#374 Mulligan Mileage

I saw this car that had apparently been in a fender bender. Although fender crumpler was more like it. Modern cars are lightweight and oh so aerodynamic. And safety engineers have determined that the safest possible configuration for a car is to have a rigid frame and a crumple zone of metal in front of the driver to absorb maximum energy should a collision occur. What that means is the least little sneeze causes your body to crumple. Body shops are kept busy mending the corrugated fenders of persnickety auto owners night and day. Some, like me, wait for sufficient bungs and dings to build up and then pray for a deer to hit our cars so we have an insurance claim to share the load. Unfortunately, though good in theory, deer collisions are few and far between. Even though I cruise recklessly through my neighborhood in the wee hours, today’s deer are so tame, and let’s face it, traffic conscious, that unless I plow through my neighbor’s yard I have little chance to initiate a collision. So dings it is. The owner of the crumpled can I saw on the freeway apparently had the same problem. I say crumpled can because that’s exactly what it looked like. Beer cans are sleek and apparently solid objects but the least little pressure, like squeezing them in your hand, can leave them crinkled and frail looking. The owner of the can in question had apparently had a fairly major encounter with the hand of misfortune involving most of his front fender. Then he had taken to doing his own bodywork. Apparently grabbing a balpeen hammer and tapping out the dented aluminum from the backside, making it look like a reinflated crumpled beer can, with all the coruscations, spalling and coarse-textured bumpiness you’d expect from such an operation. It looked like a golf ball. That got me to wondering. I once read something about golf balls having all those little indentations in them to increase loft. It was a fairly learned dissertation and it attempted to establish some point of physics regarding Bernoulli effects on curved surfaces and other scientific gobbledygook. When I finished the article, I was left with the notion that the author spent too much time thinking about golf balls and the dimples on them. Probably while he was hacking through the rough looking for his own. But if, in fact, multiply-dimpled golf balls do fly farther, if they are aerodynamic wonders, then why aren’t cars, planes and trains made to look like orange peels? What’s all this smooth stuff? I’d be willing to bet it’s another plot from the price-gouging oil bandits to make us consume more fuel. Come to think of it, my civic does get better mileage since I built up a few dings. Yeah that’s it, I’m not a cheapskate, I choose to have it crinkled, to use less fuel and reduce greenhouse emissions. I’m not just saving money on gas. I’m saving the planet.
America, ya gotta love it.