California isn't on fire. (You unhappy bastards in the other 49, put away your marshmallows, untuck your sad little chins, and uncurl your pouty little mouths.)
There are a few fires, exactly like what's happened here every year since the local Indians told the history orally, some hundreds of years in the murky past before Sir Francis Drake cruised offshore in the 1500s.
That's what happens when Santa Ana winds of 80MPH in the canyons whip through, and some assholes don't have spark arrestors on their decorative chimneys, and homeless meth-heads' cooking fires blow over while they're stoned out and tweaking in the canyon camps they inhabit.
Mostly, this is lesson #353 in Why "Homeless" People Are A Blight On Humanity, and lesson #32,000,684 on Why Homes In California Hills Should Be Mandatorily Made Of Concrete, With Firefighting Water Monitors Required On The Rooftops Plumbed To The Swimming Pools.
Both of which fall under the heading of life selecting this year's Darwin Awards nominees.
Build a million-dollar mansion in the hills with a wood shake roof, and the insurance check you get should be a bill from the fire service, and a note from your insurance company telling you to attempt self-fornication. Zero fucks will be given.
Only inebriated bottle-blonde nitwits suffering the dementia of late-stage syphilis start whining instead about the apocalypse. (Chelsea Whorehouse, call your pimp's office...)
But, with little else to talk about because Al Frankenstein hasn't decided to fall on the molester grenade quite yet, and encouraged by the long-standing policy of KABC-TV in Los Angeles to bump everything including the moon landing if there's a news copter over a local fire, the media-tards are swarming over this minor nothingburger like it was about to consume millions of people, all trapped in the concrete Coliseum, which would require USC to be playing UCLA for a spot in a bowl game just to happen.
And, being concrete as well, and 40 miles from flammable countryside, still be no threat of anything whatsoever.
Nearest fire to where I'm sitting, beyond the Orange Curtain from L.A. County: 40 miles.
Percentage of the 10-20 million folks in the L.A. Basin and surrounding suburban valleys affected by the fires: less than 5%, max.
The bigger issue is that several of the fires currently or recently straddled the I-5, S-14, and I-215 routes from L.A. to Las Vegas, and Central California. Which means it hurts Vegas slightly (the airports are wide open), and truckers going from San Diego to Seattle, who were briefly annoyed when the I-5 was actually shut down. For a few hours.
Folks ignorant of reality have carped about Gov. Moonbeam "finally" authorizing water bombers. Except that was because with 80 MPH winds, their use was problematic, and the fires weren't that much except to a few unfortunates in Charcoal Central. When a brushfire happens with outside winds gusting to hurricane force, there's no fire agency gonna do anything but stand back and watch.The fires simply aren't that big, or that big a deal. But this is only half a century of local experience with them talking. You can always believe the breathless brainless yapping gits at ABCNNBCBS.
Traffic in PhotoshopLand.
Someone else has had a photo fake of a 19-22-lane L.A. freeway at a standstill related to a 200K person evacuation order over these fires. As if.
(That many lanes should have been the first tip off that photo was not taken in SoCal, but rather in Photoshop.) If we had 19-lane freeways anywhere hereabouts, the average rush hour speed would be 75MPH, 24/7/365. And that'd be the on-ramps and truck lane. The I-5, the central freeway transit artery from Irvine to Oregon and points north has been exactly 3-lanes wide from OC to downtown L.A. since it was built in 1954, and only now is part of it being widened in that stretch. Most of it will still be 3 lanes wide forever, because unlike his daddy when he was governor, Moonbeam doesn't believe passenger cars and cargo trucks (nor dams, aqueducts, power plants, houses, people, jobs, and a functional state economy dependent on the preceding) are a good idea. So he and the criminal legislature still collect the highest gasoline taxes in the nation, required to go for road maintenance and construction, and use them for more welfare for illegals, and boondoggle low-speed rail projects to nowhere.
But a 200,000 person evacuation?
Pffffft!
That's the daytime traffic on any stretch of freeway within 50 miles of L.A. per hour, from 5A-9P, since 1980.
When you get to 2,000,000 evacuees, give a holler.
So stop believing the nonsense, and kindly chill the f*ck out about a couple of relatively piddly-ass fires. They're a problem to those unfortunate enough to lose homes to them, but they're far from the statewide calamity the media would whip up. If I hadn't heard about them on the news, they wouldn't even be a thing around here. That's what living in a 100 mi. x 100 mi. megalopolis means. If they'd been in the Central state, instead of a short copter ride from L.A., no one would be covering them outside of Fresno and Bakersfield local news.
