WTF Happened to WTF?

I’ve been getting some comments about the lack of WTF columns lately.  Well, if you really want to know, everyone keeps disagreeing with me.  And then I cry.  What? I don’t look like a crier to you?  Well, guess what, I am!  So next time you disagree with me, try to do it with some sensitivity, okay?

But seriously, what I really wanted to talk about today was that dead actress chick and all the controversy she’s stirring up.  See how I said “dead actress chick?”  There’s an example of using “sensitivity.”  Now you try it.

Anyway, the actress chick, AKA Natasha Richardson, somehow fell while skiing on a beginner run and broke her brain.  She wasn’t wearing a helmet, and the official story in this article is that they don’t know if a helmet would have saved her.  I can’t really find anything about what happened, other than the falling part, so it’s hard for me to give my professional opinion.  For all I know she fell and stabbed herself in the eye with her pole, in which case goggles would have been useful, but the helmet probably not so much. 

Without even considering the highly likely stabbed herself in the eye with her pole scenario, various people including doctors, official types, and housewives with too much time on their hands are now calling for mandatory helmet use at resorts across the US and Canada. Resorts are balking at this.  I’m guessing they’ve probably already weighed the costs of policing helmet use vs. having a few people die occasionally. 

So should helmet use be mandatory?  I don’t know. In Colorado, helmets aren’t even mandatory on motorcycles, making this officially a “be a dumbass and die if you want to” state.  So it seems pretty illogical to mandate helmet use on snow, since it’s much less scrapey on the skull than asphalt.  By the Colorado logic, we’re all adults, and we can all weigh the risks of our activities, and make our own decisions about whether feeling the wind flowing through our hair is worth those risk of death.

Well, except for those of us who aren’t adults.  I wouldn’t mind if helmets were mandatory for little kids.  Doesn’t seem right to have some dumbass parent deciding that his 6-year-old would rather risk a brain injury to feel the wind in his hair.  I mean, what if that 6-year-old is the future inventor of peace on earth.  And now we’ve gone and let him ski without a helmet. 

Maybe they should be proposing slightly less Big Brotherish ways to encourage helmet use.  For instance, they could give people in helmets some kind of incentives, like a special quicker moving lift line.  I’d wear a helmet for that.  Oh wait, I guess I already wear a helmet.

Posted by Kelly Vance on 03/20