“CAPCOM to Nowak, prepare to begin pre-launch procedures.”
“Copied loud and clear, Houston.”
“Astronaut to confirm all required equipment and supplies have been loaded and stowed.”
“Trenchcoat—check… Wig—check… $600 in cash—check… Adult diapers—check… Rubber tubing—check… BB gun—check… Pepper spray—check… Steel mallet—check… 4″ knife—check… Latex gloves—check… Large garbage bags for disposing of body parts—check.”
“Checklist confirmed, you are cleared for 900 mile drive to Florida.”
Hell may not have frozen over, but Texas has, and that’s almost as rare. Last night we were driving home from Houston when the temperature dropped below freezing, and the car showed a black ice warning light. Soon it began to sleet.
Texans really don’t know how to deal with snow and ice. I drove slowly and carefully, but people who had bought into the SUV myth were overtaking. Unfortunately, no amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control will help if you hit a patch of wet ice. Before long we rounded a gentle curve, and passed a major accident scene. A big patch of smashed glass was by the central barrier, and an SUV was a little further on, pointing the wrong way with its front left corner crumpled. Seconds later we passed another car, similarly wrecked, then another SUV in a ditch.
Fortunately, we had set out from Houston as soon as it began raining, so we were only around 20 miles from home by the time the roads got really treacherous. I found a truck to follow. My reasoning was as follows:
I also did my best to stick to the middle lane where possible. Again, the reasoning was pretty simple: if the car started sliding, I’d have the maximum time possible to let it stop sliding before I ran out of road.
It’s always worth remembering that a 40mph collision with a solid concrete barrier is quite sufficient to kill you. Combine that with a road that may at any moment decide not to let you put on the brakes, and it’s not hard to deduce that doing 50 mph is a bad move. Some of the trucks put their hazard lights on and drove slowly in formation to block the way and stop various idiots from killing themselves, which I thought was very charitable of them.
By around 15 miles from home, everything had slowed to around 6-8 mph. Fortunately, after 15-20 minutes things eased up a little, and we made it the rest of the way at around 20-30 mph.
The final problem was getting from I-35 to our house, the biggest hazard being the big dip in Oltoft Street just west of the freeway. I eased the car to the top of the hill, and tried to start the descent as slowly as possible. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to brake significantly before I got to the bottom; I took my foot off the accelerator completely, and let the electric motors provide a little drag on all 4 wheels.
As we hit the bottom of the hill and came up the other side, we realized that the power was out–along with all the traffic lights. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to slow before the first junction, and people were pretty much behaving sensibly in the absence of signals. We made it home safely, and I started trying to un-knot every muscle in my body.
Normally at this time of year, the average temperature hits a high of just over 60°F, 15°C. Today the high was 2°C. Apparently it hasn’t been this cold since 1927. But as Texas’s own Bill Hicks might have put it: Remember, increasing incidence of climactic extremes has nothing to do with so-called global warming, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise. This is just a perfectly normal bit of freak weather you’d expect every hundred years or so…and so was Hurricane Katrina, and so is this year’s Amazon drought, and so is the sudden lack of ice in the arctic, and so is the freakishly warm Carribean ocean weather that has bleached the coral reefs, and the drought emergency in the western USA, and the heaviest rainfall since records began in Australia, the freak snowfalls in Kazakhstan, the record heat in Prague, the blizzards in the UK, the floods in Cumbria, and the 195km/h storms in Sweden.
Anyway, Houston…
We’d gone there because I have some time off, and it was a fairly cheap alternative to sitting on my ass watching TV all day, nice though the new television is. We both got a religious experience into the bargain; I got mine at the Johnson Space Center, and rothko got hers at The Rothko Chapel, of course.
Before anyone else calls to ask if we’re going to drown…I don’t think so. The hurricane is currently projected to head up the east edge of Texas. It has weakened down to category 4 again, and Austin is just outside the edge of its projected path.
So, we’ll get some strong winds and thunder and lightning and a load of rain, but that should be about it. We’re on a hill, well above the flood plain around the river.
