Latest Outrage: Tennessee Bills Teen Nearly $2,970 For Wrecking Guardrail That Killed Her

Hannah Elmers, 17, died in a Tennessee car crash involving
an unsafe guardrail. The state of Tennessee later billed
her for the wrecked guardrail, but withdrew the
bill after public outcry.

Last November, Hannah Elmers, 17, was driving her dad's 2000 Volvo down Interstate 75 near Niota, Tennesees when she somehow lost control of the vehicle, traveled into the median skidded sideways, forcing the driver's side door to hit the end of a guardrail.

As USA Today reported, instead of deflecting the car, the guardrail pierced it, killing Elmers.

This would have ended up as another terrible local tragedy, a nice young teenager dying too young.

Except Tennessee decided to make things worse. Much worse, as Hannah's dad, Steven Elmers soon learned.

As USA Today describes it:

"Four months later, Steven Elmers of Lenoir City received a $2,970 bill from the Tennessee Department of Transportation, dated February 24 and addressed to Hannah for the cost of labor and materials to install 25 feet of guardrail at the scene of the crash. 

'I'm shocked, the audacity,' he said. 'What bothers me is that they're playing Russian roulette with people's lives. They know these devices do not perform at high speeds and in situations like my daughter's accident, but they leave them in place.'"

Wait, what?!?

It turns out, not only did Tennessee have the audacity to bill Hannah, they also know the type of guardrail they used is unsafe. And could kill other people.

Last fall, Tennessee transportation officials did decide to stop buying the type of guardrail involved in Hannah's crash, called a Lindsay X-Lite.

When a car hits the end of this type of guardrail, it's supposed to collapse like a telescope, theoretically minimizing injuries to the people in the car that hits it.

However, at high speeds, it doesn't collapse, and you get situations like Hannah's, where she crashed into it at high speeds. The stretch of Interstate where she was driving has a speed limit of 70 mph.

The state was originally going to leave existing dangerous guardrails in place, but now says they are  going to remove the remaining Lindsay X-Lite guardrails from other high speed locations in Tennessee.

They'd better. The Knoxville News-Sentinel says that since June, 2016, four people have died in Tennessee after colliding with this type of guardrail.

But what about that $2,980 bill?

A spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Transportation says the bill came from "a mistake somewhere in processing" and the department "greatly apologies for it."

Nice, but I don't trust it. How could somebody not catch this before it went out? I think the reversal and apology is more because of the bad PR that came when after the bill went out than any good intentions from the state.

By the way, the maybe unsafe other types of guardrails, made by Trinity Industries Inc. might be along highways in other states, like yours.

A whistleblower named Joshua Harman won a $663 million settlement against Trinity, after he alleged the company altered the design of one of its guardrails without getting approval from the Federal Highway Administration, the Knoxville News-Sentinel said. 

Virginia, citing the safety reasons, is removing a Trinity guardrail called ET-Plus for safety reasons. The city of Nashville, Tennessee did the same.

Adds the Knoxville News-Sentinel: 

"Trinity has since been involved in a slew of lawsuits nationwide in which crash victims alleged the unauthorized changes caused the guardrails to spear vehicles, resulting in injuries and deaths."

Hoo, boy, this company is in trouble. Let's hope any problematic guardrails made by this company get replaced before there are more tragedies.

E-Cigarettes Safe? Watch This Guy Get Victimized By Exploding One

An e-cigarette explodes violently in
this guy's jacket pocket, in an image from a security camera.

We've all heard of the new Samsung phones bursting into flames, but it turns out e-cigarettes are just as dangerous.

According to Slate, a French nightclub owner was badly hurt when his e-cigarettes blew up in his jacket pocket. Dramatic surveillance video of the incident is at the bottom of this post.  

Amine Britel was outside his nightclub last week in Toulouse, France

Says Slate:

"'All of a sudden I heard a loud band and a noise like a flare had gone off, only ten times louder. After the shock of the explosion, I realized that I had caught fire,' Britel said, according to Ubergizmo. 'I did not really understand what was happening to me. The pain only came afterwards.'"

Britel was hospitalized with severe burns and his fingers melted to his jacket. He plans to sue the Chinese manufacturer of the e-cigarette batteries.

E-cigarette batteries have caused all kinds of mayhem, it turns out.

According to Wired, a Colorado man broke his neck, lost some teeth and had burns and facial fractures when his e-cigarette blew up. Teenagers in California and Tennesee were badly injured by exploding vaping devices.

