Hell, You Don’t Need Sunlight. I’ve Known People Ugly Enough To Make It Happen.
They swear this is true. But, it happened in England so I dunno. As far as I know, we don’t have any correspondents in London.
They say the sun never sets on the British Empire, and that’s not good news because it’s a mean sun.
Fight fighters responded to a blaze in London.
Our investigators believe that this fire was the latest sunlight blaze of 2015. It is thought that sunlight bounced off of a make-up mirror and set curtains alight.
No, seriously. It says that.
A Brigade spokesperson said: “Crystal and glass ornaments and items such as mirror tables should be kept out of direct sunlight.
So, you’ll just have to figure out another way to identify vampires in your home.
Thanks to Don A for the heads up.
Theres sunlight in England?
1Wait…what? We don’t have any correspondents in London?
2I knew a kid in school years ago that happened to. He had a glass jug of water sitting in the back seat of his car. It set the seat (and more) on fire. The water in the jug became a big magifying glass. We have had a few prairie fires around here that started because of a glass bottle that had been tossed into the dry grass.
3My brother set a glass on the counter of the fireworks stand he was tending. Fourth of July in Galveston County many years ago. The end of that job. Thankfully he was able to jump over the counter.
4Gee, I used to fry ants on the sidewalk by using a magnifying
5glass to focus the sun’s rays on them. I was some kind of a cutting edge kid wasn’t I? Either that or I was a mean little brat…
I needlepoint, and use a magnifier on a stand. The directions that came with the magnifier warned about letting sunlight start a fire.
6Shucks, any girl or boy scout knows how to start a campfire with a magnifying glass. Just didn’t know it could happen by accident.
7I have a London source. Will verify authenticity.
8London?? England?? I lived north of there for 10yrs, and I can believe they are careless about that as the sun is visible only 1% of the time.
9Yep. Friend of mine had a jug of water in his truck with load of lumber. It caught on fire. The lumber, not the jug of water. And I’m sure all of you know how to do etching with a magnifying glass pointed at graphite drawings, focussing the sunlight.
10Also, we have a SUN OVEN, a solar box cooker. It doesn’t set thngs on fire but is a mean slow cooker. Fix your dinner with the sun pointed right at the top of the cooker. NEVER USE A PARABOLIC COOKER unless you stand there with a hose. Friends of mine set up a parabolic reflector on their building and it set the building next to it on fire.
11Just call me “trash boy.” It’s part of living in a wildfire zone that we stop like a crow to pick up any shiny object with the potential of starting a fire. Litter isn’t just ugly, it has the ability to cause massive wildfire destruction. Lightning causes sufficient mayhem with the drought conditions; we can’t be wasting precious water resources fighting stupid fires caused by careless people.
12PKM, hadn’t thought of that. Guess we oughta carry a bag for stashing shiny trash which also can be recycled.
13And starting an engine over tinder dry grass can and probably will start a wildfire, starting with the car or truck.
Marge Wood, there is so much we can do as individuals. Here we start with making our own properties fire resilient. Made my own pavers using the adobe method and built a patio fifty feet out surrounding the house, then we dish the weeds out another hundred yards from the house. The cattle do the rest.
You got it – recycle, recycle and recycle. Make that trash work for us while keeping ourselves safer.
We don’t need no stinking fuel inefficient fire hazards like off road trucks, motorcross bikes, and ATVs. Walk, hike, ride a bicycle or a horse.
14Marge, it isn’t just starting the engine over dry grass. I was at a campsite once where someone parked their car in tall grass and the heat from the muffler caught the grass and then the car on fire. Thankfully we had guards in the parking lot (and it was a windless day) and it was contained to the one car and didn’t spread any further than a foot or so away.
15Archimedes’ Revenge!
http://www.unmuseum.org/burning_mirror.htm
“Eureka!”
16PKM, after the Labor Day fires in Bastrop County a few years ago, a friend was flying over the area. They discovered that many of the houses that burned had wood decks and rain gutters (assumed to be full of leaves). Nearby homes that were still standing did not, and usually didn’t have trees too close to the house.
Those fires got hot enough that fire safes were melted. It took over a month to get 100% containment as the 30 mph wind gusts spread it far and fast. While they weren’t directly caused by man (high winds caused trees to topple into power lines, throwing sparks into dry grass), the drought and how folks had taken care of their land definitely had a hand on what got destroyed.
