I'm assuming you put this thread up so I can mention that I just got a job interview in Philly.
At the risk of sounding overly Scottish, there isn't a coda where someone reaches over and punches him in the back of the head? Maybe just a gentle wee boot in the nads?
The injustice was righted. If we were Philly, everyone involved would have been pelted with batteries.
Throwing batteries is going to be on the interview.
3 is my first thought, too. Also I have some Scottish blood, so it's probably just the Scottish street justice gene expressing itself.
3: I am always amazed at how the Scots are simultaneously one of those refined, be-health-cared Northern European cultures, approximating social democracy and with a strong tradition of intellectual thought going back to the Scottish Enlightenment and before, and ready to get violent at the drop of a pin. Hats off to you.
It should also be noted that this is basically a Seinfeld plotline.
5: I don't think the article supports the idea that the injustice was righted, unless you are interpreting the statement that the fan who stole the puck wasn't seen in his seat for the remainder of the game to mean that he was taken somewhere and beaten to death.
Not in his seat fo r the rest of the second period! Implying he was back for the third period! So he's still alive. Possibly he was bloodied up when he returned for the third period, but I think the article might have mentioned that. Maybe he just had some broken ribs or other injuries that weren't visually apparent.
It takes so long for a body to be found in the river, even if the guy dumping it is a novice.
I've mentioned recently that Canada, where the Scottish proportion of the population is roughly twice what it is in the US, and a dominant population in some regions, is a much fightier place than the US. At least that what was what I experienced as a teenager fifty years ago.
Non-lethal violence has its social uses, if the alternative is what we have here.
Enh, I think the kid getting triple the swag out of it counts for something. But if it is any consolation, the man will in all probability die alone and unloved.
13 He'll name the puck "Rosebud" and clutch it close to his breast till he breathes his last.
Except for careless airline pilots and Viking chieftains.
And short of getting Bush-administration lawyers involved there's nothing we could do that would be worse than that.
12: Is this quantifiable? Is, say, Nova Scotia fightier than Quebec or Manitoba?
If a place is really fighty, there probably aren't many police reports of fighting. What's a good way to count fights? How many times a bar has to reorder pint glasses?
Something like the British Crime Survey, asking "have you been the subject of any form of physical violence in the last 12 months?" would get it. I don't know if such a survey has been carried out. But, yes, police reports etc are not a great proxy because policies and definitions of things like "assault" vary so much.
But that might be measuring how annoying a population is, not how fighty. Honest, sir, even Gandhi would have clocked him.
History's greatest monster is the B/lanco River, close to heebie's house, which is flooding again. (The geebies are ok.) You may remember Memorial weekend flooding in W/imberley, further down the river, that destroyed houses and killed a couple of dozen people. W/imberley's getting hammered again.
Other creeks and rivers around Austin are flooding or getting close. 10-12" of rain so far.
9 exposes a fascinating divide in views of injustice: some people arguing that the injustice was righted because the kid got another puck (three pucks!), others that it wasn't because the old guy got to keep the puck he stole.
Is justice, therefore, the state in which no one is deprived of that which is rightfully theirs; or the state in which no one is allowed to keep that which they have unjustly obtained? DISCUSS (10 marks).
22 is right. idp's perception of Canada as more fighty might just be because Canadians don't like Americans.
Mark left. Don't tell us what to do.
Topically, just a few minutes before this post was up, a man was explaining to me that when he moved from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia everybody warned him that he would be killed and/or surrounded by assholes. He says this is not true.
Question: Is Squirrel Hill in Philadelphia the functional equivalent of the one in Pittsburgh?
Notice that a woman in a cap (Penguins cap?) also tries to grab the puck. Hockey fans: the most boorish sports fans in North America?
When I was around 8yo, I was at a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. Like a good Little Leaguer, I brought my baseball glove, hoping to catch a fly ball. And towards the end of game, a home run came careening directly at me. As I put my trusty Rawlings glove up to reel in my prize, this douchebag in front of me reached up and grabbed it instead. And he kept it. He was a Giants fan, the Giants being the team that was beating the Cubs on that day.
