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The relatively large snowfall in the Olympia region lately has led me to assess the efficacy of recent “traffic grant” toys installed by the various road departments.
I’m really happy about the Washington State D.O.T. road cams. You can go online and look at the road conditions at about anywhere along the I-5 corridor. I was able to see there was no snow in Tacoma the other day when there was 4 inches in Olympia. So since I had to go to Tacoma, I bulled through to Dupont, then it was clear sailing.
But while I was bulling through, I noticed a couple of things. First, traffic lights need to be set slower when it snows. By the time one skidder gets traction and gets going, the guy behind him has to hurry too much to make the light.
Which led me inexorably to my second first hand observation: Traffic islands suck. I suppose they don’t suck when they save people but they sucked for me personally when one of my first cornering attempts went out of control. I slid around a right turn and ended up straddling the narrow curb-thick traffic island meant to delineate the left turn lane of the street I was turning into.
I couldn’t back up so I straddled it for a hundred feet hoping like heck I wasn’t ripping something out of my undercarriage.
Speaking of under. Those pedestrian lights they embed in the pavement like a YouTube video? Cants see ‘em under four inches of snow.
And you know those stanchions that the pedestrians have to walk between to set off the lighted pavement crosswalk? The electric eyes in them are too sensitive. One where I live also flashes an upright sign. And the falling snow kept interrupting the beam of the electric eye and setting the damn thing off like a strobe.
It was so distracting I didn’t pace myself into the last of our recent great traffic improvements—the roundabout.
Or as I like to call it, the skating rink.
I’ll never see the expression “why don’t you take this baby for a spin?” quite the same again...
America, ya gotta love it.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
#919 Land Parts
Lately it seems like all the local news stories are like a 3rd grade class on basic geography. Here in the great northwest we have it all. Like mountains, some of them volcanoes, some of which have craters and domes. And lakes, rivers, and most importantly, the Puget Sound.
“What is a sound?” visitors ask me.
“What have you heard?” I ask innocently.
Eventually I reel off the dictionary definition: a] a long broad inlet of the ocean generally parallel to the coast, or b] a long passage of water connecting two larger bodies (as a sea with the ocean) or separating a mainland and an island.
It’s also the air bladder of a fish.
Lately, we’ve heard about a couple of more exotic land parts in our local news—the Estuary and the Isthmus. The estuary stories are about reconverting Capitol Lake to its original riverine status. Way back when, before south sound sewers and such, we used to let everything run down and out the chutes of the Deschutes River and wash into the sound.
The tidal ebb and flow brought lots of interesting smells to the noses of the legislators up on the hill and the lovely reflection of the capitol dome we now have was a sodden, fetid, mud flat. The shifting patterns of the river’s outflow braided the mud pools bubbling with cholera, typhus, and lazily swimming brown trout.
An estuary.
The estuary flowed past that other piece of geography we’ve been hearing misnamed a lot. The isthmus. Because as one local dignitary pointed out, nothing can flow through an isthmus. An isthmus is by definition an unbroken narrow stretch of land that connects two larger landmasses.
When the river and the tide flowed, that area in Olympia was a peninsula.
And it still is, as only a mechanical lock inhibits the flow.
I think some folks just like to challenge us radio people with the word isthmus. You can’t seem to say it without affecting a lisp.
The trick is to leave out the TH sound altogether. So if you spell it phonetically you could say, quite seasonably, that it’s beginning to look a lot like is-mus.
America, ya gotta love it.
“What is a sound?” visitors ask me.
“What have you heard?” I ask innocently.
Eventually I reel off the dictionary definition: a] a long broad inlet of the ocean generally parallel to the coast, or b] a long passage of water connecting two larger bodies (as a sea with the ocean) or separating a mainland and an island.
It’s also the air bladder of a fish.
Lately, we’ve heard about a couple of more exotic land parts in our local news—the Estuary and the Isthmus. The estuary stories are about reconverting Capitol Lake to its original riverine status. Way back when, before south sound sewers and such, we used to let everything run down and out the chutes of the Deschutes River and wash into the sound.
The tidal ebb and flow brought lots of interesting smells to the noses of the legislators up on the hill and the lovely reflection of the capitol dome we now have was a sodden, fetid, mud flat. The shifting patterns of the river’s outflow braided the mud pools bubbling with cholera, typhus, and lazily swimming brown trout.