The e-cigarettes are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which are in many, many gadgets, including the laptop on which I'm writing this.

However, most computer and mobile phone manufacturers have exacting standards for batteries, notes Wired, but not all less sophisticated devices like vaping things are so carefully built.

Plus, some people are altering their e-cigarettes, which makes them more dangerous.

Smoking regular cigarettes is known to be very dangerous. Vaping is dangerous too, for some of the same reasons, and as it turns out, because a few explode. Explosions are dangerous, as the Frenh nightclub owner found out in the video, below.

Happy Anniversary, Chief: Why I Have A Perfect Husband

Chief: My husband Jeff and I are celebrating our
fourth wedding anniversary today.  

Today is my fourth wedding anniversary. Time flies.

I thought I'd use the occasion to write an open letter to my husband Jeff, who I call Chief. Here goes:

Dear Chief,   

Hard to believe we've been married four years already.  Time flies when I'm happy, I guess.

If I had to list all the reasons why I love you'd we'd be here all week. So I'm going to dispense with the list. You know I love you for a gazillion reasons, and we'll leave it at that.

In these past four years, we've settled into being a couple old married farts, but I'm sure you'd beg to differ with that description.

Actually, I pretty much do, too, since it certainly does nothing to capture the essense of our marriage.

The old fart remark is a reference to being comfortable. Happy in our routines. 

It's just that I'm so comfortable with you around. Even when neither of us is doing anything in particular. Just vegging in front of the TV. Having another dinner. Or when you're downstairs at your drafting table and I'm playing around on my laptop in my office.

All "boring" routine things that old farts do.

I feel safe. At home. In every sense of the word, whatever we're doing, whenever we're doing it.

Jeff ripping apart part of our deck this summer to retrieve the
wedding ring I dropped between the boards
Repairs were quick, by the way. 

Home is a refuge. And I don't mean just a house. 

Our home is a place where I still get a spasm of delight when I pull into the driveway and your Jeep is there. That means you're home. And I'm happy.

I even get a little pang of disappointment when I arrive home from work and I see you're not there. 

You're still at work, or grocery shopping, and you'll be home soon. But I still miss you and feel a little bit too alone when you're doing something routine like that.  

Oh, I can handle myself just fine when you're not home.  But I feel my heart lift when you're around. The other night I called it "the vapors" You just make my heart race with joy, is all.   

Another thing that makes me feel secure -  at home and comfortable -  is you have faith in me even when I don't have faith in myself.

I'm impatient.  I have ambitious plans for the gardens around our house and the plans are moving too slowly. Meanwhile, you create an enormous, beautiful outdoor deck so we can enjoy our home even more. You created it seemingly in an instant, while I plod along.

You constantly remind me my projects are a process, that you delight in seeing the slowly expanding flower beds, the incremental transformations in our yard. 

Jeff and his mom. He's as good a son as he is a husband! 

You always come to my rescue. Even little instances. 

Like when I dropped my wedding ring between the boards of the deck, and you ripped up some of the boards to retrieve it. My hero! And I'm not being facetious. You ARE my hero. 

I might not show it through my frustrations  but again and always, your words and support and love make me feel safe in my own chaotic head.

I keep bringing up the word "safe."  Love, when done right, is a safe place. It's a shield against all the hate and turbulence and weirdness of the world.  I think - I hope - we're doing love right. 

In the evening, when we're watching TV, you sit in your big armchair, and I'm usually on the couch with our crazy dogs Jackson and Tonks.

I don't think you notice that sometimes I go quiet and stare at you instead of the TV screen. Yeah, the antics on "America's Got Talent" are fun enough, but the real entertainment for me is you.

Not the fact that you're sitting there watching TV. No, the entertainment is the fact that you're there. Home, with me.  

So I watch you as you giggle at "The Big Bang Theory" or roll your eyes at the politicians Rachel Maddow is picking on.

And I feel so lucky, so over the moon in love with the guy in the armchair watching TV.

Because the guy in the armchair is the one who never makes me feel lonely, who always makes me feel safe, who has made me so happy to be alive.  The one I want to be with forever and ever. I don't want this to ever end.

Thanks, Chief, for always being there.

And Chief: Happy anniversary. We're celebrating our fourth. Let's go for 40!

