A KNUCKLEHEAD IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, thought he had hit upon a good idea.  A strong fan of the football team, the Ravens,  he was frustrated with the team’s lengthy losing streak.

So he decided to publicly go up onto the roof of a bar and stay up there day and night until the team won a game (which it still hasn’t).  While up there, he generated lots of publicity for the bar and they in turn provided him with a tent, space heater, and five meals a day.  TV crews were continually climbing the stairs to the roof to interview him again.  Life was good.

Balto. Sun photo from Dec. 12
when times were good.

Until, that is, his ex-wife who had a $45,000 child-support judgement against him saw him on the tv.  She tipped off the police and you can guess the rest.

The Baltimore Sun has the full STORY.

IN GREAT BRITAIN THE FIREFIGHTERS union has come out with guns blazing over the high expenditures for “consultants” while fire stations are being closed and dispatch centers eliminated by consolidation.

The Fire Brigades Union said a “staggering” £29 million ($60 million)  had been spent on consultants since 2006, enough to pay for 1,000 frontline firefighters.

A further £15 million has been spent by the Department for Communities and Local Government on temporary staff on fire service projects, which would pay for a further 570 firemen and women, said the union.  Most of that money has been spent on a radio system project which has been delayed for 18 months, and the building of new fire control centres, said the FBU.

The Union’s General Secretary summed it up nicely when he said: 

General Secretary Matt Wrack said: “This soaring spending on consultants is a national scandal. Consultants are swimming in cash while this year during the floods fire crews had to wade through water filled with excrement without even welly boots to protect them.

“Cash-starved fire authorities are looking at station closures and the loss of frontline firefighter jobs while consultants are cashing in. No-one ever dialled 999 and asked for a management consultant.”

 The Yorkshire Post has the STORY.

*  FirefighterHourly has posted a video HERE from the Tampa FF’s Local calling the city’s mayor on her empty promises.

*  The Housewatch has some thoughts and a good tip on where to find door chocks HERE.

*  STATter911 is reporting on a house fire in Fairfax County that claimed two children last night and a suspicious fire set on the porch of Pres. Bush’s boyhood home.  He also points out Manchester, New Hampshire’s unique code enforcement policy HERE.

*  FireNews.net reports on a town in Wake County that has enacted a ban on vinyl siding on multi-occupancies (apartments) HERE.

*  FirefighterSpot has updated with a lot of excellent working fire photos HERE.  Too many to list, so just click over and have a look.

*  VAFireNews has reports on several Virginia fires and an interesting photo of what’s left of a car after a bridge crash HERE.

IN ANOTHER INCIDENT IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA’S BELEAGUERED AMBULANCE SERVICE, the administrators are rightly embarrassed and apologetic after a woman with acute appendicitis was refused service, nearly costing her life.

When 29-yr.-old Michelle Couling developed severe pains, she dialed the 000 center requesting an ambulance.  They initially told her that there weren’t any available but to call back later if the pain got worse.

25 minutes later Ms Couling was in extreme pain and rang 000 back.  After being put on hold for about four minutes, Couling’s call was transferred to a paramedic.

After a three or four minute conversation he said: “We’re actually not sending anyone out - it doesn’t sound like it’s an emergency to me, it sounds like you might have gastro.”

The paramedic said Ms Couling should still see a doctor and suggested she get a lift or call a cab.  She called the taxi and ten minutes later it arrived to take her to the hospital where she needed three morphine doses and anti-nausea drugs to dull her pain.  She was later operated on and is recovering.

Her father summed it up when he said:  “A system where you can ring up and get a diagnosis over the phone - I just think that’s a joke.”

The Herald Sun has the full STORY.

FROM ZAGREB, CROATIA, the HINA news agency reported that a 66-year-old man died of crash injuries when an ambulance taking him to a hospital skidded off a road into a ditch near Osijek in eastern Croatia. The ambulance slid on the snow-covered road and overturned several times on Christmas Eve.

The man died Monday evening in the Osijek hospital, according to the doctors. The ambulance’s driver, 31, and another patient, 52, suffered minor injuries in the crash. The driver was not under influence of alcohol and no charges will be filed against him, police said.

FROM TOKYO, JAPAN, COMES A REPORT BY the Associated Press that the death of an elderly woman is again focusing attention on the country’s health-care woes, with an aging population and a shortage of doctors.

The AP tells us:

Japanese officials say an 89-year-old woman died after an ambulance crew spent two hours trying 30 hospitals before finding one that would accept her for treatment.

Officials say hospitals that rejected the woman claimed they were full or that doctors were not immediately available to treat her. She was ill with vomiting and diarrhea.

Last year, a pregnant woman in western Japan died after being refused admission by about 20 hospitals that said they were full.

Several years ago the government meddled in the marketplace and introduced a scheme to restrict the number of doctors allowed to practice in the nation.

BOISE, IDAHO, ENGINE 8 WAS HAVING A BUSY evening on Christmas Eve.  Mostly medical calls, they were running a succession of emergencies when they started fixing a quick dinner, including Idaho’s specialty, Tater-Tots.

Shortly after, another medical assist call came in and away they went.  When they returned from this one they immediately saw a recognizable orange glow coming from the kitchen.  The potatoes became over-cooked and started a small fire in the overhead cabinets.  It was quickly extinguished and damages are confined to the kitchen.

Engine 8 at quarters

All Boise Fire Department stations are designed to cut the power to cooking equipment when the station bells are activated for an emergency call.

