Dr. Id,
re: How about the guys who attached the rocket engine to their car, and forgot about how they would stop it and crashed into a mountain?
According to the following that is really just an urban legend, sort of.
cardhouse.com
Snip....
The first thing you should know about the legend of the Rocket Car (especially if you got the story via E-mail or the Web) is that it's been around a lot longer than most people think. It started years
ago, as a vague rumor passed from one guy to the next by word of mouth, usually in bars or during lunch-break bullshit sessions. The kind of story someone hears from a friend who read it in a magazine, or
a half-remembered newspaper story that someone read a long time ago. It's a story that comes out of nowhere, gets passed around for awhile, then dies out, like one of those weird strains of flu that keep
coming back every few years. The period of dormancy varies, but whenever the story springs back to life, it seems to spread like a grass fire. I used to think it was funny how the legend of the Rocket Car
managed to spread so far (and fast) purely by word-of-mouth, but now that it's become a subject of Internet interest, it's popularity has become downright spooky.
If you've never heard the legend before (in which case I can't imagine why you'd be reading this), here's the bare bones of it: Once upon a time, in some out-of-the way part of the country (take your
pick of locations) a maniac took a rocket of some sort, and mounted it on the back of a car (make and model depend on automotive trends when the story is told). The maniac then sped down a deserted
stretch of highway, and when he reached an appropriate spot, he lit the rocket. Unfortunately, the rocket (which was either a JATO bottle, a surplus ICBM engine, or an experimental Shuttle booster)
proved to be far more powerful than the maniac anticipated. The car reached an incredible speed in a matter of seconds (somewhere between 150 miles per hour and Warp 9) at which point the car's
brakes and steering became... ineffective. This development would've been bad enough on a straightaway, but through some error in planning or navigation, the maniac found himself hurtling down a road that
curved sharply, not far from where he ignited the rocket. When the car arrived at the curve, it went straight ahead instead of negotiating the turn. Pilot and car then flew like an arrow (for a distance only
limited by the imagination of the person telling the story), before crashing into an inconveniently-placed mountainside. |
