Underpants On The Outside

Just by living there, Los Angelenos have implicitly agreed to accept earthquakes and fires in exchange for disproportional amounts of beautiful women and never needing snow tires.   As such, growing up there gives one a fairly high acceptance for acts of God.   When you wake up and the ground is shaking like the Earth suffers from some galactic epilepsy, it can be a bit disorienting, but you need to keep your wits about you if you’re going to find a way out of that waterbed.

Apparently Los Angeles went to sleep with a lit cigarette again - half the state is on fire. My sympathies and best wishes go out to anyone affected by this*, though personally I’m not too nervous about my own family and friends.  I probably should be: after all, I have a friend, a grandmother, an uncle and my father who all live close to at least one of the fires.  Worse, my dad lives in a trailer, which don’t have the best success record against mother nature; their reactivity to fire and wind leads me to believe that they’re made of two parts tumbleweed and one part propane. 

But like I said, these fires happen, so I’m not getting upset until I hear something.  Plus, I’m confident everyone’s okay at the moment; if you look at the Google Map below, you can see that there’s no way my that fire’s getting to my dad’s place.

I mean, do you know how bad traffic’s gotta be on PCH right now?  That fire’s looking at a three, four hour drive.  At least.  It’ll take twenty minutes just to make the left onto Temescal Canyon Rd.  And if that fire thinks it’s faster to take Sunset…well, we’ve all made that mistake once.

There’s even a Google map tracing all of the fires. 

I know there are legitimate uses for this, but I can’t help but wonder: do you think that the inventor of the modem ever imagined that we’d one day be able to (or want to, for that matter) look up driving directions to a fire?  Or nearby places to eat (e.g., “pizza”)?  Hell, I can look up some local movie times if I feel like making a day of it.   It’s like if the inventor of sliced bread were to find out that it’s good for both sandwiches and roofing insulation.

*For serious.  Particularly firefighters.  They’re fuckin’ rad.