Whoa! Was the raisedness a big factor?

Credit the design to J "Frank Lloyd" Roth

Stilties, hooray!

1: I'm sure it is mostly because FEMA liked how the living room welcomed the morning light.

Heebie, this is seriously sort of awesome. And you too, JRoth!

This is so cool! I recommend they do a Ken Burns approach with still photos of the raising backed with fiddle music.

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The only good thing about having the seat all the way in the back next to the toilet is you can recline your seat without being an asshole.

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This is so neat. How did they find you? Do you feel a little dirty for interacting with the current federal administration? What are you going to wear? Has Jammies been cleaning like a maniac to make sure everything is camera-ready? So many questions!

6: I recently attended a memorial that used Ashokan Farewell as one of the pieces and could not remove the association from the Civil War.

8.1: It's not like FEMA had anything else it should be doing.

I almost wrote something similar, but decided someone might helpfully explain that the camera crew would be different people than the emergency response people.

I bet a camera crew can do just fine at lying to Puerto Ricans, if they had training.

When Trump diverts FEMA resources to other priorities, he be sends them to support detention facilities for immigrants.

How did they find you? What are you going to wear? Has Jammies been cleaning like a maniac to make sure everything is camera-ready?

WELL. Let's dish. They found us via the local planning department, who knows me through the planning and zoning committee.

Do you feel a little dirty for interacting with the current federal administration?

Maybe a little. I tell myself that I'm interacting with the resistance from within the administration, and not the letter writing kind? I can't imagine Republicans want FEMA to do anything useful? This is actually being filmed by a private company, so I actually assume I'm interacting with a bunch of 20-something film majors who want to make powerful documentaries exposing seedy underbellies, but are doing this in the meantime.

What are you going to wear?

This deserves it's own comment box.

Has Jammies been cleaning like a maniac to make sure everything is camera-ready?

Jammies is pretty sour on the whole thing, because he's convinced they're going to make us look dumb, like our friends who went on House Hunters, or else make us look like rich assholes whose solution to social problems is "Just have money and raise your house on your own! Step five, profit!" I think it'll be more boring than either of those. But yes, the house is very clean!

Here's what they told me about clothes:

"Here are some things to avoid:
-- Clothing that is bright white, deep black, red, orange or yellow in color
-- Clothing with geometric patters (pinstripes, checks, houndstooth, etc.)
-- Clothing made out of shiny materials (silk, satin, etc)
-- Clothing with large logos or branding
-- Baseball caps

Colors that appear great on camera:
-- Cool colors such as blues and greens
-- Shades of gray and off-whites"

Now, online everyone seems to advise you to wear solid jewel tones, but here they are recommending against purples/maroons/reds.

It turns out that, when I rule out old v-neck t-shirts, that I mostly have patterned tops. Lots of plaids. For solids, mostly black, navy, and reds. So for shirts, I can either violate their tips and wear a burgundy shirt, or I've got one other option, a knit slate-colored shirt.

SO. It's very close to a denim color, and so I don't really want to wear blue jeans with it. (I have some very dark blue jeans but they fit weird.) I'm trying to figure out if black or burgundy jeans are violating the spirit of the recommendations, or if they just mean the color closest to your face.

I know this is fascinating to everyone.

Yep, definitely avoid geometric patterns. My father had a special pinstriped tie that he used to wear when he didn't want to appear on TV (it made really ugly and distracting moire patterns on the screen).

Plaids are going to be OK, though. What they are worried about is fine-grain patterns that will interfere with the camera. Not big checks.

Seems true. Havel showed up on the TV just fine.

Dressing will be tricky if you want to not look like rich assholes who can solve any problem by throwing money at it. Because avoiding that risks making you look dumb enough to be on House Hunters.

Not fair! There is plenty of overlap between rich assholes who can solve any problem by throwing money at it and people who go on House Hunters.

I've never actually seem it.

People respect a rich asshole on tv, so best to play it safe. Do you have any monocles or ascots?

Seen it.

Here's some dialogue for you -- "We like to think of ourselves as the third little pig."

Now, online everyone seems to advise you to wear solid jewel tones, but here they are recommending against purples/maroons/reds.

I only see a warning against "red" in what you quote. Maybe they meant fire engine red, and deeper ones like burgundy are okay?

Are deeper reds like purple and burgundy considered cool colors? I assumed they were still warm.

Also: are these sorts of rules just for shirts, as a way of off-setting your face? Or do they apply to pants and jeans?

