voluntaryXchange

A Sign of the Times

Pretty sure I saw someone with an active case of the mumps walking around one of our big box stores earlier this week.

Sheesh.

I Am Chaotic Neutral

I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons from 1977-1981. I am old enough to remember when there were only 4 possible character alignments.

I also have a phobia about twist ties getting in the microwave. I have never had the experience, but for at least 30 years I’ve been throwing them away fairly quickly after I open the bread bag.

Via bookofjoe.

Congratulations

The local Cedar High School Lady Reds basketball team won the 4A Utah championship tonight.

They finished the season undefeated, 25-0.

AND, they did it mostly without using their bench, fielding 3 juniors and 2 sophomores.

They were ranked # 3 in the state (divisions 5A and 6A are bigger schools, and each has a team ranked higher). On the way they beat the # 7 team by 13 points, and the # 10 team by 10 points, and … oh yeah … they won two earlier playoff games by 19 and 22 points.

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I am absolutely a fair weather fan.

We went to the first playoff game because it was the last home game of the band director, Mr. Shirts, who we love. The vXgirl is first flute!

But, we went to the rest of the games because it’s fun to be part of a championship. I’m 54, and this is the first time I’ve been in the stands for any championship of any sport.

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It also could be the last championship for the school’s current team name. It’s been voted out … you know … cultural sensitivity.

Funny, I didn’t seen anyone who voted against it at any of the games.

An Old Friend Makes the L.A. Times

Check out “In One Tony Houston Neighborhood, a House of Cats. Just Cats.”

The idea is that cats that are rescued (and often feral) are not a good match for adoption into the typical home: strange environment, enclosed, able to look out and see prey but not to penetrate the “invisible force fields” we call windows.

So they have a fake house for cats to acclimate themselves to before adoption.

Our old friend from NOLA, Patti Thomas, donated her home for this project.

George H.W. Bush, R.I.P.

George Bush’s funeral is tomorrow. R.I.P.

I always liked George Bush, going back to when he was a strong contender in 1980’s Republican primaries (I was strongly conditioned to be prejudiced against Reagan until sometime in 1983).

Honestly, I had a hard time watching him the last few years. His body sure held on.

One of my favorite stories to retell is something I heard that he’d said about turning 80. He was happy that he was turning 80 and losing his hearing … because if he didn’t want to talk to someone he’d just pretend he didn’t hear them.

A Real Blast from the Past

In my elementary school back in the early 1970’s, there was a memorial in the library for a boy a few years older than me. He had fallen into a boiling pool at Yellowstone while on family vacation.

I hate Facebook, but it’s good for some things. On a thread about that elementary school, was a link to this article about that event.

I’ve told this story to my kids, so I’m reprinting it here in full. It’s from the Billings Gazetter circa 1998.

By Michael Milstein

The Billings Gazette

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, Wyo. - On June 28, 1970, Andrew Hecht and his family watched Old Faithful shoot its scalding spray into the sky. Then the Buffalo, N.Y., family of five continued their first visit to Yellowstone National Park by following a path among nearby geysers and springs.

It was a path that would come to devastate the Hecht family and, later, to rattle the foundation of the U.S. national park system.

The path the family took led to a wooden boardwalk, which the Hechts followed to Crested Pool, a deep and quietly boiling aquamarine spring with a crusty white mineral rim. At the edge of the pool, without a guardrail, the boardwalk split at almost right angles and continued around the pool in each direction.

But 9-year-old Andy Hecht, for whatever reason - some say steam blinded him, others believe he tripped, fell or jumped - did not turn with the boardwalk. Instead, he went straight ahead and splashed into the seething spring.

His head rose once from the frothing water, his mouth agape but silent. Then he sank out of sight.

200 died in parks in 1970

Andy Hecht was one of about 200 people who died in the national park system in 1970. But his death was like no other because it rallied his parents to beat on the door - or perhaps beat down the door - of the National Park Service until the stolid agency finally took steps to make national parks safer.

The Hechts' campaign for safety in the national parks led to more funding and new safety officers in major parks and regional offices. Park visitors encountered more caution signs and alerts from rangers.

And this summer, after years of pleas by the family for some tribute to Andy, workers in Yellowstone installed new warning signs funded by the Hechts throughout the very Upper Geyser Basin where the boy died.

"A lot of it is just attitude," said Andy's father, James Hecht, a retired chemical engineer who now lives in Denver and keeps careful watch over park safety efforts. "It's not that no one in the Park Service pays attention to safety, but it just takes one act of negligence to leave a person without warning that might prevent them from getting killed."

Last year 179 visitors were killed in national parks - six of them in Yellowstone, not including the two Yellowstone employees also killed.

The worrisome numbers force park managers onto a delicate tightrope. They must protect the millions of people who visit the parks - often without realizing the dangers of wild settings. But they must do so without sanitizing the very wild settings that so many people come to see.

"We have to identify to the best of our abilities the risks visitors are encountering," said Richard Powell, the National Park Service's top safety officer, based in Denver. "We can't prevent them, but we can tell people: `Here's what you face.' And I think we can do a better job with that."

