A decorated book drop at my friendly local public library

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every time I return books at the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I get a chuckle from using their decorated inside book drop. When I pull the handle on its drum, it rotates downward to reveal eight teeth, as is shown above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That library branch also has a drive-up book drop. Some book drops are more complicated than they appear. There may be a spring-loaded surface inside. As shown in this brief Reddit video, books do not drop all the way to the ground from the slot.  

 

There is an article by Dr. Steve Albrecht at Library 2.0 on April 5, 2024 titled Horror Stories from the Book Drop: A Recap of Items Found by Librarians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside book drops sometimes are vandalized. Back in 2010 a disgruntled patron threw mayonnaise and other condiments into the drop at the Victory Road branch of the Ada Community Library. Another Reuters article on January 29, 2011 described how a Woman who dumped condiments in book drop pleads guilty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But that’s not the worst thing possible. Still another article by Chuck Knox in LIDAR Magazine on January 15, 2018 titled Future After Fire: The Renovation of the Eckhart Public Library said that:

 

“In the early morning of July 2nd, 2017 3 individuals were wandering the town of Auburn, Indiana looking to cause trouble. That trouble resulted in 1 of the 3 dropping a lit 1” mortar style fire firework in the return book drop box of the Eckhart Public Library. The result was an intense fire that caused an estimated 3.4 million dollars’ worth of damage to the building and its contents. The Auburn Fire Department was quickly on the scene and had the fire extinguished within 10 minutes of arriving. Even with their quick response the damage was horrific. Within a week of the fire the Auburn Police arrested Nykolas Elkin age 24 for the arson. He later admitted he placed the lit firework in the drop box; he was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison for the crime.”

 

Images of a mayonnaise jar and a fire truck came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Use relatable units when reporting numbers

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 13, 2024 I blogged about Chopping a number down to size by using the right unit conversion. In that post I noted that the federal government web site reports wildfires in units of acres. That’s hard to grasp if the fire covers thousands of them. There are 640 acres to a square mile, so sizes for larger fires instead should be shown in square miles, and not acres.

 

On July 19, 2025 there is an article by Nicole Blanchard at the Idaho Statesman titled Car on fire sparks 8,000-acre wildfire along I-84 near Boise on Saturday. A bit later that day there is another article by Barclay Idsal and Allie Triepke at IdahoNews6 titled 8,902 acre wildfire ongoing southeast of Boise leads to low visibility along I-84. 8902 acres converts to 13.91 square miles, or a square with 3.73 miles on a side (as is shown above).

 

That MM65 I-84 Fire is just east of the Blacks Creek Road exit (Exit 64) for I-84. If I plan to go east on I-84, then I commonly avoid east Boise traffic by going south on the ironically-named Pleasant Valley Road past the state prisons, and then east on Kuna Mora Road to reach Exit 64.    

 

 

An obvious lie early in Trump’s inauguration speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The seventh paragraph of Donald Trump’s inauguration speech contains an unnecessary and obvious ‘pants on fire’ lie (my italics):

 

“Our country can no longer deliver basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina, who've been treated so badly. And other states who are still suffering from a hurricane that took place many months ago. Or more recently, Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn from weeks ago without even a token of defense. They're raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now. They don't have a home any longer. That's interesting.”

 

Of course, there was much more than a token defense by Los Angeles County, which deployed thousands of firefighters who were hampered by high winds.

 

And nearby states each had responded to requests for help with more than a ‘token defense.’ An article by Christina Lords in the Idaho Capital Sun on January 9, 2025 was titled After receiving support during Idaho’s wildfire seasons, our firefighters are headed to California. We sent five task forces, 25 fire engines and 104 firefighters. A second article by Marvin Clemons in the Las Vegas Review Journal on January 8, 2025 was titled Nevada sending firefighters to help battle ‘one of the worst fires in history.’ They sent 50 engines and up to 125 firefighters. A third article by Stephen Howie at KUOW on January 10, 2025 was titled Hundreds of Washington firefighters sent to battle LA wildfires. Washington sent 45 fire engines and 280 firefighters. A fourth article by Joedy McCreary at USA Today on January 17, 2025 was titled No, California didn’t block fire trucks from Oregon over emissions rules | Fact check. Oregon sent 75 engines and 370 firefighters. Add those up and 195 engines and 879 firefighters came from elsewhere.

