It's Monday... Are You Ready For Some Softball?
In the subject of trivialities, I really am quite obsessed with the local Fox news affiliate. Specifically, Trish Van Pilsum and the FOX 9 Investigators, that hard-hitting news team that recently broke the lid off of "Schoolyard Bullying" and dirty partisan politics in "Sign Theft." Here's the synopsis of the story they featured last night creatively titled "Dorm Room Test."
From KSTP.COM (be sure to note the spelling error and awful grammar/syntax):
The FOX 9 Investigators surveyed every college in the state and asked whether they had sprinklers and what kind of materials go into dorm beds and furniture. We also set up a test. Using an old building used to house medical offices in Coon Rapids, we furnished two rooms. One, like a prison cell with non-combustible materials. We also installed a sprinkler because 75 percent of the Minnesota's prisons have sprinkler systems. The other we set up like a dorm; wood furniture, a mattress that isn't flame retardant and no spinkler [sic]. That's because the FOX 9 Investigators discovered many of the state's dorm rooms don't have sprinklers. Jamie Novak, the fire safety educator for St. Paul's fire department, sets the mattress in the cell on fire. In the dorm room, he puts a blanket on a halogen light. In just a short time, fires are burning in both rooms. 7 minutes and 50 seconds after the cell is lit on fire, the sprinkler goes off and the damage is very small. At the same time, the dorm is an inferno. Before long, it is some 1600 degrees and the room is destroyed.
Hmm, seems to me there's a vital piece of information missing here... now let me see... dorm room...prison cell...what's the difference? Oh yeah. LOCKED DOORS? BARS? Seems to me that prison cell evacuation is significantly more difficult due to the whole forced-incarceration thing. Perhaps. Seems to me, that they'd BETTER have the most expensive sprinkler system known to humanity. "It's weird that we give our prisoners more safety than we do our college students" mused fire educator Novak in the oft-repeated promo. Which implies that prisoners should be the (allegedly) endangered ones, 'cuz they're not people, per se, and our students can safely sleep off their hangovers with the soft, snuggly knowledge that sprinklers will keep them safe and sound while the felons burn.
Incidentally, the halogen light example they used to start the fire is lazy research on their part, as halogen lights have been outlawed for years in the vast majority of residence halls nationwide. Which, by the way, angered me to no end, as they mandated this at my University barely two weeks into my freshman year, so as a result, I was unable to use my phat lamp which I thought was harmless. Or my harmless lamp I thought was phat. Either way, two years later I finally got their point when aforementioned lamp set fire to a june bug. But I digress.
If there were sprinklers in dorm rooms, it would only be a matter of time before some crazy stoner whose name no one remembers but he wandered in after that party and I thought you invited him me no I thought he was your friend who cares his stuff is really good starts an argument about whether that sprinkler head is really connected to the water line or if it's just glued on there sugar-pill style and before you know it I'm standing on Adam's bed with my mini-blow-torch lighter cuz I got five bucks that says that sprinkler's a placebo hey I just remembered the word it's "placebo" and then the sprinkler goes off and dammit dude there's water totally ruining my pulp fiction poster phish cassette bootlegs and rolling stones.
It saddens me to attack such a terribly easy target like Fox (see the title line), but I'm still waiting for my election-day liquid rage to cool and coagulate into solid rocks I can wing out the second-story of my glass house. Until that time, I'm just going to live in a fantasy world where there's nothing more important to rail against than Trish Van Pilsum's misplaced journalistic integrity. And to be perfectly honest, I once fooled myself into having respect for that woman. And I really hate to be proven wrong about people. Me and my silly notions about giving the proverbial "benefit of the doubt." What a sucker. "Innocent until proven guilty?" THAT'S the sort of naïve way of thinking that undermines the American Dream and helps the terrorists, hippy. Um, this is starting to drift in a rather bad direction, soo, that's all for now.
From KSTP.COM (be sure to note the spelling error and awful grammar/syntax):
The FOX 9 Investigators surveyed every college in the state and asked whether they had sprinklers and what kind of materials go into dorm beds and furniture. We also set up a test. Using an old building used to house medical offices in Coon Rapids, we furnished two rooms. One, like a prison cell with non-combustible materials. We also installed a sprinkler because 75 percent of the Minnesota's prisons have sprinkler systems. The other we set up like a dorm; wood furniture, a mattress that isn't flame retardant and no spinkler [sic]. That's because the FOX 9 Investigators discovered many of the state's dorm rooms don't have sprinklers. Jamie Novak, the fire safety educator for St. Paul's fire department, sets the mattress in the cell on fire. In the dorm room, he puts a blanket on a halogen light. In just a short time, fires are burning in both rooms. 7 minutes and 50 seconds after the cell is lit on fire, the sprinkler goes off and the damage is very small. At the same time, the dorm is an inferno. Before long, it is some 1600 degrees and the room is destroyed.
Hmm, seems to me there's a vital piece of information missing here... now let me see... dorm room...prison cell...what's the difference? Oh yeah. LOCKED DOORS? BARS? Seems to me that prison cell evacuation is significantly more difficult due to the whole forced-incarceration thing. Perhaps. Seems to me, that they'd BETTER have the most expensive sprinkler system known to humanity. "It's weird that we give our prisoners more safety than we do our college students" mused fire educator Novak in the oft-repeated promo. Which implies that prisoners should be the (allegedly) endangered ones, 'cuz they're not people, per se, and our students can safely sleep off their hangovers with the soft, snuggly knowledge that sprinklers will keep them safe and sound while the felons burn.
Incidentally, the halogen light example they used to start the fire is lazy research on their part, as halogen lights have been outlawed for years in the vast majority of residence halls nationwide. Which, by the way, angered me to no end, as they mandated this at my University barely two weeks into my freshman year, so as a result, I was unable to use my phat lamp which I thought was harmless. Or my harmless lamp I thought was phat. Either way, two years later I finally got their point when aforementioned lamp set fire to a june bug. But I digress.
If there were sprinklers in dorm rooms, it would only be a matter of time before some crazy stoner whose name no one remembers but he wandered in after that party and I thought you invited him me no I thought he was your friend who cares his stuff is really good starts an argument about whether that sprinkler head is really connected to the water line or if it's just glued on there sugar-pill style and before you know it I'm standing on Adam's bed with my mini-blow-torch lighter cuz I got five bucks that says that sprinkler's a placebo hey I just remembered the word it's "placebo" and then the sprinkler goes off and dammit dude there's water totally ruining my pulp fiction poster phish cassette bootlegs and rolling stones.
It saddens me to attack such a terribly easy target like Fox (see the title line), but I'm still waiting for my election-day liquid rage to cool and coagulate into solid rocks I can wing out the second-story of my glass house. Until that time, I'm just going to live in a fantasy world where there's nothing more important to rail against than Trish Van Pilsum's misplaced journalistic integrity. And to be perfectly honest, I once fooled myself into having respect for that woman. And I really hate to be proven wrong about people. Me and my silly notions about giving the proverbial "benefit of the doubt." What a sucker. "Innocent until proven guilty?" THAT'S the sort of naïve way of thinking that undermines the American Dream and helps the terrorists, hippy. Um, this is starting to drift in a rather bad direction, soo, that's all for now.
posted by ab at 11/08/2004
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