Brighter days?

[jhetley]

Thin fog this morning, lifting, now sunshine.

On the other hand, a further sign that Maine is turning into a Third World state: thieves steal navigation aids for scrap metal.

Think I'll head out for a bike ride.  Unless some yahoos have stolen the pavement for the asphalt content.

Comments

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

When the Czarina and I were driving back home from Tampa on Monday, we passed through the tunnel that passes underneath the bay at Mobile, Alabama (which really is a beautiful city) and nearly literally smacked into a series of billboards along the highway. All of them were from Alabama Power, and all exhorted AP's customers not to steal electrical cable, especially if it's still live. Not because stealing electrical cable is wrong, mind you: no, the push is because of lawsuits from the families of Jukes and Kallikaks who died or were severely injured while stealing electrical equipment, because "nobody done tole us that you shouldn't steal cable." Upon reading the first billboard, I was ever-so-glad to live in a basin of relative rationality like Texas.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We had some Darwin candidates steal copper ground leads from a power substation. They lucked out, in that they survived to get caught trying to flog their ill-gotten gains to a scrap dealer.

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Last week, we had a genius in Dallas who was caught atop a power pole: he'd apparently somehow managed to turn off the power and strip out two chunks of metal before TXU Electric fixed the problem. When he was found by morning rush hour traffic, he was fused to the pole, with most of his clothes blown off from the arc, with third-degree burns over 75 percent of his body. It shouldn't surprise you that he died two days later, and all for about $5 in copper.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

We had a plumbing contractor found dead earlier this summer. It seems that during his lunch breaks he was leaving the building where he was working on renovations and breaking into a currently unused building in the complex so that he could steal the copper pipes. He made the mistake of cutting into a live electrical wiring while cutting open a wall to get to the pipes.