Strange Things are Afoot at the Circle K

What's the deal with...

1. Young evangelical ministers and goatees?

2. When did so many black people start smoking?

Firefighters as Heroes

I saw one of those "most dangerous jobs" lists a few months back.  You can find a bunch of varying ones from different years by googling, but here's my consensus based on fatalities per 100,000 workers:

1. Fishing workers
2. Timber and Logging Workers
3. Aircraft pilots
4. Steel workers
5. Trash and recyclable material collectors
6. Farmers and Ranchers
7. Roofers
8. Electrical Power Installers & Repairers
9. Drivers - from Pizza Delivery to Big Truck
10. Cab Drivers

Most lists have construction workers around 10.  According to this CNN article, farmers (41 deaths per 100,000 workers) are more than twice as likely to die on the job as police officers (18.2/100,000) and four times as likely as firefighters (11.5/100,000).  One list has working as a cashier as more dangerous than firefighting. 

Now, firefighters are there to protect us and our homes.  As anyone who's seen that fishing show on the Discovery Channel knows, those guys high compensation is based on the risk.  But other jobs, like driving a cab or delivering pizzas, are also there to serve us.  We need cab drivers to take us to the airport, just as we need firefighters to put out our fires.  Driving a cab is more dangerous and probably less lucrative.  Firefighting is a civic service because it can't be operated in a free market like a cab service can.  Thank God.  (Though give the Bush administration a few years...)

The many firefighters I met during my EMT course and clinical rotations were all very committed, knowledgeable and  professional.  But they also have a pretty sweet gig.  They work 24 hours, during which they may get significant sleep, and then have 48 hours off, when they usually run their own business or teach CPR or EMT classes.  It pays well - starting off better than teaching in many places with bigger salary raises over the course of a career. 

Slate, in all its contrarian glory, ran a piece in 2003 that questioned if firefighters are really heroes.  After some caveats, here the writer goes:

Firefighting is a cushy job. Firefighters may have the best work schedule in the United States—24 hours on, 48 hours off. And those 24 hours are usually not terribly onerous. While a few big-city fire stations may have four, five, six calls, or more during a shift, most aren't nearly that busy, giving firefighters time to give tours to school kids, barbecue hamburgers, wash fire engines, sleep, and pose for "The Firefighters of [Your City Here], 2004" calendars. Indeed, fire officials devote much of their time to figuring out how to cover up the fact they're not getting the hoses out very often. So we have firefighters doing ambulance work, firefighters doing search-and-rescue work, anything but Job No. 1. Meanwhile, the long days off give many firefighters a chance to start second careers. That makes it easy for them to retire after 20 years, take a pension, and start another profession. I've known firefighters who moonlighted as builders, photographers, and attorneys.

Firefighting isn't that dangerous. Of course there are hazards, and about 100 firefighters die each year. But firefighting doesn't make the Department of Labor's 2002 list of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers top that one, followed by commercial fishermen in the No. 2 spot, and general-aviation commercial pilots (crop dusters and the like) at No. 3. Firefighting trails truck-driving (No. 10) in its risks. Pizza delivery drivers (No. 5) have more dangerous jobs than firefighters, statistically speaking. And fatalities, when they occur in firefighting, often are due to heart attacks and other lack-of-fitness problems, not fire. In those cases where firefighters die in a blaze, it's almost always because of some unbelievable screw-up in the command chain. It's been well-documented, for instance, that lousy communication was a huge reason why so many firefighters still were in the burning World Trade Center when it imploded, and well after city police and port authority police had been warned by their own commanders of an imminent collapse and cleared out.

Firefighters are adrenalin junkies. I did mountain rescue work for several years and more than once was praised as a "hero." Oh, give me a break. It was fun and exciting. Firefighting is even more of a rush. Sharon Waxman, in an excellent article in the Washington Post, interviewed firefighters in California. Every one was in a complete lather to get to the next hot spot. "It's almost a slugfest to get in there," one told Waxman. This urge to reach the fire is not entirely altruistic. It sure beats washing that damned fire truck again, for one thing. Plus a big fire is thrilling, plain and simple.

Firefighters have excellent propaganda skills. Firefighters play the hero card to its limit. Any time a big-city firefighter is killed on duty, that city will all but shut down a few days later while thousands of firefighters line the streets for a procession. In July 2001, I witnessed the tasteless spectacle of Washington state firefighters staging a massive public display to "honor" four young people killed in a forest fire (one absurd touch: hook-and-ladder rigs extended to form a huge arch over the entrance to the funeral hall). For the families of the four dead firefighters—three of whom were teens trying to make a few bucks for college—the parade, the solemn speeches, and the quasi-military trappings all were agony. "It's just the firefighters doing their thing," one bystander said to me later with a shrug.