Love, Matt

Of course I dedicate this song to Chief, too:

Worst Texting Driver Ever In Pennsylvania

Hard to see in this still from the video. but a woman
steers through traffic near Philadelphia with her
feet while constantly texting. 

A couple driving along the highways and streets around Philadelphia spotted a woman texting with both hands and driving with her feet on the steering wheel.

I guess the texting enthusiasts' war on the rest of us is escalating. I swear they want to kill us by being as ridiculous as possible on the highways.

According to ABC 6 Action News in Philadelphia, the couple spotted the women on the busy Schuylkill Expressway and in thick urban traffic in Center City.

They followed the woman for about 20 minutes as she steered through traffic with her feet, her fingers skittering across the phone screen and eyes on the phone instead of traffic, swerving all the way.

While Shawn Delong drove and kept his eyes on the road, Sarah filmed the terrible texting woman.

"Someone is going to get killed, that's why I was so mad. You see people on their phones all the time, but that took the cake," Sarah Delong told Action News.

The Delongs tried beeping at Horrible Texting Woman and signaling her to get off the phone, but Horrible Texting Woman just took her eyes off the phone very briefly, smirked at the Delongs, then went back to texting.

Amazingly, Horrible Texting Woman did not hurt anyone, that we know of.

The cops apparently can't do anything about this situation, because they have to catch Horrible Texting Woman in the act.

Now that the video of Horrible Texting Woman has gone viral, maybe somebody can identify her and publicly shame her into never driving with her phone again.

A guy can dream, right?

Here's news video about Horrible Texting Woman

  

Why You REALLY Shouldn't Get In A Car Wreck In India

Piyush Tewari is trying to change the culture of India
that discourages people from helping accident victims. 

Almost always, if people see a nasty car wreck, people run to help. Somebody calls 911, people run over to comfort or give first aid to the injured, others direct traffic away from the crash so it doesn't get even worse.

In India, if you get in car wreck, you're really screwed. Because nobody will help you.   

The system there turns people into indifferent jerks, says a recent article in the BBC.

Everything's stacked against you if you try to help an accident victim in India.

It arriving police see you rendering aid, they'll assume you're doing it out of guilt and charge you with causing the crash and you'll face criminal charges. Basically, you're a criminal for being a nice person.

It takes forever for ambulances to arrive at accident scenes in India, so it makes more sense to drive the victims to the hospital yourself. But if you do, the hospital will relentlessly hit you up for the victim's medical bills.

Even if you avoid criminal charges and hospital bills, you might be a witness in court proceedings involving the accident case.

Trials take forever to go forward, so you're stuck in limbo. You miss going to work, running your life.

BBC says there is a safety campaigner named Piyush Tewari whose cousin was once hit by a car and nobody helped.

He managed the Indian Supreme Court to issue guidelines that allow people to call emergency services and remain anonymous, provide them with immunity from criminal liability and forbidding hospitals from demanding payment from bystanders who take people to the hospitals.

Now he's working to get all jurisdictions in India to adopt these guidelines, and enshrine them in a Good Samaritan law. (Such laws are widespread in the United States.)

Let's hope Tewari's efforts work, because a lot of people are dying needlessly in India due to their system.

And thank goodness we in the U.S. live in a country in which, almost always, people run to help eery time they see a crash.

Scary! Toddler Falls Out Of Van Into Heavy Traffic

Toddler falling out of a van into heavy Chinese
traffic. He was rescued and uninjured. A 

A viral video making the rounds shows a toddler falling out of the back of a van into heavy traffic on a Chinese highway.

Happy spoiler alert: The kid was rescued and wasn't hurt.

The van had stopped at a red light amid heavy traffic. The two year old boy was in the van, getting restless and moving around and found himself in the back of the van.

When traffic cleared, the van began moving, the hatchback unlatched the the boy tumbled out onto the pavement.

The back door of the van had been malfunctioning because the vehicle had been rearended a couple days earlier, SkyNews reported.

The van was driven by the boy's grandfather. He at first was unaware the kid had fallen out. When the kid stood up, he tried to chase after the van in the middle of the road but it was too late. Luckily, another motorist scooped up the kid and brought him to safety.

Meanwhile, another motorist tailed the van and honked his horn, trying to alert the grandfather. Finally he noticed.

The grandfather later told reporters, "After passing the intersection, a car chased me and kept sounding the horn. The driver told me a kid fell out of my van. I looked back, parked my van aside and went back and searched for my grandson," according to SkyNews.

