Blame NPR. Last summer I heard reference to I Am Legend as part of an explanation of the global grain crisis and a few days ago a friend was recently complaining about an on air economist referencing Night of the Living Dead. If economists have always been zombie fans and they are just now getting a lot more airtime, that'd explain a lot.
I think my recent running T-shirt purchase is what has put me back in the mood - it has an approaching pack of zombies in workout gear on the front and reads "28k Later" on the back. Also, some months back I counted the number of Facebook groups which reference zombies and the number was astounding. Far more than a hundred. Perhaps with memories of Jericho waning and church attendance down, kids today are now reaching for other end-times preparation motivation.
I was having trouble deciding to get out of a scary relationship, religion being a big part in my life and the kind of abuse in my marriage not being one spoken to directly in the Bible. While talking to some friends one evening I mentioned that I'd actually tried to be an atheist for a number of months because the secular part of me thought that given the circumstances, it was OK to get a divorce.
My friend Ben spoke up quietly and said something like "You know, Kel, it's OK for the Christian part of you to think that too."
Ben may very well have saved both my life and my faith with just one sentence.
I wrote an ode to Tony Hillerman the day after he died. It's much too nerdy to reproduce here, slide guitar being hard to reduce to text.
On Britannica:
The things one does
Just to prove oneself worthy
Of notice and respect
Get stranger each year.
For myself I read articles
And magazines and Wikipedia
As if my education and accomplishments
Were not enough.
My grandfather, sixth-grade education that he had
Read through every Britannica he purchased
Not to prove anything
But because he was worthy of such.
Of course I don't mean that people should go out exposed and try to travel unprotected in high winds. I maybe be a cyclist but I'm not bonkers - I'm talking about leaving before the storm hits. One CNN article from 5:30 am EDT on September 11 indicated that people were making evacuation plans; at that point I seem to recall that things were still quite calm. If they had a "go-bag" as I think I've heard Jim Macdonald call them, they could grab it and take off. If people tend not to leave as soon as they can and thus there isn't going to be any congestion, sure it makes sense to take your vehicle. Is it that people don't leave that early? Is vehicular congestion generally a non-issue if you have the sense to leave that early?
Obviously, if people have family members that can't cycle (or pets they can't carry), that isn't an option. Similarly the notion that I would judge those who didn't evacuate is jumping to conclusions - with regard to the cycling issue, some people have bad knees, some people are old, some aren't in good shape, etc. It should have been clear I was only talking about a particular subset of the population for whom it is possible. (Why not have a debate on the ideal delivery conditions for pregnant men while we're at it?)
A few mentioned that some people probably can't afford to evacuate at all, and that's likely to be an issue for young people for whom the cycling option might be physically possible. There are a lot of considerations, from the need to keep working up until the last minute for a daily paycheck, to the cost of a good road bike, to the affordability of paying for a hotel after each night of cycled evacuation, to the stores necessary to feed and hydrate themselves to be able to expend that kind of energy, but again I'm only talking about people for whom it could be feasible, not those for whom it couldn't.
What I wanted to know though is why I don't hear of anyone at all doing it, especially when it could help ease congestion on evacuation routes for those for whom it isn't an option - why wouldn't someone like me for whom it is not an impossibility evacuate with a group from the cycle club in an attempt to ease congestion?
I've never cycled in Houston but to say that it isn't feasible since there are interstates involved sounds improbable. The MS150 (http://www.ms150.org/ms150/) ride from Houston to Austin doesn't seem to use interstates - http://www.ms150.org/ms150/maps/2008/Tour%20Map%20Final.pdf seems to show that they use farm routes and if those routes are suitable for a major ride they are probably suitable for a bicycle evacuation (again, provided you leave early and have the ability to cycle and aren't abandoning a loved one and have the money to do it).
As a note I find the assumed tone of my prior post pretty funny. Come on, folks - why assume I thought I had a reactionary one-size-fits-all plan? My query as to why more people don't do something shouldn't indicate I thought I'd come up with some kind of universal solution. If just 2% of the Galveston population could evacuate in that fashion that's 1,000 less people and presumably 500 less cars clogging the roads for those for whom it isn't an option. Perhaps I'm just courteous to a fault by thinking that choosing differently in order to ease congestion rather than adding to it is a no-brainer if you have such an option. And perhaps I'm naive for thinking that Austin's a good destination for waiting out a storm like Ike. Such is life.
I have a very nice road bike. I can ride it for about one hour at speeds above 25 mph, thereafter I have to drop to about 15 mph and can maintain that for an entire day. If I had a child and a child seat on the back I could do that 15 mph and get us a good 100 miles away without any problems. I could have a backpack with all our stuff and a saddlebag equipped with spare tubes and tools and just take off and fly past all the cars stopped pretty much everywhere.
Why do not more people do that sort of thing? It seems like a no-brainer - in a situation where the traffic is likely to be horrific, why do people even try to take cars when bicycles will suit them just fine?
I got an ourebi from the Dominican Republic and seriously thought that the link would take me to something brown - perhaps betting that most animals are brown....
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|---|---|
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