Iowa Man has been training with the Bingen Volunteer Fire Department. There was a forest fire not far from Bingen this summer. If a forest fire ever reached the town, the whole town would go up in smoke. Hence, training with the VFD.
Pumper Controls
Stream
Spray
Wedge-It
Wedge-It is a door stop for firefighters. I guess it is easier to block a door open than to rip it off its hinges, and this thing can be used six ways from Sunday to accomplish that. Amazon sells them.
I originally wrote this a couple of months ago. I suppose I intended to add to it, but I never did. Anyway, I'm cleaning out my drafts folder and this one is good enough so up it goes.
For the last week (at least), Los Angeles has been on fire. Is it still on fire? Maybe, I haven't heard anyone saying the fire is out. No matter. Obviously, California did this to itself. Whether it was politicians or the government or the courts, it doesn't matter. Somebody should have been paying attention and raised a stink, and I'm sure that some people were doing just that. But not enough people listened, and the political clout never developed far enough to do anything about the risk of fire, and so it rained fire.
You know another thing that California is know for? Green energy. Green energy often means batteries, and those batteries are often lithium-ion, and when a lithium-ion battery catches fire it can be the very devil to put out. So if it was raining fire, now it's pouring.
While car batteries are the biggest, they are used in most every electronic do-dad we have:
Lithium-ion batteries are used in cellphones, tablets, laptops, wireless headphones, electric cars, and solar panel storage. - Jill McLaughlin at The Epoch Times
I didn't find any science fiction that appealed to me while I was at Powell's on Saturday, so I went across the aisle to the Mystery & Thriller section where I found three books by MacDonald:
I picked up all three. I've heard of Ross and John D. before, but Philip is new to me. We shall see how they pan out. No, they are not related. Ross is a pen name.
I started reading The Underground Man and like many of Ross MacDonald's books, is a story about Lew Archer, a private investigator in Los Angeles. And guess what's happening? The city is on fire. Huh.
Seems like there have been an awful lot of fires at food processing plants lately. I can't tell if there really has been a significant increase in the number of incidents or whether our communications channels have improved so much that we are hearing about them more often. Or maybe conspiracy theories sell, so more people are writing reports about these kind of incidents.
I suspect that food processing, like grocery stores, run on very thin margins, so some operators might be inclined to skimp on safety items like fire prevention. I mean, nobody's going to care very much if a bunch of animals get killed, they were all going to be killed anyway.
But this dairy farm fire that Bayou Renaissance Man reports on is pretty phenomenal: 18,000 dairy cattle killed in a barn fire. How can you get that many cattle in one barn? It must be pretty big barn. It is. Using Google Maps distance measuring feature I find that the barn is 800 feet by 2,400 feet. This thing is half a mile long and covers 44 acres.
What's even weirder (from my point of view) is that it is all by its lonesome in the midst of a huge expanse of agricultural fields. Dimmitt, Texas must be a very strange place.
18,000 cattle. Butchered you could get about 500 pounds of meat from each animal. At a half pound of meat per day, that would be enough to feed everyone in Dimmitt for a dozen years. Or enough to make 36 million quarter pounders.
The Bonfire of Destiny (Le Bazar de la Charité) - Trailer
FanCat
The show starts with a horrendous fire at a charity bazaar. It's 1897 and no one has given a thought to fire prevention. The place is full of arts and crafts and once a fire gets started the whole thing quickly erupts in flames. What makes it a disaster is that there is only one door, it's a revolving door and about halfway through the panic stricken exodus it gets jammed. Over one hundred women die, but no men.
Eventually the firemen show up but it's a serious case of too little, too late, and when it looks like the building might collapse, they pull back out of harms way. Alice, a young woman from a wealthy family, is one of those trapped inside the building. Victor, an anarchist and pick-pocket, has been hanging around outside looking for some easy pickings. When the firemen pull back, he spies a grate in the side of the building and, using a sledge hammer, breaks a hole in the wall, goes inside and pulls several people, including Alice, to safety.
Now the story gets a little crazy. Odette, friend of Alice's and daughter of a rich old woman, dies in the fire. When her mom visits the hospital where the survivors are being treated, she comes across Rose who she mistakenly thinks is her daughter. She continues her search and finally finds Odette's body in the morgue. Her corpse is badly burned, the only way she is able to identify her is by the rings she is wearing. She exchanges those rings for a bracelet she took from Rose in the hospital. Now she takes Rose home and plans to have her play the part of her daughter and so foil some no-good-nik from absconding with the family fortune.
Adrienne, wife of a powerful ogre leaves the bazaar early and so manages to escape the fire. She quickly realizes that this is her chance to get away from her husband by faking her death. The conservative politicians, including Marc-Antoine, Adrienne's husband, want to blame the fire on a bomb planted by anarchists to help them win the upcoming election. They pick Victor to be their fall guy.
Alice is engaged to Julien, but during the panic inside the building, Julien abandons Alice and in a panic pushes another woman into the fire. Alice is repulsed by Julien's behavior, but then her father reveals that he has made some bad investments and is facing financial ruin unless she marries Julien. Rose was Alice's maid and is engaged/married to Alice's father's coachman, Jean. Is this a tangled web or what?
Handwaving Freakoutery is not happy with the way the college students have been saddled with debt. He blames all of us for the disaster that has befallen the zillions who got loans to go to college. He's mostly right.
Universities also help maintain Western Civilization, teaching things like art, literature and history, things that are important if you want to maintain your civilization. But those topics are more of a hobby and don't necessarily tie into making a living, which is what the vast majority of college students are interested in, or will be, as soon as their funding runs out.
Is our economy functioning well? It is, mostly. There is a large, and possibly growing, underclass, and things may not be going so well for them. 'A rising tide lifts all boats' is a phrase I have heard on occasion, but it only really helps those who have boats. What we really need is a boat shop that is producing 'rowboats' for everyone, where a 'rowboat' is something that allows you to float on the rising tide of inflation. Problem is, all the talent and all the investment is being directed at building ocean liners and space ships and fancy stuff, fancy stuff that promises to bring ever greater rewards. Building rowboats for the poor is not such an attractive business proposition.
The Model T Ford was such a rowboat, as were mobile homes. Now we have smartphones which almost everyone has and will surely give you a leg up on surviving in this world.
So we are seeing colossal blunders all around us, but we are also seeing phenomenal successes. We have promoters promoting the most ridiculous nonsense, but since the the world seems to be awash with a zillion times as much money as sense, they are finding followers, followers who are contributing / investing in whatever the promoter is promoting. Cowabunga.
P.S. Mizzou, the University of Missouri alumni magazine has a fine story about the fire that destroyed their Academic Hall in 1892 (picture at top). Steam, electric and gas lighting and broken ax handles all play a part.
WEBstaurant shows you How to Deep Fry a Turkey. Note he's doing this outside, away from any buildings or children. Presumably the National Guard has blocked off his street.
The first time I saw one of these turkey fryers I thought 'that looks like a very bad idea', but this is America and we Americans hate waiting.
Homer wants it now.
So I can't stop you from frying your turkey, and I can't stop you from drinking beer while you are doing it. Just try not to give me any reason to doubt your competence.
Remains of semi-tractor fire on the Westbound Sunset Highway near Murray Road in Beaverton, Oregon. Nobody hurt.
It took dutiful daughter two hours to get home from work today, a drive that normally takes her half an hour. We found this pic when we went looking for a news report on the cause of the problem. I've seen the remains of vehicle fires before, but not one like this. Comes from making the cab out of fiberglass I imagine. Via TVF & R.
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