This week's feel-good story

 A blue 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 van, untouched by flames, sits alone amid the ash of Los Angeles:

Volkswagen needs to purchase this from owner Preston Martin (who lived in the van for a year while in college) and put it on display in its museum.  That is one hardy testament to resilience.  Or else a fluke of nature, much like how a tornado will sometimes mow down everything in its path except for one solitary farm house which miraculously escapes unscathed.

However it happened, it's an amazing story and Epoch Times has an article all about it.

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Everything I need to know about fire safety I learned in the Boy Scouts

If only there were some real Eagle Scouts among Los Angeles's leadership.

There is a lot that I could say about the wildfires in Southern California right now.   I suppose first and foremost is that the situation might the the worst example yet of ignoring reality for the sake of "feelings".  The requisite water resources, personnel, and methods of delivery for all intents and purposes did not exist.  It had been eliminated in favor of progressive programs and policies.  Like f'rinstance a tiny fish that apparently is not endangered at all.

That alone qualifies the L.A. fires as being a man-bred horror straight out of an Ayn Rand novel.

The thing of it is, fire is not really all that complex a concept.  We learned much about fire in fourth and fifth grade at school, including what is required for fire to start and what to do if God forbid you or someone else catches fire.

I suppose that more than anything right now, watching what's happening around Los Angeles, is that I'm reminded of the Fire Safety merit badge in the Boy Scouts.  Fire Safety isn't required for Eagle Scout, but it's such a basic set of knowledge that the vast majority of scouts who stick with the program earn it and usually sooner than later.  I earned my Fire Safety badge at a "merit badge college" that our local district had every winter at Rockingham Community College.  It was a course that lasted for two hours and we learned quite a bit about fire and how to be cautious with it.  One of the things that came as a surprise to me - I was twelve at the time - was that sometimes firefighters and land management people purposefully set fire to the forest floor.  This is called a "controlled burn" and it is very useful in destroying useless scrub, rotted undergrowth and fetid material that really would be potential fuel for a serious forest fire.  Controlled burning gets rid of that, makes the forest cleaner, and has the added benefit of bringing nutrient back into the soil.

It's not all that hard to do.  I've seen it done before.  I know a lot of firefighters who have taken part in controlled burns.

I mention that because President-to-be Donald Trump and others have touched upon controlled burning.  It is absolutely something that California's government should have been doing for a long time already in preparing for the outbreak of wildfires.  This is a basic tool of wise land management and it is very foolish to not have been employing it.

Folks, fire really isn't that hard a notion to grasp.  When there's heat and air and a source of fuel, they can come together and start fire.  It's then a matter of taking one or more of those elements out of the equation.  A cool head (pun maybe horribly intended) will readily know what is the best way to do this in a particular situation.  Just as that same mind will recognize the potential for fire in an environment, and understand how to prevent it from breaking out at all.

Maybe California should hire some old-school scoutmasters and merit badge counselors to come in and teach basic fire safety to the officials of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas.  If an adolescent can grasp such things, there is no excuse for grown adults to not have that knowledge also.

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Meteorite(s?) smashing Russia this morning

CNN and Fox News are proving they're worse than useless this morning when it comes to breaking news! The "big story" in the U.S. this hour is still that damned Carnival boat that was crippled at sea for the past week.

Meanwhile our friends in Russia are having to deal with a real-life Michael Bay movie unfolding even now...

Check out these bits of footage that are coming in from the Urals, especially the vicinity of Chelyabinsk, where a few hours ago the area was struck by a barrage of meteorites:

There are reports as of this writing that at least 500 people have been injured, mostly from glass shattering because of sonic booms as the meteorite or meteorites exploded in mid-air. However a lot of fragments hit the ground (including crashing through a zinc factory). I'm not hearing of any fatalities yet. Let's pray that there are none.

However to the best of my knowledge, the Chelyabinsk event today has produced about 500% more injuries than all the wounds caused by meteorites of the past sixty years or so combined. The one that best comes to mind right now is one lady in the Fifties who was struck on the leg by a tiny meteor fragment that crashed through the roof of her house as she lay on her sofa watching television.

Twitter is going nuts at the moment with even more footage and tons of photos that witnesses took of the meteor. This is not going to be a situation as difficult to document as the Tunguska event was.

Now hearing that authorities are considering the possibility that more strikes may be expected.

What a week this has been. First Benedict XVI announces his retirement, now this. I'm doubly-cursed to be a fanatic about both history and science (especially astronomy). What's that they say: "No rest for the wicked".

Seriously though, this is gonna be something to watch over the next few days. No doubt even more footage and pics are gonna be making their way onto the Intertubes.

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Earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, major flooding, mass animal die-offs, weird atmospheric phenomena, hurricane season starting up...

