NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/austin/general/3500

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-20 | 4.3 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Craig Becker)
Newsgroups: austin.general
Subject: Donorcycles (Was Re: accepting risk (was speed traps on 2222))
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Date: 19 Nov 92 16:04:00 GMT
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[e-mail] (Ken Neff) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Craig Becker) writes:
>
> |> On the contrary, motorcyclists are a major asset to the medical
> |> industry. Motorcyclists are a major supply of spare organs and
> |> tissue for various&sundry transplant operations.
>
> Do you have any facts to support this statement, or is this just
> your (nonsensical) belief?
>
> |> In fact, police
> |> in the Chicago, IL area refer to motorcycles as "donorcycles"
> |> for just this reason (ref: _What Cops Know_ and _Pure Cop_ by
> |> Connie Fletcher).
>
> Ignorant people often say stupid things.  I doubt that Chicago motorcycle
> cops refer to motorcyclists in the same manner.

Quoted w/o permission from _Pure Cop_, by Connie Fletcher ISBN 0-679-40036-2.
Fun reading, highly recommended, consisting of anecdotal tales from Chicago
police who work bomb squad, arson, prostitution, crime scene investigation,
etc. The following passages are from the chapter "Major Accidents":

  Motorcycles--we call them donorcycles. That's where the organ donors
come from. I'll tell you--it's true. If you were to go out and talk to
the harvest teams--harvest teams are the teams of doctors and nurses
that fly into hospitals and harvest organs for people needing translants--
you know what they'd tell you? Motorcycles keep them in business. They are
_donorcycles_.
  Motorcyclists die, more often than not, from massive head trauma.
Everything else--A-OK.
  Whereas in a car, you get a lot of blunt internal trauma: the steering
wheel will rupture the aorta, you'll have punctured lungs, torn left
ventricle to the heart....You sustain a tremendous amount of internal
trauma in a car accident because you're bouncing around in it. You're in
a motorcycle, you get launched, you come down, head first, case closed,
you're dead, and the rest of you is pretty good.
...
  There's no safety on a motorcycle. Without a helmet. _With_ a helmet.
But cyclists think the helmet gives them an immunity.
  Would you wear a helmet, climb up to the fourth floor of a building,
jump out and land on your head with a helmet? Would you do that? It's
about the same effect you would have driving down a street at fifty miles
an hour and you hit the back of a car and...you get launched. And if you're
going sixty-five miles an hour on the expressway, I don't care if you've
got a body helmet, it's all over.
  What a motorcycle does, it turns the human body into a projectile. It's
like a slingshot. If the bike is traveling sixty miles an hour, you're
traveling sixty miles an hour. If the bike stops, you go.
...
  A guy in our unit got killed on his motorcycle a couple of years ago.
You'd think he'd know better, wouldn't you? A brilliant accident
reconstructionist--he taught the course.
  I was with him when he bought the motorcycle. And again police humor,
I said, "You gonna reserve your fatal number now?" We have numbers assigned
to fatal accidents. And he said, "No. When I kill myself, I'll do it on the
expressway. Tha way, the state'll have to handle it." And he did. He was on
the feeder ramp going up to the Kennedy when he was killed.

Craig

Not the opinion of my employer.
--
-- "You will have the tallest,    Craig Becker, Object Technology Products --
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