Kiss Me, I'm Irate

Earlier today I had something that needed taking care of near where I used to live and had some time to kill while over there. I remembered getting a flier several years back about a park they were putting in there that was supposed to be done by now and was also apparently pretty awesome, so I decided to go check it out. It is in fact a very nice park, with well-kept sports fields and all the standard stuff along with county parks administration offices which may explain the amphitheater. The amphitheater as a whole maybe isn’t that special – it’s pretty much a big grass bowl – but the stage may be the best constructed building for that purpose on public land I have ever seen – all brick, corrugated steel roof, curved stage back, and hookups for audio and lighting (kept padlocked, naturally). There’s also a playground with a fun-looking rope thing that I wish was around when I was a kid and this thing they call a “splash pad” which apparently means “area with bubbles painted on the ground and things that squirt water permanently installed”.

There were a handful of people there when I got there, a few kids that I assume walked or biked from the nearby suburbs (being the kind of massive, cartographically confusing developments that cater to young families and older baby boomers with more gas money than sense) and apparently a couple of people there with their grandkids. I know the last bit because as I was walking back to my car – and they were getting into theirs – the grandmother for some reason felt the need to tell me that she almost called the cops on me because she thought I was creepy. Like, pedophile creepy. Keep in mind that aside from a glance at the playground and a walk through the woods at some point because they were the quickest way back to the parking lot (or so I thought – turns out the thing that I thought was a little land bridge across a ditch was just the ugliest sunken dam I have ever seen; it looked like it was made of Astroturf) I was far, far away from anyone else, mostly wandering around admiring the architecture of the amphitheater stage and checking out the picnic shelters scattered around the property. Anyway, I pretty much told her she was paranoid and went on my way.

But it got me thinking, because that kind of thing does, and it brought related things to mind.

Like the fact that 90% of child sexual abuse (much like rape in general) is from close acquaintances if not family, yet society encourages a paranoia of unfamiliar and especially unusual people. Now, to be fair, I fit what people are encouraged to be paranoid against, but also to be fair all that means is unknown, unusual, and unkempt (optional). Oh, and single male. It’s kind of stupid, really. It’s just a form of othering – a desire to believe that nobody like you could be (in this instance) a pedophile, or that nobody “normal” could be, or (to an extent) that you could not be. The fact is, the false sense of security it gives is harmful all on its own.

Also, assuming she called the cops, what exactly could they do? It’s a public park and I was on the deserted other side of the park from these people. I mean seriously. It’s not like you can have someone arrested or removed from a park because you’re paranoid and think they’re creepy because they’re a single male who looks kind of scruffy, which is the best I could come up with for the reasoning. Police would be more likely to check me for drugs, given the layout of the park.

Which brings me to the next bit – if she’d said drug dealer, I could have at least understood where she was coming from, aside from the fact that my coat isn’t thick enough (and here I am complaining about stereotypes – but the thick coat at least makes sense, it would hide lumps). I mean, the amphitheater stage has lots of bits that are well-hidden from the rest of the park and the entire amphitheater area is sunken enough to be invisible from the parking lot and especially the road so when there aren’t kids all over the park it would probably a good place for it, and I could see how one would think I was scoping it out for that purpose.

Yeah…anyway. People are crazy, yo. Silly WASPs in their silly little sterile planned communities with cul-de-sacs and loop roads being fine with letting their kids have the run of the town all day but god forbid they see someone who looks to be over the age of 15 or so wandering around in a park by themselves, they must be a pedophile. Whatever helps you sleep at night I guess.

The administrative office building there is signed as a community rec center or summat too – I wonder what that’s all about?

The gold standard of explosives is, and has been for years, the nuclear weapon.  Why is fairly obvious.  Between the godlike power to create a small Sun and destroy an entire city, that cool mushroom thing it does (not, contrary to popular belief, unique to nukes), the fact that one pretty much won World War II, and the word “nuke”, it’s no wonder that the nuclear bomb holds a special place in our collective heart.  Or… something.

But nukes have their downsides.  I’m not talking about civilian casualties or the fact that it completely destroys any structure within about ten miles of ground zero (let’s assume total war here), but the fact that after you drop a nuke, you can’t touch anything within a certain radius for decades.  That’s not cool.  So, great, you levelled an area… what are you going to do with it now?  It’s a useless wasteland.  Scratch that actually, it might be useful for a nuclear waste dump.

There’s another type of bomb that’s incredibly powerful for its size technically called a Thermobaric weapon, but more commonly known as a fuel-air explosive.  These are the most powerful weapons we have, short of a nuke.  The largest in the US arsenal is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as MOAB or the “Mother of All Bombs”.

Let me explain why fuel-air explosives are so cool.  Your basic FAE has two conventional explosive charges in it.  The first disperses the primary fuel into the surrounding environment.  The second is a more incendiary type of charge, used to ignite the fuel.  If you’ve ever seen that trick where they throw a cloud of cornstarch or something into the air and ignite it, it’s kind of like that.  Or more accurately, it’s like a grain tower explosion, but bigger.  And using a fuel designed to burn, not flour.