 

On January 19, a status report from the L.A. County Fire Department said:

 

“Firefighting agencies from across the country are joining forces at the Rose Bowl, coordinating efforts and resources to battle the Eaton Fire. Currently, 2,703 personnel are on the ground, working tirelessly to provide essential support for our community.”

 

 And an article from Gavin Newsom on January 20, 2025 was titled Here’s all the actions Governor Newson has taken in response to the Los Angeles fires described the current state response:

 

“Governor Newsom has deployed 16,000+ personnel, including firefighters, California National Guard service members, highway patrol officers and transportation teams. These efforts are supported by the biggest state investment in fire response in history — nearly doubled since the beginning of the administration. Response efforts include more than 2,000 pieces of firefighting equipment, including 1,490+ engines, 80+ aircraft, 200+ dozers and 210+ water tenders to aid in putting out the fires.”

 

Trump’s cruel lying is both horribly pointless and pointlessly horrible. In 2021 Adam Server warned us with his book titled The Cruelty is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America.

 

An image of the Palisades fire came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

A single-engine-air-tanker (SEAT) firefighting plane crashed in eastern Oregon on July 25th

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 9, 2020 I blogged about how Fighting wildfires from the air is dangerous, and described a SEAT crash in Idaho. Then on July 18, 2024 I blogged about another SEAT in second post titled Juliana Turchetti crashed and dies while fighting a Montana wildland fire.

 

There is an article by Kelly Anderson at Fire Aviation on July 26, 2024 titled SEAT crashes, pilot killed south of John Day on the Malheur (in Oregon). Yet another article by Barney Lerten at KTVZ on July 28, 2024 is titled Pilot of single-engine air tanker killed in Malheur National Forest crash identified as lifelong pilot, 74. James Bailey Maxwell had been a pilot for 54 years and logged 24,000 hours of flying time. He was flying an AirTractor 802A, which is powered by a 1,350 hp Pratt & Whitney PT-6A gas turbine engine. (That’s more horsepower than engines in early World War II fighter planes like the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk and the Hawker Hurricane).

 

The image was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.  

 

Juliana Turchetti crashed and died while fighting a Montana wildland fire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On October 9, 2020 I blogged about how Fighting wildfires from the air is dangerous. An article by Kelly Anderson at Fire Aviation on July 11, 2024 titled SEAT crashes in Montana reservoir described how a single engine air tanker (SEAT) flown by Brazilian pilot Juliana Turchetti, age 45, crashed on July 10, 2024 near Helena.

 

As shown above, she was flying an Air Tractor AT-802F FireBoss, which is a twin-float water bomber plane that can scoop water from a lake. Her LinkedIn page shows her in a FireBoss. There is another article by Jackie Coffin at Yellowstone Public Radio on July 11, 2024 titled Coroner identifies FireBoss pilot killed fighting Horse Gulch Fire.

 

The image of a FireBoss was adapted from this one by Agesch at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Air Force Reserve C-130 planes are backup air tankers for wildfire readiness

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Topics for speeches are all around you. We live near the airport in Boise. The past few days I could both see and hear dark-gray four-engine C-130 Hercules assault-transport planes flying low overhead. What is happening is described in an article by Erin Banks Rusby at the Idaho Press and KTVB on May 1, 2022 titled MAFFS training as part of local and regional wildfire-readiness efforts.

 

MAFFS is the acronym for a Modular Airborne Fire Fighting System that can slide inside a C-130 and be used to drop 3,000 gallons of fire retardant. Some Air Force Reserve units have them. These planes will be called when needed to augment the commercial air tanker fleet. On August 15, 2015 I blogged about Fighting wildland fires: Hotshots, helicopters, and whatever else it takes.

