The BBC News channel 1 hour special about the LA fires.
I know it’s obvious but the destruction is still shocking.
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Large areas of the West coast region have become tinderbox dry through lack of rainfall so for a while it’s been inevitable that swathes of it would catch fire.
But fear not, denier Donny takes charge in 10 days with a promise to burn more oil and dig more coal.
And those lefty liberals in California wouldn’t have voted for him anyway. Serves them right.
If I was rich enough to live in Pacific Palisades I’d have a pool, and given the history of fires in ‘it never rains in’ southern California I’d have a pump and a hydrant too. You’d probably need most of the properties in the block to do it, to avoid being fried by the thermal radiation from your neighbour’s places. But assuming the fire doesn’t consume too much of the oxygen perhaps the pool water would be enough to keep the flames at bay ?
It seems to have happened in a few places but not enough.
I fear there may be a cultural conflict between the Americans’ famous individualism (they don’t like anyone telling them what to do) and the city authorities’ insistence on compliance with rules and regulations. I spent a couple of months in San Diego in 1988 and saw first-hand the problems with the fresh water supply there. The company we were dealing with were reluctant to demo the equipment we were buying from them because they didn’t have a closed-cycle cooling rig for it. So they had to run rather a lot of tap water through it and down the drain when it was working, all of which was metered. They had some kind of allowance which it would have been very expensive, maybe even ‘illegal’, to breach.
My closest friend in my student days, and best man at my wedding, now lives in Wrightwood just north-east of LA. I saw him before Christmas and he was telling me about this fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeufOOvzKB8 which hit them in September. He and his partner had to evacuate in a big hurry but they were lucky. They’re not in a very built-up area of the community and the woods themselves were far enough away from their property boundary that the house survived almost completely unscathed. They knew people whose places were burned to the ground though. Of course the silver lining is that there’s so little vegetation left there to burn that I don’t think they’re at any risk now.
Just got to the end of Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes and feeling quite emotional 
Seems apt to have travelled back in time televisually to watch it all.
Still amazed how badly written a lot of it was, but the tie-up at the end was kinda neat.
Fuck knows what Sam’ll come up with next…
Can’t remember if I’d already watched this
It follows the gritty and adventurous exploration of the birth of the American West, the violent collisions of cults, religion, and men and women fighting for control of the new world.
Got two eps into this last night. Rather good I thought!!
Gritty & somewhat dark with good period realism. Anyone that enjoyed Godless should find this up their street. Does great justice to the Western genre.
On Netflix.
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Ended up watching this silly tosh last night completely by accident. 
This is being dissected on the family WhatsApp call.
Apparently the Paddy Mayne character keeps singing totally the wrong song for, err, where he was from.
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It’s funny but he’s depicted as completely unhinged which he most likely was but this was only one of his dimentions he was also intelligent (Barrister) and a seriously accomplished sportsman. A very interesting character
Allegedly the locals knew fine rightly that he was stuck in a crashed car and left him to die because sooner or later he was going to kill one of them.
Psychopaths can be extremely useful in war but difficult to fit in in civilian life.
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Hahaha, utter bollox
Absolutely loved it!
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enjoying this, saving the last 3 eps for Sunday.
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They’re all daft fun nonsense, and that’s the best of them.
The big match from 1984
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Guilty pleasure.
I know every line of dialogue.
Billy Zane with hair. Treat Williams chewing the scenery. Catherine Zeta-Jones as the leader of a gang of leather-clad lady sky-pirates.
not easy viewing is an understatement
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The intro is brutal. 
