Leap Day!

February 29, 2016

Leap Day!  

Up early to meet an old pal down from Oregon.  We head to MoCA and find free parking a block from the museum.  He has a head for contemporary art and the current offering at the museum is fairly tame, we saw some wonderful Rothkos and Hell's Gate Bridge, a Chris Burden erector set installation that I like a lot. 

It is interesting to me that all local news channels put helicopters in the sky to cover a slow car chase this evening. The expense of missing commercials and interrupting programming seems like a huge waste.  If they all cooperated and would cover from the air in segments of thirty minutes or so, sending the 'copters off on other assignments or just to land and save fuel, by handing off from 2 to 4 to 5 to 7..  or such? Might be a plan?   We are all fascinated by this type of thing and granted that it should be covered, but come on! This is a Hummer with a reported quarter tank of gas (how could they know?).  Kidnapping w/ reported two children in the big fat thing (those things are not cars!)... and a 'victim.'  They cruise down the 5 Freeway at 45 MPH.. the cops in warm pursuit.  One news anchor suggested that they just box the guy in.  I've long advocated that the CHP have cruisers that have seen their service and are being cycled out to be painted a nondescript color with a number on top for ease of identifying from the air, beef up the windows with plexiglas and put kevlar in the doors and then, have these cars at the ready at every CHP headquarters to be rolled out to simply surround a running perpetrator and grind him/her to a stop.  The cop who was commenting said that running drivers may ram the cars around him, but with cars that were basically out of service and with trained "grinders" doing the stop, bullet proof windows, these heavy duty former cop cars would be expendable.  By the time the police and CHP recycle a car (I think at about only 100K miles)..  it's tired but would work! 

Oh well.  A nice lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen and a nice chat with my old friend has made this a really good day.  

Leap Day.. February 29, 2016

michaelsheehan