Fast forward, twenty years later. I'm at a Cubs-Nationals game in DC, and a foul ball comes right at me. I fumble around, spilling my beer all over, but I manage to catch it. The kids sitting in front of me were bummed that they didn't get it, so I gave them the ball, joking with their dad, "Just buy me a new beer for it, eh?" He did not buy me the beer.
And then I found five dollars, which was not enough money to buy another beer, because capitalism sucks.
It's enough to buy a beer at a minor league game.
a woman in a cap (Penguins cap?) also tries to grab the puck
I don't think she knew it was being tossed to the kid.
30: Leo Durocher wrote a book about guys like you.
32: We also don't know that she would have walked away with it.
32/34: agreed. The guy and the kid clearly make eye contact, so he knows what he did.
I'd bet that if I read the comments on local news sites, I'd see his name eventually. But not before I saw six things about how black on black violence is the real problem and people riding bicycles are the root cause of rudeness in Pittsburgh.
Speaking of which, it would be nice jiu-jitsu if Black Lives Matter said, you know, black on black violence is a big problem, so let's raise taxes, institute a universal basic income, and restart school busing programs.
That sounds like something somebody who rides a bike would say.
I'm catholic in my antipathies. When I ride a bike, I hate drivers, and when I'm driving, I hate bikers.
The comments on the article I posted gets very quickly to the real problem: Philadelphians. Also Baltimoreans and Bostonians.
I've never been to or near Boston, so I work from pure stereotype.
I'm catholic in my antipathies. When I ride a bike, I hate drivers, and when I'm driving, I hate bikers.
I hate bikers just as much when I'm biking!
Self-plagiarizing from Twitter, I've noticed some of my internal dialogue is biking respectability politics: "if you want separated lanes and drivers held accountable for deaths, maybe don't barrel through blind intersections so much?" What I don't know is if that is too much of an analogy to be helpful.
It's enough to buy a beer at a minor league game.
Dienu.
re: 42
There's a proposal to allow cyclists to run red lights in London. Which is completely fucking insane. It might work somewhere where there's big wide streets with lots of visibility and few cars, but in dense traffic, narrow streets and with poor visibility ...
We're getting off topic. Where do regular people (i.e. small families supported by people working in the university area) live in Philadelphia? And do you throw batteries with an over-arm or side-arm motion? Does it depend on the size of the battery? Are D cells just a too much?
Those big lantern batteries probably require some kind of underhand motion. Too heavy for a flat trajectory so you use them for indirect fire, like a mortar.
re: 45
Presumably not, so if I am turning at a junction, say, and some fuck blasts through a red light and I run them down ...
A lot of lights exist because there's no safe way for a car to merge/turn because of oncoming traffic. If there's _always_ oncoming traffic, because bikes don't have to stop, then it gets crazy.
Surely the right isn't unqualified? Here SF is debating the "Idaho stop", meaning bikes can roll through stop signs and cross through red lights, but they must still look for and yield to oncoming traffic, and they shouldn't be able to barrel through when they can't see.
The only Philly neighborhood I've heard of is Center City, which is supposed to be nice.
Idaho:
A person operating a bicycle or human-powered vehicle approaching a steady red traffic control light shall stop before entering the intersection and shall yield to all other traffic. Once the person has yielded, he may proceed through the steady red light with caution.
49: Right -- where I've seen the proposal in the US, it's to allow bicyclists to treat red lights as stop-signs. They have to pause, and they have to yield the right of way, they just don't have to stop if there's no cross traffic.
46: I don't get it. Batteries are expensive and useful. Can't they just throw rocks like everyone else?
Or do they save their used-up batteries for this purpose?
And left turn arrows as "One hour parking only except on Sunday."
I myself sometimes act as if this is the rule, but usually only if (a) the intersection is empty or (b) it's a stop light with no actual intersecting street (which comes up a couple times on my commute).
Seriously though, $350,000 and up for a two bedroom place with no outdoor space or parking? That's nuts.
Don't look at NY real estate ads, if that bothers you.
46: New Jersey, if you're me and my neighbors. Which university area? Jefferson Medical University has a convenient subway line to New Jersey, as does the Curtis Institute if you're becoming a Professor of Symphonies and Stuff. Penn/Drexel, or Temple, would require a driving commute. I'm not at all clear where LaSalle is but it's rumored to be somewhere in Philadelphia.
