Cars...who can imagine life without them? They are central toAmerican life. When you're a teenager you are considered totally uncool, a total geek if you're still taking the bus by the end of your sophomore year. If you haven't figured out how to get your own set of wheels you've at least learned the important quality of hooking a ride with someone who has. The guys with the cars are the guys with the dates. Yes, cars...they're practical, they're cool, they're sexy. The beautiful people in car advertisements and in the movies tell us so.

Yes, cars are central to American life. . Unfortunately cars are too often central to American death as well. Car accidents "take a half million lives and injure another 15 million people around the world each year", According to the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center, approximately 284,000 drivers "are involved in serious crashes" every year due to some sort of distraction. These distractions may be that caused by controlled substances or simply fiddling with the CD player or some other device typically found in an automobile, eating while driving or the newest distraction, the cell phone. Insurance agencies develop their rate charts according to statistics on what distractions affect various age groups. For instance, teenage drivers have the highest car crash rate of any other age group. A study by the United States Institute went so far as to say that "teenage sons or daughters of parents who have crashed their cars are likely to have crashed alsoRecent studies have brought up the argument that the elderly should tested for flexibility and reaction times before issuing licenses to them.

The attitudes and obsessions with cars and strange phenomena of the open road are the subjects of Cyrilmagazine, July 2002. Author, Mikita Brottman, editor of, "Car Crash Culture", discusses the phenomenon of the automobile in American culture and our obsession with the fatalities they cause in an interview with editor, Silence Thayer. Researcher and writer of strange happenings, Paralayla uncovers phantoms that roam the roads at night.

Nothing captures the essence of the attitude toward the automobile as much as the latest Cyril Mp3 download, "In Cars". Ironically, in 1991, while listening to "In Cars", Cyril suffered a serious blowout accident at an excessive speed, totally demolishing his new Saab 900. Prone to bad car wrecks since a teenager, Cyril refused to listen to this song for over 6 years. He recently re-recorded the song for an upcoming CD to be released early next year. Take the time to check out one of his classic songs and his only live band performance to date. Download mp3 here.

Until next time, Cyrilmagazine fans...keep it under 90!

On-line sources for the editor's piece:

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9806/24/india.road.crashes/index.html

http://www.drivers.com/cgi-bin/go.cgi?type=ART&id=000000178&static=1