Well, their "colors that look great on camera" list includes cool colors, but it's not written as exclusive direction. They could have merely omitted non-shiny jewel tones.

Close off the bathrooms, put an empty pickle bucket in a closet, and tell the crew that it's a composting toilet and all you have for them to use.

make us look like rich assholes whose solution to social problems is "Just have money

While they can film the house, insist that the actual interview take place in a diner. Preferably on a street with an empty storefront or two. That's the universal signal that you're just friendly down home salt of the earth types.

I would like some of the space salt please.

Practicing my southern accent as we speak. YALL.

(I actually have a pretentious thing where I refuse to use y'all, despite having grown up in a y'all-place.)

Put our all of your Insane Clown Posse posters and such.

I think they want you to wear something that exposes your seedy underbelly.

I very much doubt that wearing the wrong color pants is a problem. They are thinking of the shots when you'll be talking or people will otherwise be looking at your face and torso.

Teach your youngest kid to say "Redrum" repeatedly and then leave the room.

34: Ok, good.

That's what I figured. Half of what I was wondering is if I'd incur a side-eye, ie "we explicitly told her NOT to, and she just has to go and do the opposite" but mostly I enjoy overthinking what I wear, so.

"God commanded us to build an ark, but I'm Reform."

If you think discussing my pants is fascinating, you'll love reading the interview questions:

Interview Questions

-- Can you please introduce yourself, what is your name and what do you do?

-- What's the climate like in this part of the state?

-- How does your family use the river for recreation?

-- Did you know that living next to a moving body of water could present potential risk?

-- Can you tell us about your house and if it was already elevated?

-- What did you do to mitigate risk further?

-- Can you describe the process of working with your engineers and the city officials?

37 is the perfect response to at least three of those.

Did you know that living next to a moving body of water could present potential risk?

To which you shriek "WHAT?!?!" and run screaming into the distance?

-- How does your family use the river for recreation?

(blankly) "What river?"

"Well, the documentary Sharknado hadn't yet been released, so we were naive."

"What engineers?"

43: We're three houses away from some train tracks.

I'm right next to some deer tracks. Plus, one took a dump right next to my wall.

"What did YOU do to minimize risk, mother?"

45: Oh, can you describe the process of working with your engideers?

I ruined the joke, should be "mitigate"

Vaguely related, Florence is looking like it could be a nasty one. If we have anyone in the area, I hope they're not going to be in the area for much longer.

I am starting to think that this could be the new normal: every year there are two or three really damaging Atlantic hurricanes. Every year California gets massive wildfires. Etc.

Plus, one took a dump right next to my wall.

Ah, a Brutalist, I see.

48: Want me to go in and edit that? Jokes are important.

I am starting to think that this could be the new normal: every year there are two or three really damaging Atlantic hurricanes. Every year California gets massive wildfires. Etc.

This is my working assumption.

50: The wall of my house. I'm not trapping deer in a walled enclosure so I can train them to fly. Stupid Neighbors Association.

I am starting to think that this could be the new normal

I assume it is. Climate change is warming. Heat is energy. If you put more energy in the atmosphere it has to go somewhere.

Like a deer in a centrifuge.

(I actually have a pretentious thing where I refuse to use y'all, despite having grown up in a y'all-place.)

I picked it up in Miami and kept using it (mostly) unselfconsciously, but the longer I'm here, the weirder it seems.

And it's not like I'm gonna say yinz.

56 is me.

This is very exciting! I bet Frank Gehry's stuff never Gets featured on FEMA videos.

"And if you don't take proper flood precautions you could end up with a river flowing right through the middle of your living room. Next slide please."

38.last is obviously where you subtly answer a slightly different question.

I can send you a 24x36 version of my business card, suitable for hanging.

House Of Erections, residential architecture work since 1998.

the new normal: every year there are two or three really damaging Atlantic Western Pacific hurricanes
Yawn.

(The key is lining all riverfront properties with massive 10-meter concrete walls.)

That would be an expensive erection.

More excretion than erection, really.

We don't judge.

Make that 20-metre walls.

Of course, luxury high-rises can then safely be built right behind the walls. The bottom four floors of which have a view solely of concrete. Depending on the width of the river, I'd guess you might have to get 8 floors up before you find a riverside address with a view of the actual river, as opposed to the high rises and wall on the other side..

16 floors.

Thanks for indulging my curiousity, heebie! I assume the recommendations about colors are mostly because you'll be brightly lit, and they don't want anything to look funny near your face (like true white would reflect and make your face appear dark/hard to see, red sort of reflects the color as do other bright colors, etc.). Slate top and burgundy jeans sounds cute! I hope it's fun, and even if it's not, I doubt you'll be in very broad distribution.

