The Sword and Laser discussion

Tom is safe. Stephen has had three New Years, and we all love Graham Gore. But the best part of the show is Veronica's parade of diseases.

https://www.swordandlaser.com/home/20...

Comments as I listen…

Very glad to hear that Tom & fam are safe. Those fires are terrifying. Maybe Tom can answer this for me: I spent my summers in the 70s and 80s on my aunt and uncle’s farm and they had a small shop vac-sized portable water pump where we could throw a hose in the creek and then pump water into the field. Or conversely when fields flooded, pump the water out. I know they have large pumps that sit on a flatbed truck, but I didn’t see those being used. Seems like an obvious solution to the water pressure problem since the beach is right there for Pacific Palisades. Altadena is too far from the ocean, but not Palisades. Did they just not think of it, or were they used and just didn’t make it into the news footage?

Listening speed… I always hated audiobooks because the narrators were so slow. I felt like I was being read to as if I were a not very bright 4-year-old. Only the Ed Asner narration of Carl Hiaasen’s novels didn’t infuriate me or put me to sleep. Now that we can control playback speed, I actually enjoy audiobooks. I typically listen at 1.5x speed, but will push some to 1.75x.

I’ve also bailed on most of my podcasts. I only listen to S&L and Cinematic Sound regularly, and watch Intentionally Left Blank on YouTube.

Re: my clean house. Yes, we maintain strict discipline here because cleanliness is next to godliness. Vacuuming is done once a day immediately followed by thorough dusting, then polishing the silver.

I’m kidding; it is filthy. You want to talk dog hair, get a Pug. BUT we just got new carpets and we have severely curtailed the dogs’ traffic on them. Although Zoey the blind 20-year-old Chihuahua did tinkle in the great room. However, I did receive my order of twinkly lights Thursday and set up the first batch that has faux leaves around the plants.

Looks better at night but you get the gist:
(view spoiler)[ [image error] (hide spoiler)]

Here, this will make you feel better about your house:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DEijw2xv7...

One of the reasons the house is a mess is because I was sick for the entire month of December. I think I can match Veronica on the merry-go-round of illness. We can do that scene from Jaws where they compare scars. Check out how thick my file is just from my rheumatologist: https://www.instagram.com/p/DE3O8aQvs... My PCP? Fuggedaboutit. 😂 I also have gotten a dog hair splinter in my foot. See: Pug above.

Sword book recs: I really enjoyed A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher. As I mentioned in my review, it’s not exactly cozy Southern Gothic but it’s adjacent to all those. And the audiobook is by Mary Robinette Kowal, who crushes it. (Even at 1.5 speed.) My Fantasy runner-up in 2024 was The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P. Djeli Clark. It’s an actioner. My non-spoiler review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Re: Ministry - “spooky” goes with “quantum” like bacon goes with eggs.

Speaking of Victorian sailors: lots of Shields like Ruth are reading Patrick O’Brian’s books. Interesting coincidence.

New Year coming up, the Year of the Snake. I was born in the Year of the Snake, so I will be 60 soon. (Holy crap.)

GR4eva :p

The high salt content in seawater means it is corrosive to equipment and generally requires equipment designed for it. Aircraft used in firefighting are often specifically designed for flame retardants and sometimes fresh water but rarely for sea water. It also can have a lasting impact on vegetation and soil.

But more importantly, so much demand water pressure is low, the number of personnel, and discussions like that miss the main point. Even if none of the other things being bandied about had been an issue nothing we can do with any technology we have at present that I can bring to mind is going to stop or even much slow a large scale fire with ample fuel being driven by hurricane force winds.

And the driver behind making things like that common is the climate crisis. We've known that would happen for decades now. Octavia Butler wasn't prescient. As she herself said, she just looked at information published at the time and projected it a few decades into the future. Something like getting more pumps on flat beds feels a bit like trying to put a bandaid on a bullet hole. And in the face of winds 60-80 mph winds with gusts up to 100 mph, it seems unlikely to help much.

But the main reason that's not a quick option people can try in an emergency is because it requires special equipment to handle the more corrosive sea water at scale and speed for any period of time.

Scott wrote: "The high salt content in seawater means it is corrosive to equipment and generally requires equipment designed for it. Aircraft used in firefighting are often specifically designed for flame retard..."

It would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than replacing an entire city and its infrastructure. The Will Rogers Museum was lost, and those items were irreplaceable. The town of Bedford where I work just bought a new fire engine for a little under $1 million. The pumps I’m thinking of are far cheaper than that, but even a million dollars would be worth it. I saw a report that in the Pacific Palisades fire alone they lost 9 public schools. Those cost $100-150 million each. If you ruined 100 truck-mounted pumps preserving just those schools, the state would still come out ahead by nearly a billion dollars.

As for the plants and ground, saltwater is a lot less damaging than being obliterated by fire. All those Teslas burning up released tons of toxic chemicals that will likely cause cancer and necessitate topsoil removal and sequester. Anyplace where a hurricane-driven storm surge has inundated land with hundreds of millions of gallons of saltwater has recovered quickly. We’ve seen that happen again and again along the gulf coast and South. Trees and plants left standing bounce back pretty fast. We’re talking a lot less water than that.

