How is that even a question?

I took some friends to Efingers to look at bikes yesterday. For one, it would be her first bike since childhood... she just wanted a comfortable, inexpensive machine with which she could join her boyfriend in the park and on the towpath.

At one point during the salesman's pitch, she wondered, "should I buy a helmet?"

She's a smart, skeptical girl, and I think she read the salesman's affirmative answer as a profit-seeking ploy. What next, rustproofing?

So I, the neutral chauffeur, jumped in. YES. Buy a helmet.

"Even if I'm only riding on grass or the towpath?"

ESPECIALLY if you're off road.

Asked her boyfriend, who does wear a helmet, "when you're in a car, do you wear a seatbelt?"

Countered the girlfriend, "yes, but that's because it's the law." Oy.

I told her that I could list a half-dozen situations in the past few weeks where her friends and colleagues had been glad for their uncool cranial accessories. I told her how I'd once cracked a helmet while commuting to class as an undergrad, at all of 10 mph. I don't think the message got through.

What hopefully did work, or at least ended the debate, was an angle I happily stole from AngryMark ...

How many years of schooling do you have? How many decades of hard work, all of which is contained in the fragile tissue between your forehead and your ears. When you crash, it's usually sudden and violent. If you're lucky, you lose some skin from your elbow.

If you're unlucky, you go from being BME Wunderkind to drooling, dependent child. Or worse.

Why, WHY, would you risk that? How is that worth $30?