It’s time to start the war on umbrellas

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/07/2018 (2934 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In a sincere and humanitarian effort to make the world a safer place for everyone, I am going to use today’s column to call on the government to take immediate action.

What I want to know, on your behalf, is when our elected officials will find the courage to outlaw a device that poses a clear and present danger to innocent persons such as myself, and possibly you, the devoted reader.

As many of you have already deduced, I am talking about the threat of beach umbrellas.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: “Beach umbrellas? Huh?”

Well, let me just say, and this comes from the bottom of my heart, you are clearly an idiot. As a crusading journalist who spends a great deal of his time randomly Googling stuff to avoid doing any real work, I have recently become aware of the mounting hazard posed to the public by potentially lethal beach brollies.

By way of background, allow me to remind you that last Saturday’s Speiriscope feature in our 49.8 section of the newspaper was inspired by reports about a hapless British tourist who became a global story when she was impaled by a beach umbrella that had been turned into a flying missile by strong winds at the Jersey shore.

In that feature, which focused on five cases of innocent people being skewered by ordinary objects while engaged in everyday activities, I described how the 67-year-old woman was relaxing at the beach when strong winds caused an umbrella to pierce her ankle, pinning her to the sand.

The spike of the wind-blown umbrella went entirely through her ankle and first responders had to use a bolt cutter to free her and get her on an ambulance to the hospital, where she was in good condition.

That grisly story caused me to begin perspiring heavily and rubbing my hands together in a fretful manner, but I was thrown into a full-fledged state of journalistic panic this week when I opened my office email and discovered an alarming message from my editor.

My editor’s email praised me for being ahead of the news curve and pointed out that, the day after the feature appeared in the paper, an entirely different woman was spending a day at a beach in Ocean City, Md., when a rental beach umbrella was uprooted by strong winds, hurtled down the sand and impaled her in the chest.

The thing is, one minute we were living in a world where the only things we had to worry about were random shootings, international terrorists, telemarketers and whether U.S. President Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin will turn the planet into a smoking pile of ashes.

The next minute, we discover we must also be deathly afraid of being skewered by rogue umbrellas while lying on a beach and flipping through the pages of the latest John Grisham bestseller.

Consider the facts: two women, in the space of a single week, narrowly survived after being pierced in medically important areas by windblown beach umbrellas. This is what we in the news business call a trend.

Who knew? I suspect it is only a matter of days until a SWAT team descends on a sunny beach after receiving reports of a lone umbrella behaving in a suspicious manner.

I don’t want to cause widespread panic, but it appears beach umbrellas pose an even greater danger than those pointy lawn darts we used to play with back in the 1960s until roughly half the kids in the neighbourhood had skewered themselves in the foot.

What I’m proposing is that it should be illegal for people to take beach umbrellas to the beach. These things should be kept in special sealed cases in our garages, along with shotguns and pointy objects like metal hotdog skewers. I, for one, do not want to live in a world where gangs of teenage hoodlums armed with unregistered beach umbrellas roam the streets, threatening the public and robbing convenience stores.

So today, we are bravely calling on the provincial and federal governments to take whatever action is needed to ban the beach brolly. Because when beach umbrellas are outlawed, only outlaws will have beach umbrellas.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca