Trav found mention of how incredibly dangerous Action Park was.
Man, I loved that place. I worked there for 3 weeks at the Alpine Slide. I’ve got a couple cute stories about it. My fondest memory is of going to a party at the home of one of my supervisors. There was drinking so I asked my host if I could stay the night so that I might drink safely. The party was going pretty well. Then at about 2 am, the host told me in my stupor that the party was over and I had to go home. I very clearly remember arguing with him, “But I’m drunk, I can’t drive… But you said I could spend the night…” He argued the counter-case, that I had to get out because the party was over.
I drove 1/4 mile to a spot on the road where I could pull over. I spent the next hour and a half walking around, doing jumping jacks and push-ups in a dirt pull-out on the side of a rural-residential road near Vernon NJ. Nice host, eh? I finally felt well enough to drive and proceeded home.
About 2/3 mile from the north entrance of Smoke Rise on 23 South, there is a short straight-away. I was going a steady 50 mph. My window was open just a bit to let in fresh air, the car’s heat was turned on comfortably, the pop music was playing softly on the radio. At that point, I fell asleep. I held the wheel straight while the road curved gently to the left. I opened my eyes with a start, seeing a green mile-marker sign at an odd angle leaning toward me about 4 feet in front of my face. I saw the tips of a tree branch coming at me from the right so I swerved to the left. One frame later, the green sign was out of my field of view. I made it the 5 minutes to home with 1 quart of adrenaline in my blood. Even with that, I was astounded that I almost fall asleep on the road again.
The next day, I took a look at the car in the driveway. It was a white LeBaron. There were a few green scratches on the hood and no other damage. I drove out to the spot and was amazed. I found the mile marker post and the sign a hundred feet down the road. I put the sign in my trunk. I followed my tire tracks off the road, into the dirt, over the sign post and then curving sharply to the left where I woke up. What gave me terrible shivers was how incredibly close my tire tracks were to the telephone pole. I actually couldn’t believe that the tire tracks could be so close without some side-damage to the car, or worse. The track came 1 inch away from the pole; the tires on the car are set in at least 2 inches from the outside contours of the bumper and body. I don’t know why it didn’t catch, ripping off a bumper or scraping the whole side of the car. And I thought how lucky I was that I hadn’t been 1 more inch to the right; the bumpers would have been torn off. Or if I had been 1 more foot to the right. I was wearing a seat belt but that’s no guarantee that I’d be here writing this story.
Well, maybe my memory of Action Park isn’t so fond.
The move to turn the clocks forward by an hour on March 11 rather than the usual early April date was mandated by the U.S. government as an energy-saving effort. But other than forcing millions of drowsy American workers and school children into the dark, wintry weather three weeks early, the move appears to have had little impact on power usage. “We haven’t seen any measurable impact,” said Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co., one of the nation’s largest power companies, echoing comments from several large utilities.
The thought of politicians jumping up and down yelling “We’ve got to -do- something, gentlemen” reminds me of an exchange from Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles:
Governor William J. Le Petomane: HOLY UNDERWEAR! People murdered? Innocent women and children blown to bits? We must do something to protect our phoney-baloney jobs people. Harumph! Harumph! All of the governor’s lackeys but one chant along with him: Harumph! Harumph! Governor: I didn’t get a harumph out of that guy. Another lackey: Give the governer a harumph! Lackey: Harumph! Governor: You watch your ass.
I’m sure you noticed that there’s now some ads on my site. I’ve been playing with them since May 15th or so. Here’s where I’ve come to…
I put one ad at the bottom of each article page in (what I hope is) a relatively unobtrusive spot with unobtrusive colors. Very popular pages that I don’t care too much about (like this) get a few more ads sprinkled in them.
Google Adsense says that my blog site gets about 500 ad impressions per day. WordPress stats agrees with that but Analog stats says I’m getting more like 2,000 page views/day in my blog folders… hmm. Maybe it’s that Analog is counting spam bots and web crawlers. On the ads, Google says I have a clickthrough rate of about 0.5%. The site makes $0.50/day…. about $180/year. So the site pays for itself and buys me a nice dinner every few months. You might be able to extrapolate your potential earnings from these numbers.
Seen on the back of a forklift at the Shipyard while I helped clean it out a few weeks ago.
DANGER! LAWYER OPPORTUNITY ZONE
Failure to have perfectly adequate warnings that anticipate every possible hazardous situation, no matter how remote, will result in litigation by hordes of lawyers who will make even the most innocent thing appear to be malicious willful intent by your company to cause a great harm to their client, and will leave you penniless and broken after wasting immense amounts of your time.
Jimmy Kimmel went to Maker Faire. He gave us a nice interview though all that made it to screen were a few short clips. It’s cool to note that our fire acted as endcaps to the bit. His story starts and ends with FLG fire.
I got about 4 frames on TV. At 30 frames/second, that’s 0.166 seconds of fame.
I overheard this on a mailing list I belong to. Much redacted to protect the innocent, and the guilty. The topic was, “how to keep people from tagging art work”.
Tagging will happen.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO we worked around the clock and through sand storms to finish “that stupid [redacted].” Late one evening [person] walked up behind a very large dude tagging the freshly stained [art]. The tagger was sporting two large and long dreadlocks right out of the top of his head. Suddenly his hair style changed to a uni-dread as [person] grabbed him by the head and threw him to the ground effectively scalping the guy.
As a warning to the rest of the taggers, [person] tied the scalped dread to his [object] and [left] it hanging there for the rest of the event.
Take what you will from this, everything has consequences.
Last year I helped to build The Serpent Mother with the Flaming Lotus Girls. I welded and ground a lot of stainless steel sheet. Here is a safety guide I created for safely working with stainless steel.
