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Crash course on
driving while phoning

There's an old saying: "Figures lie and liars figure, but lying figure skaters are statistically more likely to fall while attempting a triple salchow than non-lying figure skaters" -- or something like that.

Interestingly, that old saying has almost nothing to do with a recent report that alleges that idiots who use a cellular phone while driving a motor vehicle are four times more likely to get into a serious crash.

Of course, the authors of the British Medical Journal study didn't refer to cell phone-using drivers as idiots. That's my designation. But there was a certain "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" undertone in the report that suggested the researchers thought that drivers using cell phones were idiots, or, as British researchers might put it, bloody wankers.

This was an important release by the British Medical Journal since it was the first one in decades that did not concentrate on "the dangerousness of puddings" or whether the madness of King George actually was an allergic reaction to powdered wigs.

As studies go, it wasn't a big breakthrough because basically everybody knows that most drivers are idiots, whether they use a cell phone or not, and because it said absolutely nothing about lying figure skaters.

There is no one on the planet who does not know that talking on a telephone while driving is dangerous. In Thailand the number of cell phone-related collisions has gone up 845 percent, and that's just involving people riding on water buffalos.

So the British study was a big waste of time, especially for people in Hawaii who could have used more detailed information.

For instance, are you more likely to get into a crash while talking on a cell phone while driving or eating a plate lunch?

And what kind of plate lunch?

Maybe you are two times as likely to get into a crash eating a teri beef plate than chicken curry. (Trust me on this, it's hard to cut teri beef with those plastic forks and knives while steering with your knee.)

PERSONALLY, I find driving and talking on a cell phone a fairly easy enterprise. Driving a car while eating a shave ice and changing CDs is much trickier. I'll bet the crash statistics from that scenario would have blown the Brits' minds.

Another thing the British study doesn't say is whether using a cell phone while driving was the main cause of the accident. I saw a woman driving the other day talking on the phone, and it wasn't giving her any problems at all. It was trying to light her cigarette at the same time that almost caused the 15-car pileup.

I think a more exhaustive study ought to be done to determine which of all the different driver-related activities are the most dangerous. I'll bet a driver trying to smack the hell out of his screaming kids in the back seat is more likely to crash than someone merely asking his wife by cell phone what he should pick up at Safeway for dinner.

Is it safer to apply makeup while driving 50 miles per hour on the H-1 freeway or finishing that last chapter in the book you're reading?

And in Hawaii there's the age-old question of whether it's safer to drive wearing rubber slippers or shoes. Or, to be scientifically thorough, figure skates.