If the Driver Can't Drive

If this doesn't work...

Image by Azreey

Not that I live in an action/adventure movie or anything, but the other day it randomly occurred to me: What do I do if the driver of this car is suddenly shot by terrorists. Sorry, that's just how my mind works. (This was made even more odd by the fact that my wife, who doesn't ordinarily consort with terrorists, was driving.)

So, once safely back home, I consulted Google (who knows everything) and actually came up with an answer. I don't say it's a good answer, but it is a something rather than a nothing. You can at least act with assurance during your last moments on Earth in case it doesn't work.

Note: Although this emergency knowledge is contained in a list of things a manly man should know in order to be manly (it's #20), I'm fairly sure it works -- if it works at all -- for females too.

So --

Supposedly Useful Directions in Case the Driver Collapses

(from ManCaved.com's list of 50 Things Every Modern Man Should Know)

It’s not a great situation to find yourself in; being the passenger of a car when the driver, for whatever reason, loses control of the vehicle. How you react can be a matter of life and death, so do the right thing and engrave the following into your brain:

• Push yourself over the armrest/centre console to give yourself a better view of the situation
• Don’t attempt to reach the brake pedal; you can’t 
• Firmly grab the wheel with your left/right hand (dependent on country!)
• Actively check as many mirrors as you can to make yourself aware of surrounding vehicles
• Put the car in neutral and turn on the hazard lights
• Slowly guide the car to the hard shoulder/emergency lane/clear part of the road, constantly checking mirrors
• Ensure the car is going straight, and use the handbrake to slowly bring yourself to a stop, by gently pulling it up
• If the vehicle is moving too fast/about to hit something, slowly apply the handbrake on and off but never full on; this can flip the vehicle or cause it to spin.

Packed Away

Bedtime!

Photo by Paul Spijkers

There are a lot of perks to working for Federal Express, like hitching flights on cargo planes, which worked out so well for Tom Hanks in Cast Away.  Taking a leaf from his book, an unidentified FedEx worker decided the cargo hold they were loading was a good place to curl up and catch some Zs, and woke to find themselves hours later in mid-flight.

Fortunately, this plane was only headed for Lubbock.

A better way to escape a riptide??

Milton & Michael: Two old hippies who might save your life

Photo by Ken Harrison

Earlier in the week I wrote about how to spot a riptide and the official government way to escape one. But thanks to an alert reader on Reddit (where the world comes to spew its wisdom) I now know that there is an alternative, countercultural method to free yourself from a riptide if one is trying to drag you to your doom.  And it's being spread far and wide by the 2 old surfer hippies pictured above.

Their message in a nutshell: Don't swim parallel to the beach, swim toward the waves.

For more details, click here.

How to identify a rip tide

Here's a handy photo to study so you can spot (and therefore run away from) a rip tide.

And here's how to get away.

I'm Shocked -- Shocked -- That Such Things Occur in Casablanca!

POOF!

Two years ago in Azilal, Morocco a man named Abragh Mohamed received the sad news from a Casablanca hospital that his wife had been in a horrible car accident and probably wouldn't survive. But they needed him to drive back to Azilal and get some more cash so they could operate on her.

By the time Mr. Mohamed returned 4 hours later, doctors told him his wife was dead. They handed her corpse over to the grieving man wrapped in a shroud and sealed in a casket. Back home she was buried.

Then, two years later, she showed up on TV.

A friend of the poor widower called to say he was watching Mr. Mohamed's dead wife on a program called Al Mokhtafoun ("The Vanished") and she was searching for her husband. She told the show that they had "lost touch" 1 1/2 years ago.

To all appearances her grave is still intact -- no tell-tale zombie marks or anything. So in all likelihood the hospital gave her husband somebody else's body to bury. And the doctors declared his wife dead when she was quite non-dead (but not undead, thank goodness).

The moral of our story? Don't trust doctors!

Church Sign

Don't let a mess happen in your lap!

Ever been just about to bite into a juicy, delectable Whopper or one of those Carl's Jr. 1/2 lb $6 Thickburgers, especially the messy ones ones with bacon and guacamole, when all of a sudden most of the good stuff slides out from between the buns and fills your lap with a steaming heap of beef, cheese, and catsup??

Spare yourself from this heartrending despair in the future by learning forthwith the proper technique:

Helpful diagram by the Art of Manliness, although women need this skill just as much!

Don't Mess With Floridians

Florida guard dog

Photo courtesy of Ianaré Sévi

Where I live, in the not-takin'-nuthin'-offa'-nobody (that's our official motto, I think) state of Texas, we think we're pretty tough. It's not just the people, either; the whole place is hostile to its inhabitants. The wildlife is plain angry, bugs are huge, especially the stinging ones, and the weather tries to kill us all the time.

