By SIMON READ
Opinion Editor
The task of filling a car with gas became a near death experience for Rachel Landa, 48, of Redwood City when her teen-age daughter mowed her down at the pump.
As reported by the Long Beach Telegram, Landa asked her 14-year-old daughter to bring the car closer to the pump ... It soon turned ugly, when the daughter accidentally ran her over not once, not twice but three times; twice while backing up, then once going forward before driving into a signal light box.
Miraculously, Landa escaped with only a fractured foot, ankle and injured finger.
One day prior in Cincinnati, Jeff Friedlander, 48, suffered a broken tailbone and was slapped with a $100 ticket and jaywalking charge after someone driving a pick-up truck broadsided him while he was walking outside the crosswalk against a red light.
Friedlander is blind.
"This person technically was in violation," said Hamilton County prosecutor Charlie Rubenstein, who announced the charges will be dropped against Friedlander.
"I was shocked and I didn't deserve the ticket ... I guess he didn't give a hoot whether I was blind or sighted," Friedlander said.
Friedlander said he was going to pay the $100 fine, until he discovered Ohio law protects blind people carrying a white cane.
From Los Angeles comes stories of rampant stupidity on the city's freeways and other social phenomena.
CHP officers pulled over a car after they noticed a pair of legs dangling from underneath the hood while the vehicle was cruising along at 45 mph.
Apparently, a man convinced his wife to ride under the hood and pull the accelerator cable after it snapped.
In similar, tasteless news, a man told one CHP officer his seat-belt had to be unfastened otherwise he wouldn't be able to smell his feet -- whatever the hell that means.
Other oddities spotted on Los Angeles byways include a motorist eating a can of chili -- with both hands. Others have been sighted typing on a laptop computer, removing pantihose(?), cutting a child's hair, brushing teeth and rinsing with a cup of water, grooming a pet, changing diapers, styling hair with a curling iron and reading books.
In a story filed by the Associated Press from Smyrna, Del, an inmate was crushed to death in a rather odd sort of auto accident.
Larry Blanchfield, 31, was serving a life sentence after being deemed a habitual offender. In an attempt to make it to the "outside," Blanchfield hid in the back of a garbage truck, only to be crushed when the driver activated the truck's trash compactor before leaving the prison grounds.
After a search of the Delaware Correctional Center failed to locate Blanchfield, the truck was detained in a nearby field and ordered to dump its "cargo." Blanchfield's body was found crushed among the trash.
Before being handed a life sentence, Blanchfield was serving two years for theft.
Finally, from Providence, R,I.
The Associated Press covered the strange and terrible saga of Joyce Dorbor, whose luck was short lived.
Oswaldo Orellana, 27, was charged with driving while suffering from the advanced stages of alcohol distress after he hit Dorbor.
Minutes later, she was struck by another drunk driver, 39-year-old Dennis Zebro, only to be killed on impact. Zebro's alcohol-blood level was more than twice the legal limit.
Dorbor was on on her way to meet some friends to celebrate her 50th birthday.
Automobile accidents are the leading cause of injury-related death in this country. People who drive slow in the fast lane should be stuffed in a cage and prodded with sharp bamboo sticks with the rest of the idiots congesting our freeways.