Firefighters are just another interest group. Firefighters use their heroic trappings to play special interest politics brilliantly. It is a heavily unionized occupation. Nothing's wrong with that, but let's not assume they're always acting in anything but their own best interests. In Seattle not long ago a squabble broke out between police and firefighters when both were called to the scene of a capsized dinghy in a lake. The firefighters put a diver in the water, a police officer on the scene ordered him out to make way for a police team, and all hell broke loose (yes, the cops were at fault, too). The dispute wasn't over public safety, it was over who got the glory. New York firefighters, admittedly deep in grief over lost co-workers, exacerbated the challenge of body recovery operations after 9/11 by insisting on elaborate removal procedures for each firefighter uncovered, an insult to others who died there. Not long before that, in Boston, a special commission released a scathing report that detailed a 1,600-member fire department up to its bunker gear in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since then the department has bitterly resisted reform efforts.

None of this is meant to dispute that firefighters are valuable to the communities in which they work. They are. But our society is packed with unheralded heroes—small-town physicians, teachers in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, people who work in dirty, dangerous jobs like coal-mining to support a family. A firefighter plunging into a burning house to retrieve a frightened, smoke-blinded child is a hero. But let's save the encomiums for when they are truly deserved, not when they just show up to do their job.

Most of this is true.  I should add that in my area most of the fire departments also run the paramedic services, which means around 90 percent of their calls are EMS-related and only 10 percent fire-related.  These guys go on more calls than the author suggests and put up with more shit, figuratively and literally.  Still, it ain't a bad gig.  And it's significantly less dangerous than other jobs that pay a lot less. 

A Blog of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

Found it very Andrew Sullivan.  Lots of great entries and pics.

"You Could Play the Jews, I'll be Your Jim Caviezel"

It's the best SNL digital short since Dick-in-a-Box.  Andy Samberg professes his love for Iran's president.  Follow this link, as the clip can't be embedded.

UPDATE: That link be broke.  This works for now.  NBC hasn't released it yet that I can find.

UPDATE 2: This embed works for now.  Upon second viewing, this is better than Dick-in-Box.

SNL - Andy Samberg's Love Song to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Uploaded by nono_the_bean

The Seven Most Insane Moments on Cable Access Television

Cracked.com has the list.  My favorite so far is below.  John Kilduff is an MFA candidate at UCLA who hosts a cable access show called Let's Paint and Exercise TV in which he walks on a treadmill while painting and doing a third thing.  The third thing in this episode is making blended drinks.  He also takes calls, which is the greatest part.  There's a weird trend of Latino gang members encouraging him and then denouncing other gangs:

The World's Strangest And/Or Stupidest Conspiracy Theories

Swallowing the Camel has a the scoop.

Laughing Someone Out of a Room is 10x Better Than Kicking Their Ass

If the right put 1/1oth of the cleverness and enthusiasm that they spend hitting at Dems into our foreign policy, we'd be doing a lot better at the whole "WoT" thing.  They've been mad as hell about nutbag Iranian President Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia this week.  I was actually on the fence regarding the matter.  Then I saw this clip:

And then I read Ezra Klein:

He's not being feared.  He's being laughed at. Imagine how the Iranian people feel seeing these clips (and they're seeing them). Imagine how the rest of the Iranian government feels being made to look so foolish -- and all for this jester's dreams of personal aggrandizement.

The Bush administration has long upheld that our best weapons against Iran are our unwillingness to speak with them and the threat of bombing. They've failed. But our willingness to expose Ahmadinejad to the risks of free ands public speech, combined with YouTube, may prove to be far more potent.

Exactly.  And, yes, the Iranian people do hate the clerics.  They're the most pro-American people in the region.  But those on the right who think they'd side with us if we bombed and invaded their country and not succumb to nationalism are more wrong than the assbags who thought Iraq would take a month. 

Friday Night Lights

Bill Simmons, in a plea to save NBC's wonderful Friday Night Lights,  calls it "the greatest sports-related show ever made."  I have to agree.  The show's fantastic, but nobody's watching it.  That NBC did not cancel it is the best example of network benevolence in the recent past.  It was marketed as a show about football, and the season opener took up a good portion of the pilot, which featured a fairly outlandish plot.  But it got a lot better.  It's 80 percent characters, football-related and not, and 20 percent football.  The coach, his wife and daughter are the most realistic family on TV.  There's not a single cardboard character.  If the show was marketed as it actually is, it would have more female fans than male.  OK, enough televangelising.

You can watch the entire season online free here.  Or you can buy it at Amazon for $19.99, which is a steal for 16 hours of high-quality programming.  NBC also has some kind of satisfaction guaranteed gimmick going. 

Completely Anecdotal Linguistic Trend Watch

For the third time in a couple weeks, I've heard someone say that something "impressed" them when the impression wasn't a positive one.  This is completely contrary to the 2,673 prior uses of "impressed" I've encountered in life.  An impression can be good or bad, but, previously, when a person says they're "impressed," the connotation has always been a positive one.

Previous entries in CALTW noted that "plethora" is the only word dumb people remember from SAT prep.

The Fate of Regular People Who Became Advertising Icons

Mental Floss has their bios.  The Gerber Baby became a mystery novelist.  Little Debbie became a NASCAR  fan and Seventh Day Adventist.  Wendy, um, operated Wendy's restaurants.  Mikey from the Life cereal commercials did not die in a Pop Rocks and coke tragedy. 

The Science of Gangster Rap

Link

Two New Rules

1) If you still support Pres. Bush, you're a fucking idiot.

2) If you believe 9/11 conspiracy theories, you're a fucking idiot.