Posts with the tag 'danger'
After another week of reading Mother Goose to my son, it’s become obvious that he has a clear preference for a certain kind of nursery rhyme. Namely, one in which people (or in one case, an egg) fall down.
And there’s a lot of falling down in Mother Goose.
We all know about Jack and Jill, and the hush-a-bye baby whose cradle fell down, and of course there’s Humpty Dumpty. But what about Blue Bell Boy (”in coal scuttle fell he / up to his little chin”)? And the poor two gray kittens (”the bridge broke down / they all fell in”)? And the Man with bandy legs (”I met a man with bandy legs / bandy legs and crooked toes / I tripped up on his heels and he fell on his nose”)?
And then there’s the metaphorical falls. Jenny Wren fell sick. Molly, my sister and I fell out. Little Bo-Peep fell fast asleep.
So what’s with all this falling down in Mother Goose? There’s the audience of course, little children, who love the fact that gravity works, and works well.
I think there’s also the hint of the peril in the everyday, the 18th century equivalent of danger in the suburbs: downed power lines, fatal swing sets, strangers with candy.
Consider “Three Children on the Ice”:
Three children sliding on the ice
Upon a summer’s day,
As it fell out, they all fell in,
The rest they ran away.
Oh, had these children been at school,
Or sliding on dry ground,
Ten thousand pounds to one penny
They had not then been drowned.
Ye parents who have children dear,
And ye, too, who have none,
If you would keep them safe abroad
Pray keep them safe at home.
This tragic nursery rhyme offers a stern warning to parents: keep your children “safe at home.”
I can imagine a modern PSA with essentially the same message, just replace “ice” with “local gravel pit.” Or even better for my small town, “infill construction lot.”
Tags: childhood, danger, Literature, Mother Goose, nursery rhymes
January 16th, 2007
“The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we’ll be from the real thing…..There is no substitute for a planned simulation.” So says a character in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, as a midwestern town is overrun by men in Mylar suits, conducting a simulated evacuation from some vague chemical disaster.
Yesterday we had out own rehearsed disaster here at the McGuire Nuclear plant. Here is the official news release, sent via email to local residents:
On Tuesday, August 9, 2005 McGuire Nuclear Plant, Mecklenburg County Homeland Security, and regional first responder agencies will conduct a full-scale facility exercise to test the plant’s response systems as well as local resources and their capabilities in the event of an emergency. So if you live in Huntersville you may see more activity around the plant than normal, no worries. We will share the results after the event debriefing, take care, and be safe.
I had really wanted to go hang around the plant to see what a “full-scale” exercise looks like, but unfortunately I was out shopping. Nothing big, just some groceries–milk, cereal, whatever. Come to think of it, maybe my trip to the store was some sort of defense mechanisim. As Jack Gladney observes, once again in White Noise, “Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.”
The irony of it all is that the supermarket is, according to the email Duke sent out, likely more dangerous than a nuclear power plant. The email continues:
People have always been exposed to low levels of natural radiation. These levels provide a “background level” for comparison to exposures that occur from man-made sources. Basically, natural radiation is the result of cosmic rays from outer space and from radioactive materials in the earth. Man-made radiation comes from a variety of sources including medical and industrial uses, nuclear weapons testing, consumer products, and the nuclear power industry.
Damn those “consumer products”!!! I like how the email nestles this phrase in between the equally innocuous phrases “nuclear weapons testing” and “nuclear power industry.”
The good people at Duke Power then attached an informative graphic which details exactly how tiny a threat our neighborhood nuclear reactor poses (larger image):
What I love about this image is the juxtaposition of the Coleman lantern and the nuclear power plant. (Although, as I’ve mentioned before, McGuire Nuclear Power Plant looks disappointingly nothing like the towering nuclear plants of my childhood imagination, which is how the nuclear reactor appears in this image.)
This image informs me that natural background radiation is 300 times greater than the radiation released by a low-level nuclear waste storage facility. If that’s true, why is one of the lead stories in this morning newspapers the EPA’s announcement that the Yucca Mountain Facility in Nevada, where much of the nation’s nuclear waste is stored, should shield the outside world from radiation for 1,000,000 years? As most critics note, the one million years rule is a ruse to conceal the fact that the EPA is actually raising the allowable radiation limit for the first ten thousand years of those million years–the years that probably matter more to the Nevadan citizens living near Yucca Mountain.
Tags: danger, DeLillo, disaster, shopping, simulation, Suburbia
August 10th, 2005
I just can’t leave the nuclear power plant in my backyard alone.
I recently discovered a site from the Eyeball Series that lists formerly public FEMA information about McGuire Nuclear Power Station, information which was taken offline in the aftermath of 9/11.
The Eyeball site faithfully reproduces the FEMA information, which, according to what I’ve learned from TV shows like 24 and Alias, contains everything a terrorist needs to know to sabotage a heavily guarded nuclear plant.
As a bonus, the site posts a few high-resolution satellite images of the facility, so the terrorists can even find the parking lot with the best spaces.
Tags: danger, Suburbia, terrorism
August 7th, 2005
Here is a power transformer on my street, operated by Energy United, one of the two power companies in the area. (The other is Duke Power. I’d have to say that having their own nuclear reactor probably gives Duke some sort of competitive edge.)
This sign (larger image) gets right down to business, no subtlety here: “Can shock, burn, or cause death.” I love the illustration. It’s as if the box itself were attacking the stick figure human, hurling out lightning bolts from its innards.
On the Deadly Suburban Danger Sign Scale, this sign ranks high. Bonus Points for the ecumenical name, Energy United. Sounds a bit like some sort of European Football Club.
Tags: danger, Suburbia
May 23rd, 2005
