Yesterday we received in our mail a booklet from the San Diego County Office of Emergency Services. It contains all sorts of dire warnings and suggestions for living, and not quite dying, out here.

Basically, the idea is that every citizen is supposed to be prepared to survive a minimum of 72 hours after an emergency without any help from the government.  Gee, thanks. And why am I paying taxes?
So, you’d think if they were going to scare the hell out of us and try to encourage participation they might have made the thing easy on the eyes, right? Something to inspire the people to action? Hell no:

Note the happy children contrasted by the scary emergencies! And that fine (ahem) photoshop work.

Blech.

It gets most improbably worse. At the bottom of each page they run a banner:

What the hell is that thing? A human squashed like a bug on a windshield? Ew! That makes me feel secure…not.

The content is a bunch of lists of supplies which, if any normal Californian got all of, would leave absolutely no room in the house in which to live.  Batteries and moist towelettes, sure, but “powdered chlorinated lime” to put on the raw sewage you produce and store in the “large plastic trash bags for waste sanitation.” Ew. “Blankets or sleeping bags for each member of the family” are needed as well as at least one gallon of water per person per day (family of 4 needs at least 12 gallons) and heavy gloves and heavy shoes…who has space for all this stuff?

Then there are all the fill in the blank bits for information like reunion sites, out-of-area contacts, where all this crap is stored, who learned CPR, etc. And don’t forget to draw a plan to scale of your house to go over all the different possible emergency procedures–what do do in an earthquake versus a fire versus a terrorist attack, etc.

All in all, one terribly ugly, poorly written, and almost completely useless publication…and a waste of taxpayers’ money. Bravo.

The husband was offered some nice seats to Monday night’s baseball game–Padres v. Phillies. Very nice seats, actually:

Sorry for the wicked flaring, but that was taken with my hand shielding the lens as much as possible. When the sun is setting, watching batting practice takes more brim than any hat provides.

Anyway, that’s five rows from the field. Nice. Only problem was that one of my favorite players didn’t play–Dave Roberts. Actually, he pinch-hit (what is the correct past tense of that?) in a late inning, after we left. Darn. We left in the middle of the 7th, with the Padres behind and looking a bit sad. Of course, in the bottom of the 7th they had a great inning and took the lead. But it was late and bed was calling–oh well.
Unfortunately, such fantastic seats (free too) have now spoiled me to the cheap ones. When you are that close to the action, it really does change the game. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I won’t go if I can’t get that close, but it does mean I’ll pay too damn much for a ticket to get as close as I can.

Today there were almost simultaneous bombings in the transit system of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) India. As of this writing, there are reports of over 150 dead.

Of course, I got those reports from CNNInternational, since there is almost no coverage of the situation on CNN or MSNBC.

Not to minimize what happened in London a year ago, but less than a third the number of people were killed and yet those events got constant live coverage on all the major networks. These events in India get an occasional blurb on CNN or MSNBC, and that’s about it. At least CNN has their CNNInternational channel (on some cable systems, including TimeWarner here in SD) with live coverage, but where is the rest of the press?

Why doesn’t India rate the same coverage as England?  In both cases they were terrorist attacks (probably extremist Muslim terrorists, too). In both cases the terrorists hit transit targets during rush hour. In both cases they used bombs set up with nails/screws to fly as shrapnel. And yet the Indian events (that they have already noted as their “attacks of 7/11″) are getting only occasional coverage.

Do I really need to say it?