I only just got round to reading an article I tore out of the paper a
couple of weeks back. It was in the New
York Times but it was about walking in Los Angeles, written by David Hochman,
and titled “Hollywood’s New Stars: Pedestrians.” His point was that walking has become cool in
some (strictly limited) corners of the Hollywood universe, and of course some celebs
are all over it like a cheap leotard.
Hochman recommends, unironically I think,
that meetings should be taken not in an office or over lunch but while
walking. He tells us that Janet Tamaro,
who created Rizzoli and Isles
“sometimes spends 10 straight hours walking through rewrites (many days her pedometer
registers 50,000 steps).” I’m not sure if that’s actual steps pounding the
street, or at one those treadmill desks, I suspect it’s the latter, but
impressive either way. Here is Janet
Tamaro with Angie Harmon: a couple of very fit looking women.
Actually the most interesting “fact” in
the article is that an Australian study has concluded that for each additional
hour of TV a person sits and watches each day, the chance of dying rises by 11
percent. This raises a lot of questions
in my pedestrian brain. I mean,
additional to what? Additional to
none? Surely not, because “chances of
dying” are absolutely 100 per cent whether you walk or not. Chance doesn’t really come into it. But equally if you suddenly watched 9 and a
bit hours of TV a day, would that increase your chances OVER 100% and result in
sudden death? I have evidence that it wouldn’t.
There’s a friend of a friend of mine, now
in a nursing home here in Los Angeles, who has been unable to walk for the last
several years, and I would estimate that he watches TV from his bed for at
least twelve hours a day. He has not
died, though he constantly says he wants to.
Anyway, this got me thinking about another
article, this one in the LA Times, dated August 5, and headlined “Rise in
pedestrian deaths may be due to texting while walking.” I’ve shared this with a few fellow travellers
and the response has been equally split between, “Duh, you think?” and “Hurrah,
serves the bastards right.”
To be fair, the article is simply quoting an
announcement from Secretary Anthony Foxx of the Department of Transportation
who is worried about “distracted walking” in general, and he reckons that texting
or listening to music, or even taking drugs, may perhaps all play their part. That’s why he gets the big bucks.
Alcohol too, naturally, plays its part. I know
I’ve banged on about this before, so I’ll bang on about it again, and the
article repeats a new version of an old statistic, “Alcohol was involved in
half of traffic crashes resulting in pedestrian fatalities, and 37% of
pedestrians had a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit, compared
with 13% of drivers involved in crashes.” This is for the whole of America I think, and
is certainly not news to me. Drunk
driving is clearly very bad and wrong, and of course illegal. Walking
drunk on the other hand is not illegal, but is far more likely to kill
somebody. Usually the walker, of course.
