Hence and thither

Stayin' Alive

There is a very literally vital post over at Making Light, one that could mean life or death for you. You may not know--I certainly didn't--that all Emergency Medical Team personnel are instructed that when they are called out to a home where the victim in unable to answer questions, they are to search out an information package called a Vial of Life (where "Life" doubles as an acronym for Lifesaving Information For Emergencies).

And where are they to look for such a thing, considering that seconds may count? Believe it or not, in your refrigerator. Please go to the linked source and read the whole post--it's for November 20, 2007, titled Vial of Life, as posted by Jim Macdonald at 12:07 PM. I repeat: it could save your life.


Would you believe this close?

How much difference is there between 5 and a half feet and a bare half a foot? Oh, about 5 feet--or, looked at another way, a factor of 11. Apparently a factor of 11 is literally close enough for government work, even when lives depend on it.

As CNN has published, the Army Corps of Engineers, already famed for their expertise in flood control, has further burnished their credentials by reporting that their new package of flood-control measures in New Orleans would reduce flooding in many areas by about 5.5 feet--except that in a report released November 7, tucked away deep in a technical Appendix, was the reality that Corps scientists were estimating that the actual benefit the system would provide would be just 6 inches. But hey, who's counting?


So Chicken Little said to Henny Penny . . . .

Does anyone else find the current roller coaster on Wall Street as amusing as I do? Not that the ride is painless, but for real investors--those who nake their picks, put their money in, and sit back--the bumps are well cushioned. It is, to me, anyway, utterly astounding that billions of dollars are shifted around daily on what boils down to whim: millions of Chicken Littles running their money in and out based on every tiny puff of rumor or innuendo that the clueless goops charged with managing public and private money are farting out this hour. If Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke knew so much about how money works, wouldn't they be making it themselves instead of regulating that of other people? Jeanne Dixon could do as good or better a job than those clowns. And remember that investment counselors make their money off their clients, not off their own brilliant investing. I guess P. T. Barnum (or Paper Collar Joe Bessimer, or whoever) knew his stuff.


I think I'll just look into this dark closet here . . .

Horror-movie fans can rejoice in the recent scientific discovery that once upon a time (albeit a time 390 million years ago) scorpions larger than a human paddled through swamps and rivers. "The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought" said the discoverers. But nothing like that could have survived down to today--right? Right?

technorati tags: vial of life, emergency preparedness, New Orleans, Army Corps of Engineers, Wall Street, monsters