This May Save Your Life
Candace is my niece who drowned in her car on New Years Eve. We still don’t have all the details, all we know is she wrecked off of a bridge, her car landed in the water and she did not get out of it. The ditch she landed in normally has two feet of water, but since it had been raining so much the night before, it was seven feet deep that day.
I couldn’t understand why she didn’t get out of the car. It seems simple. It is not.
Less than a month after the accident, Mythbusters premiered their episode of a car underwater. They showed how difficult it was to get out, how the doors and windows are impossible to open at certain points while the car is sinking. It is best to open the door when the car first hits the water, or open the windows before the water rises that high. But once the water gets past the window, you need to break it with a hammer or one of those gadgets they sell just for that. Or conserve your energy and just hold your breath until the pressure equalizes in the cabin. Then the door will open easily. It is a long time, about a minute and a half of holding your breath.
I used to think, oh I’d just breath near the ceiling in that pocket of air. Wrong. The front end sinks first because the engine is so heavy. So, nose down. Cars usually rotate upside down, too. (very disorienting) I’d have to chase that pocket of air to the back dash. It’s not likely I’d be in clear water, either.
Oh. Make damn sure the very first thing you do is unlock the door and unbuckle your seatbelt.
This video shows how they got out using two different methods. It’s just a few minutes, but it may save your life. After you watch that, come back and hit this link, it shows their first attempt, uncut. Had they not had an oxygen tank in the car, one Mythbuster would have drowned.
Edited Note: Mythbuster segments are no longer available on YouTube, so I had to find a replacement.
Here is a 20/20 segment of them doing pretty much the same thing.
Or you could click on this link, a video from the experts, Survival Systems USA, “How To Get Out of A Sinking Car”.
I bought the LifeHammer and Res-Q me punches for every car we own. Just in case the door or windows are damaged and won’t open. The Res-Q me punch fits on the keychain and is easy to pull from the keyring. The LifeHammer also has a razor on it to cut the seatbelt.
You can order window punches from Amazon.
Under Pressure
It’s about the end of the month and I know a lot of you writers out there are feeling it. That deadline. It’s closing in on me pretty tight and swift. Funny how it comes gradually then suddenly.
Well here is an excellent song I am spinning just for you prisoners of deadline. It’s a redo of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” by The Used and My Chemical Romance.
Now I like Queen and didn’t think any of their stuff should ever be messed with. This song however is actually better than the original and I’ve talked with some hardcore Queen fans who totally agree. What do you think? Oh and the video part is not important (unless you are an MCR or The Used fan like me), just want you to hear the song. Sit back, turn the speakers up and relaaaaaaax. Then go kick some deadline ass.
EDITED NOTE: To be fair, here’s Queen and David Bowie’s original “Under Pressure” (the video part of this one is important).
Sleepwalk Freak
I am a big time sleep talker. Blane says I rattle on all night long. I don’t worry too much that any big secrets will come out because first, I don’t have any, and if I did, 99% of the time my words don’t make sense. It doesn’t even sound like English because each word is a combo of the beginning of one word and the ending of another.
My very own sleep language.
It’s worse than that, though. I sleepwalk too. And sleep eat. I’ll wake up in the morning and find a candy wrapper and oh, no, I can’t even remember enjoying the damn thing. This is slightly embarrassing.
My latest sleep adventure was sleep writing. Oh yeah. My daughter, Sweetpea caught me sleepwalking and thought I was awake. She asked me to write her a note for school, something about not being able to make it in early for tutorials, whatever.
Here is the note:
First of all, SMS is the name of my other daughter’s middle school. Sweetpea goes to high school.
Second, none of those words make sense.
Third, and this is the scary part. My signature at the bottom of that note? Not my freaking name. Not even close.
Dude, Where’s My Car?
A friend of mine has a daughter, Jules. She adopted the girl from a Russian orphanage when the kid was about five. An extraordinary child, she mastered English in just four months.
Now at fourteen, this kid already has her own business, well, at least she has her own business cards. She does babysitting, household chores, housesitting, walks dogs… She has the key to all the homes in the neighborhood where she lives.