Also, I’m not just thinking about fire fighting, but also hosing everything down so it doesn’t burn in the first place. Some of the embers floating around were the size of Buicks, but even those wouldn’t have started new fires if they’d landed on water-soaked roofs.

Check out this equipment: https://www.fireapparatusmagazine.com...

They’re talking about pumping anywhere from 3500 to 20,000 gallons per minute. Even at the low end that’s more than a plane or helicopter can hold, and the stream would be constant. No 30-minute round trip for refills. When those aircraft hit the fire with water, it goes out, so a constant blast is going to be even better. Plus, much of the time they’re using chemicals, which have to be worse than ocean water.

I just think the downsides of using large pumps to spray seawater are minuscule compared to the downsides of losing 12,000 buildings, as happened in just this fire.

With all those considerations, I’m curious why they didn’t employ them.

Oh, and since recommendations were mentioned, for some reason I thought S&L had read something by Seanan McGuire already, but checking the wiki apparently not. (I must be mixing it up with something else in my memory.) I think Middlegame would be a good fit for S&L out of her canon of work. It's rich and complex and fairly unique. And even though there are other books set in that world, all of them can be read separately, especially Middlegame. It tells a complete story.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

Trike wrote: "Also, I’m not just thinking about fire fighting, but also hosing everything down so it doesn’t burn in the first place."

Ahhh. That makes a lot more sense than what I was imagining which was trying to stop an approaching fire being driven by dry tinder and hurricane force winds.

I logged in 13 titles totaling 111 hours on audible, and my longest stretch was 3hrs8mins. But I listened to 20 audiobooks this year, and the other 7 were Libby titles, so I don't actually know how many hours I listened to.
I listen about the same amount to podcasts as I do audiobooks, maybe slightly more podcasts actually, so yeah, I just listen to a LOT of stuff. I'm very much an audio-based learner, so I've fully embraced the diversity of audio content the internet has generated!
Re: speed, I do 1.25 for books, 1.5 for re-reads, and 1.3 for podcasts. I do find that audiobook narrators often read slowly, so 1.25 usually sounds more like normal talking to me, but if it's complicated or not slowly narrated, I'll bring it back down to 1x.

Fantasy recommendation: How about The Great When? I don't believe we've done Alan Moore, and he's a giant in the genre. Also, as mentioned in the quick burns a while back, it might be the first book-to-film project of his that he doesn't deride!

If you need a fantasy novel, I was thinking it was time for me to reread The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden. It's great, has cool folklore-based magic, interesting Russian history, and is just good. Maybe the group would enjoy it.

Also, I have a brother named Scott, so when Tom said "Why can't you be more like your brother Scott?" it wasn't the first time I'd heard that.

Seth wrote: "Also, I have a brother named Scott, so when Tom said "Why can't you be more like your brother Scott?" it wasn't the first time I'd heard that."

Now that made me laugh!

Trike wrote: "Scott wrote: "The high salt content in seawater means it is corrosive to equipment and generally requires equipment designed for it. Aircraft used in firefighting are often specifically designed fo..."

I don't know about salt water being less of a problem than fire ecologically. Salt contamination is really difficult to deal with and can cause serious long-term damage. Most echo systems like those around LA can recover from a fire given enough time.

As Scott commented once a big fire like this gets going it is just about impossible to stop. Water in the amounts humans can move, even with big pumps is just not going to cut it. The fire fighters just do their best to contain the fires and in an urban environment like LA that is going to be really difficult (back burning and bull dozing houses are probably out of the question). Once the fire is big enough it spreads very rapidly with wind-blown embers able to extend the fire front rapidly.

LA is probably going tom have these events again unless there is a radical change in how the urban environment is managed. Urban sprawl into fire prone regions makes this inevitable.

This makes me question my decision to move to Adelaide. Living in a city surrounded by eucalypt forests that have a history of burning means a lot of care will be required.

At tonight’s town council meeting (https://www.instagram.com/p/DFJyd69OU... ) I asked a firefighter about my idea and he thought it was workable.

Didn’t we read a novella by Seanan Maguire? The title is escaping me right now but it was about a boarding school for kids who’ve had portal fantasy experiences.

That's the Wayward Children series starting with Every Heart a Doorway. I know I've read them as have many people here. I don't recall it being a monthly pick.

I searched through the wiki and confirmed she hadn't been read, at least as a main pick. I thought I remembered her being a pick at some point, but apparently not.

On discord Veronica indicated she's settled on her pick. At some juncture Tom will write a book briefing which Veronica won't read. ;-)

This is the way.

Ruth wrote: "Didn’t we read a novella by Seanan Maguire? The title is escaping me right now but it was about a boarding school for kids who’ve had portal fantasy experiences."
Scott wrote: "I searched through the wiki and confirmed she hadn't been read, at least as a main pick. I thought I remembered her being a pick at some point, but apparently not."

This whole discussion is giving me deja vu. Haven't we discussed whether or not we read Seanan Maguire in the podcast recently? I feel like Veronica and Tom have worked this out on the air at least once in the last year or so...

Here's the list of all the previous picks.

https://swordandlaser.fandom.com/wiki...

Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant may be the most discussed author of books we haven't read with Sword and Laser. ;-)

Mark wrote: "Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant may be the most discussed author of books we haven't read with Sword and Laser. ;-)"

Hah!! Perhaps true.

Speaking of tapeworms...