 

The 2007 image of a C-130 with an earlier version of MAFFS is from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Cold Missouri Waters – a folk song by James Keelaghan about a smokejumper tragedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The tragic Mann Gulch Fire happened back on August 5, 1949 in Montana. 13 of 15 U. S. Forest Service smokejumpers who parachuted in to fight it were killed when the fire surrounded them. Norman Maclean (who had written the novella A River Runs Through It that became a 1992 film) wrote a whole posthumously published book about it titled Young Men and Fire.

 

The U. S. Forest Service video about it, Mann Gulch: The Wrath of Nature, takes ten minutes to describe what happened. Could you tell that story in a five-to-seven-minute speech at a Toastmasters club? To do so you would need to pick a viewpoint, and eliminate lots of details. James Keelaghan did it in a folk song titled Cold Missouri Waters, originally on his 1995 album A Recent Future. He told it in just five verses, as a confession by the foreman, Wag Dodge hospitalized with terminal Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At YouTube you can watch a 5- 1/ 2 minute lyric video of that song it by Wolf Loescher, and another 10-minute lyric video by the Fiddlin’ Foresters.

 

The image of a sign came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Fighting wildfires from the air is dangerous

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a wildfire is burning on steep hills, the quickest way to fight it can be for a single engine air tanker (acronym SEAT) to drop retardant. On September 22, 2020 the 30-acre Schill fire was located two miles southeast of Emmett, Idaho. An Air Tractor 802 airplane piloted by Ricky Burton was dispatched from the Bureau of Land Management near Ontario, Oregon. It crashed, and Mr. Burton was fatally injured.

 

An article at IdahoNews2 on September 25, 2020 described how Pilot killed in Emmett remembered for decades of experience (and his love of kittens). A news release from the Bureau of Land Management on September 23, 2020 said:

 

“We offer our sincere condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of the pilot lost in this tragic accident. This reminds us of the inherent risks involved in wildland firefighting and the gratitude we owe to the courageous and committed men and women who serve willingly to protect lives, property, and natural resources.”

 

An Air Tractor 802F has a wingspan of 59 feet, and a 1,350 hp turboprop engine. It has a cruising speed of 220 mph, but a typical working speed of just 120 mph. It  has an empty weight of 7,200 pounds, a maximum (take-off) weight of 16,000 pounds and a hopper with a capacity of 820 gallons. Plain water weighs 8.34 pounds per gallon, so that would be about 6839 pounds. An article by Bill Gabbert at Fire Aviation on September 25, 2020 titled The SEAT that crashed Sept. 22 in Idaho was first registered two months ago explained that:

 

“The Air Tractor 802A can hold up to 820 gallons of fire retardant weighing approximately 7,380 pounds. If any air tanker pilot is depending on the release of retardant to make it possible to clear terrain while exiting the drop area, a malfunction preventing that release would affect the aircraft’s ability to climb, possibly resulting in impact with terrain.”

 

Another article from News9 on September 24, 2020 titled Oklahoma firefighter dies while battling fires in Idaho further explained: 

 

“The preliminary finding from the FAA is saying that the dump gate malfunctioned and didn’t open to dump the fire retardant, so he wasn’t able to pull up over the ridge,’ family said.”

 

On August 15, 2015 I blogged about Fighting wildland fires: Hotshots, helicopters, and whatever else it takes.

 

The image of a retardant drop came from FEMA via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Pop-Tarts: comedy, history, and toaster fires

I particularly enjoyed a routine in Jerry Seinfeld’s Netflix special 23 Hours to Kill about Pop-Tarts. He said to:

“Think back to when the Pop-Tart came out. It was the 60s. We had toast! We had orange juice frozen decades in advance. You had to hack at it with a knife. It was like a murder to get a couple of drops of liquidity in the morning. We had shredded wheat. It was like wrapping your lips around a wood chipper. You’d have breakfast, you had to take two days off so the scars could heal so you could speak….