Grandfather and grandson were reunited, and I'm sure the kid was strapped in a seat belt but good after that.

Here's the video. Yikes!

Driverless Cars Getting In Crashes Because We Humans Are Too Stupid To Drive

A Google driverless car. People who actually drive cars
are idiots, and are slamming into the driverless ones. 

Experiemental driverless cars are getting into a lot of accidents lately. And it's our fault, not the fault of these robot cars.

According to Bloomberg, the "problem" is driverless cars follow the rules.

"They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well.

As the accidents have piled up -- all minor scrape-ups for now -- the arguments among programmers at places like Google Inc and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?"

The first driverless car crash with injures came in July, when three Google employees in a driverless car suffered relatively minor neck injuries when another driver rear-ended them, says CBS News. The driver of the car that re-ended the driverless vehicle suffered minor injuries.

The accident rate for driverless cars is twice as high for driverless cars as it is for regular cars, according to the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute, as reported by Michigan Public Radio.

However, so far, none of the crashes studies were the "fault" of the driverless cars. Most have been by inattentive drivers slamming into the backs of driverless cars.

The driverless cars tend to obey the speed limit. A huge proportion of people who drive DON'T obey the speed limit (Yeah, I'm talkin' to you!)

Add in inattentiveness - let's text while we're driving since everybody else is doing it! -- and people end up rear-ending the slower driverless cars.

As a Google engineer put it, driving is a social game, not just plugging in the exact parameter of what is legal on the roadways and what is not.

Should Google and anyone else testing self-driving cars to break the rules every once in awhile, just to make things on the road flow more smoothly?  And if so, to what extent?  Limit it to things like crossing a double yellow line to make room for a bicyclist? Or speed a little bit on the freeway to keep up with the flow of traffic?

Where's the line between breaking the rules to make things go better and becoming a robot scofflaw?

And what of that "social game"? Will road rages become even more enraged when a robot car does not respond emotionally to some jerk yelling and screaming about something? Do driverless cars call police to report their suspicions that the car ahead is being driven by a drunk?

You can imagine, also, whether to program driverless cars to make "moral" choices, even if it's saving others from their own stupidity.

For example, asks Bloomberg's reporting, "should an autonomous vehicle sacrifice its occupant by swerving off a cliff to avoid killing a school bus full of children?"

Driverless cars will ultimately be programmed differently, so different models will "behave" differently in traffic.

That begs the question, posited by another Bloomberg article: Who would be at fault if two driverless vehicles collided?

After all, says Bloomberg. Computers routinely crash. Won't robot cars crash, too?

Lawyers are loving this, as you can imagine. Yes, driverless cars are autonomous robots. But would be made by humans. Who make mistakes. Who might program a car incorrectly.

Says Bloomberg:

"With no one behind the wheel, lawyers say they can go after almost anyone even remotely involved.

'You're going to get a whole host of new defendants,' said Kevin Dean, who is suing General Motors Co over its faulty ignition switches and Takata Corp over air bag failures. 'Computer programmers, computer companies, designers of algorithms, Google, mapping companies, even states. It's going to be very fertile ground for lawyers.'"

Well, at least lawyers can look forward to full employment, since robots and computers are going to take all the rest of the jobs from  us humans.

All these driverless car questions leads to the largest question of all:  Will the machines just take over? And another question: Will they do a better job? Because sometimes I think us humans have really mucked things up.


,

Let's Hope He Doesn't Drop The Air Conditioner - Or Himself

Workplace safety is no accident, but
this guy is testing the odds.  

A video is making the rounds of a guy in China installing an air conditioner.

Sounds boring, but watch the video and see how dangerously this guy lives.

Note that he's just wearing socks not sturdy shoes, and especially note what would happen if he slipped and fell.

If I were him, I'd just forget the air conditioner and put up with any heat waves that come along.

Watch:

A Bunch Of People Got Food Poisoning At A Food Safety Meeting

Last month, there was a U.S. food safety summit in Maryland where people from the government and the food industry came together to discuss how to make food safer, and less likely to make us sick.

Apparently, you need to avoid food safety
conferences if you want to avoid food
poisoning.  

The only problem was, many of the people who ate lunch at the food safety summit came down with food poisoning. 

As many as 400 of the 1,300 people who attended the conference got sick.

Health officials are still trying to determine which food at the conference made people ill.