Every year California gets massive wildfires.

California fire Twitter has been pretty interesting since the Mendocino Complex fire. So, like, this is called a huge fire year because we're looking at 4-6million acres burned. But someone turned up a Depression-Era poster (promoting fire suppression) saying "Every year, another 30 million acres burns". (On reflection, maybe that was the whole West.) So this notion of massive wildfires is ahistoric. 4-6 million acres is only massive relative to the decades of fire suppression. (I do understand that the fires are now vastly more intense.)

The fire folks say that we're paying off a huge fire deficit. Even more interesting, this last fire and all the complaints about smoke provoked a thought I hadn't seen before about a "smoke deficit". Someone suggested that California trees evolved to be in smoke all summer; there may also be other benefits, but they suggest that the smoke helped keep down bark beetle populations. There is traditional ecological knowledge saying that 'trees like smoke.'

That was all very new thought to me (not about the fire deficit, but about the corresponding smoke deficit.). Anyway, I expect we'll address the huge fire problem somehow, because it is real visible and expensive. Also, frankly, it is self-limiting in ways that other climate problems (drought and flood) aren't. Once everything's burned (a very painful transition period), it'll reach equilibrium. From what I can tell, droughts and floods aren't going to reach an equilibrium; they'll just keep getting more extreme. So anyway, fire.

Megan! Can I email you about Prop 3? I continue to be torn and your informed input would be fantastic.

(Reminded because it seems like a lot of its projects would also have major fire safety benefits...)

IF AMERICA WERE A SERIOUS COUNTRY IT WOULD BE MOVING TOWARD RENEWABLE WILDFIRE SUPPLIES

I do understand that the fires are now vastly more intense

Huh, I hadn't heard this. More in the sense that they last longer, or that they burn everything more thoroughly? I mean, those roughly equate, but I'm imagining old-timey fires being ones that would flash across a landscape, such that some structures could survive, while the hip, new fires rage and rage until the soil is all but sterilized.

The 1910 fire was a pretty big deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910

AIMHMHB, my office mate has a cabin in Glacier. They were very nearly burned out in the Roberts fire of 2003, and had an even closer call in the Howe Ridge fire, which is still burning. This second fire was mostly area that was burned in the first, and so it was 6-8 foot conifers. The favored myth in the Red West is that decades of fire suppression and lack of logging (goddam tree-huggers) are what is making the new fires so bad. Not the Chinese Hoax. Red Americans being wrong about cause and effect isn't exactly news, though, is it.

My understanding is that native peoples burned the landscape often enough that there wasn't a huge fuel load. So they had small, less hot fires smoldering over a greater area, which was good for plant regeneration.

Current fires have way more fuels and different canopy structure, and burn way hotter. That can sterilize the seed bank in the soil, or cook the soil itself so it changes structure.

They showed up earlier than we arranged. It was kind of a shock to show up to a house full of camera crew.

That's the goal.

I have done some extended takes of walking up the steps to the house so far. It's all very exciting. I had to pause and look out into the distance, and then keep going.

76.1 I've never heard that as a factor in Northern Idaho or Northwestern Montana. They wouldn't have burning anything intentionally -- do you mean just random accidental fires?

JRoth, they like the back of the house. OF COURSE. They're going to do the interview part there.

79: Are you sure they aren't just creeping on you?

Just give nosflow a heads up if you're going to mention Unfogged during the interview so he can get to work on another impenetrable 10,000-word welcome post.

(For folks who weren't around at the time, nosflow gallantly fended off a potential deluge of Times readers lured by a write-up of the glamours of the Flophouse.

80: Nah, my understanding is that there were fires from lightning strikes and a deliberate regime of fire setting.

I had to do MORE walking up the stairs and pausing at the top to stair briefly across the street, this time with a half-smile. Fake news.

But I have never once claimed to know anything about Idaho or Montana.

Interesting.

The Blackfeet are so-called because of prairie fires, but I've never heard of them setting forest fires. West of the Divide, I can imagine that fire would have been useful in keeping camas meadows clear, but have never heard of it. Maybe because population densities would have been lower here, and if all you're trying to do is keep a 50 acre meadow clear -- in our slow tree growing climate -- you don't need to start a forest fire. I'm going to do some reading.

I stand corrected. file:///C:/Users/charl/Downloads/ndianuseoffireinecosystems.pdf

Speaking of feet, if they ask you to crush a small animal on the stairs, don't do it.

