From the Editor’s Chisel:
The dust has finally settled on Tuesday’s tragic three stegosaurus pile-up. Five people are dead, another seven seriously injured. Our city is at rock bottom, scraping to find some answers. Folks, trust me when I say I’m not one of those hippie-dippie, free-the-lizards activists, who expects everyone to get around on their own two hairy feet, like they did back in the Triassic. I’m a modern, Cretaceous man, with modern, Cretaceous values; some of my best childhood memories are those summer holidays when Dad would hitch the camper up to the family Parasaurolophus and burn gravel, with nothing but a map and a half-tank of leaves to guide us. I get it—there’s something intoxicating about hitting the open-road with four powerful legs beneath you, all four chambers of that dino-heart roaring with five-hundred pounds of pure, unbridled lizardpower. But in light of the recent catastrophes, even this commentator is forced to acknowledge an uncomfortable fact: dinosaurs have simply gotten too big.
I recognize I run the risk of sounding out-of-touch. This might come across as the stereotypical “old man yelling at the ghosts in the sky that rain their dreams into our heads” here. But if you’re of a certain age, you remember a time when Sedmenton was a quiet, safe place to raise your children. When kids could walk or slateboard to school, and every driveway housed a practical, family-friendly dino, like an Austoraptor or an Ankylosaurus. But nowadays, the mantra is bigger is better. That’s great for the luxury reptile dealers, and the leaf stations, but what about the rest of us? My next door neighbour rides a Triceratops to work. Yes, a TRICERATOPS—with all three horns, and a giant armour plate on the head, which must be a nightmare for blindspots. My neighbour doesn’t scavenge mammoth carcasses from the ice-wilds for a living, nor does he have to haul sheets of rock around town to do construction work. My neighbour works as a tabletkeeper at the bank. By all accounts, a good one, but a tabletkeeper nonetheless. When even white-tunic workers feel like they need heavy-duty, industrial-sized dinos for their daily commutes, I can’t help but feel we’ve lost our way.
It was only last year that The Cave Matthews Band’s driver fell asleep at the reigns, and crashed their Tour Rex into a crowded promenade, killing nearly a dozen people, and wounding countless others. How many more tragedies like this must we endure before we do something about it?