links for 2009-02-05

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Due to work stuff, I'm very busy this week, and I don't have time to write a detailed pathological language post, so I chose something that doesn't take a lot of explanation, but
While browser over at programming.reddit.com, I came across something simultaneously hideous and amazing.
I saw it at Julie's.
"American Music," the Violent Femmes "California Stars," Billy Bragg and Wilco "The City of New Orleans," Arlo Guthrie "Song to Woody," Bob Dylan "The Body of an American," the Pogues

The news reports about how Londoners are dealing (or not) with snow sound not vastly different from what I encountered when visiting Seattle during their December Snowpocalypse. I arrived on a Friday evening to find that the company with a monopoly on door-to-door shuttle service to/from the airport was only serving hotels on the I-5 corridor, and taxis were between scarce and unavailable. King County took a large fraction of their bus fleet out of service, because they rely on articulated buses that cannot handle snow, and many of the routes that still allegedly had service were modified to avoid hills as much as possible. Both SEA and PDX ran out of de-icing fluid, and there was no way to get more because the snow closed all highways across the Cascades. Some areas had gasoline shortages because tanker trucks could not safely deliver to those areas.

It's easy to criticize a city for shutting down in the face of trivial amounts of snow when you live in a place that considers such snowfalls routine. But because they are routine here, we have the equipment and manpower to dig out. Stockpiling equipment for a once-a-decade (or less frequent) weather event doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Washington, DC, sees snow often enough that they should handle it better than they do. Seattle itself rarely sees snow, but it happens often enough in the surrounding hills that there are people who know how to deal with it--they are the ones I saw driving around with tire chains on--or improvise solutions with what they have on hand (like the fellow my mom and I saw who was using a garden shovel to shovel snow). London doesn't even have the nearby hills that Seattle does, so I understand why it's a struggle for them.

By Eric Lund (not verified) on 05 Feb 2009 #permalink