Ah, Men!

The item posted by the Stealth Bloggerette about guys dropping bowling balls from airplanes reminds me of a column I wrote in 1994 about... well, guys dropping bowling balls from airplanes.  Except the guys I wrote about weren't doing this for Scientific Reasons.  They had invented a sport called Car Bowling:

This is an exciting new sport that I found out about from an alert reader named Robert Grimm.  He referred me to a friend of his named Mark Luman, a pilot in Michigan, who informed me that what he and his pilot friends sometimes do, for recreation, is go up in airplanes and drop bowling balls on cars.

At this point, many of you women are thinking:  "They drop WHAT? On WHAT? From WHAT??  Whereas you men, because of your complex and psychic interplay, are thinking: "When can I do this?"

I have to admit that the idea of Car Bowling appealed to me. although I did have a couple of concerns, the main ones being:

1.  Are there motorists in those cars?

2.  Do the pilots wear rental shoes?

I am pleased to report that the answer to both questions is "no."  Luman told me that in Car Bowling, you use an unoccupied junk car, which you place on the runway of a private airport. Then you fly over in a small plane, going 80 to 90 miles per hour at an altitude of 20 to 50 feet, and attempt to hit the car with a bowling ball.  If you succeed, you get the sense of inner spritual gratification that comes from seeing what happens to a car that has been hit by a bowling ball.  But the beauty of Car Bowling is that even if you miss, you get a very positive result, from the male perspective.

"You cannot imagine," said Luman, "how far a bowling ball will bounce when it hits a hard surface at that speed.  It's amazing."

                                                                                                  ---Dave Barry