[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy5rkw4SeP4]
Calvin, the title character of the very-excellent Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, once remarked to his tiger friend Hobbes, “You can bet when I’m a geezer like Dad, I’ll be going like a maniac.”
“Ever notice how the older people get, the slower they do things?” he asked. “I wonder why that is. I would think that the less life you had left, the faster you’d want to do everything, so you could pack more into the remaining years.”
He had a point.
That going-like-a-maniac comic strip first ran in July of 1990, more than two decades before the above video was uploaded to YouTube. It shows Colin Furze of Sky 1’s Gadget Geeks fame tearing through an open field of snow – snow! – on a heavily-modified, gas-powered mobility scooter “which can apparently reach speeds of up to 70 mph,” according to CubicleBot.
Sure, putting our senior citizens behind the handlebars of mobility scooters capable of keeping pace with most standard cars may ultimately turn out to be a mistake of monstrously dangerous proportions, but it’s the least we could do to help them “pack more into the remaining years.”
Do it for the elderly. And if not, do it for Calvin.