We’ve talked about this several times before, but I continue to be wildly impressed with the manner and speed of information dissemination in this era of the internet.  On Thursday we posted a story about some guy who drove a mult-million-dollar car into the drink down in Galveston, Texas.  (Firegeezer report HERE.)  Somebody stopped by with a video camera and recorded the recovery of the car out of the lagoon and on that same day uploaded it onto the YouTube site.  Before the car’s owner had even dried off, the world was watching his 16-cylinder baby being chained up by the tow truck operator.

Galveston Daily News / Paschenko

Then yesterday FossilMedic finds a companion video on YouTube showing the actual accident take place.  Again, here is somebody who happens to be there recording the wreck and within hours the world is watching again.  Mike posted the video here last night…. just scroll down to the next posting to watch it.  It got me to thinking, just what are the odds of all this happening?  Let’s consider:

• A car just happens to be traveling along a parallel highway as the Bugatti is crusing down the frontage road.
• The occupants just happened to have a video camera with them and decided to record the clip showing the car.
• They also quickly thought to get the video uploaded to YouTube.

And before your old Win95 machine could complete a boot-up, the entire episode was being watched literally everywhere.  An amazing set of circumstances that was just a whisper away from being shown on live tv.  A fortuitous set of coincidences, eh?

The Galveston newspaper that wrote up the story said that the driver of the Bugatti is from Lufkin, Texas.  So yesterday I brought up the Lufkin newspaper’s website and found out that the driver/owner is a local used-car salesman who bought the Bugatti a few months ago from another dealer in Arkansas for $1.2 million.  It’s safe to assume that his intention is to  resell the car for a tidy profit, or at least it was his hope.  So that calls for a re-thinking  of this situation.  Let’s review:  a) A used-car saleman; b) cruising along a near-vacant roadway; c)  A video camera operating alongside at the same speed that just happens to be turned on.  Too much of a coincidence for me.

What do you want to bet that these amateur videographers were employed by the used-car salesman to make a “demonstration” video for advertising purposes?  Maybe the answer to that will surface later.  As Mike pointed out, though….. it’s too bad the camera didn’t catch the “low-flying pelican.”

Before we have to start ducking charging birds, we’d better get this equipment checked out now.  I’ll get the coffee started.