Greg In The Desert

I thought this was a joke.

The Group “Angrytownhall” is holding live protests at libraries nationwide, and in downtown Los Angeles on 9/24/09. The “Flamer” movement” aims to protest socialized social services in America, beginning with fire stations. The group has added over 14,000 members in just one month on its Facebook group and is a rapidly growing political movement.

Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 15, 2009 — On Thursday, September 24, citizens from Los Angeles will join concerned citizens across the United States in opposition to ongoing taxes imposed by America’s socialized fire services, and gather to promote individual liberty, privatization, and free market principles.

Angry Townhall logo
So many people are engaged in everyday socialism without even knowing it. Our police, our Medicare, roads “So many people are engaged in everyday socialism without even knowing it. Our police, our Medicare, roads” said Angrytownhall President Troy Conrad. “We’ve decided to bring awareness to the rampant socialism in America, starting with our nation’s fire departments.” With over 14,000 members on its Facebook page, “1 Million Strong Against our Socialist Fire Departments,” the “Flamer” movement is a ‘grassroots organization’ intent on keeping taxes low for the American people by privatizing of 100% of America’s fire departments by 2011, then moving to other social services.
“We have too many people who are tired of paying for their neighbor’s fire, when they’ve had no fire. We want our America back,” observed Conrad. The protest is expected to draw thousands in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands nationwide. Los Angeles-based ‘anti-socialism’ protesters will rally in front of the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles at 3 p.m. Local residents are encouraged to attend to show their ‘opposition’ to socialized fire services. For instance:

A pilot light is a pre-existing condition. Why should neighbors be forced to pay for carelessness?
The USA hosts the best fire departments in the world, but that doesn’t mean that just anyone (i.e. non-U.S. citizens) should be able to dial up and have fires put out, without first giving a valid credit card.
There may be a secret order to let houses more than 65 years old burn if on fire.

Additional information on events in other U.S. cities, extended press release, a link to Facebook group, and the group’s “List of 10 Demands from the Government” visit: http://www.angrytownhall.com
Key Event Info
Los Angeles
Date: Thursday September 24
Time: 3PM
Place: Downtown Central Library
630 W. 5th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Contact:
Troy Conrad, Los Angeles Organizer
(323) 596-1181

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• News : Bats provide alternative to spraying – Rio Rancho Observer – SSCAFCA sponsors a number of bat houses erected near water retention ponds in Corrales and neighboring areas of Rio Rancho. Each house can hold between 150 and 400 bats, depending on its size.
• Plant communication: Sagebrush engage in self-recognition and warn of danger | Science Blog – Plants engage in self-recognition and can communicate danger to their "clones" or genetically identical cuttings planted nearby, says professor Richard Karban of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, in groundbreaking research published in the current edition of Ecology Letters.
• Sci-fi comedy shooting in New Mexico – New Mexico Business Weekly: – “Paul,” a sci-fi inspired comedy starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is shooting in New Mexico through mid-August. “Paul” is about two sci-fi geeks who make a pilgrimage to Area 51 and have a bizarre encounter with an alien named Paul, which leads to a life-changing road trip.
• Gil’s Thrilling (And Filling) Blog » Turtle Mountain Brewing – Rio Rancho, New Mexico – When Nico Ortiz, son of the famous anthropologist launched his inaugural restaurant and microbrewery in 1997, it just made sense that it should be called Turtle Mountain, a name which pays homage to his father and to the magnificent peaks under whose shadow his enterprise would reside.
• Is There a Milky-Way Galaxy/Earth Biodiversity Link? Experts Say "Yes" – 1n 1999, Astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way, measured precisely how long it takes the sun to complete one orbit (a galactic year) of our home galaxy: 226 million years.

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• Watch this space | The Australian – AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.

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• Apartment Therapy ohdeedoh | How Mac N’ Cheese Is Like A Cigarette BusinessWeek.com – The article by Cathy Arnst is a review of a new book by Dr. David Kessler promisingly titled The End of Overeating. In it he describes "conditioned hypereating" – an almost uncontrollable drive to eat excessively beyond hunger. This breakdown in appetite regulation begins in childhood and only gets worse.
• Add enhanced audio track to iMovie | Music and Audio | Mac 911 | Macworld – Set about your dirty work in Soundtrack or whatever audio application you care to use and do anything you like except change the duration of the audio file. So, play with the EQ, filter noise, or add an unhealthy amount of reverb, just don’t cut or add anything to the file. (Because if you do, the file won’t be in sync when you add it to your iMovie project.)
• Wienermobile Crash: Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crashes into Racine home – WITI – The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile got itself into quite a pickle when it crashed into a Racine home Friday morning. Neighbors tell FOX 6 the Wienermobile took a wrong turn and ended up on the dead-end street, Kenilworth Avenue in Racine.
• Hoover Dam bypass bridge an epic marvel – A quarter-mile downstream from Hoover Dam, two fingers of concrete stretch toward each other from sheer cliffs, suspended nearly 900 feet above the Colorado River. In a month, the fingers will meet, an 80-foot gap will close and the longest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere will be complete. The union will mark a major milestone in the nine-year construction of the Hoover Dam bypass bridge, scheduled to open in late 2010.

