Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Ghost Riding The Whip

This sounds like fun:
Hyphy was born in the San Francisco Bay cities of Oakland, Richmond and Vallejo in the late 1990s, and devotees often hold late-night car rallies called "sideshows" where crowds perform risky stunts, including ghost riding.

"Ghost riding" refers to the absence of a driver. "The whip" is urban slang for your car. Typically, the driver drops the car into neutral and dances around and on top of the vehicle while it inches forward.

Sometimes it is a solo act; sometimes a half-dozen or more passengers get out and dance, too. The stunt is usually performed late at night, on a deserted road or in a parking lot.
But also exceedingly dangerous:
"It did not take Einstein to look at this thing and say this was a recipe for disaster," said Pete Smith, a police spokesman in Stockton. "We could see the potential for great injury or death."

Earlier this month, Davender Gulley, a ghost-riding 18-year-old, died after his head slammed into a parked car while he was hanging out the window of an SUV in Stockton, police said. In October, a 36-year-old man dancing on top of a moving car fell off, hit his head and died in what authorities said was Canada's first ghost riding fatality.
People have been doing similar things for years. I remember being in the parking lot at Santa Fe High School, NM, in 1971, when a car rolled by with two teenage girls on the hood. The car slowly turned left and the right-hand girl slowly rolled off and bounced on the pavement. It's horrifying to watch all that flesh shake like jelly upon meeting an immovable object (like the slow-mo cameras capture so well at professional football games).

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