An estuary.
The estuary flowed past that other piece of geography we’ve been hearing misnamed a lot. The isthmus. Because as one local dignitary pointed out, nothing can flow through an isthmus. An isthmus is by definition an unbroken narrow stretch of land that connects two larger landmasses.
When the river and the tide flowed, that area in Olympia was a peninsula.
And it still is, as only a mechanical lock inhibits the flow.
I think some folks just like to challenge us radio people with the word isthmus. You can’t seem to say it without affecting a lisp.
The trick is to leave out the TH sound altogether. So if you spell it phonetically you could say, quite seasonably, that it’s beginning to look a lot like is-mus.
America, ya gotta love it.
Monday, December 29, 2008
#918 Taint So Pure
The other day I was joking to a friend that they’ve finally solved the product problems they’ve been having in China. They’re now glazing their toys with melamine and thickening their milk with lead.
Okay, not so funny, but then I read this headline in a science magazine. “FDA tackles tainted drugs from China”
What? Drugs from China?
I read it fully expecting to see some expose about pesticides affecting the opium crop or something. Nope.
We import all sorts of pharmaceuticals from China.
That’s right. Drugs to fight illness and stuff. And the FDA is having to fight with the Chinese government so they’ll allow us to inspect their drug making facilities.
Incredible. I mean, the FDA in this country puts drug companies through such a vigorous colon-twisting it leaves them uncertain which orifice to poop out of. But we let un-inspected drugs in from China? Drugs we swallow and stuff?
And we can’t just say, “let us inspect them or we won’t buy them”? You can bet American drug factories are inspected at least as often as Armour meat-packing facilities.
And really, does it do any good to put the major drug developers through 10 years of clinical trials to determine if incremental doses will cause the ever popular bloating and diarrhea, if we then turn around and let people ingest a jolt of poison from a foreign factory?
Hey, I’m all for globalization. I like foreign cars. I love a plump summer squash from Chile in the middle of the winter. I’ll even go so far as to say I enjoy an occasional French fry.
But pharmaceuticals from a land so lacking in oversight that they allowed melamine to be added to their own baby formula?
So my next question, can you clearly see “Made in China” on your prescription label? Or only on the pharmacist’s giant jar?
Good news, though. Between 2002 and 2007 the FDA inspected 80 drug plants in China. Bad news. There are 714.
That we know of.
Who knows if some back yard apothecary isn’t cooking up a batch of Viagra next to where he’s melting down computer motherboards.
Lead in your pencil anyone?
America, ya gotta love it.
Okay, not so funny, but then I read this headline in a science magazine. “FDA tackles tainted drugs from China”
What? Drugs from China?
I read it fully expecting to see some expose about pesticides affecting the opium crop or something. Nope.
We import all sorts of pharmaceuticals from China.
That’s right. Drugs to fight illness and stuff. And the FDA is having to fight with the Chinese government so they’ll allow us to inspect their drug making facilities.
Incredible. I mean, the FDA in this country puts drug companies through such a vigorous colon-twisting it leaves them uncertain which orifice to poop out of. But we let un-inspected drugs in from China? Drugs we swallow and stuff?
And we can’t just say, “let us inspect them or we won’t buy them”? You can bet American drug factories are inspected at least as often as Armour meat-packing facilities.
And really, does it do any good to put the major drug developers through 10 years of clinical trials to determine if incremental doses will cause the ever popular bloating and diarrhea, if we then turn around and let people ingest a jolt of poison from a foreign factory?
Hey, I’m all for globalization. I like foreign cars. I love a plump summer squash from Chile in the middle of the winter. I’ll even go so far as to say I enjoy an occasional French fry.
But pharmaceuticals from a land so lacking in oversight that they allowed melamine to be added to their own baby formula?
So my next question, can you clearly see “Made in China” on your prescription label? Or only on the pharmacist’s giant jar?
Good news, though. Between 2002 and 2007 the FDA inspected 80 drug plants in China. Bad news. There are 714.
That we know of.
Who knows if some back yard apothecary isn’t cooking up a batch of Viagra next to where he’s melting down computer motherboards.
Lead in your pencil anyone?
America, ya gotta love it.
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