Meanwhile in Houston, things are grim. It looks like an attempted mass exodus; people have seen dead bodies floating in the water, and don’t want their family to end up like that. An eyewitness reports:
Local news stations report that TXDOT (Texas Department of Transportation) is opening inbound lanes to outbound traffic on I-45 North now, and Highway 290 West and I-10 West later. Traffic is now moving at a crawl when it moves at all and some people have run out of gas after having been on the road for 12 to 24 hours. There is now almost no gas left anywhere in the city.
So if you were asking why all those stupid people in New Orleans didn’t evacuate, you can definitely now STFU.
There’s been some mild panic in Austin too. Clearly watching the Federal Government leave New Orleans to drown has freaked people out. The local grocery stores have had a run on bread and bottled water.
You’ve all seen that “looter” is an irregular verb for white people in the media: “I am commandeering essential supplies, you are finding essential goods, they are looting”. You’ve also all seen the compassionate Conservatives criticizing people for not evacuating. Here’s something new: calling people looters for stealing an abandoned bus in order to evacuate.
Ask yourself this: If I were in New Orleans wading through sewage-filled water and dodging bullets, if I’d waited days to be evacuated by the authorities but seen no action on their part, would I steal a bus to survive?
Speaking personally, hell yeah. I’d steal anything up to and including an army tank in order to get myself and my friends and family to safety. Not that I’ve ever driven a tank, of course; but I’m sure I’d learn pretty quickly with that kind of motivation. And this guy packed the bus with complete strangers and drove them non-stop to Houston.
The news media call it an “extreme act of looting”. I call it taking initiative and showing compassion for your fellow man.
Actually, maybe I should take some tank-driving lessons in Dallas. You never know when something like that will come in handy.
Well, it appears I’ve landed myself in the middle of an Internet fraud. The web hosting provider I was using, which vanished overnight, is supposedly one of the numerous web hosts set up by someone known as “Shang”… and also known as Josuee Shang, Joe Shang, Joe Sheikron, Josuee Ortiz, Joe Guadalupe and Joshua Shang Ortiz.
It gets weirder. His step-father is apparently named Daniel Milk, and is a VP at Compaq who managed to lend his son a bunch of Compaq machines to start his hobby web hosting business with.
Yes, his son. “Shang” is apparently a teenage kid. Reports of his precise age vary, but the mode is 19 years, with a range of 15 to 21.
The person “Shang” listed as the head of finance for his companies is a Ms Milk, which means she’s probably his mother… but her full name was on the domain records as Guadalupe Milk, so perhaps it’s just another alias.
Whoever “Shang” is, he lives in Porter, TX, just outside Houston, close enough to Compaq that at least the bit about his dad seems credible. His recent companies include Tacidhost.com, tacidhost.net, eryxma.com, and tacidblue.com.
The interesting thing is that while lots of people claim to have been fraudulently billed, I’ve checked my credit cards online and he hasn’t attempted to defraud me at all. The services were provided and worked fine right up until the implosion. And sure, I’m out a few months of really cheap hosting, but companies go bust all the time. That’s one of the reasons why the “bargain” 100 year domain registrations from Network Solutions are worth avoiding. (Even more worth avoiding than anything else involving Network Solutions, that is.)
So for a second time, I’m watching an online tempest of allegations and counter-allegations swirling around, with insufficient verified information to let me reach any kind of firm conclusion. However, as this entry will no doubt soon shoot to the top of Google, I will take the opportunity to say that anyone reading this should probably be wary of doing business with any web hosting company with a name starting with “tacid”…
Mean time, my web site is back, sorta, at a company which is based in… Porter, TX. Hmm.
Something I thought was an impossible urban legend:
A staff doctor at Christus St Joseph Hospital in Houston, TX was stepping into the elevator when the doors suddenly closed, pinning his shoulders between them. The malfunctioning elevator then ascended, decapitating the doctor.
A female hospital employee who witnessed the incident ended up trapped in the elevator with the doctor’s severed head for twenty minutes. She is now being treated for shock.
Details in the Houston Chronicle.