Category: That's life
In lieu of flowers
When John “Jack” William Carew, 82, of Shores Cove on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, died Saturday, his family faced the usual quandary of whether to accept flowers or request donations to a favorite charity. Mr. Carew’s obituary in the St. John’s Evening Telegram offered a uniquely Newfoundland solution:
Blueberries and bakeapples will be accepted in lieu of flowers.
A relative of yours, Stan?
Hat tip: JP.
How my family survived a highway crash
The five occupants of this 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan — my son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren — survived a head-on collision on the TransCanada Highway Thursday evening. I offer the following details in hopes that other families will find it helpful to understand the factors that decisively improved their chances of survival.
Shortly before 5 p.m, August 26, my family was westbound on Route 105 in Lexington, Nova Scotia, just north of the Canso Causeway, when a severe rain squall hit the area. Daughter-in-law Jenn had just slowed down when an eastbound car apparently hydroplaned and spun across the centerline into their path.
Grandson Jacob, age 6, suffered a broken femur. The others — Jenn, my son Silas, Jacob’s twin brother Josh and sister Maggie, 8 — were badly bruised and badly shaken. Surgeons at the IWK-Grace Hospital in Halifax repaired Jacob’s leg Saturday. Doctors expect all to recover fully. We are grateful to them, and to the EMTs and volunteers who responded to the crash.
The driver and lone occupant of the other car, Marlene MacDonald of Port Hawkesbury and Washabuckt, died at the scene.
I offer my sincere sympathy to Ms. MacDonald’s daughters, grandchildren, and siblings. Events like this cause those affected to reflect on counterfactual alternatives; since Thursday, our family and friends have thought constantly of the MacDonald family’s suffering, and how easily it could have been ours. I am sorry for their loss.
Death and injuries in car crashes result not from a vehicle’s collision with another object but from what’s sometimes called the second collision — that of the occupants with the inside surfaces of the car. The second collision occurs a fraction of a second after the first.
Here are some of the factors that made the second collision survivable in my family’s case:
- Jenn reduced speed to reflect driving conditions, lessening the force of the subsequent impact.
- In response to legislation, insurance company pressures, and consumer demand, automobile manufacturers have made tremendous improvements in the crashworthiness of their cars over the last decade. Modern vehicles are better engineered to absorb and dissipate the force of sudden impacts while maintaining the integrity of the passenger compartment.
- Jenn and Silas drove a 2008 Dodge Grand Caravan equipped with front and side airbags. The Insurance Institute of Highway Safety gives this model a “good” rating (its highest) for “frontal offset” and “side impact” test results. You can check the crashworthiness of your car here.
- All the occupants were secured with optimal, industry-recommended safety equipment: the adults with standard lap-and-shoulder belts; the eight-year-old with a child’s safety booster seat held in place by a lap-and-shoulder belt; the six-year-olds by properly secured child safety seats appropriate to their size and weight.
The last point merits emphasis. For many families, child safety seats are expensive to purchase and tedious to install and use. After Thursday, the expense and inconvenience look pretty small to us, the benefits enormous.
Finally, a word of thanks to the numberless, nameless engineers, auto executives, safety advocates, insurance industry risk analysts, and legislators who helped my dear family survive.
Their survival is not a miracle. It is the result of considered steps by real people to improve highway safety.
Land of orange vehicles
What’s up with Queens County, Nova Scotia, and orange vehicles? Top to bottom: Ford Ranger 4×4, Charleston; Harley Davidson, White Point; Custom two-door, Liverpool.
Post-apocalyptic shopping-cart woman shlep
The Herald’s Pat Lee has a lovely piece about Contrarian’s friend Jane Kansas, currently walking from Montana to Halifax. The layout is also gorgeous, if you can scare up a physical copy of the paper. (Previous Contrarian mentions here and here; Kansas’s own blog here.)