Perhaps it is just me, but real life lately is way, way too much resembling the prologue of the 1980 movie Flash Gordon...

"FLASH! AHHH-AAAAAAAHHH...!!"

Well, at least we've been spared the hot hail so far.

I have a confession to make: Flash Gordon is on my short list of all-time favorite "guilty pleasure" movies. It's a film so exorbitantly bad that it's insanely good! But I doubt that Dino De Laurentiis ever intended this to be a "serious" movie anyway. It's just good clean tongue-in-cheek camp, made even more awesome with that classic soundtrack by Queen! I've also read that Max von Sydow considers this to be one of his favorite movies that he's worked on, because of all the outrageous costumes that he got to wear as Emperor Ming the Merciless.

(And c'mon, Sydow's Ming is one of the greatest film villains in the history of anything. You know it's true :-)

Here's hoping that all the stuff going on lately is just bad coincidence. I'd hate to think that Ming really is out there on Planet Mongo, waiting to see if anybody is noticing his handiwork :-P

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Thoughts and prayers going out across the South

This past week, the southeastern United States has been thrashed in the worst way.

Sanford, here in my home state of North Carolina, is still recovering from a horrific tornado that went through there this past weekend. And since Tuesday communities from Mississippi and Arkansas all the way east to Virginia have been hit by even worse storms. At this hour the death toll is approaching 300, in what is being called the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes the south has ever seen. We were under tornado watch for most of yesterday and early this morning but, doesn't look like any touched down.

For those who are hurting this day, our thoughts and prayers go out to you.

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To our friends in Nashville: You are in our prayers!

Nashville, Tennessee is currently the biggest disaster area in the entire country: never mind the oil spill in the Gulf and the attempted car bombing in Times Square. But somehow, most people in America other than those in the immediate area seem completely oblivious about it.

Nashville native Patten Fuqua addresses the unawareness to his city's plight - along with bold optimism - in a great piece at Section 303...

If you live outside of Nashville, you may not be aware, but our city was hit by a 500-year flood over the last few days. The national news coverage gave us 15 minutes, but went back to focusing on a failed car bomb and an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While both are clearly important stories, was that any reason to ignore our story? It may not be as terror-sexy as a failed car bomb or as eco-sexy as an oil spill, but that’s no reason to be ignored.

The Cumberland River crested at its highest level in over 80 years. Nashville had its highest rainfall totals since records began. People drowned. Billions of dollars in damage occurred. It is the single largest disaster to hit Middle Tennessee since the Civil War. And yet…no one knows about it.

Does it really matter? Eventually, it will…as I mentioned, there are billions of dollars in damage. It seems bizarre that no one seems to be aware that we just experienced what is quite probably the costliest non-hurricane disaster in American history. The funds to rebuild will have to come from somewhere, which is why people need to know. It’s hard to believe that we will receive much relief if there isn’t a perception that we need it.

But let’s look at the other side of the coin for a moment. A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are. Think about that for just a second. Did you hear about looting? Did you hear about crime sprees? No…you didn’t. You heard about people pulling their neighbors off of rooftops. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. No…we didn’t loot. Our biggest warning was, “Don’t play in the floodwater.” When you think about it…that speaks a lot for our city. A large portion of why we were being ignored was that we weren’t doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We were handling it on our own.

(snip)

Parts of Nashville that could never even conceivably be underwater were underwater. Some of them still are. Opry Mills and the Opryland Hotel are, for all intents and purposes, destroyed. People died sitting in standstill traffic on the Interstate. We saw boats going down West End. And, of course, we all saw the surreal image of the portable building from Lighthouse Christian floating into traffic and being destroyed when cars were knocked into it. I’m still having trouble comprehending all of it.

And yet…life will go on. We’ll go back to work, to school, to our lives…and we’ll carry on. In a little over a month, I’ll be on this website talking about the draft. In October, we’ll be discussing the new Predators’ season with nary a thought of these past few days. But in a way, they changed everyone in this town. We now know that that it can happen to us…but also know that we can handle it.

Because we are Nashville.

I was in Nashville a few years ago with Dad. We had a great time there (I went to try out for Jeopardy!, and so help me I like to think I'm knowledgeable about many things but fourteenth-century French opera is not one of them :-). A lot of the places that Fuqua mentions in this article, we visited. Opry Mills is where Opryland used to be. It's now a mall that pays homage to Nashville's legacy of country music.

I'm having a very hard time picturing the place flooded and destroyed.

To the people of Nashville: you've a lot more friends out here than y'all can imagine. And you are definitely being held up in our thoughts and prayers as you have to go through this.

And I for one have no doubt that you will bounce back from this. Because, like the article says: you are Nashville.

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