Whipped Cream Difficulties

I feel an obligation to say something about the Super Bowl. Here it is:

I was burned out on the game and the commercials by Sunday of last week. I had no intent to watch any of it; I was just so tired and frustrated and fed up with the whole thing.

I ended up catching a few minutes of it when I went out for dinner. What I caught was the less exciting part, but I did see a couple of commercials that puzzled me:

• Can somebody explain to me what I was supposed to get out of that Nissan “Cat’s In the Cradle” commercial? It’s never too late to reconnect with your child, as long as you’re a famous racing driver who drives a Nissan? (It doesn’t help any that I hate that song.)
• Are we pretty much all in agreement that the Nationwide “…but I died” commercial is just plain creepy? “The sole purpose of this message was to start a conversation, not sell insurance.” I’m sorry, what kind of conversation are we trying to start here? “Dead kids are bad.” Mmmkay. If we’re trying to start a conversation, should I be waiting to hear from the pro-dead kids side?

I’ve been sort of following the Brooklyn warehouse fire story, and I got to wondering. Seven alarms is a lot. But what’s the largest alarm response ever in the history of the NYFD? And how many alarms was September 11th?

I haven’t found a good answer to either of those questions. According to this Slate article, there has been at least one ten alarm fire. (I defend my decision to link to Slate by noting that this is a very old article.)

As for the second question, that’s also not easy to answer, but for different reasons. According to New York magazine:

In a standard single-alarm fire, a total of six units—three engines, two ladders, and a battalion chief—respond. A five-alarm fire brings 44 units. September 11 was on the order of five five-alarm responses, involving more than 214 FDNY units—112 engines, 58 ladder trucks, five rescue companies, seven squad companies, four marine units, dozens of chiefs, and numerous command, communication, and support units.

But:

Off-duty firefighters and entire companies “self-dispatched” to the site without orders. So did numerous ambulances and police officers. The area around the Trade Center quickly became a “parking lot,” in the words of one police radio report, making it impossible for many units to report to the alarm boxes and staging areas they were assigned to. Of the 214 or so units dispatched, only 117 of them activated a “10-84” status signal that let dispatchers know they’d arrived. The details of what many companies did at the scene remain hazy; the operations of twenty companies that were wiped out are simply unknown.