Must have been a slow day for FoxNews on Monday. I don't normally watch the station. My boss just loves the show. He turns it on as soon as he gets to the kennel. I can't stand watching it. However, I walk out earlier today and notice three columns of smoke on the horizon. Not good. I thought at first, that maybe there was three separate fires. Had some nut gone around and set three different locations on fire? I walked into the house and turn on the TV. Unfortunately, the people who installed the satellite dish where I work, seemed to have disconnected the TV antenna, so we can't watch local news. So, I put it on FoxNews to see if maybe they might mention what's going on. I thought that they would be talking about Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, but usually they have a "crawl" going at the bottom with some news tidbits. Lo and behold, the TV comes on and they are headlining with "Power out in downtown Los Angeles!!!!" Yes, it seemed that the city of Los Angeles had lost power in certain areas. The downtown area was dark, which means people were stuck in elevators. Traffic lights were out all over the place. So, this took precedence over the fact that 45 dead bodies were found in a hospital in New Orleans. That was reduced to a crawl under the images of Los Angeles intersections with their signals out. Yes, they seemed to think it was important to fly over some major intersection in West Los Angeles. Why? I don't know. If they were hoping to see 10 car pile-ups, or people shooting each other, they didn't get it. They were so desperate for something, that they started following a police car with their helicopter. Ooh! A police car! Maybe he's racing to the scene of an accident!!! He gets to one of the intersections, with the traffic light out, and blocks it. Why? Because a couple of fire engines were racing through. The police car was running a blockade. Fire engines!!!! Oh boy! They had something now! So, the helicopter starts tailing the fire engines. Do they race to the scene of a 15 car pile-up? Nope, they pull up in front of a building. Looks like it might have been a convalescent hospital. Something along those lines. No big deal. So, they really have nothing to report. They actually seemed shocked at how well behaved us Angelenos were. With the signals out, drivers were treating the intersections as four way stops and were quite courteous to the others drivers. For the most part, LA drivers are pretty good. And, when incidents like this happen, we do behave. I guess we must have really disappointed FoxNews. By the way, the "three fires" were local refineries doing "burn offs". This is some procedure they undertake during power outages.
Posted by Valkyre at September 14, 2005 07:45 PM