“In this case it appears the dispatch center did not know they had returned from the previous call and did not activate their station bell, thinking they were still returning to the station,” Dep. Chief Dave Hanneman said in a media statement.

There were no injuries, but the Tater-Tots were a total loss.

File this one under “Bureaucratic Blunders.”  One of the inherent problems of governmental hierarchies is the tendency of the bureaucrats to meddle in something that they know nothing about, yet have the authority to make costly decisions about it anyway.

This phenomenon was studied back in the 1960’s by a Canadian scholar named Dr. Laurence J. Peter who published a famous book on the subject in 1968, The Peter Principle:  Why Things Always Go Wrong.  His basic premise was that:  “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”   His observations were well documented and the phrase “Peter Principle” became part of the North American jargon.  His book was even listed as one of the references to study on one of my upcoming promotional exams.

Basically, without getting too deeply into it, he pointed out that within any hierarchy (usually large ones) an employee who is doing a good job gets promoted to a higher and more responsible position.  This continues until they reach a level that they are incompetent in.  When that happens, they get stuck there….never promoted again and in the case of government workers, unable to be demoted.  Eventually all the mid- and upper-level positions are filled with incompetents and the organization becomes dysfunctional.  A textbook example of this theory at work is the U. S. Postal Service.

The other day I came across a champion blunder that illustrates the unstoppable nonsense that seems to roll right on through despite its obvious uselessness.

The Australian state of Victoria has a (bureacratic) entity called the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment.  The title alone tells you that it’s ripe for governmental mischief.  The DSE (as it’s known) is responsible for supplying the many rural fire and ambulance squads, mostly volunteer, with map books that will allow them to promptly find any place they are dispatched to in the State.

By the way, the volunteers have their own hierarchy, the Country Fire Authority (CFA).  Recently the DSE issued its biennial map book, the Vicmaps, and the CFA has exposed it as being seriously deficient.  It seems that the Vicmap books contain thousands of roads that don’t exist, the same schools appearing at different locations, and are even missing fire hydrants.

Since the books were published, the DSE has been forced to delete more than 5,000 roads from its electronic database and reclassify another 74,000 roads.  The Vicmap books have been issued to CFA brigades and are also used by regional police and ambulance services.  The Vicmaps are also used in electronic form by the Emergency Services Telecommunication Authority’s (ESTA) computer-aided dispatch operators.
However, an ESTA spokesman said dispatch operators were able to cross-reference the Vicmap data with VicRoads maps.

“While Vicmap is an important part of the picture, it’s not the only process, since it’s cross-referenced with other details and goes hand-in-hand with details from people at the scene,” the spokesman said in good bureaucratese.  (If the map’s no good, how did they get to the scene to radio in these cross-referencing details? … FG)  

Victorian Rural Fire Brigades Association (RFBA) president and CFA mapping committee member Peter Downes said volunteers were stuck with expensive, inaccurate map books.  So will the books be recalled and corrected versions issued?  Nope.  The corrections will not appear in print until the next round of Vicmaps is published in two years.   Two years of lost ambulances cruising the country roads of Victoria.  Good luck, folks.  Pay attention during your street drills.

OK, let’s get the equipment checked out.  I’ll go start the coffee.

WHAT IS ARGUABLY THE MOST WELL-KNOWN AMERICAN STAMP is the famous “Jenny” with the inverted plane in the center.

Several sheets came out of the printing press with the picture upside-down.  But all of them were caught and brought back to the post office except one sheet of 100 stamps.

Of those 100, less than five of them have never been attached to stamp albums with “hinges” that leave a small adhesive mark on the back.  The stamp that just changed hands last week is one of those.

A private sale was brokered by an auctioneer and the stamp was sold for $825,000.

Any kid who has ever started stamp collecting knows about the Jenny. 

The Assoc. Press tells about the sale HERE.
Wikipedia has the full history of the stamp HERE.

FIREFIGHTER MICHAEL COLEMAN WAS HONORED LAST WEEK at #10 Downing St. when he and nine other “unsung heroes” met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown at a special reception.

FF Michael Coleman at the UK’s most famous address
Guardian photo

FF Coleman, a member of green watch at Tooting fire station, rescued a man from a serious house fire in Streatham last November and he was awarded the Vodafone Life Saver Award.

The Guardian has the full STORY.

BACK ON TUESDAY, DAVE STATTER RAN A SERIES of four early motion picture films (1897-1904) of steamers and other FD apparatus.

One of the films is of the annual NYC fireman’s parade where you get to see some water towers and a team of truckies carrying about 20 pompier ladders.

It’s a great treat.  If you missed them, click HERE and take a look.  Maybe we can get him to make it an annual posting.

SONY CORP. ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT THEY will stop making rear-projection television sets in February.  They join two other major manufacturers (Seiko and Hitachi) that have already discontinued their production.

Even though the rear-projection sets have excellent pictures and a wider viewing angle, the consumer is mainly buying the flat-screen LCD and plasma televisions.

The loss-making rear-projection televisions - which use a projector, lenses and mirrors to create images on large screens - have fallen in popularity.  In October this year, Sony lowered its sales forecast by 43% to 400,000 for the technology, popular in the US for home theater setups.  By contrast, the electronics firm expects to sell 10 million LCD televisions in the year to March 2008.

SONY said it will be focusing its resources on liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology.

The new OLED screens are the thickness of a coin and will enter the Japanese marketplace next month.  Firegeezer covered the OLED tv set (with a video) on Oct. 4 HERE.

Business Week has a good look at SONY’s reasoning HERE.