I didn't mean you had to get a pine tree air conditioner. Fuzzy dice would have done.

One of the most distressing trends in the last year or two is people committing vehicular manslaughter and just driving away with the victim lodged in the windshield. It's happened in Texas, it's happened in Quebec (I was just complaining about this in August), and now it's happened again, this time in Washington state. I'm not sure what's the more discomfiting thing about this trend -- the apparent rise in the number of drunk drivers with a callous disregard for human life or the obvious decline in quality of auto glass.

I remember how the most unintentionally hilarious part of the movie No Holds Barred was when Hulk Hogan bodyslammed a guy right through a windshield, smashing it easily as though it were window glass, when in real life, the guy would have simply bounced off it, leaving behind a nasty star-shaped crunch pattern. That, the moment where I truly stopped believing in the Hulkster, was in 1989. Barely a decade later, it's apparently so easy for people to smash right through a windshield that we're reading about it in the paper all the time (and keep in mind we're only reading about a subset of such incidents in which the drivers cold-bloodedly drive away with the victims embedded in their windshields and leave them to die. We don't hear about the ones where they take them out on the spot or the ones where nobody dies and apologies and handshakes are exchanged all around).

I blame Speedy Auto Glass and other such companies for being so profit-driven that they''ve evidently started making windshields out of breakaway sugar glass like the stuff used in the movies. It makes me mad enough to break chairs over their backs.