in all fairness it has been done other places with non-subscribers still getting their fires put out and then being billed $15,000 or $20,000.

Well, yeah. That could work. But to stand there and watch it burn? Seems pretty heartless and pointless, when you could get a new subscriber and potentially a large contribution.

Maybe the homeowner only wanted to pay insurance prices, not the full firefight price.

Not that I think explicit subscription is a society-friendly idea--institutionalise it as taxes already.

But if you have it, I guess you have to enforce it, or what's the point?

I totally got Toasted skin syndrome before I got a thing to put my laptop on!

Yeah, I have to say I empathize with that family. Our local fire chief absconded with what amounts to a couple of million dollars, leaving the firefighters unpaid, and us without any fire service for about a year. We have a new chief and a volunteer firehouse now, but it only operates bankers hours. So I`m good if I have a fire during the day. And of course, although the guy is being indicted, I`ve still been paying taxes, first into his pocket and then into the void when we didn`t have service. I would like my money back please or fire service. I don`t think that`s too much to ask for my local government.

did the volunteer thing again yesterday. Helped three cats go to their new homes. Rather frustrating, actually, because there were three volunteers at the cattery, and none of us knew what we were doing because we'd never been there when someone picked up a cat. (Luckily, the paperwork and goodie bags had at least been completed, and we did have a phone number for a lead volunteer who could walk us through the process.)

The cats seem friendlier. I think they recognized me. At least some of them did. Skipper in particular wouldn't stop following me around whenever I was in the room....

And I'm getting pretty good at vaccuuming up stinkbugs. They're very good at getting into the cattery, and they don't use insecticide because of the possible effects on the cats. So -- vaccuuming is the best option left.

Boring preposition jokes: new termination policy

Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?), e.g. in this post, commenters who have apparently never read the site before enter comments of two types.

One type says "I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!", or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame "look-I'm-violating-the-rule" joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, "This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!" (invariably thinking that they are quoting Sir Winston Churchill, though Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book, and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben's discovery).

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two dopey comment types and deleting them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.

...

But the let-everyone-have-their-say softies who criticize my policy have no idea just how many boring self-satisfied twits have posted almost exactly the same thing over and over again down the years. Yes, death is a severe sanction. But I think people should look at things from my point of view. It is really irritating.

I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers.

The internet would be greatly improved if more blogs adopted that policy.

I have Braves-Giants tickets for Sunday!

t skips gleefully through thread

Language Log cracks me up.

I would like my money back please or fire service. I don`t think that`s too much to ask for my local government.

Yeah, that seems reasonable!

I just had one of those moments at work where I feel like a genius -- last week, a coworker and I were talking about someone else's work, saying, "I don't know why they don't do X," and today I got a voicemail that they are going to do X! Good one.

Darwin award waiting to happen...

Long Island liquor store owner believed pet alligator was just a large lizard

The 3-foot gator had been living in a storage room for about two months at Alpine Wine & Liquor in Wading River - where workers fed the beast about 45 goldfish a day, officials and the owner said.

Suffolk County SPCA seized the animal Wednesday and ticketed Corcione for possession of an illegal animal.

Skimming through a weekend's worth of Natter (300+ yargh!) to say,

Go, Kathy, go! So proud of you!

ita, holy crap on toast, I wish that I could join in with a posse of other buffistas and come out to LA and unleash some fiery justice on some of these ER docs. I just wish it could be different, with significantly less suck.

Much ~ma to your MiL, Burrell.

Oh, I forgot to say, I saw darth the other day. It was awesome.