http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/030612/170/4dnhg.html&e=14&ncid=1778
Geez. I though thing was gyroscopically stabilized up the wazoo so that the most unco-ordinated geek could still operate it.
Yeah, I thought it was impossible to fall. Maybe it has to be powered up for the stablizers to kick in?
That’s priceless. Gerald Ford, move over!
-TomIt probably wasn’t turned on, so he probably leaned too much and bowled over… sigh :?
— Alan\
Well, if he’d broken his ass on it, that would just about end the life of Segway. Luckily he’s good at bails.
It looks like he broke it. :roll:
Maybe it failed as he boarded it.
Fool me once
Shame on
Shame on you
Fool me can’t get fooled again!
But…but Dubya can land a jet plane on an aircraft carrier all by himself!
Makes you realize how truly dangerous that stunt was.
He wasn’t really flying. The pilot gave him a little toy joystick, sort of like the steering wheel thing that Maggie uses in the opening sequence for the Simpsons. As long as he thinks he’s flying the “big vroom vroom,” everyone is happy.
From the looks of it, he had the control column pulled way back when he stepped on the platform, and it looks like it snapped into the upright position and his weight carried it all the way in the other direction.
Kinda hard to tell from still photos tho.
I’ll have to chalk it up to “User Error,” or as Bush would say, “Usah Errah”
Explanations of how Bush fell off the Segway:
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2003/06/kintisch-e-06-13.html
The Whitehouse says – “It wasn’t on.”
Yay, I was right, I must be a Segway expert.
— Alan
I take it they were referring to the Segway and not President Bush.
If I were Bush I think I’d fire whatever wonk I’d hired to prep me for new things. My guess is Bush had no idea how to use the thing and just jumped on. The descriptions of “power-assist” and “balance mode” and letting it warm up, etc. sound fairly complicated. I think the president can be assumed to be lacking the time to read many instruction manuals, and relies on folks for overviews of things.
That said, it was pretty funny.
Yeah, it’s pretty hilarious. After months of hearing how not even the biggest idiot could fall off one, Bush falls off the second he tries to get on it. It’s almost too perfect.
Nope, he’d actually ridden one before at some event a couple of months ago.
The White House is trying the “it wasn’t turned on” spin.
Coulda been worse. If it had been Ford, he wouldn’t have recovered from the fall.
I just tried a segway out the other day. I almost fell off it too. My wife looked like she was stepping onto a rock. My guess is that different people have different balance sense.
So even if the thing was on, I can imagine falling off of it if you don’t have the right instincts for the thing. But of course nobody wants to hear that because this story gives everybody a nice fuzzy feeling of superiority over Bush.
“He’s dumb and he falls of a Segway! Guffaw!”
Anyway, my verdict about the Segway is that it is not nearly as amazing as the hype and I don’t see it revolutionizing anything in its current incarnation.