Pretty Much Nobody Can Operate Anything Nowadays

A summary of recent accidents follows below. All of these stories are from Action News‘ website.

• On Route 1 in Bucks County, a cabinet fell off a pickup truck and caused a six-vehicle crash.

Well, okay, that was kind of a random accident, though. At least our trained drivers are a little more careful.

• On Roosevelt Boulevard in the Northeast, an ambulance crashed after another vehicle hit it, causing it to roll over.

Well, okay, but that was a private ambulance and it was hit first. I’m sure our professional drivers — say, pilots — know what they’re doing.

• The Pinelands fire earlier this year was caused by a National Guard pilot who dropped a flare to close to the ground on a bone-dry day, though a senator from N.J. called it more of a “systematic failure.” [AP]

Okay, okay. So the National Guard messed up and caused a fire that destroyed 17,000 acres. But, you know, mistakes are mistakes. Our highest trained pilots surely are top-of-the-line.

• A bunch of astronauts flew drunk. [AP]

Forget it. Nobody should be allowed to operate anything more dangerous than a Barbie® Power Wheels car anymore. Even then, somehow some guy named Ken would probably be killed.

Loch Ness Monster Shuts Down Crime Cameras

A 23-year-old man was shot and killed outside a Chinese restaurant over the weekend. Fortunately, there were cameras outside the restaurant, and the killer will hopefully soon be identified.

Ha ha, just kidding! (Not about the homicide, but about the cameras.) In yet another example of the incompetence of Big Brother, the cameras outside the Chinese restaurant were not working. (If Nineteen Eighty-Four were real, Winston’s time in Room 101 would have been spent playing with puppies.) Back in March, the cameras — installed by the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation — also didn’t work, so they’ve really made a lot of progress on the issue. (Hey, another parenthetical aside: Perhaps one of the problems was that ex-PCDC president and soon-to-be-City Councilman Curtis Jones said he had a master’s degree when in fact he had a certificate of compliance from a weekend seminar of some sort.)

Anyway, the PCDC does have an excuse for the non-working cameras.

The Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation which runs the cameras, says hackers and a lightening strike were the reasons the cameras were off. The president of the PCDC says the cameras should be working again by Friday, and he wants the D-A and the US attorney to investigate the hackers.

Hackers and a lighting strike? Usually when you comes up with ideas for a ridiculous excuse to save face, you only choose one one those ideas.

But who knows. Perhaps there really were hackers. I don’t know what they were like, but I can only assume they are like Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller’s characters from the 1996 film Hackers, not nerdy script kiddies in their parents’ basement. This makes for a sexier story.

Anyway, next time this blog happens to be down, it’s the fault of Bigfoot and solar flares.

Crime Cameras Stall in Wynnefield
March 26: Get Ready For More Of This In The Coming Weeks