Cali Fires

Maybe I'm a closet pyro, but I am fascinated by wildfires and wilderness firefighting of late. Check out this awesome google mashup by the San Diego Union-Trib.

Real Word Sydney...looking interesting

So I just finished watching the real world sydney premiere, it was pretty interesting. First, the girls:

KellyAnne is the smoking hot brunette is is definitely a little crazy
Then there's a blonde who's already buddy-buddy with KellyAnne, her name's Trisha and is really a nice, classic valley girl air-headed blonde stereotype....bravo mtv.
There's one other blonde, Shauvon, she was pretty amusingly narcissistic, and long-winded which makes for great idiot quotes.
Then there's Parisa, who seems like the tomboy who revels in pissing off the valley girls, a perfect instigator for all sorts of bitchiness, cattiness, and hilariously petty feuds.

guys:

First, Cohutta, or something, which is a bizarre name. He is hard-core southern, from like deeeeep Miss. A unique character for the real world, I think he might join parisa to start some fun.
There's a shaved headed guy, Isaac, who was hard to read, other than he was the silent type with a crazy eye who's going to have to be placated every once and a while.
Lastly is a dude with the classic long-term gf, Dunbar. I cant tell it he's a tool yet, or if he's going to be the detached player-type who stirs things up.

all in all, looks like an excellent season to look forward too.

Catching up with ridiculous video

I posted on the china airlines crash last week here. I apparently missed some absolutely ridiculous video about it though...check it out, can you believe everyone on the plane survived!!! The image of the people sliding down that stupid chute is burnt in my retinas; I will never, ever, take the stewardess briefing lightly again (ok, maybe that's hyperbole, but I'll try not to). Meanwhile, some asshole customers are actually complaining that the flight crew gave unclear instructions...or something. Take a look at this video, then realize that ALL 157 PEOPLE ABOARD SURVIVED. HOW ON EARTH COULD THE FLIGHT CREW HAVE DONE BETTER? Perhaps if the stewardesses had served beverages after passengers deplaned off the chut?

Also interesting is that The Consumerist is reporting that it may have been caused by a loose bolt slamming into the gas tank.

Hmmmm, so maybe the roads aren't falling apart after all?

Very interesting commentary here, about the state of the US infrastructure. As usual, it appears the initial panic over the bridge collapse in Minnesota was overblown, underlined by this gem:

as far back as April 1982, The Reader's Digest had an article entitled "Cures for America's Dying Highways". This concern led to a series of Federal acts over the subsequent 20 years that tried to help address safety and efficiency issues by providing additional funding for maintenance of roads and bridges

So its been a 'crisis' for a while. Well if you step back and think about the number of times you read a newspaper article about someone killed by faulty infrastructure, versus the number of times you read about someone killed by a drunk driver, head-on collision, or encounter with a lightpole, you quickly realize this is yet another societal overreaction. I think its probably because we are simply much more concerned when something we trust, something where its reliability underpins our everyday safety fails. While its nice for these stuffy old elitists to think rationally about issues such as highway safety, the fact remains that the average person knows bad drivers are a risk, and goes about his every day business knowing that fact. His world is deeply rocked, however, when the basic foundations of his everyday life (the trust he places in banal infrastructure), is shaken by events such as the bridge collapse.