Cancel the CaliHater tailgate parties too, sil vous plait.
It's 72° F. here daytime, and at night, it drops almost to 50°. Three weeks from Christmas. The snow tires for my truck look like handi-wipes, and a bottle of ArmorAll.
Winter clothes here come from Coppertone, not Columbia.
I'm not without sympathy for the colder parts of the country this time of year. Why just last night, when I was scooping fresh ice cream to beat the afternoon heat coming in through the windows, my hand got cold, for almost 30 seconds, and I almost spilled ice cream on my shorts.
This fire season, in the wettest year in CA history after 6 years of the worst drought, isn't even worth mentioning, which is why I hadn't until people started losing their minds about it.
The only fires in this state worth talking about would be the capitol and governor's residence going up in flames, while occupied.
I live in hope.
23 comments:
Crap, I was really looking forward to seeing that giant Hollywood sign go up in flames dammit.
Maybe I can find a photoshop of that too.
Lol!
Hollywood's set itself on fire with sexual harassment, and all the Leftards whiners are going down in flames by the score.
Actually burning the sign is just window dressing.
Still, the night time video of the hills afire are wild. The closest I've ever been to a forest fire was when I was living north of Steamboat and I saw the fires burning the sides of mountains maybe 2-5 miles away. Smoke filled the valley and as far as away as it was, it still was pretty freaky.
NOW you sound like a Houstonian talking about flooding, only instead of natural wonders and weather we talk about jobs, low cost of living, no state income tax, and a healthy economy (outside of some Oil and Gas).
I used to live in Highland Park/ Eagle Rock, before that Redondo Beach/Torrence, and commute to the Dodgers Stadium area and later downtown Hollywood.
The best traffic days were when all the illegals decided to stay home to "show us11!!!11" Get rid of the illegals and suddenly you don't need new freeways, new school buildings, new wings on the hospital, etc.
I will say that I don't miss the traffic, attitudes, freaks, or high costs. I do sometimes miss the weather and the friends who are still there. Texas has been very good to me...
nick
"Why just last night, when I was scooping ice cream..... My hand got cold, for about 30 seconds, and I almost spilled ice cream on my shorts."
"The only fires in this state worth talking about would be the capitol and governor's residence going up in flames, while occupied."
Damn you, Aesop! You made me snort coffee out my nose. Twice.
"The I-5... "
When you start talking in grammatical gobbledygook like this, you've been in CA too long. It's just "I-5", dude. I-5 is a proper noun and never needs the definite article "the".
I was just talking back to the TV about this last night. So California has a wildfire season? You mean Like Montana? Oregon? Washington? Florida? And, I don't know, everywhere outside of the Sahara?
It's like snow in midwinter in Central Park is national news, because it's New York City, "the capital of the universe" (as a memorable "man on the street" said). Fires in El Lay are news because El Lay.
We Don't Care. Well, we care in the same sense that we care about anybody getting burned out of their homes. The media is breathless because El Lay is just more important than flyover country.
Fires earlier this year in the Napa Valley area were probably larger, and endangered more actual commerce, since wineries thereabouts are A Thing™. Only an issue for us because work was in the 'prepare to evac' area, directly adjacent to the 'GTFO NOW' area; and home was downwind of the nonsense, making the boy's respiratory workload more difficult.
In thinking about the 'OMG the world is on fire' shots on the news... a very long lens appears to pull the hills off in the distance much closer (hello telephoto compression), dramatizing an otherwise non-issue. If the fires had actually been close / a danger, the road would have been closed when they were shooting the video.
Flynn will testify about being told to ask the Russians to start the fires...
Ask the rancher who once ran cattle on those foothills and valleys that are now covered in zero lot line houses. The answer will be they will burn'd up in the next 5-15 years. As for 100-200' fuel clearance, can't do that when it is your neighbors house. as for traffic, here it is elk, deer and logging trucks, 'merica.
