Normally I don’t approve of the actions and tactics of the Winter Springs Police Department which, for the most part, involves ticketing people for six over the speed limit¹. I especially dislike their automated speed guns, which to me seems like cheating. But not today, not when one of those aforementioned automated speed guns was set up directly outside of my house. It’s what I like to call an “attractive nuisance,” and like a little kid pulling the pot of boiling water over on themselves I just had to mess with it.

My brother and I tried throwing a football past it, but it was just too hard to get the ball to cross the radar without hitting the unit (in our failures we smacked it a couple of times, but purely by accident), so we resorted to just running at the damn thing. That seemed to work. Most of our attempts at capturing our efforts failed, but we were able to capture the coup-de-grâce: a short video (.avi, ~1.2mb) of me running at it doing my best Waterboy impression. It’s harder to keep a camera stable and run towards a speed gun than I imagined it would be.

It was, by all accounts, quite an amusing thing to behold.

¹ Yes, yes, I know, the WSPD and other police departments do really good things and put their lives in danger to protect us, but geez they can be annoying as hell.

Posted by John on Thursday, May 29th, 2003 at 7:00 pm.