That was breakfast. And in the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts suddenly appeared out of Battle Creek Michigan, which as you cereal fans know, is the corporate headquarters of Kellog’s and a town I have always wanted to visit … because it seems like a cereal Silicon Valley of breakfast super scientists … conceiving of the frosted, fruit filled, heatable rectangles in the same shape as the box it comes in … and with the same nutrition as the box it comes in too.

That was the hard part. I don’t know how long it took to invent the Pop-Tart, but they must have come out of that lab like Moses with the two tablets of the Ten Commandments.

‘The Pop-Tart is here! Two in the packet! Two slots in a toaster! Let’s see ya screw this up! Why two? One’s not enough. Three’s too many. And they can’t go stale ‘cause they weren’t ever fresh.’ “

History of Toaster Pastries

At Mashed on April 9, 2018 there is an article by Carissa Stanz titled The untold truth of Pop-Tarts. She said Post actually came up with Country Squares before Kelloggs but unveiled them before they were ready to hit the market. Kelloggs had time to knock off the product, and mass market first. An earlier article for the thirtieth anniversary by Steve Hymon in the Chicago Tribune on September 25, 1994 titled Toasting an icon compared the marketing:

“The names given to the two products were one more indication of Kellogg's superior marketing savvy. Kellogg appreciated that kids were the primary target audience for Pop-Tarts because they had yet to establish breakfast habits of their own. Post seems to have been more confused. As awful a name as Country Squares seems in 1994, it was arguably worse in 1964, when the word ‘square’ was widely used to mean ‘nerdy.’ When paired with ‘country,’ it seemed to describe a food for middle-age rubes from the sticks.”

My family tasted toaster pastries before they were sold in supermarkets

I remember tasting one type of unmarked toaster pastry before either was in supermarkets. My stay-at-home mother raising us five kids had signed up for a consumer panel that sent out free products to be tested. We just had to fill out a set of survey questions about our reactions. I vaguely recall that prototype product had less filling and was less tasty than what eventually appeared.  

Toaster pastries can cause fires

At the Miami Herald on June 27, 1993 there was a humor column by Dave Barry titled Tarts Afire. He discussed a fire in Ohio from pastries stuck in a toaster. A recent article at Extra Crispy on February 7, 2018 is titled Pop-Tarts are flammable, so we set some on fire. You never should leave a toaster unattended. Some toasters even can turn themselves on after a power failure, as described in CPSC recalls for ones from Waring and KitchenAid.

The pop tarts image came from Evan Amos at Wikimedia Commons. The toaster fire cartoon was adapted from an image of a Hamilton Beach toaster at Wikimedia Commons.  

What do people in Singapore fear a lot or a little?

Speaking coaches often claim that public speaking is the greatest (or really the most common) fear. But that’s often not backed up by survey data. On August 11, 2013 I blogged about how Public speaking was ranked sixth by a survey of workplace phobias in Singapore.

On October 31, 2019 YouGov had an article titled Singaporeans’ greatest fears revealed that reported results from a survey of 1,033 people done in October 2019. They asked whether 15 items were feared a lot, a little, or not (at all).

Results for a lot of fear are shown above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer version). Drowning (53%) was the most common fear, followed by fire (48%), reptiles (47%), cockroaches (42%), germs (41%). Death and heights (40%) tied for sixth, followed by ghosts (39%), public speaking (35%), spiders (31%), and clusters of holes (25%). Then came enclosed spaces (23%) and a three-way tie between darkness, dentist, and loneliness (21%).

There were some large gender differences – cockroaches were feared by twice as many women as men (56% of women and 28% of men), reptiles were feared by 61% of women and 32% of men, but 40% of both women and men feared death.  

Results for a little fear are shown in a second bar chart. Darkness (57%) was the most common fear, followed by loneliness (56%), clusters of holes and enclosed spaces (both 53%), public speaking (52%), and germs (50%). Dentist and spiders were tied for sixth (49%), followed by ghosts and heights (47%), fire (45%), death (44%), reptiles (43%) drowning (39%), and cockroaches (37%).