The food service provider, Centerplate, was cited for one minor violation, so it doesn't exactly look as if  Typhoid Mary was the lead cook at the ill-fated food summit.

The bottom line: If you don't want to get sick from food, don't go to a food safety conference.

On Video: Incredible Rescue On Flaming Houston Building

I don't know what it is about large apartment buildings under construction lately.

A construction worker hangs Tuesday from an
unfinished balcony as a partly completed
Houston apartment building goes up in flames  

They all seem to be going up in flames.  There have been recent dramatic construction site apartment fires in San Francisco, in Pennsylvania, in which a neighboring, occupied apartment building was damaged, in Salt Lake City, and other places

There was another notable one back in December in which a construction worker trapped above and in the flames of a half finished apartment building Kingston, Ontario was rescued via helicopter.

The rescue yesterday in Houston was even scarier than the one in Ontario, as a midrise apartment complex under construction there roared into flames.

A construction worker was trapped in a top floor apartment as flames raced and roared through the structure toward him.

I know these buildings go up in flames so quickly because sprinkler systems aren't installed yet. But these seem like a huge safety hazard. In one of these construction site fires, construction workers are going to get trapped and die, or the fires will spread to occupied buildings and cause a disaster.

It's time OSHA find ways to make these situations safer so we don't get a tragedy. There must be a way to prevent this kind of thing.

In the Houston fire yesterday, horrified onlookers filmed from a building across the street. To be honest, as I was watching, I thought the worker was doomed. Things keep going from bad to worse, with some scary surprises as things moved along.

Spoiler alert: The construction worker ended up being rescued, uninjured. But that doesn't diminish the power of this heartstopping video. YIKES!!!

Insurance Group Claims Vermont Has Nation's Safest Drivers. Boy Are They Wrong!

I choked on my Diet Coke and almost went off the road while driving and was tempted to grab my iPhone to send a text when I heard this news bulletin come over the radio: Vermont supposedly has the nation's safest drivers, according to carinsurancecomparison.com 

A bad car crash in Quechee, Vermont last summer
From the Valley News of White River Jct, Vt.  

The insurance group based its ranking on such things as traffic fatality rates, incidence of drunken driving, seat belt use, and the relative amount of tickets issued for violations like running stop signs.

Supposedly, when carinsurancecomparison.com crunched the numbers, Louisiana turned out to have the least safe drivers, and Vermont the safest.

As a lifelong Vermonter who drives a great deal, I have to tell you the ranking is BOGUS. Vermont might have the nation's most creative drivers, the most free spirited drivers, and certainly not the fastest drivers. But safest? HA!

Vermont is the state where a mentally ill man took a tractor and drove over and destroyed a bunch of sheriff department cruisers.

I live in a Vermont town in which, two years ago, a manure truck with failed brakes roared down the hill past my house, through a series of traffic lights while miraculously not hitting anyone and then smashing through a building in downtown St. Albans.

Just yesterday, news broke of a drunken moron doing "doughnuts" in a snowy parking lot--while a Vermont State Police trooper watched. The trooper arrested said drunken moron.

Vermont is a state where people halt at stop signs and wait for them to turn green. When a traffic light turns green, they sit and wait, hoping for a prettier shade of green.

Here, Vermonters cruise along in the passing lane well below the speed limit, backing up traffic and apparently hoping police officers hand out lollipops to the drivers for going so slowly.

A 2011 crash on Interstate 89 near Richmond, Vermont
in 2011. You'd think we could drive in the snow.
From the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press.  

Vermont is the land of Subarus. Really, really, really slow Subarus. For some reason, just about everyone who drives a Subaru goes way below the speed limit, but also drifts in and out of their lane while they gawk at the scenery.

Or you see the Subaru drivers hunched forward, holding on to the steering wheel with knuckles snow white, panicking at the fear of a crash because it is starting to sprinkle and the road might freeze. (Never mind that the temperature is 70 degrees at the time.)

These slow drivers are especially dangerous because young men in big pickup trucks or roaring motorcycles are simultaneously trying to go really, really, really fast. They pass the slowpokes on blind curves, in busy downtowns during what passes in Vermont for rush hour.

The hot rod young men, can of Budweiser ready in the drink holder, especially like to drive super fast during very bad ice storms.

Let me tell you, when I get into the mix of the slugging people in thier crawling Subarus and the tipsy Mario Andrettis driving in their loud pickup trucks, my own knuckles get really white on the steering wheel.

