Reviewing the 14-Year-Old Blogroll

(My God, my blogroll is older than the girls trump and Epstein like!!)

It's been a while, so I figured I would see which blogs I blogrolled were still active.

I also have two new ones to add, when I get energetic enough to update the blogroll, FireLawBlog (firelawblog.com, duh...). Attorney and retired chief officer Curt Varone's fascinating and informative analyses of legal problems affecting the fire service. The second is Statter911 (statter911.com, of course), by retired newsman Dave Statter... a great way to keep track of news of importance to the fire service. Pay special attention to his SMACSS pieces -- Social Media-Assisted Career Suicide Syndrome (similar to Chief Varone's YCMTSU category).

Political
BadTux, but he's at a new address: https://snarkypenguin.wordpress.com/
Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, https://xnerg.blogspot.com/
Mustang Bobby, https://barkbarkwoofwoof.com/
Blue Gal, http://bgalrstate.blogspot.com/
Jurassic Pork, http://welcomebacktopottersville.blogspot.com/
Mock, Paper, Scissors, https://mockpaperscissors.com/


Medical
Ambulance Driver, http://www.ambulancedriverfiles.com/
Rescuing Providence, http://rescuingprovidence.com/ (Providence lost a great firefighter/medic when Michael retired)
The Happy Medic, http://happymedic.com/



Apparently Defunct
Ambulance Ranger
Firegeezer
Life Under the Lights
My Two Cents
White Noise Insanity

A Stolen Random Thought...

... from Mustang Bobby:

I have never seen an episode of either, so I have no idea if Downton Abbey is Duck Dynasty for the totebag contingent.

Good question...

Gimme That Old Time Music - Bonus

An extra piece... an old Shaker hymn, suggested by a post at Mustang Bobby's.

Enjoy.

... And maybe even learn...

Gimme That Old Time Music

In honor of the 33rd Annual Mid Coast EMS Conference, in Rockport, Maine.

This is from the two-hour pilot. Notice the original Squad 51, and the rest of the classic vehicles. You'll also notice that Martin Milner and Kent McCord (Malloy and Reed from Adam-12) appear. Not surprising, as Emergency! was a spin-off of Adam-12, which in turn was spun off from Dragnet.

A potential spin-off from Emergency! that failed was called 905-Wild, about some LA County Animal Control officers. That one starred Mark Harmon, David Huddleston, and Gary Crosby (Bing's son).
_____________________

When Emergency! debuted in 1972, the whole field of EMS was only a couple of years old. Previously, emergency medical care -- such as it was -- was provided by attendants with roughly 40 hours of Advanced First Aid, and maybe CPR. The vehicles were usually modified station wagons, operated by the local funeral homes (putting in the crews in an interesting situation - take the person to the hospital, or perhaps pick up the funeral?), or by civic groups like the American Legion, or Lions clubs.

Cadillac was the most popular make, but there were others like Pontiac, Chevrolet, Packard, and De Soto.

Some were barely-modified hearses:

Some very progressive services did use vans early on... here's a 1962 Chevy Corvair:

As the old wagons were being phased out, we started using vehicles like the Chevy Suburban or the International Travel-All:

 

 

As you can imagine, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot of room inside to work on patients. Not that it really mattered, since all we did at the time was advanced first aid - no IVs, usually no CPR, certainly nothing like intubation.

 

 

And what do we have these days?

 

 



Gawd, I'm starting to feel like Mustang Bobby with all the classic vehicle pix...

Looking Back. Way Back. Yet Looking Ahead, Too...

I was reading the usual blogs this morning, when one brought to mind a good memory.  I'd like to share it with you.

Back in 2006, I was conducting a First Aid/CPR/AED course for my employer. The company -- amazingly -- allowed each of its almost 1000 employees to sponsor a non-employee for First Aid/CPR/AED training, at the employer's expense.

Part of my lecture was along these lines:

We do not go into emergency services because of the fantastic schedules. We know that for the first twenty years, we will miss every holiday, every birthday, every wedding anniversary, every school play, every PTA meeting. We do not go into emergency services for the fancy uniforms. The uniforms are polyester: they are hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and they always look horrible. We do not go into emergency services for the money. There is no money in emergency services: most of us are volunteers, or at best, paid-on-call.  We do not go into emergency services for fame, fortune, glory, or greed. Do you know the name of even one police officer, firefighter, or paramedic in your town? Or do you know only the Johnnie Gages and Roy DeSotos, the Barney Millers, the Tommy Gavins? We may not admit this, especially when we're sober, but we go into emergency services because we want to make a difference. We want to keep our friends and families, our neighbors, even strangers, safe and healthy. We want people to go home to their families, their spouses, their children, in the same condition as when they left in the morning. We don't want to see tears, we don't want to hear anguished crying, we don't want to tell people their loved ones are never coming home. We want people to stay alive, to go on vacation, to see their children marry, to bounce grandchildren on their knees...

Well, the wife of one of our staff members was in that class, and she listened to what I said. No, she more than listened, she heard, she understood, for the following year when it was time to recertify her CPR, she told me she was back in school, going for a paramedic certificate to pay her way through nursing school... to become a trauma nurse and eventually, a flight crew member of the local air ambulance.

What brought that memory to mind?

This:




Via Mustang Bobby

Yeah, I guess I made a difference, too.

Mustang Bobby: Double Play!

Mustang Bobby has consecutive postings that are well worth reading: the first on Bigus Dickus and the Pentagon's "terrorist credit checks", and the second on "Spocko", a blogger who's fighting with MouseCo, ABC (as one wag put it, "Assimilated By Conservatives"), and KSFO, over the "extreme" comments by the station's neocon hosts.

In the Pentagon controversy, Bobby makes this observation:

Perhaps the most outrageous part of this maddening assault on our rights and our intelligence (pun intended) is the last one where the Vice President suggests -- hell, he proclaims -- that the opponents of the president and his divine revelations are playing into the hands of al-Qaida and other evil-doers. The truth is that it is the Bush administration who has lent encouragement to the terrorists with their weak and vacillating approach to fighting them, not to mention accomplishing their putative goal of destroying America from within by letting us do it ourselves with anti-democratic tactics like spying on our own citizens and bellicose bullying by the neocons like Dick Cheney.

Of course, the "bellicose bullying" is going to continue until (a) Cheney, bush, and company are impeached by the House, tried by the Senate, and removed from office, or (b) bush's successor is sworn in.

As for the Spocko saga, Bobby says:

Those of us who have supported Spocko, either with blog support or financial aid, know that this is just the start, and getting the attention of a major media outlet like the Times is a good step forward. Spocko also encourages bloggers to become well-informed about how they can defend themselves against the attacks of the likes of the trolls at KSFO and their minions in the legal profession. Education is the ultimate weapon and a bulging-biceps defense of bloggers' rights under the copyright law's Fair Use doctrine is part of that.

The mouth-breathin', Bible-thumpin', hooker-humpin', sister-marryin', rifle-rack-in-the-pickmup neocon wingnut idjits have gotten away with their shit -- aided and abetted by the bushtards -- for so long, they see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Civility just does not work with these morons:

KSFO’s Lee Rodgers: “Well I haven’t apologized for anything and I am not going to start with you. How the hell do you like that, creep?”

We're supposed to reach out to these oxygen thieves to promote bipartisanship? I call bullshit.

I wish I thought we would reach out to them as they "reached out" to us in 2000 and 2004... with the same vitriol and hatred, the same lack of respect, the same sarcasm and cynicism they showed us.

But we won't, and I know it.

Because WE are better than that.