Wearing Headphones Will Kill You
Hello. Let's get right to the point: someday you will die. Maybe you'll sacrifice yourself to save a bus full of nuns, or die bringing food to starving children in a war zone, or pass away at the age of 90, surrounded by an enormous, loving family and all your Nobel prizes. More likely, though, you will get unceremoniously creamed by a fire truck because you couldn't hear its sirens over "How Will I Know":
The number of headphone-wearing pedestrians seriously injured or killed near roadways and railways has tripled in six years, according to a U.S. study.
The number of cases rose from 16 in 2004-2005 to 47 in 2010-2011, according to the research published today in the online journal Injury Prevention. Thirty-four of the 116 total cases in the study specifically mention horns or sirens being sounded before the victims were struck, wrote researchers including Richard Lichenstein at the University of Maryland Hospital for Children.
To avoid this, you could stop wearing headphones, or never leave your home. Or, accept your headphone-related death as an inevitability and make sure you have a really cool playlist on your iPod so all the EMTs will be like, "man, that dude had awesome taste in the music."