Every year or two, there's a brush fire along the 405 going up Sepulveda Pass, near the Getty Museum. Car fires along the 405 are even more common. The fires leave behind a big, black patch of burned-out brush. As soon as the first seasonal heavy rain is in the forecast, the Brentwood and Bel-Air crowd will be yapping about mudslides, and all the local news channels and the LA Times (neither to which I pay any attention, other than when I want to annoy myself), run stories about CalTrans putting-up concrete K-barriers to re-direct the water run-off. Might as well re-run last year's news.
@Jim Brent
Not so. The Titanic, the Great Pyramid, and the Louvre, all proper nouns, disprove your grammatical point.
Actually, they're known hereabouts simply as the 5, the 14, and the 215.
It's the never-used-in-CA-in-living-memory "I" and "S" designators that I threw in - for the benefit of the barbarians in flyover America - that's improper.
Before Eisenhower and the National Defense Interstate Highway Act, even that nonsense didn't exist.
Most freeways even have proper names, which are commonly used locally in most cases (the exceptions being trying to palm off the names of grasping politicians attached belatedly by their acolytes, long after the highways in question were well-established), but that would have been even more arcane and less intelligible to people from parts far removed. Freeways having been invented here, those of us who've been around them since birth are far more familiar with what to call them, and what's what.
Which drives home the theme: this is the Seinfeld of news stories: news about nothing. And to those upwind, or farther away than about a mile, nothing to even be concerned about in the first place. Let alone anyone who would need TV at all to find out about it. It isn't as if the flames were going to eventually sweep up along the coastal range and endanger Portland next month or something. In a week or two there'll be rain, and that will be the end of that. Because winter.
But the network affiliates want to get their money's worth out of their news copter budget, and pretty much since Og and Thag used it to roast wooly mammoth ribs, humans will stare at a fire as if mesmerized, even one on TV.
They used to blame them on carelessly-tossed cigarettes (Smokey The Bear was the first ever Fake News as such), but the reality is that when the first Spaniards shambled north from Mexico centuries ago, the L.A. Basin was covered with a smoggy haze from indian campfires, and lighting-ignited brushfires, long before either cigarettes or automobiles. For Moonbeam et al, that's just another inconvenient truth.
My favorite example of the LA/SF centric nature of California news is the Cedar Fire in San Diego County in 2003. It was the largest wildfire in the history of the state but because there were also fires up towards Los Angeles it was difficult, even in San Diego, to find much news about it.
I did hear on a local Ham radio net this morning that a fire crew from Columbus, Montana, population 1,900, is heading to California to help out. I hope those boys don't get corrupted by the big city. It's a shame a state with 38 times the population of this one doesn't have the resources it needs for annual events.
It seems you are bewildered that other states hate you and wish disaster upon you. As one who was born and raised in California and only escaped when the govt. went full retard on guns ( early 90's ), I can attest to the hate. You guys do suck. Nothing personal. But I don't want anything bad to happen there like The Big One earthquake. Then MORE of you would take over all the other states and screw them up even more. I miss the old culture I grew up in, but then I also miss how the US used to be. Sucks is as sucks does. If you are moving out of State Suck, please consider anywhere BUT Nevada ( ps-Las Vegas is NOT Nevada, it is a parasite those of us in the state must nourish ).
That’s dipped in honey and rolled in chopped almonds right there! You weren’t if the film set of “Lucas” by any chance, were you?
I am no such bewildered, James.
Envy is one of the deadly sins for a reason.
My offer stands: if the other 49, who sent California the vast overwhelming majority of fucktards who infest the Golden State to this day, noted that fact, took them back, and checked the residency and origin of all their own so-called "Californians", they'd find out that 95% of them were the very same blind banjo-playing kinfolk that were missing from their own trailer parks.
I'll take the heat for the few natives they can lay at California's doorstep.
It still took millions of invaders to royally f**k things up to the point any of the native retards could get into positions where they could do any damage.
(Don't believe me: check Wikipedia for the point of origin of such stellar specimens of "California" douchitude as Gray Davis, Nancy Pelosi, and Barbara Boxer. Ditto for 75% of Hollywierd. Not my problem.)
California was pretty great state to grow up and live in, until the late 1980s, when the invasion from points east and south, and the exodus of natives like yourself, finally started to flip it from (R) to (D).
I'll leave Califrutopia when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
Having lived through the Stalinism, and with the state teetering on the edge of financial collapse, I plan to be here when the economy tanks, to watch the statues of Lenin pulled down by angry mobs.
If I get to string up a few of the bastards in the melee and confusion, so much the better.
