Hail Fellow Hel Ment.

As readers of "Rolling Stone" already know (just kidding, nobody reads "Rolling Stone" anymore), details on Bono's bicycle crash in Central Park have finally emerged, and they are not pretty:

While riding his bike through New York's Central Park on Sunday, the singer attempted to avoid another rider and was involved in what doctors have called a "high energy bicycle accident." Bono was rushed to New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center's Emergency Department and underwent "multiple X-rays and CAT scans" followed by five hours of surgery. 

So who was this other rider?  A Strava segment-hunting Cat 4?  A weaving tourist on a rental bike?  David Byrne and Matthew Modine salmoning on a tandem?  We may never know.  One thing we do know though is that Bono is in pretty bad shape:

The singer suffered numerous serious injuries, including a "facial fracture involving the orbit of his eye," three separate fractures of his left shoulder blade and a fracture of his left humerus bone in his upper arm. The latter injury was particularly damaging, with the bone shattering in six different places and tearing through his skin.

I was sorry to hear this and wish him a speedy recovery.

Of course, whenever anybody is injured on a bicycle, regardless of the circumstances or the nature of the injuries, that means it's time to CUE UP THE MORONS!

Bono suffered injuries more serious than originally reported when he crashed his bicycle in New York’s Central Park on Sunday — and the extent of those injuries suggest the 54-year-old U2 singer may have been riding without a bicycle safety helmet.

Oh shut the fuck up.  The only injury a foam hat might have mitigated was the one to his face--and even then, according to the Snell Foundation, a helment is basically 50% effective in that department.  So basically what this means is that it's exactly as likely that Bono was in fact wearing a helment, which means that Bono's helment is basically the equivalent of Schrodinger's cat.

Plus, the same idiotic "article" then goes on to say this in big letters:

Injuries To Upper Left Arm Appear Most Serious, Broken In Six Places

But yeah, by all means, keep fixating on the helment.

I'd hate to think that, should I meet my fate out there on the mean streets of our metropolis, the media would speculate on my hat status in a similar fashion.  Therefore, for the avoidance of doubt, I've already composed my epitaph:

Sure, I do wear a helment a lot of the time, but I also know it's impossible for anything bad to happen to me while I have one on, so the epitaph will surely be accurate.

And if I must go, please let it be this way:

("The victim was not wearing a helment, and says to blow him."--The Daily Victim-Blamer)

Anyway, my biggest fear in all of this is that it turns out Bono was not wearing a helment, he gets all contrite about it after his recovery, and starts advocating for helment laws just as vigorously as he promotes his charity work.

Now that would really suck.

Speaking of helments, designers continue to attempt to disguise them as hats, and here's the latest attempt:



It's certainly better than some of the other ones I've seen, but it still makes you look like you're riding a horse:

See?

Not that there's anything wrong with that:

Now that's what I call "portaging."

Meanwhile, up in Halifax, a reader tells me the undead corpse of Margaret Thatcher is tryijng to get a bike licensing scheme going:

A Dartmouth councillor thinks it's time to consider licensing adult cyclists who are 18 years old and older.

"I think there would be more control over what they'd do. They'll be identified," said Gloria McCluskey.

"You're out there and you see them — no helmets, no lights."

McCluskey said the money raised from the licences could be used to pay for more bike lanes.

Hey McCluskey:

If you see them, then what's the problem?

Idiot.

Not to mention they already tried that and it didn't work:

But the co-owner of Cyclesmith, a bike shop on Agricola Street in north-end Halifax, said he remembers when the city used to issue bike licences in the 1970s. Mark Beaver said the program was shut down because it cost more than it brought in.

Then again, they didn't have the "Smart Hat" back then, so there's that:

Sometimes the technology just has to catch up with society's desire to oppress--though evidently the schmuck who came up with this thing still needs money:

We have the skills to fully develop smart hat and we are looking for interested parties to assist us in modest funding, co-developing & branding this exciting new product together.

Oh, please, let there be a Kickstarter!  Pleezpleezpleezpleez...

By the way, when I plugged the term "Smart Hat" into a popular Internet search engine, the first thing that came up was this:

I'm fairly certain that's what Bono was wearing when he crashed.

Lastly, even though cycling may be stagnating in Portland, and even though they're only the #4 bike city now, and even though nobody even cares about Portland anymore now that there are cooler white people cities like Des Moines, they're not giving up.  Well, I mean yes, they're giving up on bikes, but they're not giving up on being #1 when it comes to riding around town on non-motorized stuff with wheels.  Instead, they're moving on to skateboards:

As we wrote last year in an interview with the group’s founders, the rise of skateboard transportation has been driven in part by rapid advances in skateboard technology. And as NWSC members Cory Poole and Tessa Walker explained in a podcast episode last winter, that’s only one of the parallels between the skateboarding and bike transportation movements.

Wait a minute. "Rapid advances in skateboard technology?"  It's a freaking board with wheels.

Let me know when they're using skateboards to deliver soup.