Look twice. Or three times, or more… you know, whatever you’re comfortable with.

This commercial has been airing during my House reruns approximately 63 times per minute for the last couple weeks, and it really, really bothers me. It’s taken me until this morning to figure out why.

The message of the commercial is sound: pay attention to your surroundings while driving, because motorcycles are small and kind of hard to see and a collision with one is more catastrophic than a collision with Super SUV Soccer Mom. I voted against shredded motorcyclists in November, so I’m totally in favor of the commercial’s message.

Nonetheless something about it got under my skin and started poking me. Was it the speed the biker was going? No, further examination reveals he doesn’t have a stop sign, so there’s no reason for him to slow down. Was it the look on the driver’s face a split second before a motorcycle plowed into him? Well, okay, yeah, but that just means the ad’s casting director accidentially hired a tool. I was being nagged by something deeper.

It’s the method that bugs me. How do you avoid this bone-jarringly horrific vehicular disaster from happening to you? Why, simply follow these three steps! Look, look, then look again. We’re being asked to look three times: look in one direction, then the other, then the first one again. However, the advice immediately contradicts itself; it tells us to look twice for motorcyclists. B-b-but if we “look, look, look again”, we’ve only looked twice in one direction! What about motorcyclists coming from the other direction? What of them!?

Okay sure, that can be explained away as semantical nonsense. What is the commercial really trying to tell us? We see the man look left, and there are no motorcycles at all down the entire stretch of road. Our perspective is blocked a little by his head, actually, which means he can see a lot further down the road than we can. He then looks the other direction and, convinced it’s clear, he pulls out — then gets annihilated by a motorcycle.

What did this guy do wrong? He obviously didn’t see the motorcycle. But why? The commercial would like us to believe that in the second or two he turns his head to look to his right the biker advanced enough that he went from “functionally invisible” to “too close to prevent a collision”. In order to remedy this situation, you’re supposed to turn your head a third time to look back down the first direction you’ve already checked.

Now, if a bike can advance far enough to cause an unpreventable crash from one direction, why not another? In the second or two it takes to turn his head back to the left, a motorcyclist could have advanced into the Danger Zone on his right. This necessitates another neck-swivel to the right, just to check… which opens the door for another biker from the left. The logical conclusion of this is that no car can ever make a left-hand turn, because the driver has to sit parked at the stop sign forever turning his head back and forth to cover the endless string of one-second gaps.

So, that settles it. To prevent motorcycle accidents, we must as a society agree to ban left-hand turns. I’m starting a grassroots “Three Rights Make a Left” campaign; donations are greatly appreciated.

That’s nonsense, of course. There’s something even more sinister in the ad. If you look carefully you’ll notice the driver begins bracing for impact almost a full second before the motorcycle hits him. As though… he knew it was coming. This bastard saw the bike and pulled out anyway due to some perverse addiction to vehicular manslaughter.

I’m beginning to feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what this ad has to offer us. Each layer peeled away serves to reveal another. I’ll get back to you after I’ve found a way to play it backwards.