Whipped Cream Difficulties

It looks like this is going to be a NYT heavy day. I apologize, but I go where the interesting stuff is.

This is a no-snark story. Even though I think the main idea is well known, and gets repeated by the NYT every few years, I still think it is worth noting,

Decades later, the operators say, the images are vivid. The slender fellow in the jacket and tie, bending his knees at the platform’s edge. The reveler stumbling on the tracks at dawn, wobbly in her evening best, unable to stagger away in time. An arm reaching up, hopefully, then disappearing in a flash.
“As cruel as it makes it sound, for the individual it’s over,” said Curtis Tate, a former operator whose train struck and killed a man in 1992. “It’s just beginning for the train operator.”

According to the NYT, operators expect an average of one death per week. (There were 55 in 2012, and the system has already had the first death of 2013.)

“I was always seeing it, you know?” Ms. Moore, 45, from Staten Island, said. “I see him alive and….”

Also in the NYT, an interesting article about the investigation into the Indianapolis gas explosion.

Even before they heard that family photographs were missing, investigators said they sensed something was not right with the scattered remains of Monserrate Shirley’s home.

I’ve heard more than once that family photos being missing, or obviously taken out of the house before the event, is a significant clue to investigators that they might be dealing with arson or some other deliberate act. But as we shift towards digital photos and storage in the cloud, how long is that going to remain a useful clue?

Officials believe the home, in the Richmond Hill subdivision, had been saturated with natural gas for six to nine hours before it erupted at 11:11 p.m. The explosion was seen and felt for miles. It shattered windows and collapsed walls throughout the neighborhood, shoving some homes off their foundations. John D. Longworth and his wife, Jennifer, who lived in the house next door, did not survive.

Conveniently, the people who owned the house were “at a casino 100 miles away”, their daughter was spending the night with friends, and they had boarded their cat.

This came to me by way of the NYT: I’m linking to the AZCentral web site, but both have about the same amount of detail. The jury in the trial of Erick Venola deadlocked on the second-degree murder charges against him. Mr. Venola is expected to be retried in late February; he was pleading self-defense in the shooting of his neighbor, James Patrick O’Neill.

Why is this worth noting? I don’t note every mistrial in Arizona. True that, but: Mr. Venola was a former editor of “Guns and Ammo” magazine, and I’ve seen absolutely no mention of this in the gun blog sphere (or anywhere else) before now. It may be that Mr. Venola is not exactly a sympathetic defendant: the prosecution claims he and Mr. O’Neill were both drunk at the time of the shooting.

Interesting set of stats from the NYT, by way of Jimbo: Arthur O. Sulzberger’s obit in the NYT was the fourth longest in the past 30 years. The top five:

1. Pope John Paul II.
2. Richard Nixon.
3. Ronald Reagan.
4. Arthur O. Sulzberger.
5. Gerald Ford.