Happy 6/6/6!

More on 666 here and here.

Some people are praying that the world won’t end today. Others are just hoping they don’t give birth to the Antichrist. Still others are getting married, while at least one blogger wants to have sex sex sex. More topical blog posts here; more 06/06/06 happenings are described here.

In a related story, apparently The Omen kinda sucks.

Tim Eyeman, a charlatan and opportunist who has used and abused the initiative process here in Washington, is at it again, this time working to gather enough signatures to put a measure on the November ballot to repeal a recent Washington law adding sexual preference to anti-discrimination laws.

Fortunately for opponents of Eyeman and of his most recent initiative/referendum efforts (he’s going for a double push on this one), he is a bit short of the needed signatures, 112,000, before tomorrow afternoon. In an effort to drum up support, he appeared at a press conference today dressed up as Darth Vader. Um…ok Tim. He claims he is just embracing the politicians’ characterization of him. Good idea, embrace the image of an evil dictator who was only redeemed on his death bed. That’ll show ‘em, Timmy boy.

As I mentioned earlier, tomorrow afternoon will bring about a fiery, apocalyptic 6/6/06 battle of traditional archrivals: Newington vs. Southington, in the boys volleyball state semifinals. This is, I believe, the first time Newington has played Southington in a state tournament game since the softball quarterfinals in 1999 (my senior year), and it’s the deepest into a state tournament that the two schools have met since the girls basketball state title game in 1993 (before my time).

I say “traditional archrivals,” but I’m referring to the schools generally, not these particular teams; I have no idea whether the Indians and the Blue Knights have ever really been rivals in volleyball particularly. (I was never a big boys volleyball fan.) Moreover, the NHS-SHS rivalry has definitely lessened in recent years, thanks to the realignment of the CCC, which moved Southington to the CCC North while keeping Newington in the CCC South. If you ask a current Newington student who their “archrival” is, they very well might not say “Southington.”

But for me, as a proud member of the NHS Class of ‘99 who still “can’t hide that Newington pride,” it will always, always be Southington.

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Last night’s “lost episode” of It Could Happen Tomorrow got me thinking about BrendanLoy.com’s “lost post” from the wee hours of Tuesday morning after Katrina made landfall. It’s a post in which I discussed how the hurricane had “almost” been a calamity for the whole city of New Orleans. I wrote it, and published it, at a time when media reports were still suggesting, erroneously, that most of the city (the Ninth Ward excepted) had “dodged a bullet.” My basic message was: the Big Easy barely escaped a citywide calamity this time, but they’d better not get complacent, because next time, they might not be so lucky.

But of course, they weren’t lucky — at least, not nearly as “lucky” as we then believed. It’s true, as I’ve pointed out countless times, that Katrina wasn’t the worst-case scenario, but it was far, far worse that I believed when I wrote the “lost post.” Unbeknownst to me, even as I was writing about how someday a hurricane would flood almost the entire city, levee damage caused by Katrina was, at that very moment, allowing in torrents of water that were flooding almost the entire city.

It wasn’t long after publishing the post that I found out how wrong I was. Indeed, the post only appeared on the homepage for a few minutes before it became clear that, if not the worst-case scenario, a very, very bad scenario was happening in the Big Easy. And that’s why I decided to remove it — turning it into the “lost post.”

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From the "and you think your job is bad" files… how would you like to lay down tracks for the new Phoenix Light Rail in 110-degree heat? Yeah, me neither.

There's a smallish-looking fire around Thomas and 2nd Ave. Or rather, there was a fire — since I took this picture, it looks like they've put it out. But here you can (sorta) see white smoke where the fire was occurring, and grayish smoke blowing away to the east (right).

Just saying, this guy deserves serious consideration.

My website will be briefly offline tonight, around 9:30 PM MST/PDT (12:30 AM EDT), so that WestHost can install an additional 512 MB of RAM on my dedicated server (for reasons previously discussed here and here). The upgrade will probably take around 20 minutes. I hope y’all can survive for that long without an Irish Trojan fix. :)

(Shamelessly stolen from engadget)

Damn hilarious. :)

…for 06-06-06?

