Watch your back, lest someone ram it

Last week at Hydraulic Road and U.S. 29, local SOB Dollymom was waiting on her Yammie V-Star 650 T for the light to change when a crazed cager crammed its bumper right up her tailpipe.

Admittedly bruised, battered and bent, D-mom says she's OK, but the bike is a total.

Unfortunately for us, this type of stupid, moronic crash is happening more and more often, whether it's caused by bleaters mewling on the cell phone, tonheads texting or just limp-lobed loonies staring vacantly out of their windshield thinking that it's a freakin' television screen and not realizing that the scenes on the other side of the glass are, in fact, real.

Check out the past posts and you'll see everything from Phoenix garbage trucks amok to nail-painting fatal femmes slammng butt and killing SOBs.

You know it's bad when state legislatures are actually doing something without screaming political platitudes at each other and drawing imaginary lines in the stacks of oil industry lobbyist contributions flooding their campaign coffers like so much BP oil in the Gulf.

Red means get ready to go, just in case

There isn't much you can do to prevent a rear-ender, being as it comes at the most vulnerable time, when you're sitting still. Still, there are some techniques that might help.

• Shift to first gear at the stoplight/stop sign: If someone thinks your arse is cute and wants to get too close, you can roll on and roll away.

• Stop to the left or the right of the vehicle ahead of you rather than behind it: That gives you an exit, should the guy in the Lincoln Navigator coming up behind be too busy feeding his Labrador retriever an ice cream cone to notice that you're in the way. Uh, don't ask how I know that.
• Watch your mirrors: Keep an eye out for the idiots behind you so you can scoot between cars and get away from assenders.
• Stay alert: This is not easy, especially at lights like Hydraulic and US 29 or Rio Road and U.S. 29 where people have been known to meet beneath the romantic glow off the red light, fall in love, conceive and give birth before they get the green light. Keep your guard up until someone is behind you to intercept any assenders.
• Flash your brake lights: As the cars approach behind you, pump your front brake level in a random pattern so that the flash of your brake light may actually attract their attention away from ordering food on their iPod touch.
• Wear high-viz vests: Yeah, they're ugly, but they get attention. They make you look like a dork and they're hot in the summer, but they work. I wear one, often, although not since the heat got cranking, but after D-Mom, I might start up again.

Rear end collisions are 99.987654321 percent the fault of the striker, not the stricken and they're hard to avoid.  All you can do is cover your ass so that the assender that ass-ends you isn't the ass that ends  you.