Pictures of a bunch of wrecked cars

June 18, 2004 11:10 PM

The driver, I found out later, was drunk, from Texas, and had only one arm.[Warning: there are at least 35 megabytes worth of jpegs, which take some time to load. YMMV] Via Presence Server
posted by swift (46 comments total)

wasn't me
posted by Keyser Soze at 11:13 PM on June 18, 2004

The GMC Yukon™ is one tough truck.
posted by trharlan at 11:46 PM on June 18, 2004

Jeez, I just saved that page and it was 49.9Mb in size. Hope that Harvard bandwidth is free.
posted by mathowie at 12:49 AM on June 19, 2004

Harvard BOFH™ is gonna be one pissed admin.
posted by stbalbach at 1:25 AM on June 19, 2004

on june 17th, i pled guilty in arizona state court to leaving the scene of an accident. i paid the state $420 and promised the judge i'd learned my lesson. now i feel like a saint. thanks!
posted by kjh at 2:18 AM on June 19, 2004

Mirror with the pictures scaled down by 50%. 500KB instead of 50MB.

A 50MB web page is just plain wrong anyway
posted by nathan_teske at 2:24 AM on June 19, 2004

That was beautiful. I really love crazy shit in the middle of the night.
posted by rudyfink at 2:44 AM on June 19, 2004

How do you handcuff a one-armed man?
posted by Eekacat at 2:50 AM on June 19, 2004

"best of the web." yessiree. the sun is coming up (both literally and figuratively).
posted by sklero at 2:56 AM on June 19, 2004

Eeakacat: you have founded a new genre: koans for kops.

If a perp falls on his face, and there are no witnesses, does he make a sound?
posted by e.e. coli at 3:03 AM on June 19, 2004

That was a beautiful story.
posted by Jairus at 3:14 AM on June 19, 2004

did anyone else read it and think of - the fugitive?
posted by triv at 4:12 AM on June 19, 2004

Kiiiiiimble!!!!!!
posted by jpburns at 4:27 AM on June 19, 2004

Many are stalled but few are frozen.....
posted by lometogo at 4:52 AM on June 19, 2004

poor doggie.
posted by dabitch at 5:10 AM on June 19, 2004

BITCH HIT MY TRUCK!
posted by ColdChef at 6:02 AM on June 19, 2004

Wait so his car is ok?
posted by phyrewerx at 6:11 AM on June 19, 2004

thanks jpburns, glad i wasn't the only one...
posted by triv at 6:14 AM on June 19, 2004

I need follow-up!
posted by mcsweetie at 6:35 AM on June 19, 2004

One victim told NBC 7/39 that he had just purchased his car on Monday for $1,000 to use for a pizza delivery job. The vehicle was totaled before he had time to get it insured, he said.

Wait, nevermind, poor guy.
posted by phyrewerx at 6:37 AM on June 19, 2004

Of course, by poor guy I meant the car owner...and well I guess the dog.
posted by phyrewerx at 6:38 AM on June 19, 2004

a future president!
posted by quonsar at 6:47 AM on June 19, 2004

I can't help but note that the 'attack' vehicle was a tank... I mean SUV, and that a good number of the demaged vehicles were regular cars... yet another example of why SUVs are dangerous, potentially killer, vehicles.

No matter if the driver is from Texas or not. Or has two arms, or not.
posted by sunexplodes at 7:41 AM on June 19, 2004

I think his car is okay, because someone took his parking spot when he went shopping. Right?

I was hoping to see it, though.
posted by swift at 8:10 AM on June 19, 2004

Umm... sunexplodes? All vehicles are potentially killer.

Granted, a Chevette probably wouldn't destroy 17 other cars (unless it clunked out in the middle of a California freeway or was filled with explosives and dropped via helicoptor onto a parking lot), but still.

Blame the drunk driver, please.
posted by dakotadusk at 8:11 AM on June 19, 2004

How drunk do you have to be to hit the first 9 cars (some severely) and keep on going through the next 10? That's staggering.

Obligtory snark: you'd think someone paying $40,000+ per year for a Harvard education would know how to compress digital photos.
posted by psmealey at 8:29 AM on June 19, 2004

Obligtory snark: you'd think someone paying $40,000+ per year for a Harvard education would know how to compress digital photos.


Yes, because the first thing they learn upon arrival at Harvard, no matter what their major, is photo compression.
posted by websavvy at 8:31 AM on June 19, 2004

That's just insane!