Results for the sum (a lot or a little fear) are shown in a third bar chart. Fire (93%) was the most common fear, followed by drowning (92%), germs (91%), reptiles (90%), and a tie of heights and public speaking (87%). Ghosts (86%) were sixth, followed by death (84%), spiders (80%), cockroaches (79%) a tie between clusters of holes and darkness (78%), loneliness (77%), enclosed spaces (76%), and the dentist (70%). At Business Insider Rachel Genevieve Chia discussed these rankings in an article titled What spooks you? Singaporeans’ greatest fears are drowning, fire, and germs, survey shows.

Burning a prop dollhouse to demonstrate how a house fire occurs

It’s hard to understand exactly what variables control how a structure fire occurs (fire dynamics). One excellent way is a demonstration using a dollhouse – an inexpensive prop just 49” high, 32’ wide, 19” deep. Watch Allen Fitzpatrick in this three-minute YouTube video titled Salem firefighter demonstrates fire flow paths by burning down doll house.

At Modern Fire Behavior there is a an article from 2015 on a new style dollhouse with plans. There is a 25-page pdf file of Palmer’s Dollhouse with both plans and instructions for lessons.  

There is a 9-minute video titled Deputy Chief PJ Norwood demonstrating flow paths with this training prop, and a 24-minute video titled Doll House fire behavior, Birmingham Fire and Rescue.

 

Cognitive biases and the frequency illusion

We may think of ourselves as basically rational, but really have a long list of cognitive biases. The list at Wikipedia divides them into three categories (1) decision-making, belief and behavioral biases, (2) social biases, and (3) memory errors and biases. A selected few of them would make a good topic for a speech at a Toastmasters club, or a public speaking class. 

One is confirmation bias:

“the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.”

Watch a recent YouTube video shown above, with a tall geyser that confirms (based on our seeing Hollywood movies) - what should happen when a vehicle hits and breaks a fire hydrant just above sidewalk level. The video was made in Manhattan Beach, California.

But that’s just what happens with a wet barrel hydrant – a type used in Hollywood and other very warm places. It isn’t what happens in colder parts of the U.S. though where dry barrel hydrants are used. There usually will not be any geyer. Another YouTube video shows how dry barrel hydrants are made. The valve mechanism actually is located underground below the frost line. When the hydrant is hit above ground, the long rod which operates that mechanism just detaches.    

Now that I’ve mentioned fire hydrants, you will start seeing them, and have another bias – the frequency illusion:

“The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards.”

If you live in a city or town, then fire hydrants really are all around you. But you probably were not paying any attention to them. There are Clow brand hydrants at both ends of the block my house is on. Within walking distance in other housing developments there also are Mueller and Waterous brands.

Over two decades ago I looked at a “traffic hydrant” which was designed so the ground level flange connection would break away rather than the hydrant body. That design used four necked down bolts which unfortunately corroded severely from road salt. When the hydrant valve was opened one day, the bolts failed and the body flew upward like a rocket. On January 25, 2015 I blogged about A simple prop made from PVC water pipe fittings.

This post was inspired by the May 23, 2018 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic strip about the frequency illusion.  

Just in time for summer - an outlaw country song from Steve Earle about hotshots and the legendary Ed Pulaski

It’s officially summer, which is the season for wildland fires out here in the intermountain west. During the Soda Fire, on August 15, 2015, I blogged about Fighting wildland fires: Hotshots, helicopters, and whatever else it takes. Hotshots are elite 20-man firefighting crews.

The Firebreak Line is a country song on the latest album from Steve Earle & the Dukes titled So You Wannabe an Outlaw. You can listen to it here on YouTube.

