Always wear your helmet

Way back in 2007, a newspaper in Madison, Wis., carried an interesting report of a bicyclist whose head was run over by a delivery truck.
Except for a concussion, Ryan Lipscomb, then 26, was perfectly fine.
His helmet, however, didn’t do so well. The Giro-brand helmet, made out of foam and plastic, was split down the middle and was indented with a tire imprint.

This is an excellent lesson, people.

A lot of you — kids included — don’t like to wear helmets when you’re bicycling, skating and participating in other street sports.

If you’re one of those people, just ask yourself: Where would you rather that tread print be? Your head or your helmet?

Comics on the Brain admits that helmets look pretty dorky (heck, we even draw them dorky in our “Downward Spirals” comic) and we figure it’s time that the helmet-making industry works to improve the aesthetic appeal of their gear.
Here are a few suggestions:

• Force Field Helmet: OK, if you don’t like wearing a helmet, maybe one that isn’t really there will suit you. A force field would do just that. Sure, we don’t actually have force fields technology, but why should that stop my brainstorming session? I come up with the ideas and leave it to the crack CotB science team to work out all the physics.
• Darth Vader-style: If you’re going to make us look like idiots, we might as well look like bad-ass idiots. Give us a full face-mask and a voice modulator. Imagine “Coming up on your right!” in full-on James Earl Jones creepy-ness. If you can’t do Darth, how about Boba Fett?
• Helmet dreads: If you pin enough Rastafarian dreadlocks on a helmet, it would give us a cool George Clinton look. Just be careful that they’re not so long they get caught in the spokes.
• The Spartan: The soldiers in ‘300’ rocked with their dust-broom helmets. Skaters would totally dig it if we included matching breast plates and swords.
• Targeting: RoboCop has a great set-up for his helmet. It includes a targeting readout and threat-assessment monitor. That would be especially helpful to avoid a wandering gang of teen thugs.
• Anti-hat-hair helmet: Anyone who wears a helmet will tell you it squashes your hair flat. We need one that doesn’t. We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t get rid of hat hair. … Sigh.