Last week Jules was babysitting two kids for a wired up artist type lady, Felicity. My friend gets a call from Felicity:
Felicity: Where’s Jules?
My friend: Babysitting at your house.
Felicity: Well she isn’t here. And my Lexus is gone.
My friend: Can’t be, Jules doesn’t know how to drive.
Oh yes she did. Turns out Jules had put the children to bed, saw the keys to the Lexus and had an irrisistable “urge” to drive. She didn’t just drive around the neighborhood, she went on the tollway. She admitted this wasn’t the first time, either. And that she was a damn good driver.
Jules’ parents made her call everyone in the neighborhood and explain the situation. Suprisingly, she only had to return Felicity’s keys. The kid is still in business.
Cook Dinner For Your Best Friend
Over at Max’s blog, there is an update on the pet food recall.
My vet is telling all pet owners not to feed their dogs or cats any packaged wet foods, even if the food is not on the list. He’s saying to feed the animals steamed rice and chicken broth if you feed your pet wet foods. Bringing your pet in for a blood test would be a good idea
Dry foods were not affected by the recall.
EDITED NOTE: Make damn sure you check out Pooks’ post about the shocking cause of all this, Go there right now.
Blak On A Mac
Oh yes, I did it again, spilled a drink on my computer. The first time it was on a laptop, IBM I think it was. I watched that thing die before my eyes. The screen had a dark red color that invaded it in a liquidy pattern, like a hemmorrhage. As terrible as it all was, it was funny, yes, horrifying of course, but it just looked like the thing was bleeding to death.
It never came back, either. But that was then. With the MacBook, well, I turned it upside down real fast and let the soda drip off. It still works! It’s alive!
But my keys are sticky. AJ tells me I can just go to the Apple store and they have new keyboards they just pop right in there. Oh, and yeah, of all things, it was Coke Blak I spilled on it.
Calling All Dog and Cat Owners
There has been a big pet food recall. Go check out Max’s blog entry about that. It’s pretty bad. Animals are dying.
EDITED NOTE: I’m hearing they are adding foods to the list. Keep checking those links at Max’s blog.
Things That Hurt
A friend of mine described the feeling of losing his child six years after the fact. He said, “It feels like I’m walking around with a sword in my chest.” He also said he recently went on a religious retreat and experienced something, like the sword was being pulled out, all at once.
I’m not religious, but spiritial. I don’t know how I’d deal or if I could deal with that sort of loss.
When my niece Candace was born, my brother got a tattoo with her name and birthdate. Not a lot of people were getting tattoos back then, but I thought it was cool. After Candace had her son, she got a tattoo with her son’s name and birthdate. I didn’t know that until yesterday.
Yesterday her mom (Paula) sent me a photo of a tattoo she just got:
What a beautiful tribute. Baby blue was Candace’s favorite color. She liked it so much, it was part of her email address.
Feel Like Dancin’?
I bet you can’t listen to this song without wanting to get up and dance. (Don’t try this at work, wait, yeah try this at the office.)
Check ‘em out, K-os, from Canada.
Pay attention to the video at the very end, it’s trippy and beautiful.
Can You Scream In French?
I never thought of myself as a romantic. I was a nurse working with people hooked up to so many machines they looked like the back of my tv. My mind was grounded in science. Heart rhythms, not heart strings were more important in those days.
ICU nurses burnt out quickly. Fortunately I didn’t have to work anymore. Even better, I got to start travelling. At first it was just to visit my friend Liv in England with a side trip to Paris.
Before long, I found myself driving all over France looking for a second home, something we could fix up and live in during the summertime. The Euro was only ninety cents US. This would be a great investment.
One of the first houses we looked at was in the Loire Valley. I’d found it on the internet and it seemed perfect. It was a huge stone house, multi storied with a turret and on about 10 acres of land that backed to a beautiful river,. It was called a maison de maitre, but to me it looked like a little chateau.