A large FAE essentially sets the air around it on fire.  This first creates a massive shock wave, and hellish heat – enough that a small device launched into a building can flatten it, and a large one can flatten and/or burn out a forested area – and then a backdraft so powerful that it can pick up and throw a man or asphyxiate them.  And when it’s done?  Everything destroyed by it, all the area cleared by it, is perfectly safe.  A bit hot, but give it a couple days.

So, even though the MOAB has only about the yield of a very small nuke, and less than one thousandth the yield of the nuclear weapons used in Japan, I’d rather use one of them than a nuke.  At least you can use the area you just blew the shit out of.

Here in Seattle we have a pretty decent transit system. Now, it’s not as good as New York’s, or as many others, but it’s pretty damn good given what we have to work with, especially after the addition of Sound Transit.

Now, we have this nice thing downtown called the Ride Free Zone. In most of downtown, you can get on a bus and ride it to any other part of the zone for free.  This is pretty handy if you want to go grab lunch at the other end of town or something.  There’s also a tunnel that runs under most of 3rd Avenue and then up Pine Street, and at the south end (of third) it connects with a transit-only thoroughfare that runs all the way down to Spokane Street, at least, maybe farther.  If you catch a bus that goes in the tunnel, that’s the quickest way to get from Sodo to north downtown.  This is part of why buses are awesome.  Also we have the S.L.U.T. and light rail going in, but those aren’t buses.

Riding the bus through downtown – wherever it’s going (since anyone can and will hop on just to get to the other end of downtown, since it’s free) always presents you with an interesting cross-section of the population.  Like the guy who gets on talking to himself loudly about punching punk-ass motherfucking bitches, which is probably the extent of his vocabulary.  Or the two women I had the displeasure of riding with once: [somewhat loudly] “Girl, where you been?” “I just got outta jail” “Naw” “Yeah, I had another miscarriage” “In jail?” “Yeah” (something is broken there if you ask me, but that’s another post maybe).  Maybe I should wear kevlar in Belltown (northwest bit of downtown, between Pike, Westlake, and the Denny Regrade), idk.

Per slashdot, today was declared by someone or other “Blog Action Day.”  Someone decided to spontaneously try to get everyone to blog about the environment.  Riiiight.  Well I for one am inspired.

So today is the most recently declared “Blog Action Day.”  This particular declaration from whatever group that nobody is going to care about when the not-news leaves the slashdot front page is that this day is for blogging about the environment.  Now, a lot of you probably think that I’m going to blog about how we should be doing more to save the environment, or how wonderful it is, or something to that effect.  Therefore, so you know what you’re getting into, and for the rest of you who are going to say tl;dr: fuck environmentalists.

I was going to say the environment there, but that wasn’t quite right.  I have no problem with the environment, save that it seems to inspire people to interfere with perfectly reasonable plans of others.  Granted, I found GreenPeace hanging themselves off of the Aurora Bridge to try to block some kind of large ship coming into Lake Washington and then being arrested and having no net effect whatsoever EXTREMELY amusing, but I imagine marine traffic on the ship canal didn’t.

There’s this measure on the Washington State ballot this November, Proposition 1.  It’s called the Roads and Transit Measure, and that’s basically what it is.  Massive improvements to main roads, including a few badly-needed expansions of interstate highways, and transit in the Puget Sound area.  One of the biggest opponents of it is the Sierra Club.  Now think about this for a minute.  Transit has a huge positive effect on the environment.  Arguably, better roads do as well – faster throughput means cars on the roads for shorter times, therefore less emissions, therefore smaller impact on the environment.  QED.  But no.  Expanding the freeways is going to have another impact on the environment – they have to take out a few trees to make room.  God forbid.

Get over it, people.  The environment isn’t in the greatest shape, but it’s improved drastically in the last few decades, despite Al Gore (HE’S CERIAL!) and his contemporaries.   Could we improve it more?  Yeah.  But is that really why you want me to drive a hybrid?  No, it’s so you can make gas cost more (sales are down!) so you can afford more money to hire someone to drive you around in a stretch-Hummer limo when you retire, you fucking pig of a half-wit oil executive.  I know your game.

…

But really though.  The real reason people buy Priuses and their kin are not because they’re low emissions.  It’s because “low emissions” translates to “high mileage” usually.  Quit pretending to try to help the environment so you can feel good about that and feel good about driving technology forward (pun intended) instead.  And if I’m lucky, you might even drive the cost downward.

What do you put in a “welcome” first post?  Hell if I know…

Yeah, I don’t have anything to put here really.  I made a blog because I could.  Stuff will come later.  Therefore, in lieu of content, here’s some “About” page material that will likely be copied there when and if I actually create an “About”
page.

The title came from a slashdot signature.  I later realized that it’s probably parodied from those “Kiss Me, I’m Irish!” aprons and shirts you see everywhere.  You’re Irish, good for you.  So am I – and German, and Swedish I think, but American born.  Here, have a thimble.

So, no idea why you’re here.  Whether you’re a friend who I gave the link to, or you stumbled across the blog somehow, or you were wondering why there was a site titled “Kiss Me, I’m Irate” on a “What Links Here” page from google or something, welcome.  Stick around for a while, leave your name in the guestbook.  Or the Comments part, whatever.  Same idea.