Life in the Atomic Age

Oh, Yeah,

And Finish The Job.

Then you’re a heartless bastard. Period. No room for discussion.

Capt. Walter Hynes of the New York Fire Department’s Ladder 13 dialed home that morning as his rig left the firehouse at 85th Street and Lexington Avenue. He was on his way downtown, he said in his message, and things were bad. “I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I want to tell you that I love you and I love the kids.”

Firemen don’t become firemen because they’re pessimists. Imagine being a guy who feels in his gut he’s going to his death, and he calls on the way to say goodbye and make things clear. His widow later told the Associated Press she’d played his message hundreds of times and made copies for their kids. “He was thinking about us in those final moments.”

Ouch.

As for the SUV, we borrowed WW publisher Richard Meeker’s 2006 Subaru Tribeca. The six-cylinder engine in Meeker’s SUV pumped out less than 10 ppm of hydrocarbons and 1 percent CO2. In other words, the two-stroke scooter WW tested produced about 490 times the hydrocarbons and more than eight times the Co2 of the SUV

There are some reasonable objections to the article in the comments, and a couple of very angry scooter riders who are offended by the entire concept that their preferred ride might pollute. Still and all, smaller does not always mean “better”.

.

Dixie Chicks do Canada. By necessity?

Canada feels the Dixie Chick’s pain.

The author is perplexed by the public reaction to Natalie’s comments, since it should be obvious to even the densest country music fan that she was right!

That’s tough to figure out (the backlash against the DC comments - ed), especially when you factor into it things such as Bush’s low approval rating (now hovering just above 30%), the admission by a majority of Americans the Iraq war was a mistake (at 51% and rising) and even the discovery that most, if not all, justifications for the action were false (purposefully or not).

The best part, of course, is this nice little slap at Toby Keith and, by association, his fans:

He fed into, played up and relished his role as conservative country musician, and he, too, has spent the past couple of years selling out stadiums, winning awards and, now, spent the past nine weeks in the Billboard Top 50 with his appropriately titled album White Trash With Money.

Nice, eh? (< -mandatory use of “eh” for all postings originating in Canada).

I find it interesting that anyone who supports Bush or the military or the war in Iraq is just pandering to a conservative base - apparently the thought that they may actually support these things never enters into the equation.