I have been hearing about lawmakers in Oregon trying to disallow the use of a cell phone while driving. At first glance this seems a bit ridiculous to me, and after further inspection of the published numbers, it appears they have a wrong focus.

For example, take the numbers provided in this story (KGW.com). According to the article:

State traffic safety statistics showed that in 2005, five of Oregon’s 487 car-related fatalities were related to cell phone use, as were 234 of its 44,877 crashes.

Being the reasonable person that I am, I figured I would see what percentages of the overall car related fatalities and crashes that were related to cell phone use and see if the numbers warrant some new legislation. However, it turns out that only 1% of fatalities and .5% of crashes were even related to cell phone use. This seems to be an extraordinarily low percentage and something that does not appear to be worthy of new legislation.

Another thing that this article mentioned was the new focus of the these legislators to create new legislation that will provide penalties for those people who through eating, reading, talking on the cell phone, or whatever impairs their ability to drive. Honestly, this seems like common sense to me, and I would have figured that we should already have had laws to allow for penalties in those scenarios.

Thoughts?

Last night my wife and I went out to see a movie at the Northern Lights Theatre here in Salem. The movie we were watching was ‘Deja Vu’ with Denzel Washington. During the movie I was surprised to hear one of the characters say “I need more cowbell”. I thought this was quite humorous, and it even drew a small laugh from other members of the audience. (FYI, “I need more cowbell” is a line from a SNL skit Wikipedia link here.) What makes it even funnier (to me) is that a buddy of mine even used that line on Tuesday night at Awana. “I need more cowbell!” LOL