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Cameras mounted on car dashboards have given us multiple, spine-tingling views of the meteorite that exploded in the Siberian skies on Friday.
Jalopnik Friday republished an essay by Marina Galperina that explains why dashboard cameras have become ubiquitous in Russia: Fights, bribe requests, scams — the everyday insanity that afflicts point-a-to-point-b travel there.
And then, sometimes, someone will jump under your car at a crossing, laying on the asphalt, simulating a badly hurt pedestrian waiting for that cop conveniently parked nearby. This dramatic extortion scheme was common, until the Age of the Dash-cam. Oh, and there are such juicy, triumphant tales about of would-be extortion victims turning the scheme around and telling the cast members to pay them money or they’re going to jail for this little performance!
Galperina embeds a video compilation of Russian road mayhem that if you are lucky will be the weirdest thing you see all day.
A video that purports to show a flaming crater caused by the meteorite is reportedly fake. The Is Twitter Wrong Tumblr doesn’t have anything on the Russian meteorite yet, but it’s a good place to check if you see a too-good-to-be-true image. After Hurricane Sandy, Craig Silverman wrote about how not to get taken by fake photos.
NPR followed up on Galperina’s original post in December, adding some more videos.
If you’re somewhere where no one can hear you shouting “Holy cats!” or something stronger, here’s another collection of Russian dash-cam-captured lunacy that its curator swears collects only non-fatal incidents.
Related: How a DC hockey fan site got the Russian meteorite story before the AP (The Atlantic)
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