They’re ready in Hell!

Personally, I don’t understand why everyone is so excited about the tenth anniversary of the NHS fires of 1996. I mean, yeah, el dia del fuego was very memorable for those of us who were there, but I never thought its anniversary would be an event of worldwide significance… :)

P.S. Speaking of NHS, the baseball team lost. :( So it’s up to the boys volleyball team to carry the flame for Newington, which they will attempt to do in a fiery, apocalyptic 6/6/06 battle of archrivals: Newington vs. Southington in the state semifinals.

P.P.S. Come to think of it… I’m not sure how many regular readers I have in the town of Newington — let alone readers who are current NHS students — but I figure it’s worth a shot: if anyone is planning on attending the Newington-Southington game tomorrow (4:00 PM at Maloney High School in Meriden), and would be interested in taking pictures and/or filing live cell-phone audio reports for the blog, please shoot me an e-mail at tips[at]brendanloy.com!! I would definitely love to have a correspondent at that game!

Americans are greedy, imperialistic bastards, and the only reason we don’t like Hugo Chavez — who, c’mon, is really a swell guy — is because he’s a “stubby foreigner pretending to have a claim to the resources under his people’s feet.” Or so says Marshall, a guestblogger on Casey’s blog.

Let the flame war begin… muahahaha…

P.S. Oh, I almost forgot, we’re all a bunch of dumb hicks, too.

The Toronto Star has much more detail on the unraveling of the Canadian Islamists’ terrorist plot.

Meanwhile, Toronto’s police chief is pleading for calm after bigoted idiots smashed windows at a city mosque.

So says this troubling New York Times report:

In the wake of a cluster of avian flu cases that killed seven members of a rural Indonesian family, it appears likely that there have been many more human-to-human infections than the authorities have previously acknowledged.

The numbers are still relatively small, and they do not mean that the virus has mutated to pass easily between people — a change that could touch off a worldwide epidemic. All the clusters of cases have been among relatives or in nurses who were in long, close contact with patients.

But the clusters — in Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iraq and Vietnam — paint a grimmer picture of the virus’s potential to pass from human to human than is normally described by public health officials, who usually say such cases are “rare.”

Watching “The Lost Episode” on The Weather Channel, I am so freakin’ sick of people saying that the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina was “unimaginable” or “unthinkable.” That is factually false, and this very episode proves it!! Not only was Katrina imaginable, it was imagined — in fact, storms FAR WORSE were imagined — by the producers of “It Could Happen Tomorrow,” by disaster planners and meteorologists across the country, by this very blogger, and by countless others. It is an insulting and dangerous lie to call it “unimaginable.” It does violence to the English language and to the very concept of truth. It excuses the inexcusable, failing to hold accountable those who screwed up (and thus failing to adequately encourage their counterparts in other vulnerable cities to do what’s necessary). And most importantly, it doesn’t remind people how important it is to take experts seriously when they talk about worst-case scenarios. Unimaginable? Unthinkable? Give me a freakin’ break!!

UPDATE: Overall, the “Lost Episode” was good. But I thought it struck a few wrong notes and missed some opportunities to make certain important points. In particular:

• Why wasn’t there more specific discussion of how much worse Katrina could have been, and what exactly the differences would have been between Katrina’s effects and the effects of the worst-case storm that Katrina almost was? Granted, Jim Cantore did mention that Katrina hit as a Category 3, not a Cat. 4 or 5, and that New Orleans didn’t get the worst of even Cat. 3 Katrina. But there was little detailed discussion of how much higher the water could potentially have risen, and what the consequences would have been, if Katrina had not weakened at the last minue, or if she had taken an oh-so-slightly different path. Those details are extremely relevant to the issue of what, in the lingo of the series, “could happen tomorrow.” Yet, far from emphasizing this point, the show seemed to downplay it at times. For every statement like Jeff Morrow’s observation that a Category Five would be “ten times worse” than Katrina, there were several statements like “Katrina has set the bar for just how bad a storm could be.” No, you fools, Katrina wasn’t anywhere near that “bar”! I really feel this is a point that people need to have drilled into them, lest the “I survived Katrina, so I can survive anything” mentality take hold.

