What was it I was doing while texting? Oh - driving!

Do you know why the Titanic hit an iceberg? Because the guys in the crow's nest were TEXTING.

Well, maybe. I haven't read everything to come out of the all-important National Summit on Distracted Driving, but that's probably in there somewhere. In fact ...

... Hold on, you're not reading this on a PDA while you drive to work, are you? OK. Good.

Anyway, the summit already produced concrete results: President Obama signed an executive order banning federal employees from txting while drvng, kthnxbai, and our own Sen. Amy Klobuchar has called for a nationwide ban.

It's like a law against gargling honeybees while performing brain surgery: You'd think people could figure that out for themselves. Alas, too many people have learned that you can text while driving and probably not end up in a ditch with the wheels pointed at heaven and an airbag in your face. At least that's what experience tells them -- so far!

If we had evolved from octopuses, we'd use one tentacle to drive while the other seven fiddled with knobs and wrote thank-you notes. But it's not safe. If you can't wrap your brain around that, you'll wrap your brain around a tree trunk.

Admission: I have tweeted while in a car. Sometimes you have a blinding insight about a song on the radio -- say, the realization that Men Without Hats' "Safety Dance" may not have been UL approved, but was nevertheless a natural reaction to disco-related spinal injuries in the late '70s -- and you must post the thought lest your cranial exhalations evaporate before they're shared.

But I only type while the light's red. Surely that can't be illegal. A good portion of driving, after all, consists of looking away from where you're going. The moment you check your rear-view mirror before switching lanes, you're looking away. You go through an intersection, you check to see if one of those idiots convinced of his Wolverine-like imperviousness blew through the red. But it's OK to take your eyes off a road if you're looking at another road, I guess.

Texting is one thing; talking on a cell might be worse. Without fail on my daily drive, the worst driver is the one who's yammering merrily away on a phone. Someone steering with her right knee and applying mascara with her left foot would be a more attentive driver.

I don't know what it is about cell phone conversations that makes people enter la-la-land; I regularly have chats with my daughter in the back as we drive around, and it doesn't make me slow down, drift from lane to lane, and behave as though I think I'm a human Nerf surrounded by bubblewrap.

If you're worried that this will give The Man one more excuse to pull you over, relax.

If you're acting super-suspicious -- i.e., observing the speed limit with both hands on the steering wheel in the 10-2 position while driving through Cracktown at 3 a.m. with an arm hanging out of the trunk -- they will find a reason to pull you over. "Sir, were you aware that your bumper sticker contains a logical fallacy? Asserting that you cannot hug children with nuclear arms is a violation of the metaphor ordinances. Step out of the vehicle, please."

The law won't stop people from texting, though. Better: Set up some sort of sensor that tracks your eye movements; if you take your eyes off the window for more than 1.7 second, the airbag deploys. Believe me, after you've been bum-rushed by the Pillsbury Doughboy a few times, you'll pay attention to the road.

Or, you could just write SHUT UP AND DRIVE backwards on your forehead, so you can see it in your reflection when you flip open the phone.

Oh, yeah, right, you'd think. Drive the car. I knew there was something I was forgetting.

jlileks@startribune.com • 612-673-7858 More daily at www.startribune.com/buzz

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