OT: I just learned that I've been saying "hyperbole" wrong my whole life.

Which is the worst thing anyone can have happen to them.

Well played.

90 is true.

THIS IS SO FUNDAMENTALLY BOGUS!

So is 92.

I thought everyone who said hyper-bol-a was mocking people who couldn't pronounce the word right.

All over! 90 minutes of footage for 90 seconds of video. JRoth, I did namedrop your name because the director and I were chatting about the addition, and then he lobbed an interview question specifically about the addition process, and it was honestly what came out of my mouth. On the other hand, 88 minutes and 30 seconds are going in the trash, so.

Film editing sounds like it would take just absurd amounts of time.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA.

Maybe that's why crush videos are so popular? You just keep the part from where the mouse starts to look squished until it's gone then go home for the day.

Film editing sounds like it would take just absurd amounts of time.

It does but those guys are paid by the hour.

Thanks, Heebie, that's really cool.

Good lord I'm being asked to include the words "proactively leveraging knowledge" on a slide and I'm not sure I can bring myself do it.

103: Thank you for reaching out to ensure we are all on the same page going forward.

that sounds awesome, heebs! congrats to your family and jroth. what did you tell them you did on the river?

my dad is in s.c., on what is the safer (southern) side of florence--it loses energy as it churns back around in its counterclockwise circle, which is why we pray one never makes landfall with the eye just south of us or all will be wiped clean in the scouring of hilton head. nonetheless it looks like a beast. he is sheltering in place in a house on a river (though up on a 40-ft bluff) for the same reason every other south carolinian is: he can't leave his pitbulls and hound dog and shelters won't accept them. (I literally heard a woman being interviewed who cited the same problem, though I do see the shelters' rationale.) I feel like hotels might, somewhere, but probably not. we have steel shutters, but I still don't like it. I agree this is the new normal--if the atlantic is warm then tropical storms will develop into hurricanes, no way of avoiding it.

103: that's horrifying

It's only horrifying until you've gone through the onboarding process.

Speaking of TV reality, have folks seen this?

108: In that vein: Jeff Fager apparently got fired not for sexual harassment, but because he threatened the job of a CBS reporter for reporting on the harassment.

With Moonves, Rose and now Fager, it has been very weird watching the CBS morning news show, as I do most days. Correspondent Jericka Duncan was put in the weird position of discussing the e-mail she received from Fager.

My first thought in these situations is always: Being a dumb fuck is absolutely no bar to success in our meritocracy. What could Fager have possibly thought would be the result here?

But then I realize that the contents of his e-mail were probably accurate. People no doubt have lost their jobs for crossing him. He probably had every reason to believe he could get away with it.

Being a dumb fuck is absolutely no bar to success in our meritocracy.

Just as long as we can stop making it a prerequisite.

I'm not usually in the Death to the Boomers mob, but if Moonves' 'why would I want to cast her if I didn't want to fuck her' is an accurate read of audience preferences, well, cleansing by fire may be the only answer.

|| Good news! Progressive Democrat, Sam Bell (and my best friend's nephew!) won the primary over a long-time incumbent in State Senate race in Rhode Island! http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20180912/sam-bell-defeats-longtime-state-sen-paul-jabour-in-democratic-primary ||

I'm going to elevate 108 to the front page. Jesus christ.

BTW, the phone's been ringing off the hook this morning, thanks for the publicity, Heebs.

112 is good news.

Bell took 46 percent of the vote to 37 percent for Jabour and 17 percent for Nick Autiello, a recent Commerce RI employee backed by the Greater of Commerce.

The Greater of Commerce? What is that, like a viceroy of the company that bought and privatized Rhode Island?

114: "You've reached JRoth Associates. If you have a thing you want us to put on top of another thing, please press one. If you don't have a thing yet but you want us to build you one, please press two. If you already have a thing on top of another thing, please hold for an operator."

105. I was wondering about your dad. I recalled he was on a bluff but wasn't sure how safe that was. Hoping he and the dogs come through okay.

he can't leave his pitbulls and hound dog and shelters won't accept them.

I saw a thing about how shelters were putting all the animals to sleep in advance of evacuation. It was a call to see if anyone here in Texas wanted to adopt a dog that would otherwise be put to sleep because of the hurricane.

No pressure.

Is euthanasia a bad word now?

It is if you're dropping off your pit bulls so that you can evacuate, and would like them back.

A dog like a pit bull should stay behind to protect the property anyway. Earn its keep.