Getting close to dinner time, thinking about asking his parents for a scooter. He wouldn‘t have had a bicycle accident if he’d been on a scooter. And since scooters are lower to the ground and can‘t go as fast, he was 122 percent less likely to break a bone on a scooter than on a bicycle. Sixty percent less likely to bleed, and besides everyone else . . . (this was as far as he’d rehearsed).
Based on the wooden scooters made popular in the ‘50s, the shiny metal foldup scooter with small, candy-colored wheels that Lime was thinking about asking Mr. and Mrs. Barty for over dinner wouldn’t be available for another 25 or 30 years. Still, he thought, now was a pretty good time to ask them, what with the bicycle accident and this being a leap year and all, and them being pleased with today‘s accomplishments at school -- his proficiency with yet-to-be-invented microtechnologies -- to buy him a scooter now, while he was still young enough to enjoy it.
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Home to ”one of the largest private collections of bicycles in the world,“ the Bicycle Museum of America (www.bicyclemuseum.com) in New Bremen, Ohio (make a north at Dayton), maintains, as any good bicycle museum should, an engaging online presentation of deeply captioned photographs of pieces in the museum’s collection.
Scooter Depot of Largo, Florida, maintains a page called Scooter and Wheelchair Video‘s [sic] (www.scooterdepot.comvideo.htm), which provides the casual browser with clickable thumbnails of what has become one of the Internet’s least provocative selections of motorized-scooter videos. Choose from Pride Legend Electric Scooter, Pride Hurricane PMV Scooter, Overview of Jazzy Electric Wheelchairs and almost half a dozen other popular titles. Don‘t forget to click HERE (www.scooterdepot.comentry.htm) for your chance to win a ”FREE Manual Wheelchair!!!!“ (Offer expires September 14, 2000.) And please note that most of these scooters are for use by veteran scootists and should not be operated by those of inappropriate age.
The International Human Powered Vehicle Association (www.ihpva.org) is an affiliation of associations and organizations, and vice versa, ”dedicated to promoting improvement, innovation and creativity in the use of human power, especially in the design and development of human-powered vehicles.“ The association publishes a journal, Human Power, and maintains an extensive database of all things at once human and vehicular, including links to works in progress around the world (www.ihpva.orgBuilders) and video clips (www.ihpva.orgMovies), notably three rather large (17 to 46MB) MPEGs of the 1996 Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race.
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