How do you handcuff a one-armed man?
Rick Allen, Def Leppard's one armed drummer, when arrested for spousal abuse at LAX had his arm handcuffed to his foot.
posted by riffola at 8:37 AM on June 19, 2004

I suppose I should have seen that one coming, websavvy. Oh, well serves me right. Regardless, the person who posted the photes to his/her site on Harvard's net is about to get a lecture from the sysadmin on the matter of how to shrink digital images down.
posted by psmealey at 8:38 AM on June 19, 2004

also:

-rw-r--r--  1 mrbill  mrbill      98K 19 Jun 12:24 1-web.jpg
-rw-r--r--  1 mrbill  mrbill       1M 15 Jun 06:33 1.jpg

Someone needs to learn about "save for web" in Photoshop or whatever program they're using. Both files are the same resolution.
posted by mrbill at 10:26 AM on June 19, 2004

you'd think someone paying $40,000+ per year for a Harvard education would know how to compress digital photos.

then again. you know someone paying $40,000+ per year for a Harvard education is gonna get some of it back in bandwidth.
posted by quonsar at 10:53 AM on June 19, 2004

FUCKING TEXANS!

(remember that nation that projects its problems on the South?)
posted by foot at 11:32 AM on June 19, 2004

Hol-ee crap. That was an awesome link, far better than the polinewscrap being posted lately. Thanks.

Amazing.
posted by xmutex at 11:37 AM on June 19, 2004

I'm just shocked that there wasn't a farmers' market involved somehow.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 11:51 AM on June 19, 2004

I'll drink to that! I just wont drive!

On preview what mrbill said. Both Fireworks and Photoshop have web gallery creation features.

But, yeah, what quonsar said.

This was a great post that made me laugh out loud and show my gums like a Simpson.
posted by geekyguy at 12:48 PM on June 19, 2004

(LA) kop koan: If you beat a black man and there are no video cameras to record it, does it break the law?
posted by five fresh fish at 1:17 PM on June 19, 2004

That was an awesome link

I thought it was fairly pointless, myself, but YMMV.
posted by pmurray63 at 5:31 PM on June 19, 2004

Not to mention that those are straight-from-the-camera 2272x1704 images that he's sending to the browser and then asking it to scale them down to 600x800. If he'd scaled them down to 600x800 to begin with, and then used a lower jpg resolution setting, for example this photo (a whopping 1.5M) could have been this photo (only 35K). That's 2% the size of the original! Yeah, he's gonna be having a chat with his sysadmin.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 5:43 PM on June 19, 2004

I read the thread just to read the rips on any fool posting a 50 meg page and appreciate the little mirror.

As for the one armed drunk dumbass. They should also book him for animal cruelty.

He also didn't just hit some cars, apparently, he hit them, backed up and rammed into them again and again.

But it does remind me of the video clip of the drunk guy blazing through San Diego a few years ago in a tank and destroying cars, trucks, RV's and finally getting caught on a highway divider so the cops could rush up and shoot him.
posted by fenriq at 7:36 PM on June 19, 2004

This is really nothing compared to the actual tank we had rolling through the streets a few years ago (also here in San Diego). Ripped through motorhomes like it was opening a zipper.
posted by LionIndex at 7:39 PM on June 19, 2004

Damnit, fenriq!
posted by LionIndex at 7:40 PM on June 19, 2004

LionIndex, hahaha. Sorry. Hey, if you had a link to it then I would concede victory,
posted by fenriq at 7:46 PM on June 19, 2004

Sheesh, here in Colorado a guy built his own tank out of a D9 Cat, some half inch steel plate, and concrete. Ripped buildings down even. Millions in damages. Must be the thin mountain air up there.....
posted by Eekacat at 8:02 PM on June 19, 2004

I'm beginning to notice that fenriq has an uncanny ability to post what someone else is posting, beating them at it by mere moments. Spooky!
posted by five fresh fish at 9:53 PM on June 19, 2004

seriously. Thanks for the story, but who goes to Harvard and doesn't know how to compress jpg's ? Evidently, this is not so strange at Harvard, and it is not so strange for some of you. I feel quite a loss for the good old days of technology worship. Now we have people who know nothing about it but think they do, probably thinking they are better fit to make the decisions around here in the future.

Posers
posted by firestorm at 8:49 AM on June 20, 2004

Thanks nathan_teske, your mirror was much appreciated.
posted by snarfodox at 9:33 AM on June 20, 2004