Ever since we stopped getting the NYT on paper, I haven't.
And not New Jersey, for obvious reasons.
Moby, if you get serious about a move, I can put you in touch with a bunch of people in Philly. I know faculty and staff who live in Mount Airy, West Philly, and in various places along the Main Line. I'm sure I know people who live other places in Philly as well, but I don't know the city well enough to know for sure. Anyway, several of these people are longtime residents of America's most pugnacious shithole (or its surroundings) and should be able to help you.
Thanks. I may do that. I don't have an offer yet, of course. I'm trying to get ready for the salary question and determining how much it takes to get me to leave town.
How much does Chip Kelly get paid? Start there and work your way up.
I was in Mt Airy last weekend, and it really seemed nice.
I don't want to commute from North Carolina, but at least it isn't New Jersey.
re: 68
I was going to say that a friend of mine [relocated Brit] lives there, but no, Mt Airy, Maryland.
Re:batteries: I saw a Colombian soccer game once where someone threw a goddamn muffler, which requires planning.
72: Just wear it round your neck until the time comes, presumably. Tricky to throw any distance though.
I thought maybe they removed the innards or something, so it was just the assembly. Still, any kind of distance on that thing and it's deadly.
it's probably just the Scottish street justice gene expressing itself
Has anybody looked into whether Ben Carson has some Scottish ancestry?
76: Jonah Goldberg has vouched for his authentic African-Americanness.
Oh look, the rivers flowing backwards. (We're being evacuated.)
Oh no! Hoping you and yours stay safe, and your stuff doesn't get damaged.
Take care. Hope that all stays safe.
I've heard great things about Mt Airy.
This short thread has a few neighborhood names that might be a place to start.
Wait, is Mt Airy, MD being suggested as a possible relocation for someone working in Philadelphia? That can't be true.
Mt Airy PA (which I didn't know existed) doesn't look so good either.
I kind of want to live in Bala Cynwyd to see how long it would take me to learn to spell it correctly.
(googles more) Oh, it's a neighborhood too? Never mind.
You have to move to Bala Cynwyd, Kobe went to school there.
Also, Al Haig, who was very briefly president.
I see that's on the "Main Line." Which I need to figure out what that entails these days. Do they let the Irish in yet?
And of course it's by Bryn Mawr. Because we can't have two areas with Welsh names.
Was he actually president? I thought he was just "in charge" (until somebody killed his mic.)
Thanks for making that explicit, Chris.
I think that depends on who you ask.
I could live in Delaware. It's a little bit of a commute, but it's Delaware.
95. No that was a serious question, since I'm not entirely familiar with your quaint political customs. If the Queen and her 55 closest relations all fell out of the same balloon, an elderly, obscure rock musician would instantly become king. I thought presidents had to go through some formalities, but I'm open to correction.
I'm assuming 98 refers to Elvis Costello.
If everybody ahead of him in the order of presidential succession had died (only four people), he would have become president automatically. However, four less than four of them had died.
100: I think Ringo would make a pretty good king.
100 This guy. You've never heard of him, but he was in a band around town when I was a kid.
The mean old man in the OP certainly dressed the part. Classic mean old man look.
Mt Airy, MD isn't that bad of a place. I used to live just up the road from there. It's home to one of the few recumbent bicycle shops in the area. There's not as much wearing socks with sandals as you'd expect from such a place, so don't be alarmed.
105 is rad. It sounds like the person 56th in line to the British throne is kinda the UK Bob McManus. Let's make this happen.
It seems to me only fair that Pete Best be ahead of Ringo in the line of succession.
Philly has a super-extensive public transportation network, so you can live anywhere in the city or the inner ring suburbs pretty painlessly. (That includes Bala Cynwyd or the Main Line.) For a family with kids, the Northeast would be fine.
Someone on the internet believes that Haig actually saved the world with his so-called faux pas.