To stand a chance the citizens have developed a larger-than-life hostility of their own. Nobody but nobody transgresses on a Texan's property, and if they do they're quite likely to meet a herd of huge of dogs who are as angry as the rest of the animals.

But as it turns out, we're small potatoes compared to Florida. They guard their homes with alligators. Hungry ones.

Danger: Texas

Texas

Texas is a dangerous place. Back in June a gentleman named Frank Reyes was changing a trailer tire when the jack slipped, trapping him.

Worrying that somebody might not happen along would be your major concern in any normal state. But this wasn't Seattle or Poughkeepsie.

This was Texas. In June.

The apocalyptically hot Texas sun heated the trailer's metal to 10,000 degrees (or thereabouts), and slowly seared the flesh of his hand right off down to the bone.

Did you know that in the 1800's, when land barons were trying to get people to immigrate to this place, the publicity hapless Easterners heard (from Davy Crockett himself!) was that Texas is "the garden spot of the world?" Davy Crockett was a bald-faced liar because Texas will try to kill you every chance it gets.

Fortunately, we now have central air conditioning that makes Texas habitable, and that has made the appearance of highly intelligent medical doctors possible. Today they sprout in hospitals and medical centers all across our gigantic state, on stand-by to leap into action and work their clever wonders on Texans who venture outside and suffer, as they surely will. Because this is Texas.

Belly -- best place for a desicated hand

Mr. Reyes, sadly, did not have the benefit of central air conditioning that day. But he did have skilled doctors waiting in chilly hospitals, ready to apply their healing arts to his hideous hand that the Texas sun had gnawed to bits.

Realizing eventually that nothing else was making the remainders of his fingers grow back, they chose the ultimate option, something only a highly creative, comfortably refrigerated, Texas doctor brain would dare to think of trying: cutting a hole in his belly and sewing his hand inside. Blood-filled vessels from his abdomen swiftly permeated his digits, filling them with life.

And now, weeks later, Frank's rejuvinated appendage is free of his stomach and living comfortably, changing trailer wheels left and right.

Once again, central air saves the day!

Mazda vs. the Spiders!!

"Little guys can do big things too," as they sang once in a VeggieTales video. What? You do not know of these VeggieTales of which I speak? Well then, click on the short video at the end of these paragraphs and enlighten yourself with this snippet of animated vegetable wisdom.

But this post isn't about VeggieTales; it's about a persistent little spider who, while doing its spidery thing, is costing Mazda a bundle of money.

There is a spider called the Yellow Sac who really belongs in Europe and Asia but somehow snuck over to North America, and they spin very pretty webs. They also very, very much love the smell of gasoline. And I can't blame them; I used to like it too when I was a kid. Who am I to judge?

So naturally they did what anyone would do: Crawl up into the evaporative canister vent lines on the Mazda 6 and build webs there. Unfortunately this had the unintended side effect of building up pressure in the fuel tank causing them to crack open.

Mazda actually had a recall 3 years ago to put little anti-spiders filters in the hoses. But the engineers hadn't counted on their amazing spider sense which helped the intrepid arachnids to evade danger and continue to build their webs like nothing happened.

So once again Mazda is recalling all the 42,000 Mazda 6's built between 2010 and 2012. This time they have a clever computer upgrade, possibly written by the renowned Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius that they're certain will defeat the pesky wall-crawler at last!

And now ladies and gentlemen, Junior Asparagus!

Our Cruddy Oceans

One obstacle to finding the wreckage of MH370: all the other junk out there!

Locating Flight 370

The other day they announced that the mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight 370 had definitely flown all the way to the Indian Ocean and then crashed. How did they figure that out? 

It's really kind of ingenious. What they did was use the plane's satellite 'pings', the Doppler Effect, and information from other jets that flew that route.

The Doppler Effect, one of those things you probably heard about while sleeping through science in High School (so it must be in your subconscious someplace!), is the very technical scientific principle that train horns and police sirens sound higher when they are coming toward you than they do when they're going away. 

As it happens, that works on radio signals too, and the one form of communication that was still operating on MH370 was it's satellite 'pinger' (where the satellite repeatedly says, "Need anything?" and the plane usually responds, "Nope.")

Mr. Doppler's effect

So basically what some British scientists did was use the pings to determine the plane's distance and direction (east) from the satellite -- and how long it existed before crashing. The Doppler Effect told them if the plane was moving towards or away from the satellite (away) and at what rate of speed. Then they compared that with past plane flights that gave off similar pings. They also knew how much fuel flight 370 had, which gave them the outer limits it could possibly reach.

This aviation blog reports there was one last incomplete ping received from the plane at about the time it would have been running out of fuel. That may have been transmitted at the moment of impact.

Now they just have to find it in a very deep, very inaccessible stretch of ocean.