Category Archives: Pedantry

Demolition Derby

Demolition Derby

This past weekend, I took my wife and son to the county fair. We did not go to see the flower hall. We did not go for the rides. We did not even go to see the livestock exhibition. We had done all that on our previous trip. This time we had a single goal: the Demolition Derby.

This is one of those odd American subculture things I always enjoyed as a child, and now get the pleasure of sharing with my own little one. There’s nothing quite like watching a half-dozen beat-up old junkers with gaudy paint-jobs shoving each other around, kicking up mud everywhere, and crashing left and right, punctuated by the occasional geyser from a popped radiator or flare from a burping carburetor. Yes, somebody got shoved all the way on top of the four-foot burm surrounding the track. Yes, somebody’s car caught on fire. Yes, somebody showed up with a Confederate flag painted on his Impala. Yes, the Batmobile was trashed.

If you’ve never had the pleasure of attending your local demolition derby, you’re really missing out on something. I never understood the appeal of auto racing, not as a spectator sport. I never got the appeal of tractor pulls and monster trucks. But a bunch of guys in salvaged late-model cars duking it out for a prize that maybe represents two weeks pay, smashing and scraping and steaming and burning, well that’s just good times.

Pardon the photo quality, it’s from my phone.

Brainstorming

Desalination

Just a couple of things that have come to mind repeatedly while reading the news:

  • Instant run-off voting doesn’t make sense to the entrenched parties. Why give the fringe parties a seat at the table? Possible solution: introduce instant run-off in non-party contests like county seat, city council, school board, etc. Over the course of a few elections, people may get used to the idea of not having to settle.
  • Nuclear power is safe, and secondary and tertiary-fuel reactors are possible and feasible. Fire a couple up where the fault-lines aren’t.
  • Transmission over long distances is inefficient, and centralized production is subject to market manipulation a la Enron or physical disruption. Put some solar-panel factories near the reactors.
  • Recently-viable third party forms in-state to reform state constitution and ensure that California taxpayers are getting their fair share back from the feds.
  • Take a queue from Germany and give some incentives for private citizens to buy into decentralizing the power grid a bit. More resistant to interruptions in transmission lines (earthquake, fire, etc.), increases in residential population helps offset increase in consumption.
  • Continue building nuclear reactors to run desalination projects for Imperial Valley, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other inherently-thirsty areas.

Not a plan, just thinking about some ways to address California’s reliance on its neighbors.

LA River Truly a River

Kayaking the Los Angeles River

No, really. It’s got water in it, and it’s navigable. By kayak, sure, but navigable nonetheless. I joke with my wife sometimes about them needing a TMDL for shopping carts, and about the absurdity of having one of our nation’s biggest population centers in a desert, but I just don’t like it when a government entity like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers messes something like this up. It may not be common knowledge that there’s something in the L.A. River other than the bitter tears of crushed dreams and leaked motor oil, but facts are facts.

Big hat-tip to LAist.com (also source of photo, obviously).