I don’t have a photo of it, but this one is similar and in better shape:
So we got there and were greeted by a French couple, a man and woman in their late sixties. The house had belonged to the woman’s mother who had recently died. They did not speak a word of English. No problem. We spoke a little and brought Blane’s cousin, an interpreter with us. Parfait.
The old man had bug eyes and a constant smile on his face. He was about five foot tall, a little bent over with arthritis and rail thin. He had little patches of fine hair that reminded me of baby bird feathers. When he talked he began every sentence with “Quand” which is sort of the same as valley girls saying “like” all the time.
His wife also smiled a lot, was not much taller than he, but she was rotund and robust. Everything was funny to her. That’s how it seemed at first. Until I realized she was just embarrassed about what was in that house.
The house was still completely furnished with the oldest antiques I’d ever seen. Dark stained furniture with carvings of creatures and claws. On the wall in the living room was a wooden plaque about ten foot wide by about two feet tall. Hung up like a picture. There were skulls and skeletons carved into it. She just shrugged when she saw my eyes pop out of my head. Then there was the human skull on the mantle. I asked her if it was real. She picked it up, turned it over, then placed it back on the mantle and nodded, “Oui.” More laughs.
On to the cellar. The French word for that is “cave.” It looked like one. A single light bulb with a pull string swung from the ceiling. Roots grew into the walls. Full of spider webs. But the most amazing thing, there were shelves filled with Bell jars of preserves. Thousands of them. Green beans, peaches, everything you can imagine. They had been sitting on those shelves for fifty years.
What I thought was a turret was actually a two story chapel that was added to the house after the loss of a child. It had pews and an alter, beautiful religious frescos on the walls and ceilings. Lots of old melted candles by photographs of the little girl.
What was really confusing about this house was the staircase. It was a two story house, but the way this house was spread out, it looked like it had five stories. It was a circular staircase and every few steps there was a door to a room. It didn’t make logical sense.
On this staircase was where Blane and I got separated. He went one way with the old man, I followed the old woman into another room. Right away, in the dead woman’s bedroom, leaning against the wall was a wooden coffin, classic toe pincher style, upright, empty and with its door open. The French woman was giggling so hard she could barely tell the story.
Which was her father had made the coffin by hand for her mother, but the father died first and the mother refused to be buried in that. No one in the family had the heart to get rid of it.
We meet up with my husband and the old man in a similarly macabre room and Blane says, “We’re going to get eaten in here.” The old man was nodding, “Oui.” He had just shown Blane a bone he pulled out from under the bed, a human arm bone. He was pretty sure as the old man kept pointing to his upper arm and then to the bone. And Blane knows human bones, he comes from a funeral home family. He grew up around bones. They don’t scare him, but people showing off bones?
There were things to see outside. In the front yard, a pigeonaire which is a two story round tower about ten feet in diameter. Birds still lived there, wild ones. I don’t know why so many old French homes have these things.
The barn and stables were set far back from the house, next to the river. To get to it we crossed the pasture of knee high grass, lush, perfect green and dotted with wildflowers.
On the old barn door was a metal warning sign. It doesn’t take a single French lesson to understand the two words that stood out: Quarantaine and tuberculose. More nervous laughter from the woman when she saw my reaction. The sign had been there since the 1950’s.
We didn’t buy that house or any house in France. It would’ve been a good investment, just in terms of money exchange. The thing is, it wasn’t really about an investment anyway. It was just a romantic notion I had, an idea to go live in a place where the grass seems greener, the language velvety, and the people sometimes so quirky they reorganize your brainwaves for a moment.
Seems greener? It is greener. I still have those ideas, too. Maybe if the Euro goes down. One day…
I Can’t Beat This, So Here’s Spanky
Spanky is my thirteen year old daughter and she wrote a review of the Taste of Chaos concert we went to yesterday. Calling me the chaperone would not quite be accurate here since I enjoy the music just as much as they do. Besides, it’s research.
The following is what Spanky wrote in her blog today (I added the photos):
I went to a concert yesterday.
No, not an orchestra concert or a band concert.
That’s right, a rock concert.
