Sorry about the radio silence for the past few days. I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, and kicking around the Cleveland area.
Our flight got in around 7 PM last night, and it was 10 PM by the time I got home. I’m trying to get caught up, and hope to have more substantial reports and some photos up over the weekend.
In the meantime, have some music.
(Man, wasn’t Learning to Crawl a great album? “Back On the Chain Gang”, “My City Was Gone”, “Middle of the Road”…)
I’m waiting until I get back to edit and post photos. (As a side note, geotagging photos is a PITA on Ubuntu, compared to Apple’s iPhoto.)
We (that is, my mother, aunt, uncle, and I) were trying to get a good view of the tall ships at the Port of Cleveland. Which we couldn’t do yesterday, because the good views required $10 a car for parking plus $14 a person. However, my mother and I went back downtown today and took some photos.
I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters recently. There was the West incident, and then the Houston Fire Department lost four people fighting a fire in a crack motel. Then there was Arizona. And it isn’t clear to me if any firefighters were lost in Quebec.
We stumbled across this yesterday while we were out, and I wanted to go back and photograph it. I’m happy with the way this photo came out.
Cleveland Fallen Firefighters Memorial, Cleveland, Ohio.
Interesting thing about this memorial: it was designed by Luis Jiménez, who also started building the sculpture. Mr. Jiménez was a popular and well-regarded sculptor. While he was working on the Firefighters Memorial, he was also working on the “Blue Mustang” sculpture for the Denver International Airport. In the process of building that sculpture, part of it fell and fatally injured Mr. Jiménez, and the memorial was completed by other people.
Winking Lizard, Macedonia, Ohio.
Blogging will be airplane and rental car bound until the late afternoon.
At least the Motel 6 has free wifi.
Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor are serving time for the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Negron. Ms. Negron was 16 years old when she was murdered.
The main witness against the two men was a crack addicted prostitute who was “forcibly detained by the authorities in a hotel until she testified”.
Is this our old friend Louis Scarcella? Is the Brooklyn DA reinvestigating this case?
No. And no.
One. Out of 750. And three wrongful convictions.
(Explained.)
This sucks. I’ve wanted a good telescope for much of my life, even though I find it hard to use one with glasses and I really am not able to stay up late in order to do observational astronomy. Still, I’m sad to see the market shrinking, even though the technology gets better and better.
Verizon has a great idea for Fire Island. As you might have guessed, the island got the crap beat out of it by Sandy, and the phone system was devastated.
Sounds great, right?
Not mentioned in the article: Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) over copper works when the power is out. Will Verizon’s wireless system? The cell towers may have battery backup or generators, but do the home receivers?
There’s an interesting article (tied to the Arizona tragedy) in today’s LAT, about the problems of investigating these incidents.
Some of them are probably obvious: these things generally happen in remote areas, and fire destroys a lot of evidence. But the main thrust of the LAT article is that a deep distrust has developed between firefighters and investigators since 2001. That year, four firefighters died in the Thirty Mile fire. The Forest Service did an investigation, and determined that there were a lot of issues with the way the fire was fought; from my reading, some of those issues were just bad luck and equipment failures, but there were also some procedural issues:
What happened next is that one of the crew bosses was charged with manslaughter, based on that report. (The boss pled guilty to “making false statements” and served 90 days on work release.)
Safety procedures exist for reasons. And it is hard to say that people shouldn’t be held accountable. On the other hand, there’s also a very strong “do whatever it takes to fight the fire” attitude among firefighters, even if that means sometimes disregarding rest and safety rules. (And what are you going to do if it is rest time, there’s no relief, and the fire is still burning out of control? “Sorry, can’t fight that fire. On my coffee break.”) The other thing to realize is that wildfires are very volatile and chaotic situations; things can change literally in seconds. Is it fair or right to pass judgements in hindsight on the people who were there on the ground fighting the fire?
Obit watch: noted computer scientist and inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart. LAT. NYT.
You, too, can have a Tony award. If you’re a “major investor” in a Tony-winning production. And you have $2,500.
I’m going through a little bit of personal agita right now. The next few days leading up to, and during, the holiday, are shaping up to be kind of busy. Mostly the fun kind of busy (some of us are trying to plan a range trip; plus, fireworks), but with some work involved.
This coming Saturday, I will be flying out to Cleveland. My maternal grandmother passed away on Saturday, and her funeral is scheduled for a week from today. I plan to take a laptop with me and blog as much as I can from the road, but be prepared for a bit of a slowdown.
(I know there’s been a bit of a slowdown already. Mostly, that’s because there hasn’t been a lot going on that I’ve found worthy of blogging. I think we’re into the summer slowdown season; things are so hot that everyone is acting like giant lizards, conserving energy as much as they possibly can. Which is great for keeping cool, but not so great for providing blog fodder.)
(Is it just me, or is Houston experiencing a rash of motel fires?)
They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.
–Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
(Why.)
