Tag Archive: bike


Well, Slap Me with a Squirrel!

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 7 Comments
March 28, 2012

(Submitted by reader J. D. Mack)

Sometime back in the 1990s I was riding my bike through a residential neighborhood in Bethesda, Maryland.  Suddenly, I felt something like a giant hand slapping the top of my head.  This was followed by the sight of a squirrel running away from my vicinity.

What had happened was a squirrel had fallen from a tree and landed on my head.  Now think about this.  We’ve all seen squirrels leap from tree to tree, but have you ever seen a squirrel miss and plummet to the ground?  I haven’t, so I would count that alone as being a fairly rare event.

But what are the odds that one of these rare falling squirrels would land squarely on the head of a moving cyclist?  I don’t know the exact odds, but I suspect that one would have a better chance of winning the lottery with a single ticket than having that happen to them.

[EDITOR: Now think about THIS: How embarrassed was that squirrel? Probably not as embarrassed as this one was to see itself on YouTube after this bender…]

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ikH9ZRcF2Q

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Pedaling in the Right Direction

Filed Under: Stories by Reader submission — 3 Comments
February 15, 2012

(Submitted by reader Thomas Brown)

In the fifth grade, living in Seattle, WA, my best friend and I were on the same little league team and one Saturday had hopped on our bikes and rode down to the park for our game.  Typical of the times and our age, we just let our bikes drop in the grass near the dugout and proceeded to warm up and then played ball.

After the game, to my friend’s dismay, someone had stolen his bike.  I don’t know what possessed me to do it, but I vowed to find it and hopped on my bike and started riding in no particular direction.  I came to one of many apartment buildings some ways away and went in and around the back where, lo and behold someone had locked up my friend’s bike to a railing (it still had all my friend’s decals on it — it was really his bike).  I pedaled like crazy back to my friend’s house and his dad drove us back out, with a pair of bolt cutters, and we simply stole the bike back.

Out of all the homes and apartment buildings in a two or three mile radius of that park, I somehow picked the exact right direction to go and right building to turn into (I was not methodically searching and none of us saw the bike being take and ridden away).  The Odds were truly Crazy that day!

[EDITOR: Vigilante justice combined with sheer dumb luck, or was our submitter IN ON IT THE WHOLE TIME?!?! Nah, probably just sheer dumb luck.]

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