17SusanF – you raise ANOTHER of my pet peeves. WHY won’t these power companies BURY their lines? Asplundh Tree Exterminators, errr. “Experts,” came through my complex the other week, at the behest of the local power monopoly, and absolutely RAZED trees and shrubs away from the power lines.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it had to be done to avoid storm damage, but it was done EXCESSIVELY so that it won’t have to be done for another 10 years or so, destroying the green stuff needed to clean the storm-causing CO2 out of the atmosphere that THEY stuck into the atmosphere to CREATE the power they are sending through cheap, weakened infrastructure in the first place.
Any tree that looked as though it could grow tall enough to someday pose a threat was hacked back unmercifully, to where it will not have enough foliage to sustain it, so that in 2 years Ass Plunderers will be invited back by the complex to dismantle the corpse of their victim.
Tell me again how the private sector is going to save us, when it’s actually in their best interest to kill us?
18daChipster, in a good portion of central Texas it would take high explosives to bury power lines a safe distance below ground. When I lived in Pflugerville, supposedly in the “Flatland Prairie” portion of our ecosystem, limestone bedrock was less than 8 feet down. West of Austin no trenching tool would survive. We’ve got limestone, marble, and granite deposits on the Balcones Escarpment.
Areas that can, do bury power lines in neighborhoods (they are in my neighborhood), but the high power lines still seem to go over land. It’s probably a heck of a lot cheaper to string wire in the air on towers than to dig across the miles and miles of Texas.
Besides, it gives the buzzards a place to roost.
But I agree, I hate it when they truncate the trees.
19daChipster: I hear you, man. BUT…
Burying the lines costs mucho more money. Developers don’t want to pay it, passing the costs onto the home buyers who don’t want to pay it. Only new laws can make burying lines mandatory where feasible. Then people have to pay. In the long run it saves money but, well, most people don’t think in the long run.
As for tree cutting, talk to the dolts who plant trees under power lines. I’ve seen it done in my own neighborhood. Or they let existing trees go wild near power lines. Or they don’t maintain or care for the trees properly which rot out at the trunk and topple over. Believe me I’ve seen all the stupid there is to see.
Then they bitch about the cutting. Or then bitch when a heavy branch falls and they have no power for hours. Or then bitch when their rates go up because of line repairs caused by trees. Sigh. Somedays I can’t help but wish a whole bunch of Americans could just disappear.
20@daChipster . . . Gee that tree company Asplundh does the trimming here too in CO.
I’m usually around when they come down the alley and use every wile and the full measure of my little old lady look to beg them be very careful of my huge maple that I’ve been told is somewhat hollow in the middle and really shouldn’t be alive. It is a glorious tree and quite healthy at that. They are a pretty stable company it would seem since the fellows who do the work remember me from year to year. I also pay to prune the dead branches, some very large, in the interest of keeping it healthy. And, yes the truncating is pretty ugly when the tree is leafless in the winter.
21Shuckins! I remember seeing the old movie about Thomas Edison starring Micky Rooney. There were scenes where the local doctor had too operate on Momma Edison but needed more light. Young Tom got every lantern in the house and used a mirror to magnify the light. Surgery was a success.
22Here in Manhattan, our power lines are buried. Not so in the so-called “outer” boroughs. Our power was every bit as dead as theirs during Frankenstorm Sandy, and I had no landline phone for a full month. The phone is dead again (glad I mostly use the mobile), and they’ve promised it will be fixed by Tuesday 7 p.m. at the latest.
23Just look for the Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on their car.
24I’m not as concerned with the high tension lines. In my experience those suckers are 150 feet or so off the ground, no tree has a chance of over-topping them. It’s the lines running down the street, attached to the light posts, that seem to have to the worst problems with tree branches. And, sure, burying the lines is expensive, but so is having to go out after every storm and replace a few miles of them that were taken down by falling trees/tree branches.
25Problem is, no one cares what happens next year. Their worry is for this year’s budget. Stupid, short-sighted @#$%#$^ dolts.
Burying power cables would be easier if they didn’t need such a large hole for the poles to lay in.
PKM,get yourself a pack of packrats. They collect shiny objects. I’ve heard stories of crows that collect shiny stuff,too.
England gets some sun or nobody would have ever noticed the white cliffs of Dover.
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