensure your balance and safety?

Answer: you forget to turn it on (via lambert of eschaton):
It would have been brilliant publicity: the leader of the free world, tooling around the family compound on a newfangled Segway scooter.

If only the leader of the free world hadn't fallen off.

On Thursday, President Bush failed to flip the ''on'' switch to the scooter he had purchased for his father, so the self-balancing mechanism didn't work. The president tumbled to the ground, unhurt. And news photographers, lingering outside the compound with long lenses, picked up grainy images of a presidential spill.

When Ann Hershfang spied the pictures in a newspaper yesterday, she couldn't suppress a giggle. As president of the advocacy group WalkBoston, she questions the New Hampshire company's bid to make its scooter legal on Massachusetts sidewalks. So she didn't mind a black eye for the big-wheeled contraption some have billed as a transportation revolution.
First of all, George W Bush's inability to operate what is supposed to be an idiot-proof, overly-user-friendly vehicle shouldn't constitute any sort of "black eye" for the producers of the vehicle.

Apparently he hit the ground, though. None of the pictures show that. We see him beginning his tumble, then the next picture we see is of him awkwardly walking away. What, no picture of our majestic, fearlest leader experience the force of gravity at its finest? Yeah, probably the photographer was only able to squeeze the shutters a certain amount of times, and missed the full Ford-ness of a man who once piloted National Guard Jets (well, not in 1972, but you know).

And look carefully at the photos. Pay attention to the background. You can see a darkened doorway, or space in the wall, in the upper-left portion of the first photo, as he's just about to get on. In the other three photos, which show Bush's tumble, the door, is now in the upper-right of each picture. That means in the whole process of Bush getting on the Segway and then falling off, no more than a couple of feet are covered. Just take a moment to picture that in action: A grown man, the leader of the free world, steps onto it and almost immediately falls forward. It reminds me of when cartoon characters step on rakes (including but not limited to sideshow bob).

Presumably that's Jenna next to him in the first of the photos. Thus, it is possible that Bush tumbled after sharing some of Jenna's "shipment" from her good buddy Ashton.

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