Further back on October 20, 2009 I blogged about A Heroic Forest Fire Story: Ed Pulaski and the Big Blow Up. In that post I quoted a 390 word version of the story from a 2007 publication on Leading in the Wildland Fire Service. But in the second verse of his song Steve Earle tells the Ed Pulaski story using just 80 words: 

“...Ed Pulaski is a friend of mine
When I’m cuttin’ out a firebreak line
He invented this thing like an axe I swing
And he never left a member of his crew behind
When the fire jumped across the line
Took ‘em down in an abandoned mine
Then he drew his gun, said he’d shoot the first one
That got it in his head to try and step outside
Got everybody out alive, Ed Pulaski is a friend of mine”

Steve’s version is almost five times shorter. It’s not totally correct, but some poetic license is allowed. There’s a live solo version of The Firebreak Line from Good Records in Dallas. In it Steve jokingly claims that, along with the axe-mattock Pulaski, there is another combination tool called a chingadera. But that really is a rude, indefinite Spanish noun which means “that f*cking thing.”    

The statue in Boise is in front of the Wildland Firefighter Foundation.

Fighting wildland fires: Hotshots, helicopters, and whatever else it takes

Today’s National Weather Service forecast for Boise begins with the phrase patchy smoke. That indicates we are in the midst of wildfires. How much of the U.S. is burning right now? About 1,151.3 square miles, or more than the whole state of Rhode Island (1033 square miles). What’s the biggest active fire? It’s the 340 square mile Soda Fire, which is burning here in Idaho, about forty miles southwest of Boise. I took the image of it shown above on the afternoon of August 13th, looking west on Kuna-Mora road south of Kuna, Idaho. 

The table shown above is from data posted by the National Interagency Fire Center here in Boise. How much land has been burned so far this year? It’s 10,171 square miles, or more than the entire state of Maryland (9707 square miles) and almost as much as Vermont (9217 square miles) plus Rhode Island (10,250 square miles).

How are wildfires fought?

HOTSHOTS

Often it calls for handcrews of twenty people on the ground, out in the back country with hand tools. The elite crews are called hotshots. See a National Geographic article, Who are the hotshots? A wildland firefighting primer. There are about 400 people fighting the Soda Fire. They also have dozers.

HELICOPTERS

Big Ericksen Aircrane helicopters are often seen passing through Boise. Their 72-foot diameter, six bladed rotors make a distinctive low-pitched sound. They have big hoses that can be dunked into lakes to refill their water tanks in just about thirty seconds, as can be seen in this amateur video from Idaho. A longer professional video shows water bombing of fires in California.     


AIRPLANES

A wide variety of Firefighting Aircraft are being used, ranging from single-engined single-seat crop dusters (like Dusty in the animated Disney movie Planes: Fire and Rescue), up to DC-10 airliners, as shown here on the Soda Fire. One type we often see operating from Boise is four-engined C-130s equipped with the MAFFS system for dropping 2600 gallons of retardant. Of course, there also are smokejumpers, who are like firefighting paratroopers.



WHATEVER ELSE IT TAKES

For the Soda Fire there have been crews arriving from far away, including northern Michigan, at the border with Canada, and Alaska. There’s a constant juggling act to get the available resources sent around to handle everything that’s going on.

According to the Idaho Statesman:

"About 460 personnel are fighting the fire with 11 helicopters, 34 engines, 12 water tenders and 9 bulldozers."

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2015/08/15/3940351/soda-fire-grows-residents-prepare.html#storylink=c"

   

UPDATE August 19, 2015

This morning the Soda Fire reportedly was 95% contained, and just 70 people were fighting it. It now covers an area of 443.3 square miles. Yesterday it was 90% contained and 702 people were fighting it. Two days ago when it was 70% contained there there were 811 people fighting it. As of then, the states with current fires were as shown below:

 

A simple prop made from PVC water pipe fittings

Sometimes a simple, inexpensive model is just the right prop to  illustrate a point in your presentation.

Several years ago I gave a speech to twenty members of my Toastmasters club about a corrosion problem that I’d seen two decades earlier. It involved special bolts used at ground level in a flange joint on a fire hydrant, instead of regular hex-head bolts as shown above.