• Along those same lines, a particlarly unfortunate missed opportunity was the discussion of how Ninth Ward resident Idris Lewis took shelter on his roof and survived the storm. It would have been very effective, and true, if the show had specifically pointed out that in a Category 4 or 5 direct hit — which Katrina very nearly was, and as late as Sunday night, no one had the right to assume she wouldn’t be — Mr. Lewis’s roof would have been underwater, along with virtually all the other roofs in the Ninth Ward and many other places in the city. A clip from the original “lost episode” mentioned in passing that “anybody who is below a third story is going to drown,” but they never elaborated on this point, or made it specific to the individuals in the show. It would have been a powerful piece of television to point out that if Katrina had lived up to her true “worst-case” potential, Mr. Lewis almost certainly would have died, along with most of the tens of thousands of others who were rescued by helicopter and boat in the days after landfall. In other words, there’s a good reason New Orleans has those 10 to 15 thousand body bags on hand at all times, and it isn’t alarmism. It’s the reality of what really could “happen tomorrow.” And people need to realize it, in no uncertain terms.

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Tropical Depression 2-E in the Pacific is causing heavy, flooding rains in Acapulco.

Meanwhile, here’s another blog post about The Weather Channel’s “Lost Episode” of It Could Happen Tomorrow about Hurricane Katrina, which airs in 20 minutes.

The post also links to this article asking whether people in various storm-susceptible cities are prepared for the worst. The answer, of course, is no. Excerpt:

Despite gales of pre-season publicity, [NHC director Max] Mayfield says many people along the USA’s hurricane coasts are not poised for the next tropical storm, let alone for a monster like 2005’s Katrina. The Census Bureau says more than 34.6 million people live in the most at-risk coastal zones, from the Carolinas to Texas. That’s more than triple the population there in 1950.

Mayfield, who has barnstormed hurricane country for weeks to preach the gospel of readiness, sees trouble in a recent poll of coastal residents in 12 Atlantic and Gulf states. The survey of 1,100 people by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research found that more than half don’t feel vulnerable to hurricanes, and three in five have no family disaster plan.

The poll, released in mid-May by the National Hurricane Survival Initiative, a public-private partnership that includes the hurricane center, also found that more than two-thirds of the respondents have no hurricane survival kit. And half erroneously believe that masking tape makes windows shatterproof in a storm. Thirteen percent say they wouldn’t evacuate, even if ordered to leave.

“The folks there in Mississippi and Louisiana who made a conscious decision not to evacuate (in Katrina) were not just tempting fate, they were playing Russian roulette,” Mayfield says.

He says he was heartened by the unprecedented turnout of media for the center’s five-stop “hurricane awareness” tour this spring along the Gulf Coast. But news coverage “is all for nothing if we can’t translate that into individuals taking personal responsibility and developing their own hurricane plan.”

Indeed.

Mayfield, like Dr. Jeff Masters, also seems not to agree with the AccuWeather hair-on-fire predictions about the Northeast: “Right now no one knows exactly what areas of the coast, or which states or locations. Could it be Florida again? Maybe. How about New England or New York City? That’s possible. … The bottom line is that all coastal states from Texas to Maine are vulnerable.”

The article does talk about the NYC nightmare scenario, which is indeed a very serious thing:

Emergency managers in New York City, which would have to evacuate up to 2.5 million people in a major hurricane, say Katrina caught people’s attention. “New Yorkers who normally are complacent are starting to take hurricanes seriously,” says Jarrod Bernstein of the Office of Emergency Management. It now features hurricane advice prominently on its website.

“Take Rockaway peninsula,” Bernstein says, referring to the city neighborhood most exposed to an Atlantic hurricane. “We go out there every year to talk about hurricanes, and they’re like, ‘No way we’re leaving.’ This year it’s, ‘You know what? If the man says it’s time to go, we’re going to go.’ “

That’s a great attitude, but unfortunately, it will almost certainly fade after a few years. It always does.