I’ll admit I was a bit afraid, as we had tickets for the pit and I am still scarred from my near-death moshing experience at Download 2005, but I would not let that get to me.
Who was going, you ask?
Well, my mother, my father, my sister, two of her friends, and my dear, dear self.
First, we had to get our wristbands for the pit. They were an extremely vibrant neon pink, and this amused me greatly as it was not exactly Britney Spears we were going to see.
Upon entering the pit, I found out two very strange things that completely contrasted with my former experience with pits.
Number one being that it was very small, and number two being that it was nearly empty.
Also, upon looking closer, the floor was already soaked in beer.
A band was just finishing their show, and after their final scream, the lights flipped back on and people began to vacate, for water or cigarettes or some of the crappy and overpriced food they sold.
We luckily got a place right up to the bars that separate the people from the security and the stage. This place was not exactly right in front of the middle of the stage, but even I, being blind and not wearing glasses for fear of having them break, could see very well.
We waited about ten minutes for the next act and then the stage lights dimmed. I hoped that this was going to be good.
A sole spotlight shined upon the stage, and a man in a rabbit suit, yes, a rabbit suit hopped onto the stage.
His speech went something like this.
“HELLO[EXPLETIVES]. HOW YOU ENJOYING YOURSELVES? WELL, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR SOME PURE DAAAAARKNESSSSS!!!! HERE’S CHIODOS!”
He then hopped offstage.
I had to admire a man who could get up on a stage in a bunny suit and say the words, “PURE DARKNESS!”
I assume this man was the lead singer of the band in question, but I never really paid attention to him.
Who was I watching?
The keyboardist.
Why the keyboardist, you ask? [And is that even the right word for the guy who plays the keyboard?]
Because he was totally and ineffably insane, that’s why.
Throughout the entire set, he was headbanging with his huge puff of hair and and slamming his hands onto the abused keyboard. I’m not even entirely sure he was playing the thing, but he probably was, as I could see him get serious when he had solos.
But man oh man. What a keyboardist.
I don’t even remember the music because of this guy.
So then the lights went on and a few people left to go choke down a death stick or drink some water. We were trying to leave to go get water or something, but then the next band started.
This one was Saosin, a favorite of my sister’s and a relatively popular band.
And this was where the fun started.
You have never seen stupid things that people do when they’re drunk until you have seen moshing.
Also, this is a hilarious thing.
One guy and another stand back to back, link their arms, and then the first lifts the second to do a flying, kicking thing.
Now, what’s particularly hilarious about mosh pits is that fact that everyone knows when they begin and everyone knows when they end.
Plus, it’s a bunch of drunken people beating each other up, I mean, seriously, what more could you ask for?
Everyone moves out to make a circle, and in the middle of this circle you’ve got people beating each other up for no apparent reason.
Then, the moshing ends and everyone moves back in.
“Organized chaos,” my father called it.
Then we moved back to our spots at the bars [we were at the back for the entire moshing bit, but I didn't like it there. At the front we were next to the speakers and we were also able to see. Because only tall people like to stand in front of us, usually].
It was here I noticed a fantastic phenomenon.
In fact, I think that I’d probably go to rock shows just to watch this and the moshing.
The crowd-surfing. Oh my god.
Is this stuff not the most amusing in the world?
You’ve got the security guards, who angrily pull people from the crowds and then jostle them all the way over to the side of the security area, then they have to go to the back of the pit.
Then, there’s watching the people.
Their looks of triumph.
Happiness.
“I’m going to do it again!”
Watching them jump up and down in success, and then getting grabbed by a security guard.
And now, to talk about the actual music of Saosin.
I honestly don’t remember it much, and I don’t listen to them so I don’t know what a good song sounds like, but there was a lot of screaming, both from the crowd and the singer, so I assume that this means it was a good show.
A bit later came Senses Fail.
Finally, a band I could sing to.
This was fun.
For me, I would sing and alternately scream.
Because I never get to scream and I just find that fun.
Hohoho.
So the lead singer screams around and jumps all over the stage like an insane person, and the crowd-surfing and the moshing rises in its energy.
