You may or may not know, but I work at EPA. I work closely with first responders (firefighters, Hazmat teams, Decontamination teams, etc) to develop new tools and techniques to help them do their jobs better in certain situations where "terror" is induced by the release of chemical or biological agents.
That being said....sometimes my job kicks ass. Like when I get to spend the day at Great American Ballpark watching the ultimate LARP.... A terrorist attack on the Reds featuring: 7 explosions and 1 dirty bomb, 500 "victims", firefighters, military, bomb squads, and the SWAT team. I got an all access pass to the event and took a ton of photos.
The bomb guys who set this off call themselves "Fire Artists" (their words, not mine). They run a fireworks company.
Victims were instructed to act out a designated set of symptoms.
Cinci's Analytical Response Team....Scientists with rubber clothes on. They go in contaminated areas to determine what chemical or biological threats have been released.
Bomb Squad... you know what they do.
Bomb Robot...it does the bomb squad's job.
Mobile Decon shower tents. Quite possibly sponsored by Sbarro. There were 4 of these.
Inside the 1st stage of the decon tent. this guy has been exposed......to shaving cream...thats what was used to ID victims who were exposed to the dirty bomb. He is about to take his clothes off before he hits the shower.
It turns out that shaving cream is a good surrogate substance to use for decon showers. Who knew?
2nd Stage of a decon tent...the shower. The third stage is where people put on clean clothes. You really don't want to see those photos.
Stay vigilant America, lest you to endure the humbling act of stripping your clothes in exchange for 2 free Reds tickets.Labels: LARP, redlegs, science
the bar. over. i fucking passed. i'm an attorney.
(I never got your shitty email, dan.).
Is Ken Griffey, Jr. a first ballot hall of famer?
also, dan, I've called you out on the angerblog. too chickenshit to reply?
Labels: redlegs
All Bostonians should make/take the time to see
Melvern Taylor and the Fabulous Meltones.They only play around Lowell, Mass..... But... Slaid Cleaves covered one of his tunes on his last album, so the word is getting out that these guys are super-talented! If anyone does catch up with the band, please let me know how the live performance is.
Salud, MSV
Labels: music
Why My Day Was Totally Sweet:If dan gets to post about planets, then I get Nascar.
Labels: nascar
UPDATE: 2003 UB313 Renamed! And the Winner is:Well, nobody and everybody. Nobody because they didn't take any of our suggestions. Everybody because unbeknownst to me, this dwarf planet has apparently long been referred to, unofficially, as "Xena" but that has ended (hooray!). So nobody wins, but everybody wins! And especially the disciples of Mal-2 and Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst.
Why? The new name, as posted in
this press release, is Eris. Eris! Discordians everywhere rejoice! Your goddess has joined the night sky!
(image courtesy of Wikipedia)
Labels: nerdcore
I was going to post about how I went to an E.O. Wilson lecture yesterday and had the opportunity to meet the man, then
this came up...
Whoops.This, I think, constitutes a "boner". From the Boston Globe via
Boston.com (I'm going to post the whole thing since it's short and links to boston.com frequently don't work):
By Mac Daniel, Globe Staff, and Andrew Ryan, Globe Correspondent
State police hid eight ounces of plastic explosives on the back bumper of a truck Wednesday night during a drill for bomb sniffing dogs at Logan International Airport.
Before the drill had been finished, however, a Massport employee drove off in the white pickup truck, unaware that a clump of the explosive Semtex had been slapped on the back. The employee only drove about 1.5 miles, according Lieutenant Sharon Costine, but it was far enough for clay-like explosive to fall.
State Police today were still searching for the Semtex, which they say can’t explode without an ignition device, Costine said.
"It isn't dangerous if you bump it or if you drop it," Costine said. "We are still looking for it."
I guess it's not very much Semtex, but still--with cops like these, who needs terrorists?
Terror Sweeps Great American Ballpark! Free Parking!This is worth at least a thousand of your Earth Dollars. Anyone who is in Cincinnati on Sept. 30th
please take advantage of this offer and report back with detailed findings from the proceedings.
Please also note, at the end of that press release, the email address for Mark Lindquist in the Hamilton County Homeland Security Office. It's a fucking hotmail account.
Labels: redlegs
Who wants to get a league together?I was just doing some Wikipedia reading instead of my work when I came across a reference to a sport by the name of "
Cammag" which originated on the Isle of Man. From the Wikipedia article:
"One sport that originated on the Isle of Man is cammag. This is similar to the Scottish game of shinty, and Irish hurling [...] It involves a stick (cammag) and a ball (crick)
with anything between four and hundreds of players. Sometimes whole towns and villages took part, or even played each other. The cammag can be any stick with a bent end, and the crick can be made from cork or wood. Old accounts tell us that it was occasionally covered in a rag to make it less painful to hit. Cammag season started on Hunt the Wren Day (26 December) and was only played by men (of all ages) during the winter. Realistically, it ceased to be played around 1900. However, in modern times, an annual match of cammag is played in St. John's (Balley Keill Eoin).
As there are no rules to cammag, a trip to the local inn is advised to ease any feelings of cowardice beforehand!" (emphasis added).
Sounds suspiciously like a more populated, painful and drunk version of
Calvinball. Who's in?
AngerBlogIt is with great trepidation that I announce the launch of the
AngerBlog . Inspired by Sarge & Dan's recent commandeering of the Jackblog for the purpose of flaming each other over topics ranging from baseball to homosexuality, the AngerBlog is an attempt to foster our desires to be mean to one another without forever changing the face of the otherwise benign jackblog.
Have at it, scoundrels.
