The Wax Conspiracy

Easter road toll 2016 turns out the lights at eight

Prices for coffins and makeshift cement pits are not exactly the only cause to mangle your body into a bundle of bones. But at least when you’re screaming high unto the sky in a blinding light you don’t think about how this Easter is a quieter one nationally. Eight at the end.

Crunching the numbers all the way back into a single box, it’s an eight for the period that lasts 24 to 28 March 2016. It’s got to be a surprising low when news outlets make sure you run that total from years’ past. So it goes from 2015 at 22, 12, 21, 11, and 16 on 2011.

Never fear the reaping Western Australia, taking down a round slap of five to boost and bolt all the way to the top of the leader board. It was slim, then at the end they rush toward the line and send over three into the abyss. A marked improvement over last year, but only by one.

And that bye is what leaves the rest of the pack swimming in the gristle and hot to touch metal crackling under the strain of the jaws of life come too late. South Australia, Northern Territory, New South Wales and Victoria all posting a single and crowning it for the lot.

Better still than the outfits of ACT, Queensland and Tasmania. Quiet on the road. Too quiet.

So quiet up in the state up north east that the Queensland Police Service notes it being the flattest of years past. (They did rankle with eight in the year before.) Take note their charge for the coming years after loosening their grip on the title,

“But that doesn’t mean we can become complacent. We are now entering phase 2 of the campaign which coincides with school holidays. The roads will be busier than usual, so we all still need to take extreme care.”

That’s the official count from the Easter end there.

And then there was this whispered nugget,

A 35-year-old motorcycle rider has been killed in a road crash in south-western Queensland, in the state's first road fatality for the Easter holiday period.

Who is the lifeless body on the road pretzel with a motorcycle? The headline yelps, “Motorcyclist death first Easter holiday road toll in Queensland” which must be from some other sunshine state of a similar name.

Onward with the tolls. On they bong and bring it in. Even the ghosts out there riding into the sunset.

Ethan Switch

Written on Friday, 1 April 2016

The Wax Conspiracy

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