Senses Fail played pretty well, and they sounded a lot like their album with a few embellishments.
I had the most fun screaming to their songs, but I wish they’d played Angela Baker and My Obsession with Fire.
That’s my favorite.
So then the lights went on, and they set up for the next band.
The set up process I find to actually be pretty fascinating.
They have a rotating thing, and while one band is playing, the other band’s stuff is being set up. [Stuff being drums, scenery, etc.]
Then when the lights flip on, they flip some switch and the entire thing rotates.
Fantastic.
So, while its rotating, I see the most insane set ever, just totally over-the-top.
It’s the set for 30 Seconds to Mars.
Also, it’s got screens and paper lanterns and is supposed to look like China.
I think, Oh my god, Jared Leto, oh my god. He just loves the theatrics.
And here is where the fangirls came rushing in and I suddenly found myself surrounded by the most insane Jared Leto fans on Earth.
I’m lucky I survived.
Then.
Opera music begins to play [the song from The Omen].
Just one of those crazy ones where there’s some huge chaos about to go down.
Everyone looks around excitedly.
However, Jared Leto and the band are not going to be getting on the stage in the same way any normal band would, no way no how.
We see flag-bearers, bearing red flags.
Behind them trails… 30 Seconds to Mars walking in from the audience.
Cue the fangirls.
Jared Leto eventually gets on stage, amazingly without having gotten his clothing ripped to shreds.
He is wearing all white, and a white bandana.
Also, he has an insane-looking white guitar that you know and I know he is really not playing.
He pulls down the bandana.
And holy God almighty, he has a beard.
Can you say instant turn-off?
Not to mention that Jared Leto is possibly the most conceited of all lead singers.
When he knows everyone wants to hear The Kill he says something to the effect of, “Let me hear you scream it!”
He’s standing up there in the spolight saying, “Beg me, beg me, pray to me my little sheep!”
Not in those words, but that’s the idea.
Dear oh dear oh dear.
Also, you see him standing there in the spotlight.
In all white.
With that crazy beard.
And you get this strange impression that goes something like this.
Oh my god. This man thinks he’s Jesus.
Aside from the fact that he’s horribly conceited, he is a good performer.
He comes to the sides of the stage that nobody goes to, and he touches the hands of the fans.
Also, he likes to get down into the crowd and convene with the people, letting them touch him while he croons his songs.
And amazingly, he always returns without missing any clothes.
My mom actually got to touch him as he was running by once.
30 Seconds to Mars played very well and sound pretty much like their CDs.
Then the lights came on, and instead of rushing out, people began rushing in.
Here was the big act of the night.
They even dropped a black veil over the front of the stage, so you couldn’t see them setting up [and so you could see the band's silhouettes when they eventually came out].
And then came the words on the veil.
THE USED.
Cue the fangirls once more, please.
Then we see Quinn [guitarist] come on stage.
Scream, scream, scream.
Then some other guy.
And then another.
And then…
Bert.
And now even the men are screaming like girls.
They unveiled their set. It was a bunch of what looked like fish bones, extremely tall and standing straight up like sentinels.
Also, the “bones” had neon lights in them, and the heads of the fish were some of those things that look like fire.
They performed well.
I liked the blending of the songs they did, and I got to scream a bunch.
Also, Bert dancing was hilarious, though it was a little gay.
Also?
Bert does not know how to please the fans.
He’d go up to the middle front, standing on the speaker, shrieking, and the fangirls would put out their hands for him to touch.
He would not touch them.
One girl actually grabbed his pinky on the microphone.
He pulled away like it was fire.
Also, he said, “Has anyone here not heard of the Used?”
To the few murmurs, he replied what was to the effect of, “This song is for you, and you can go to hell.”
Almost those exact words.
Not exactly a way to be picking up the new fans, is it?
So I woke up this morning, bright and early at 11:30.
Funny ruckus.
My sister entered a contest to go backstage to meet the Used, and she found out she had won but not until today. She thought they’d let her know by email but should have checked their website. She could’ve gone backstage.
So she missed meeting her favorite band.
She doesn’t want to talk about that.