Haig recognized from all the indicators that the Soviets were in the process of launching World War III, while neither Weinberger (a politician) nor Allen (an academic) recognized the threat. In horror, Haig watched a live television monitor as Deputy Press Secretary Larry Speaks fumbled in the Press Room; in answer to journalist Leslie Stahl's question of "who was running the government in the absence of President Reagan?", Speaks responded that "I cannot answer that question at this time" which was like a flashing neon sign to the Soviets that said, "NOBODY IN CHARGE HERE!"
Reagan was barely in the ambulance when the Soviet Warsaw Pact ground and air forces were mobilized, along with the strategic rocket forces, their nuclear submarine forces were alerted to take up attack positions off the U.S. coasts. and the Soviet Command Train [their mobile command center] was activated. This was all noted by every intelligence agency on the globe. Escalations were exploding. The Soviets feared Haig. They had tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him previously and he was the absolute last person they expected or wanted to see in charge of the US government.
So Haig did not commit a faux pas, nor did he show a lack of understanding of the constitution. The man basically stopped WWIII from breaking loose. Brezhnev and his generals immediately recognized that a face-off with Haig would surely bring about the destruction of the Soviet Union, and they ordered the stand-down of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact military forces.
http://adst.org/2014/03/al-haig-and-the-reagan-assassination-attempt-im-in-charge-here/
108 is objective pro-murdering 55 people, at least some of whom are babies.
Higher than the Memorial Day floods by far. Last we heard, it was about 3 ft deep at our house, which is 4.5 ft off the ground.
Did you put your stuff on a coffee table or something?
The news says it crested. That sounds promising, doesn't it?
112: Gosh! Seek higher ground, heebie!
The Blanco crested. They're saying it's still rising at the activity center near our house. There's no way it's not in our house by now.
Ugh. That's horrible. I'm so sorry.
Really no way your house could still be dry, or are you just managing your own expectations? If the former, that really does suck, but if the latter, I have my fingers crossed for you.
Well, the guy that snapped the photo has since stopped communicating, so I assume it's risen since that photo was taken. I don't know for sure.
42: my mantra around here is "don't make me guess whether you're a vehicle or a pedestrian right this instant."
The activity center by our house was serving as an evacuation center, but it is now being evacuated itself.
JRoth should have anticipated this. Sorry, heebs.
118 Aw hell heebie, so sorry to hear that but glad everyone is safe.
Some of the pictures on the weather channel looked really bad.
112: you would know the flood risk better than me, obviously, but there's a huge difference between 3 feet and 4.5 feet, especially if your house is already on relatively high ground. It could be gigantic amounts of additional flooding that would be needed to bring the water up those additional 18 inches.
Is the activity center higher than your house?
Holy crap, heebie. I'm sorry.
I work in philly and take the main line to work (but am a little further out than the mainline towns).
129 is what I'm trying to tell myself. Looking at topographic maps, we're in the same 10 foot range contour, which isn't very helpful.
Safe evacuation to you and all the little geebies. Were they mostly at home, in daycare today? Because that'd be a big dose of additional complexity.
Fingers crossed that you'll soon be able to return, and find that it's all still in good shape!
Daycare closed and sent them home, but Hawaii was in school all day. Logistics weren't too bad, though.
Water is receding but our street isn't open yet. So if the water got in our house, it didn't sit there for more than an hour or two.
So it probably didn't have time to finish all the beer.
135: Is it possible that they closed the activity center because the road to it was about to be flooded instead of the center itself.
Even if you got away dry, your poor neighbors.
Oh man. Hope you're all OK and the house too.
The past few days checking in have revealed this to be the blog of doom. Hang in there everyone.
I have a big knot in my stomach thinking about the neighbors and all the people flooded 2x in such short time. Hopefully a lot of those houses and apartments are still vacant.
Is there a big difference, damage-wise, between "flooded for only an hour or two" and flooded for longer than that?
We've moved on because selfish Heebie is all MEMEMEME, but the true spirit of Pittsburgh is as follows:
Screaming foul ball into the upper deck of Three Rivers Stadium, 2nd game of the year, 1993. Ball headed for small child, parents reacting too slowly. Young man* lunges across the aisle to snag the ball, then tosses it into the kid's lap. Standing O from the whole stadium.