Don't even talk to me about Vermont motorists' ability to drive during snowstorms. You'd think people would be used to driving in snow by now, since the state annually has 11 months of winter and one month of poor sledding.

Actually, it seems that 90 percent of Vermont drivers do fine in the snow. It's the other 10 percent that screw things up for everybody else. Again, it's that ugly mix of speed demons and panic people.

The fast ones don't understand the concept that ice is slippery. They also don't understand that when you hit the brakes hard on ice, it almost always ends badly.

I know this is basic physics, but physics isn't really Vermonters' strong suit.

So, when the inevitable skid happens when people slam on the brakes of their high and tippy SUVs, they roll over and hit the people driving 5 mph because that's as fast as they want to go.

Vermont is pretty rural, and there are only so many roads and so many detours. When someone causes a crash on the road during a snowstorm and blocks it, you can count on sitting in your car for three hours waiting behind the wreck instead of getting to work on time for a change.

The bottom line: I can't speak for the skill, or lack thereof, of drivers in Lousiana. But if you want to come to Vermont to feel safe on the roads, don't bother.

It's scary out there on Vermont's highways.

Dire Hazards You Never Knew Existed: Nasty Frostbite From Deodorant?

Sorry, but we have to talk about your underarms for a minute. And your feet.

Extra cold, too, if
you misuse this stuff.  

You get ready for work in the morning, and after your shower, you spray a little deodorant under your arms so you don't stink up your coworkers. The spray initially feels quite cold, and good there.

Then you get to thinking. Well, what if my socks and shoes and feet get sweaty and gross? Maybe I could give my socks and the insides of my shoes a good soaking with Right Guard or something like that.

Don't do that! A guy in Scotland learned the hard way. He soaked his socks in deodorant and went on his way, but soon he was in agony. The skin on his feet was black and peeling off and gross.

It turned out he had severe frostbite, according to the Daily Mail of UK.

How did this happen?  It turns out when the spray comes out of the can, it immediately cools to just a few degrees above zero fahrenheit. When sprayed into the air into your underarms that's not a big deal, as long as you don't hold the spray too close to your skin.

Confined inside your shoes, the deodorant will give you frostbite, just as if you walked around barefood outside in Vermont in January.

Who knew? The thought has even crossed my mind in the past to spray deodorant onto my socks.

I guess I'll forever have to ensure my socks are clean and my feet can breathe. Or something.

What scares me is, what other seemingly perfectly safe and harmless products are out there that will kill me if I get creative using them?

I Want to Drive On Really Cool Glow in The Dark Pavement

Leave it to people in the Netherlands to come up with a really cool way to improve traffic safety.

They've taken to painting lines on dark roads with a photo luminescent powder, which makes lanes glow brightly in the dark.

This is a godsend to people like me, who have trouble seeing on particularly dark,  rainy nights while driving on unfamiliar roads. Apparently other people are worse at this than I am, judging from the alarming traffic patterns I sometimes see at night.

Photo luminescent paint on a road
in the Netherlands alerts motorists when
the road might have ice

Sunshine that  the paint absorbs during the day allows the material to glow for up to 10 hours at a time at night. That's true even in the weak winter northern hemispheric sun.

In some areas, they've used the paint to draw huge snowflake patterns on the pavement. You don't see the glowing snowflakes on the road until the temperature drops to 33 degrees or lower, because of the technology that went into the roadway.

When you see the giant snowflakes, that means the road is freezing or close to it, so it alerts motorists to slow down because there might be black ice.

The article says a design and technology company called Studio Roosegaate is behind these innovations. The pavement and pain in the Netherlands is a pilot project. If it works, it could spread throughout Europe.

If it works, I'd also like it to spread to the United States.

As an aside, I've been the beneficiary of some great ideas from great friends on what to post in this blog. The Netherlands highway paint idea came from Vermont's Denis Desjarlais, who has a habit of finding very cool articles. Thanks, Denis!

Dog Contrasts, Hot Dogs,

I took the photo on Burlington, Vermont's bikepath along the city's waterfront about a week ago. I love the two contrasting pairs of dogs. So I hope it brings a smile.

Also, I love, below, the parked police car, somewhere, on a hot day. I especially like how they left a thermometer inside the vehicle to let people know how hot, how quickly it gets.

Church Sign of the Day: Texting for Jesus

Floating on the Internet thingy here: This church sign that says it all. Praise Jesus!