My high-school physics teacher used to try to sell physics to us by insisting that Evel Knievel had a team of physicists at his disposal measuring out the precise speeds and angles he’d need to safely traverse whatever it was he was jumping, and that his stunts actually weren’t very dangerous at all because every factor was accurately weighed by smart people. Science!

Enter Flying Jimmy Elvis:

The 2011 [Crash-A-Rama] show, a four-hour extravaganza of demolition derbies, figure-eight school bus races and airborne automobiles, was opened by Flying Jimmy Elvis, whose success in launching a Lincoln Town Car super-stretch limousine off a ramp and into a 14 foot by 65 foot mobile home set the tone for the rest of the evening….

Mr. Elvis said he had knocked down some of the walls of the mobile home and had checked for squatters, but otherwise, there was no preparation, nor was there any rehearsal.

He figured that he needed to hit the ramp at 52 miles per hour, a speed computed by nonscientific methods (“It seems about right,” he said). He had never jumped a limousine.

With white “ELVIS” signs glowing and the 4.6-liter V-8 purring, he drove the Lincoln around the speedway. Just beyond the midway point on the front straight, he steered toward the ramp. As he hit it, there were fireworks and a blinding explosion — the pyrotechnician hired by Mr. Elvis had done his job — and the limousine emerged from a cloud of smoke, in lazy flight, 30 feet off the ground. The nose touched down into the top of the mobile home about 20 feet from the far end. Aluminum, pink insulation, wood paneling and shag carpeting flew as the Lincoln smashed back onto the grass infield, traveling another 150 feet or so before coming to a stop.

The most important thing is that I have to get to the next Crash-A-Rama before too many performers suffer life-threatening injuries and the insurance costs spiral out of control (assuming someone thought to insure these things). It sounds utterly awesome.

The second most important thing is that everything I’ve been led to believe about the widely diagnosed dumbing-down of society being incorrect is probably itself incorrect. Or maybe — maybe! — we’re all now so smart that we don’t even need the crack team of physicists anymore, and Flying Jimmy Elvis can just eyeball a limo jump and accurately guesstimate the appropriate launch speed.

In either case, I realized yesterday that I have more off-days left this calendar year than I thought I did, so I’m taking one today. There’ll be a podcast up later, and maybe some other stuff if I get bored or something big happens. But most likely it’ll be slow around here.

Huge hat tip to Billy Pilgrim for the link.