Today’s New York Times story, “They’re Soft and Cuddly, So Why Lash Them to the Front of a Truck“, is a delightful sociological study of why stuffed animals adorn some trucks. Reporter Andy Newman asks, “Why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast?”
He describes the bunnies and other stuffed critters as “soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes”.
The reasons for the mounted stuffs are many and varied. “‘Yo, man, I drive a garbage truck. How am I going to get the ladies to look at me?'” saysone stuffed mounter. My favorite explanation comes from an artist. “Binding a soft thing to a very powerful truck–there’s a kind of macho thing about that,” she says.
The story deserves praise for its wit and clever phrasing. Heck, if my blogs read as well as his story, I could write for the Times.
Photo Credit: Gene Han