The gimlet eye.

LAST winter this guy got his head cut off by an elevator in the Bronx.

Did you hear about this?

The guy's gettin off the elevator, it starts to go up real fast while the door is still open. The guy loses his balance and leans toward the elevator, and it cuts his head off, and the head goes rollin around in the car with five other passengers, and the body falls down the shaft. And for five minutes all these people had to stand there lookin at the head until they were rescued.

But what was strange about the news accounts is that there were all these people sayin, What can we do to make sure this never happens again? What state agency is responsible? Stuff like that.

Politicians were demandin that the elevator company check all its elevators, to make sure nobody's head gets cut off in the future.

Listen to me. This is not ever gonna happen again.

There are some things that are not ever gonna happen again.

This is a one-time deal.

About a hundred things had to go wrong, all at the same second, for this to happen.

Why is it that, when somethin like this happens, everybody wants to set up an Anti-Cut-Off-Your-Head Elevator-Rights Committee? Do they really think they were having meetings at the Otis Elevator Company, where a bunch of evil shifty-eyed fat guys sat around sayin, "Yeah, sure these elevators could slice off a guy's head, and the head might go rolling around in the car -- but that's a risk we're willing to take"?

What do they want em to do -- invent some crash-test robots that will stick their heads in an open out-of-control ascending elevator car, to see if they can survive?

But there are people who still think, "This never should have happened. They should have known about this." And so they get all self-righteous, and by the time they finish, they've convinced themselves there's a conspiracy by American businessmen who are trying to cut off the heads of unsuspectin elevator patrons. They think some engineer wrote up a set of specs on the elevator, and said, "Hey! Looky here, Bob! If we set this gauge just so, it might shoot the sucker up three floors with the door open and rip off a guy's head who's leanin the wrong way! Come on, let's try it! Here, I'll figure out the setting so that the head will end up in the car, but the body will fall down the shaft."

But these are the times we live in. Every time a car blows up, or a plane crashes, or somebody busts his head open by slippin on a wet sidewalk and flyin up in the air like Wylie Coyote, what's the first thing we think of?

Lawsuit, right?

Lawsuit lawsuit lawsuit.

And the more it hurts, the bigger the lawsuit.

The best lawsuit you can possibly have is when you're dead. You can get lots of money for being dead, especially if you became dead while doin somethin fun, like flippin over in a Jet-Ski or gettin crushed by a rock-concert stampede.

What I would like to know is, does the idea of an "accident" even exist any more? Is there a single situation where somethin bad happens to somebody, and you can say, "Well, it was just an accident." Or is it always somebody's fault?

Several years ago a Delta Airlines plane crashed at Dallas - Fort Worth Airport, and the investigation showed that it was caused by a "freak" storm. Five minutes before the crash, the weather was absolutely clear. Then one of those weird prairie thunderstorms came up. I've seen em myself. They last about ten minutes, and they can cover as small an area as 400 square feet. You get humongous winds, rain, lightning for 30, 40 seconds, then the thing goes back up in the sky. It's not a tornado, but it kind of acts like a tornado. You can see these things all across the Great Plains, from northern Canada to Mexico, even on clear days.

So that's what it was. Everybody's pretty sure that's what it was. And I thought, if there was ever a pure-dee "act of God," this was it. But the lawsuits over this deal went on for years, with all kinds of debate about whether it was the air-traffic controller's fault, the pilot's fault, the airline's fault, or the airport's fault (for the placement of the storage tank that the plane eventually ran into).

What if it was just the weather? What if it didn't even show up on the radar? What if God occasionally just says, "Time's up"?

IF YOU'RE using your Lawn Boy and it flings a rock out and beans a neighborhood kid and cuts his cheek, you end up in court nine months later, tryin to decide: Is it the Lawn Boy user's fault that he didn't see the rock? Is it a requirement that before you use a Lawn Boy, you comb through the tall grass searching for rocks? What if you did search for rocks, but somebody threw a fresh one in there right before you fired that mother up? Maybe you had the blade set too low. Maybe Lawn Boy had a defective design, and the hard surface of the rock was supposed to stop the blade. Maybe the kid was standin too close to the mower. Maybe the owner of the Lawn Boy failed to warn the kid. Maybe he did warn the kid, but the kid ignored him. Maybe the kid was keepin a safe distance, but he had to run over and pick up his football, and at that moment . . .

And after a while you wanna scream at these people: "It was just a goldurn accident!"

What I'd really like to say to em is, please, don't move to West Texas, where everybody over the age of six has been cut, burned, beat up, hit with foul balls, injured by equipment, pummeled in schoolyard brawls, and lost family members in railroad accidents, wars, and car wrecks -- and which has fewer "plaintiffs' attorneys" per capita than any other place in America.

Why? Because they still believe there's such a thing as a "neighbor."

And you know what a neighbor says?

"Don't worry about it, Joe. It was just an accident."

How quaint.