I'm just disappointed that people from other states, whose senators and congressional shitweasels largely and deliberately helped create the problems of California (Sens. Lindsay Grahmnesty and Marco Foolio are from where?), are all so happy to pop a woody every time they imagine things here are apocalyptic.
It's juvenile, bordering on infantile.
But when things decline enough, their prodigal trailer trash will return home, and those of us here will have the last laugh.
Probably while wearing Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops. In the dead of winter.
And I'm already onto NV: the Brown State. Relatives in Reno and Sparks. Not interested in that much sand, with so little ocean.
If you want fire suppression sprinklers, don't put them on the roof. Put them on the ground around the yard and about 50' out from the buildings. That way you water the wall, roof and grounds. Use impact type sprinkles and a fueled pool side pump not an electric one.
BTW. Colorado got Californicated in the 70's by coastal residents moving in. Both coasts. Nothing wrong with fly over people. California did more than it's share to fuck up the rest of the country. Lived in the North Bay area for a very long year. Nice climate, nice countryside, the people - not so much.
Used to watch the "Borate Bombers" regularly growing up in the Valley, when they cancelled recess (but not school) so, presumably, our young respiratory systems wouldn't take in too much of the junk flying around. This was long before "smog" and southern California was a pretty red place & fine to grow up in. Largely I agree with the host in that those who were settled natives - many of those immigrants to wartime jobs from the south - weren't really the ones that hosed everything up. I left in '69, so I might be jaded & haven't been back. (Thank you Uncle Sam for the first career.) Hell, we kids built models of those (and there were more than a couple still flying then) B-17's, B-24's, and PBY's dropping the orange stuff on the fires.
Oddly I just can't get up a lot of sympathy for someone that doesn't keep their understory cut and insists on building in an eroded place that's basically asking for it. Kinda like rebuilding 5 times in Louisiana where the high point is your dining room table at 30" MSL.
Spent about two years in LA in the early 90"s when the Rodney King riots, Northridge earthquake and the fires that nearly burned down the old Getty museum were the topics of the day. The only real way out of LA was to tie a bunch of tires together, grab a pole and a sheet and head west out of Santa Monica bay. I worked with some fine aircraft mechanics at LA but the politics already sucked and I just did not need that aggravation. I bid a job out of California and never looked back.
Like I said, dig deeper.
99% of the "Californians" everybody bitches about are no such animal. If they were, we would have needed 50M residents here in 1970 just to keep up with the claims.
They're overwhelmingly just rootless locusts from everywhere but, and California was just the last place they fucked up after they left their original trailer parks and tenements, before they left here and moved elsewhere.
You can have 'em all, but we still have a 10M douchebag surplus, and another 10M or so illegal alien tribe members.
Don't fret none; when the gravy train ends here -as it inevitably will - they'll all be coming back home to momma, and Juan and Maria will be heading there too. With their seven kids, aunts, uncles, and grandparents.
Y'all looked the other way for thirty years while they fucked the stated up, so I hope you enjoy them as much when they move in at the Home Depot down the road.
;)
And btw, loren, that was a water monitor, not a sprinkler. About 500gpm difference.
Sprinkling a house in a brush fire just makes a lot of steam.
You need to soak the hell out of it in a hurry, and have enough pressure to blow out hotspots that flare.
Anybody who builds a stick-built house on a California hillside is too stupid to save whatsoever, and I wish they'd stop evacuating them and just let them burn. They were interviewing one happy jackhole who's been burned out 5 times (slow learner, obviously), and still hasn't got the sense God gave a jackass to move the f**k out of the firezone altogether, and/or stop building houses there out of kindling.
Best use of that sort of idiot is filling a burial plot.
And his insurance premiums ought to be the face value of the house, per annum, and have it designated by the fire agencies as "Do Not Save".
Red line all those idiot neighborhoods, and let them reap what they sow.
Aesop, yeah, I knew the difference.
What really counts though is reality. 500gmp isn't real likely but 80 pump is and you can wet down a lot of territory with that. Fires get in through broken windows, eaves and vents mostly. Course if you have dry brush or trees around the house then you're SOL.
Fires come at you over time. Start early. Get out. Hope it works. It did for me in Colorado, then I moved.
Mostly though, don't live there in the first place.
Yup. Which last is definitely the prizewinning lesson of all time.
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