*this was the pre-dudebro era
143: I'm pretty sure yes. Even if the drywall is soaked and needs to be cut out, the studs behind will be basically dry (surface moisture, but no absorption), and so no fear of mold blooms and such, at least as long as you air the place out before closing the walls back up.
It's possible there's a length of time where even the drywall is salvageable, but I don't know.
Just got home. We're dry. It got up to the first line of siding. Yard is super destroyed and the rain is supposed to pick back up tonight. Omfg I'm so relieved.
Agreeing with JRoth. My understanding is that the flood waters get more and more polluted the longer they stand (molds, pollutants and toxins from the cleaners and yard poisons in the garages, building materials dissolving, decomposition). An hour of a bigger river running through your house is pretty different from three days of a lake rising and falling through your house. (Sorry, heebie.)
I doubt the drywall is salvageable after any inundation.
146: Whew! Glad to hear that you dodged disaster.
Up to the first line of siding means still below the interior floor?
146: Phew.
147: Yeah, I believe that plaster & lath can withstand a brief inundation*, but drywall has zero resiliency.
*honestly, it's hard to picture a rain event where the inundation would be brief enough, but say an isolated plumbing incident doesn't have to be fatal.
149: Siding covers the rim joist, which is, obviously, at joist level, below the floor.
I forget, we didn't use treated wood for the joists, did we? That's OK, it should dry out soon enough.
I hope that's right. I certainly didn't replace all the ceiling after we had a pinhole leak in the ceiling.
Time to raise the house another couple of feet.
Although I am still concerned about your neighbors.
Glad you're okay, heebers.
Is there a big difference, damage-wise, between "flooded for only an hour or two" and flooded for longer than that?
The office building I worked at in New Orleans had been under like fifteen feet of water during Katrina. I was kind of amazed it could keep being an office building after that—but apparently so!
I spent all night wondering if our choice was between raising our house and moving. Both seem awful. I kept telling myself that it's not a decision that has to be made in a panic.
Was it originally built off the ground or raised afterwards because of lesser flooding?
Originally built off the ground, following the last bout of dramatic flooding in 1998. So it's several feet above the flood plain, which was revised last month.
There's a spare blimp you can use to keep your house up.
So it's never flooded. Since I moved in in 2006, we've evacuated twice - last May and yesterday.
I'm having trouble processing the idea that two ostensibly 1000 year events happened in a six month period.
Like, do we just assume that FEMAs predictions are just historical averages and this is part of a new climate that we should take very seriously? Or is this such an aberration that we should not overreact and panic? Also I have town tragedy fatigue. FEMA just barely closed registration from the last go round.
159. Take your time over this. It may be hard to sell for a while because potential buyers will think you're panic selling because of flood risk. Cost raising before you do anything else- if you raise and then sell you might get your money back.
From what I was reading online, I'm guessing maybe $50k to raise the house. Which, compared to buying a house, is sort of the kind of loan that you end up taking in stride.
In a couple of years Heebieville will look like George Jetson's town.
Once every two million years, two once every thousand years events will happen in the same six months.
Just spitballing here, but maybe the cheapest thing would be to sue everybody up river who has paved a wet land or altered their drainage to send more water your way. Because I sort of doubt that climate changes are responsible for this kind of a shift happening so quickly.
There's only ~1 mile of river upstream of us. This was just an entire watershed getting 14" in the course of 8+ hours and it all running through the creekbeds through town and into the river.
About the time Hawaii was born, the city undertook a big project to redo the drainage in our neighborhood, which took them several years to complete. In theory, things got much better a after that.
If your little river went backwards, that means the bigger river got so full it served as a dam, doesn't it? So, same plan, different river.
I might be overly fixated on suing real estate developers.
Fifty thousand sounds like an incredible amount of money to me. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just build a four foot-ish wall around the house, and then dig a moat in front of it? This would also have the advantage of making it easier to defend against the marauding tribes that will roam the Texas wastelands following the Trump presidency and apocalyptic breakdown of society.
$50k around here is an annual real estate market fluctuation.
You should just dig out the ground under the house, it's cheaper and you'll still end up with longer stilts.
I was once involved with lifting the floor of an unfinished house. It didn't seem like a $50,000 process.
