"Run & Hit" L-Cut Style

Yesterday on my way to the encounter with the Gold Teeth Teen Girls I saw a kid get hit by a car. Sorta...

I was driving west on Pines Blvd in Pembroke Pines, FL ( home to the most dangerous intersection in the state! - but not this one) when I got to the intersection of Pines Blvd and University Drive. As usual this summer I was jamming to The Jacksons - Triumph and in a good mood since my parents went to Jamaica for the weekend. I pull up to a red light behind a few cars. Here's where my Law & Order Witness skills get fuzzy.

I can't remember if the turn light for west bound traffic turning south was green or had just turned green. What I do remember is the chubby early-teen Spanish kid with CDs in his hands who needed to cross Pines Blvd faster then Dave Chapelle needs crazy pills.

The kid races across the street since he figures like I do that east/west traffic on Pines is about to get a green light. Here's where the L-Cut happens. The L-Cut is an audio term used in music and film business. I'll give you the Adobe Premier Elements definition.

The L-Cut is used most effectively if the sound effects or dialog of the previous clip would have a dramatic or comical impact on the next clip. For example, if a pile of dishes is about to fall to the ground at the end of scene A, perhaps the sound of the dishes actually crashing to the ground may be more comical in the background as you cut to the downstairs neighbor reading the Sunday paper.

Do you get it? I don't mean to imply that kids getting kit by cars is a comical event, that's just a description.

Why all this L-Cut stuff then? Well while the kid is halfway across the street I look over to my left and see the cars in BOTH turn lanes are well, turning. I think, this kid is gonna be stuck in the middle of the street cause he's going to have to stop when he gets to the turn lanes... Now the L-Cut again? Well there's a large white Chevy Astro Van blocking my view of the future events.

Moments later I see all the cars in the turn lanes suddenly stop and I already know what up. I use my context clues pretty well, like people from the nearby Hooters running in the direction of the "incident", etc.

My light turns green and we push off slow enough for everyone who has more important things to worry about to get a look at the result. My imagination is running wild on what happened to this kid until I finally get into the intersection. He's sitting on the median, one of his shoes is sitting under the car. I couldn't see any blood, so that's always good right? But his poor CDs didn't make it, they're scattered all over the street, beyond the help of any scratch repair kit.

As I drive further down Pines I look in my rear view mirror and see the kid has moved from sitting on the median to laying sprawled out on the median apparently more injured then meets the eye of a non-medical professional. That's one of those times when I wish I was a doctor and not an engineer. Then I could do something extra meaningful. I won't be saving to many lives by making your factory more efficient. Oh well. That was my most significant event of the day, until I went to play basketball...