Both the weaknesses and strengths of the Park Service's approach to safety show themselves in the tragic death of Andy Hecht and its aftermath.

The Hechts had arrived in Yellowstone after flying from New York to Billings, renting a car and driving over the Beartooth Highway to the park's northeast entrance.

No rangers at entrance

It was late in the day and no rangers were on duty, James Hecht recalls, so the Hechts entered Yellowstone for the first time without receiving any maps, information or warnings.

At Old Faithful, the family talked with a ranger, who told them about the trails through the geyser basin but did not warn them of the boiling water that often lies just beneath thin mineral crusts, James Hecht said.

Andy was walking with his older brother and sister - and amid a crowd that had dispersed from Old Faithful - when he plunged into Crested Pool. His father remembers the shock.

"Why us? How could this happen? When it happened we weren't out in the wilderness. We were on the boardwalk.

"We think of Andy when we look at our other two kids," says James Hecht. "He would be 37 now. He was a terrific kid, very bright. He was very outgoing. He was gutsy. He'd play football with bigger boys and dive for the ball. He was a charmer. He was interested in the pretty girl across the street."

Unable to sleep that night, James Hecht arose and wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel. In writing, he told Hickel: "I torture myself, but I do it in an effort to give a little more meaning to Andy's life. We believe his tragic death was caused by inadequate safety precautions."

Congress responded by more than doubling funding for the Park Service's safety program, which paid for new safety officers in major parks and regional offices.

Soon crews in Yellowstone rerouted the boardwalk so it no longer encircled Crested Pool and erected a railing to prevent future falls. They also added more warning signs.

While John Hast, the National Park Service's top safety officer at the time, acknowledged the park's insufficient warnings, he concluded that such messages would not have prevented Andy Hecht's death.

After four hours of watching visitors near Crested Pool in August 1970, Hast wrote to higher-ups that "the demonstrated lack of parental control while in these areas is alarming. . . . We must find a better way to reach people with a message on the hazards of the areas."

In the wake of accidents, James Hecht said, the Park Service pays more attention to what the victims did wrong than what park rangers might have done to prevent the accidents.

"People will do something foolish and the Park Service says they're foolish, but the question is, did they know of the risk?" he says. "Did the Park Service take the reasonable steps to promote knowledge of the risk?"

The Hechts settled their $1 million lawsuit against the government for $20,000 and used the money to start a foundation named for their son that sponsored a safety award for Park Service employees.

Today, visitors to Yellowstone receive a park newspaper with pages of red safety warnings. It has been 10 years since someone died due to burns in Yellowstone and that was in an undeveloped, backcountry geyser basin.

"The information is there, but we can't force people to read it," says Yellowstone safety officer Galen Warren. "We have to hope they do."

The Hechts visited every Park Service director since Andy's death to discuss safety and their hope for some kind of memorial to their son in Yellowstone. Every director resisted the plea, responding that they could not turn parks into impromptu graveyards, until the Hechts visited Roger Kennedy, who was Park Service director until last year.

Kennedy directed officials to work with the Hechts and the park staff proposed updated signs warning of the dangers of the geyser basin with a short mention of Andy's death.

I went to a conference this autumn about public lands usage. The discussion in a van on the way back from an off-site event was about how the parks can and/or should manage risky behavior.

Oh. Come. On. (Alabama Edition)

I mostly gave up football in 2001, and college football long before that. But I tuned into the Alabama vs. Georgia game on Saturday.

Bum Phillips described how good Bear Bryant was roughly as: “He can take his’n and beat your’n, and then turn around and beat his’n with your’n”.

Alabama did something close to that to Georgia on Saturday.

A year ago, Georgia dominated them and their star quarterback. So Alabama put in a freshman and came back and won the game.

This year, Georgia dominated the now sophomore. And when he got dinged for good, Alabama put in the starter from most of last year (who’s been on the bench for 11 months now), and he came back and won this game.

WTF.

And that’s coming from someone who loved Alabama football when they were a kid, still has a soft spot for them, got hired by Alabama for my first job as a professor (and stayed there for two years), and whose wife is an alma mater.

Cool Maps: Understanding Canada

Canada’s median population line:

When I grew up in the Buffalo suburbs, older people pejoratively called that bit of Ontario below the line Canada’s “Banana Belt”.

Ridiculous Optimism or Innumeracy

We got a new building. It has water bottle fillers:

Note the counter. It took about a month for us to hit 1,000. That pace has been sustained.

But that display has 8 digits.

If it took a month to get to the 4th digit, it will take about a year until the 5th digit turns from zero to one.

And thus, about a decade to turn the 6th digit, a century to turn the 7th one, and a millennium to turn the 8th one.

By analogy, this is like a car’s odometer going up to 99 million miles, rather than the 6 digits (on newer cars), or the 5 digits on older ones. Next time I drive to the sun I might need that.

Thanksgiving Travel Celebrity Amusements

Kinda’ sure we saw Roseanne Barr at Cheesecake Factory in Salt Lake City on Wednesday night.

The vXyoungman was in line at Starbucks with Dawg the Bounty Hunter at the Salt Lake Airport on Sunday.