A story on KRQE about a remodeled home in Rio Rancho being destroyed caught my interest yesterday. There is an incredible amount of damage to the home, $30,000 worth and months of work. To make matters worse, the owner of the house doesn’t have home owners insurance.

The story starts with saying it only took a few hours to do the damage but later says the home owner hasn’t been home in several months. It seems like it would have taken more than a few hours to do this kind of damage.

One of the neighbors saw to make kids between 14 and 17 years old, one blonde and one brunette, walking away from the home. There is a reward for them.

The Wall Street Journal has a article title “The Three Martini Renovation” in which the the article can be summarized to this

But when novices who’ve had a few drinks get a hold of crowbars, drills and Sawzalls, the results are sometimes less than satisfactory.

A number of house bloggers were interviewed for this article, including myself. Many bloggers believe the reporter of the story, Jennifer Saranow, misrepresented herself.

The reporter told me she was writing a story about such work parties. People helping people. That sort of thing. When I described the plaster party to her on the phone, she expressed the usual polite surprise that people still help each other like that.

Then the reporter admitted the story was not a feel-good story about people helping their neighbors. It was a story about people throwing renovation parties to save money and inviting inexperienced friends over to mix alcohol with demolition – friends who ended up screwing things up or getting injured.

1902victorian.com’s account of the story is pretty good. I recommend reading the whole thing.

I was contacted via my blog, but I took several weeks to get back to the reporter. By the time she had interviewed me, I think she pretty much had the story written and didn’t dig too much. I did have a demolition part with plenty of beer but there was no excitement like some drunken friend taking out the wrong wall. I’m not mentioned in the story.

I guess this sucks if you have a helicopter and live in Scottsdale. The advantage of owning a helicopter is you can live pretty far away.

Only a handful of residents have commuted via helicopter since then, but planners said that they feared more helicopters would start hovering since street traffic is so congested. About three years ago, some homeowners began complaining about noise from heli-commuting neighbors.

The Rio Rancho City Council overturned a recently enacted Ordinance that banned tractor trailers from parking in residential areas.

On Wednesday, Jan. 24, about a dozen truck drivers attended a City Council meeting to speak out against an ordinance that had been approved the week before. It prohibited tractor-trailers from parking on residential lots in Rio Rancho.

Many of the drivers argued that before purchasing houses in Rio Rancho, they had checked with the city to make sure they could park their rigs at their homes. Others said they had surveyed their neighbors, and found that many were surprised by the city’s decision to enact such an ordinance.

Personally I’m not sure what to make of it. I’ve seen the rigs parked around Rio Rancho and they do take a lot of room and don’t look that great. They shouldn’t be around for very long, since the truckers make their money by being on the road, not parking the truck.

What a cool story.

When Susan Kuhnhausen returned home from work one day earlier this month, she encountered an intruder wielding a claw hammer. After a struggle, the 51-year-old nurse fended off her attacker by strangling him with her bare hands. Neighbors praised the woman for her bravery, and investigators said they believed the dead man – Edward Dalton Haffey – was burglarizing Kuhnhausen’s home. But after an investigation, police now say the intruder Kuhnhausen strangled was apparently a hit man hired by her estranged husband – Michael James Kuhnhausen Sr. – to kill her.

This morning my backyard looked liked it belonged in a swampland instead of a desert mesa. The rain has been insane and it’s been pretty much like this every night, I believe the ground is pretty much saturated. Yesterday one of my neighbors backyard was out in the street, there was so much mud that the city had to come out and dig it out.

This is precisely why none of my outdoor projects are getting done. As soon as the rain lets up I’m going to have a mess of weeds to clean up.

There’s nothing worse then when the person setting next to you stinks. All of the smoke from the wildfires in Arizona are prompting health warnings in New Mexico. Meanwhile the Phoenix area has their normal amount of smog, most of it’s not caused by the fires.

This is an amazing amount of money, that equals about 74,500,000 US Dollars.

A gang that pulled off one of the biggest cash thefts in history posed as police and walked into the homes of two bankers, taking their families hostage to force them to help in the audacious Belfast robbery, neighbors said Wednesday. Dozens of detectives were interviewing the two families and employees of Northern Bank, which lost at least $39 million when robbers cleaned out its central cash vault.

Luckily for John McClane, he wasn’t with the executives this time. Because if he had I’m sure it wouldn’t have been as successful.