I have no idea. I found one story of a small cottage that was lifted for $17k, and I figured our house is 2x as big, labor is really expensive right now, and we'd have to move out while it was being done.
If each kid takes a corner you can put the new stilts under while they lift.
Even more unlikely idea. You could move the house. They'd still have to jack it up.
The Heebie family just needs to buy a scaled up version of this and they'll be good to go.
But a large part of what we like is the location. We're on the river! (More seriously, this town is not very walkable, and it's unlikely we'd land anywhere on so many parks and walkable to the town square and major buildings.)
If it were me, I'd just wait and see without doing anything. It's one of my best talents.
A moat. No, wait. The opposite of a moat.. a taom.
184: That houseboat looks amazing. We should all move into houseboats and start an Unfogged floating village. We'd fund ourselves through lawsuits, apps, and an online university. Who's with me?
On a serious note, that flooding would stress me out so much. I grew up in a townhouse that was one of the few in the neighborhood that didn't flood during hurricanes/major storms, and it still stressed the hell out of me. Hope y'all are hanging in there okay.
There's somewhere with frequent floods where they have houses that rise with the water. I guess they still have some limit of how high they can float after which they're still screwed.
Spending $50k on flood prevention for a house that's been standing for decades and has never ever flooded seems insane. Unless the flood risk really has recently changed dramatically. Which, as Moby said, would be the fault of some developers you should be suing, not general climate change. And raising your house wouldn't do anything to mitigate your town disaster fatigue. (Would it even save you from needing to evacuate? I figure they would evacuate everyone if the neighborhood flooded, even if your house was high enough to stay dry.)
Have you considered installing a basement and filling it with desiccant ?
I watched the USGP at COTA on TV; rain on rolling hills really favours the British driver.
187, we can spell the flood away.
The very first thing I said when I saw this video was "Pittsburgh not Philly? Close enough." Now I'm scared.
About ten years ago, assholes started moving in.
My two thoughts:
1. Every climate change prediction I've ever seen has turned out to be an underestimate: how much carbon we would emit, how fast it would get hot, when the droughts would arrive, how bad the storms would get, how fast the trees would die, how bad the fires would be. We have exceeded the high-low range on every prediction I've seen. So now I figure that the worst of the climate models are the floor.
2. The way I would force my own self over the denial is to ask whether I am a person who learns from near misses or a person who has to have the bad thing happen to believe it. You escaped twice and and still have a house that can be sold or raised. Do you want to be making the same decision when you have a flooded out house worth much less? (Although maybe that would make it easier to walk away.)
This is the suckiness of climate change, made personal. It really sucks.
Let this keep you awake tonight, then.
(Would it even save you from needing to evacuate? I figure they would evacuate everyone if the neighborhood flooded, even if your house was high enough to stay dry.)
We'd still have to evacuate, because you don't want your cars flooded. But the evacuation itself is not terrible - schools and workplaces generally shut down, and you just go over to a friends' house for the day. I found it super stressful not to know if there was water in the house, but not the logistics of the evacuation.
How does your life change if all your neighbors move away? You've stayed dry, but hasn't everyone else on the block been flooded badly twice in a year? I'd figure a bunch of them will move.
I thought the climate change predictions for Texas were that it would get drier. I realize this isn't incompatible with greater rain from isolated storms, but it does seem to indicate that the concern might not be entirely related to climate change. I'm still thinking of this article from the last set of flooding. The same thing happened here. The old mill towns were built close to the rivers but rarely flooded until somebody put 6,000 houses and four malls in the drainage basin up stream.
Very glad to hear that you and yours made it through unscathed. For my part, I think crowd-sourcing a decision on unfogged about whether to move due to climate change is a worse fate than drowning.
This from the guy who decided to move to Central PA without asking us.
202. Big place, Texas. Famous for it. Maybe most of it will get drier.
So I wonder, if you wedged giant Styrofoam pontoons under the house, how big would the pontoons have to be to make the whole house float when the water rose? Because that's my suggestion. You could melt down a whole bunch of packing peanuts for less than $50K.
I found it super stressful not to know if there was water in the house
A problem quadcopters were made to solve.
FREE YOUR MIND, AND URRAS WILL FOLLOW