When a hydrant is located near a road, it can be hit by a wayward vehicle. It is desirable to have the flange joint break just above ground before the hydrant body does. That special feature is the difference between a regular hydrant and a “traffic hydrant.”

One way to do this is to have the cast iron bottom flange made in pieces (or with grooves) so that it breaks before the body of the hydrant does.

Another way is to neck down the cast-iron bolts at the joint, so these special “breakable bolts” (as shown above) fail first. This inexpensive fix once was used by some manufacturers. The bolt head even could be shaped like a T (to indicate traffic).

The problem with breakable bolts is that the smaller diameter section is hidden away. It is a good place to trap water and road salt. If you forget to undo and inspect some of those bolts periodically, they will corrode away without being noticed. Then when the valve on a hydrant is opened all the bolts can break, accidentally launch the hydrant skyward like a rocket, and severely injure someone. This is why some municipalities forbid the use of breakable bolts. 

I wanted to make a larger-than-life (~3X) model to show the head and neck from a breakable bolt to my audience. (There already were PowerPoint slides of regular hydrants). So, I headed to my friendly, local plumbing supply store and bought a two-foot length of one-inch PVC pipe, two caps, a tee, two couplings, two reducers, and a two-foot length of half-inch pipe. I cut short lengths of pipe, and slipped all the pieces together. If I had a larger audience, then I could have instead used two-inch PVC pipe.

How to fry a turkey without burning down your home

Sometimes a demonstration is the best way to present a topic. Deep frying is one way to quickly cook a juicy turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. If done wrong, it’s also possible to start a fire that could burn down your home and wreck the holiday celebration.




Last year the Boise Fire Department did this video demonstration of what could go wrong. It isn’t the only cautionary video out there, but I think people are more likely to listen to their city fire marshal than someone distant. Underwriters Laboratories has one and State Farm has another.   

At the Food Network, Alton Brown has an instructional video along with a detailed description of how to build a Turkey Derrick. 

Survey done before last Halloween for Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in London found women’s top five fears were losing family members, being buried alive, speaking in public, dying, and fire

Note that public speaking wasn’t first. When the Daily Mail reported about it on October 30th their headline was:

“Is public speaking a fate worse than death?
Most women are more scared of public
speaking than they are of dying”

Why did they follow the two-decade old Seinfeld joke about the third and fourth fears on the list? They were lazy and rephrased the first sentence of the October 23rd press release on the 72Point Digital Hub which said:

 “Women are more worried about speaking in public than DYING.” 

The press release said there was a survey of 2000 adults, and listed the top 88 fears for women shown above. (Click on either table for a larger, easier to read view). Another version at www.72point.com on October 30th also has links to press coverage they got worldwide. 

The headline for the press release claims that:

“WOODEN ICE LOLLY STICKS, CHICKENS AND
BEARDS AMONG MODERN DAY FEARS AND PHOBIAS”

Both chickens (#61) and beards (men with beards #65) are in that top 88 fears list, but ice-lolly (Popsicle) sticks are not. So why are sticks worthy of mention?

The text of the press release mentioned even more fears that weren’t on their list (positions for those which were are shown in parentheses):

“The top fears cited in the survey were losing family members, followed by being buried alive and then speaking in public.

However the survey did uncover a whole list of weird and wonderful phobias including wooden ice lolly sticks(?), chickens(#61), feet(#62) and men with beards (#65).

Some women confessed to having an irrational fear of peanut butter sticking in their mouths (#77), while others can’t bear the feel of polystyrene(79), woolly jumpers (#78) or cotton wool (#83).
 
Other weird and wonderful things guarantee to make some women shudder include bubble baths(?), people on stilts(?) and balloons popping(#59).

The study shows a large number of women are freaked out by things like the sight of blood(?), horror films(?) and scary television(?).”

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! London didn’t bother to briefly post about this survey on their own web site until November 14th, and curiously they didn’t link to the 72Point posts.   

The KEEP CALM poster came from William Louis.