Mrs Wagner's pies

Moving swiftly on from the introspection of that last distasteful article, I am relieved to see that eccentricity is a pastime that spans the ocean.

I am delighted that my friends at WNEM in Saginaw, Michigan, have taken the trouble to report the following:

The 2008 Guinness World Records book honors the 29-year-old McKnight for living to tell about being thrown 118 feet after being hit by a car. McKnight was standing along a highway about 15 miles east of Pittsburgh on Oct. 26, 2001, helping victims of a car wreck when he was hit by a car doing 70 mph.

He suffered two dislocated shoulders plus a broken shoulder, pelvis, leg and tailbone. His injuries put him in the hospital for two weeks, followed by 80 days in rehab, before returning to work in April 2002.

This seems to be a lot of trouble to go to in order to get one's name in print. At one point I contacted the said publication in order to see how many more people to whom I would have be rude in order to gain an entry, but when I addressed them as misbegotten sons of rat’s miscarriages, they refused to furnish me with the required data. I will certainly not be bothering them again, let alone take part in any activity that might involve my discomfort.

The article does not mention whether Mr McKnight was an accomplished jumper of any sort. Nor does it say whether he lay there in agony until a representative of Guinness arrived to accurately measure the distance. It would be churlish to suggest that he took the time to crawl an extra few feet. I am not sure how long it took Mr Guinness to arrive, and I would not begrudge Mr McKnight a couple of feet in his condition. Had he shown a little initiative, he could have claimed that he had been propelled all the way into his hospital bed by the accident. Thick twat.

The only thing that I know about Saginaw is that it took Paul Simon 4 days to hitchhike from there. The song implies that he was travelling to Pittsburgh, a distance of some 290 miles. He must have been as good a hitchhiker as he is a songwriter. The drivers on that route were obviously afraid that he would read some of his lyrics to them if they gave him a lift. I estimate that he could have made the trip by being involved in 12977 accidents such as that experienced by Mr McKnight, assuming of course that each car was able to propel him in the direction of Pittsburgh. That may have taken more than 4 days to accomplish, but may have provided him with the suffering necessary to have the perspective to be able to write good songs.