Subterranean Beefworks

With a vengeance

Having a bad cold is a little like having an antiquated sewer system just below the surface of your face. Every now and then, a fluid no one wants anything to do with comes gushing forth, quickly mopped up and discarded to a container that people will try extra hard to avoid.

It's like being a rain cloud. You can aptly describe your mood the same way you would an overcast day. You traipse about open spaces, going nowhere in particular and pissing everyone off while you do it. In a ceasless cycle, your sinuses accumulate that thin infectious discharge, and periodically dump it in torrents on your upper lip.

Everything changes when you've got a bad cold. Your favorite foods are not only unappetizing, but you grow mad at them for being unappetizing. After paying good money for the least offensive meal available, you end up throwing it out and digesting your own heavy hunger. No position in bed is comfortable, no amount of blankets will warm you up, and if you're male, even breasts don't seem all that special anymore.

[Intermission]

Should I be saving money to go to japan in march or has that fallen through?

sorry

there's like 3 people who have checked this site more than once in the past 5 weeks. there's nothing really here of interest to me, or to anyone. i just haven't given a shit, or have felt especially opinionated or whatever.

my camera's batteries are dead, so i can't well take pictures

i don't know, i'll be back the next time i feel like being back

WKRW Worchester

Ohioan NPR is to Pennsylvanian NPR as your friend's mom's cooking is to your own mom's cooking.

Because radio entertainment in Ohio was in such dire straits, I took to 88.5 FM, National Public Radio, if I wanted to listen to broadcast radio. Besides the nerve-twisting hours of opera on weekends, they had some pretty good stuff if you don't mind listening to people talk about things that aren't all that interesting. What strikes me though is how soothing the voice talent is. They all speak very eloquently, even as they're telling a bad joke, and beyond good speech, there is the odd evening where something very interesting is on. "All Things Considered" takes the listener to the most unremarkable places on the face of the earth, and shines light on someone or somesuch that sometimes offers something new. One episode had the journalist talking with an old man who collects rare and out of print records from the time when records were first on the market. You could hear the old man shuffling around in his daudy low-ceiling basement, as the journalist described everything to you, from the smell of the air to the spectacle of 500,000 records stacked wall to wall. I dig that kind of stuff.

Getting back to my analogy about home cooking, there are few differences between Ohioan NPR and the PA NPR that I now listen to. Like mom's cooking compared to some other mom's cooking, you know it's still food and it doesn't taste bad or anything. It's just different, and you would prefer what you grew up with. The one single thing that I liked better in Ohio was NPR. They were just...slightly...different.

A word about my new webpage, I am nearing completion of the layout, which means coding is not far off. Here's a little preview:

Who the hell cares?

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/03/elec04.prez.dean.terror.ap/index.html

So Howard Dean, to me the most promising presidential candidate so far, is in hot water for allowing poor security at Vermont's nuclear plant. This bugs me because it threatens the progress of the only man who has a chance of ousting Bush, who simply should not be in office.

It bugs me because security at nuclear plants is not the huge deal it's made out to be. That's my opinion after doing a hearty bit of research on the Chernobyl disaster, and then into nuclear power plants in general. Plants are not designed like they were in 1986, the year of the disaster, nor were American plants ever nearly as unsafe as Russian ones, which were built with haste in order to compete with the west. Even before America imagined terrorists flying jetliners into buildings, nuclear plants were fortified with many feet of concrete, steel, and earth to withstand just such an impact.

Knowing that, what could a terrorist accomplish after infiltration of a plant? Obviously, the goal is to release lots of radioactive material into the atmosphere with the hope that mass amounts of people will die of radiation sickness and that Americans will be plagued by cancers and birth defects for years to come. Sorry terrorists. It just doesn't work that way.

During the catastrophic meltdown in Chernobyl, the nuclear core overheated (for reasons which aren't important to know here). A steam explosion blew the lid off the reactor hall. Air was allowed to rush into the hall and and set aflame the extremely hot reactant material. As Russian plants were not designed with safety in mind, there was no secondary containment chamber for the reactor and so Reactor 4, with a huge gaping hole in it, began releasing massive amounts of radioactivity into the atmosphere. 31 people died in the tragedy, people who worked in the plant and the firefighters who first arrived on the scene to put out the fires.

31 people is without argument a tragedy, but it is not the massive genocide a terrorist would like to see. In the years following, there was a slight statistical increase in thyroid cancer in populations based within 30 miles of the accident, and to date, only 10 thyroid cancer deaths were attributed to the incident. Here's my source.

Now considering how much better American plants have been designed, how much safer they are, and how much more physically fortified they are, what are we worried about? We have learned from the mistakes of Chernobyl, improving everything from containment of the reactor hall to how best to prevent the spread of radioactive material. There would be arguably FEWER casualties than what happened in Russia in 1986. Consider also the fact that when treated early, thyroid cancer responds extremely well to treatment.

It's my opinion that the amount of casualties from an attack on a nuclear plant is simply not worth a terrorist's time, not when they've set the precident of September 11th.

So, if it isn't directly death that they want out of an attack, what could they gain from otherwise disabling a plant? They would get a power outage. Whoopty-friggin-do. They would have to attack and disable a number of plants to defeat the fall-back mechanisms of our powergrid, and granting them that much, they forget that the most critical elements of our infrastructure, the one's we would need most directly following an attack, have their own backup generators (hospitals for example). God forbid they want to steal nuclear material to make bombs. They would be quickly disappointed to find out that nuclear fuel used in power plants is enriched about 2-3%, whereas to be "effective," a nuke needs about 90% enrichment.

This post is a huge middle finger to three groups of people. The first goes to those who give Howard Dean static for not turning a power plant into a military compound when such an undertaking shouldn't even waste ink on the priority list. The second goes to terrorists for bringing forth all this bullshit. And finally, the third goes to everyone whose vote is swayed by the kind of paranoia nonsense expounded in that news article.