Halorganite
In response to the fuss over Halifax sewage sludge, Contrarian reader S.P. points out that the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, District Sewerage Commission has been selling processed sludge under the brand name Milorganite for more than eight decades. The name, a contraction of Milwaukee organic nitrogen, was the winner of a 1925 naming contest in National Fertilizer Magazine.
A corporate history on the commission’s website explains that product grew out of a pollution control program. Early in the last century, the city formed the commission to clean up organic matter flowing into Milwaukee’s waterways. The commission opened a laboratory to study a British chemist’s scheme for aerating sludge with oxygen and then allowing it to settle in ponds. It decided to incorporate the system into a new treatment plant on the shores of Lake Michigan.
The only question was what to do with the microbial solids that accumulated during the process. The visionary commission established a fellowship at the University Of Wisconsin College Of Agriculture to investigate the use of activated sludge as fertilizer, and by the mid-1930s, it was selling 50,000 tons of Milorganite a year to golf courses and home gardeners. My parents used it when I was a child.
The process is tightly controlled with daily testing that keeps contaminants an order of magnitude below the EPA’s upper limits for “exceptional quality” fertilizer. Further evidence, if more were needed, that the fuss over what we might call Halorganite is ill-informed to the point of silliness, and runs counter to best environmental practices for dealing with human waste. Journalists and city councillors need to start distinguishing between science-based environmentalism and magical belief systems.
The science of ugliness
The blobfish, highlighted in a New York Times slide show on ugly animals, is “practically all face — a pale, gelatinous deep-sea creature whose large-lipped, sad-sack expression seems to be melting toward the floor.” An accompanying article explores the underpinnings of our aesthetic recoil:
[C]omparative consideration of what we find freakish or unsettling in other species offers a fresh perspective on how we extract large amounts of visual information from a millisecond’s glance, and then spin, atomize and anthropomorphize that assessment into a revealing saga of ourselves.
Wildlife biologists are far from immune to prejudice against the unbeautiful.
[R]researchers found 1,855 papers about chimpanzees, 1,241 on leopards and 562 about lions — but only 14 for that mammalian equivalent of the blobfish, the African manatee.
“The manatee was the least studied large mammal,” [University of Pretoria researcher Morgan] Trimble said. Speculating on a possible reason for the disparity, she said, “Most scientists are in it for the love of what they do, and a lot of them are interested in big, furry cute things.”
Greenpeace and the IFAW learned how to monetize this prejudice decades ago, via their cash cow, the seal hunt protest.
Market multitude – feedback
The new Halifax Seaport Farmer’s Market doesn’t impress Contrarian reader Michael Graham:
I really hope there is a tremendous amount of work to be done, because it is an insanely cramped space with two sets of narrow doors. There weren’t thousands of people at once — no mob, just a very small space with no room to move. Three people effectively block all movement along an aisle — no wider than at a grocery store. Relatively speaking, the brewery market is incredibly easy to move through.
What makes this space attractive? Glass, concrete, and gridlock? It’s just a small warehouse with natural light… I the like variety of the spaces in the brewery labyrinth; I don’t like the “science fair in the high school gym” feel [of the new location]…. I think that the building is a boring glass box, it’s neither beautiful nor ugly. It’s just there and evokes nothing – except perhaps the feeling of office culture.
All the work in the world won’t make the space any bigger. The least they should do is triple the number of doors on the west side. Do they expect to pack in more vendors?
De gustibus non est disputandum. I like the building; Michael doesn’t. I used the enjoy the rabbit-warren quality of the Brewery building, but as crowds grew in recent years, it became a dank, fetid, claustrophobic space. It was no longer a pleasant place to shop or socialize.
As for Saturday’s crowd, it was indeed huge — likely an all-time record for the market. Many vendors set sales records. The numbers overwhelmed the building in its current configuration. Will this get better as the market opens for longer hours, on more days of the week? I hope so, and I’d be delighted to hear from the Market management or the designer about any adjustments they plan.
Michael has a point about the exits, although this may be part of the building’s rigorous energy conservation. (For the record, Mr. Graham has no affiliation with the dissident vendors who are staying behind at the Brewery building.)
