Another close call for Florida man.

"Missing Florida man found over a week later trapped in shoulder-deep mud/Local crews rescued Andrew Giddens, 36, near a borrow pit after he faced freezing weather without food or water" (The Guardian).

Deputy Derrick Holmes of the sheriff’s office in Florida’s Putnam county spotted Giddens’ abandoned car on 23 February relatively close to a sand plant belonging to Vulcan Materials Company.... Vulcan employees, meanwhile, had not stopped looking for signs of Giddens when one spotted him during the early evening of 25 February in shoulder-deep mud by what is known as a borrow pit.... Giddens was alert and could talk, but the worker who had found him could not get to him because he was surrounded by “unstable” ground, the sheriff’s office said.... The elaborate [rescue] operation took about three hours, with rescuers needing to be careful to not become stuck in the mud themselves....

Here's the sheriff's office video, which refers to the substance — in scare quotes — as "quick sand."

"The exact spot that held me: 38°40'55.3"N 109°38'45.3"W. If nothing else, let this stand as a reminder to others. Quicksand is real."

"I didn't believe it before today. It does not care how experienced you are. It only cares that you stepped in the wrong place at the wrong time."

From the Reddit post, "I Had to be Rescued off the Hayduke Trail Today in Arches National Park After Getting Stuck in Quicksand."

The story appears at many news sites now, including "Stuck in Quicksand, a Hiker in Utah Has His SOS Answered/Austin Dirks used a Garmin satellite device to reach emergency responders, who rescued him in a remote canyon in Arches National Park" (NYT). That's a free link, and there's some good video there, showing the rescue.

A quote from one of the recipients of the call for help: "We always try not to be judgmental. But you’re thinking, Quicksand, really? It’s probably some tourist with their foot stuck in the mud somewhere."

AND: Dirks shows up the comments section at the NYT:

"I got my one foot stuck because I was trying to get my electronics out of my pocket. I knew not to panic."

"I have to be a macho man. You can’t ask for help when you’re trying to impress the girl you’re with."

Said Mitchell O’Brien, quoted in "Man Sinks in Quicksand and Emerges With a Girlfriend/A Michigan man who ended up waist-deep on an unstable beach was rescued, and found himself in a relationship" (NYT).

A comforting thought: "As it happens, drowning in quicksand in real life is nearly impossible, scientists say. Sand is denser than the human body, so even if one’s legs sink, the air in the lungs keeps the body too buoyant to go all the way under."

And here's that John Mulaney bit about quicksand: "I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life — behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky. I used to sit around and think about what to do about quicksand. I never thought about how to handle real problems in adult life, I was never like 'Oh, what's it gonna be like when relatives ask to borrow money?' Now that I've gotten older, not only have I never stepped in quicksand—I've never even heard about it! No one's ever been like, 'Hey if you're coming to visit, take I-90 'cause I-95 has a little quicksand in the middle. Looks like regular sand, but then you're gonna start to sink into it.'"

"Manna walked past a 'trail closed' sign and made his way down the path for about 10 or 15 minutes, looking left and right for any sign of the child."

"Near the end of the trail, he said, he caught a glimpse of water through the trees. 'I sprinted down to it and I saw there was a stream, and I saw a T-shirt and a diaper floating in it... My heart dropped.'... He ran down the stream to look for her and ended up in a marsh. There was a naked child splashing in it. 'She was playing in the water, and it was up to her waist.... I called out to her, but I didn’t want to scream, because I thought that would scare her. She was walking toward deeper water that was about 10 feet out, so I told her to stop.' When the girl didn’t listen to him, Manna said, he quickly peeled off his shoes and socks and waded out to her. She was about 30 feet away, he said. 'It was a real muddy marsh — my feet started sinking into the bottom like [it was] quicksand... When I reached her, I picked her up by the armpits, held her as high as I could and brought her back to land.'"

From "A worker paused to help find a missing girl. He found her waist-deep in a stream. Jake Manna was installing solar panels at a home when a panicked mother ran by looking for her 5-year-old" (WaPo).

The other people looking for the child — who is autistic —  were looking in their backyards and garages when Manna decided to go into the woods.

"When the mom saw us, she ran to us, grabbed the girl and went to the ground with her to hug her for the longest time, probably 30 minutes.... Things happen, and I’d hate for her to think it was her fault."

"As the water level drops, formerly sunken boats are emerging in the mud, and other vehicles are getting newly stuck...."

"And on Monday the National Park Service shared several photos on Twitter that showed trucks stuck in the mud around the lake – a shoreline that looks deceivingly stable, but acts more like quicksand."

CNN reports — with photos showing the kind of truck that makes you think you can go where those other vehicles can't.

Interesting to see the old quicksand! threat making a comeback. From a 2010 Slate article:

For now, quicksand has all but evaporated from American entertainment—rejected even by the genre directors who once found it indispensable.... Quicksand once offered filmmakers a simple recipe for excitement: A pool of water, thickened with oatmeal, sprinkled over the top with wine corks. It was, in its purest form, a plot device unburdened by character, motivation, or story: My god, we're sinking! Will we escape this life-threatening situation before time runs out?... Time was, a director could sink a man in the desert and still win the Oscar for best picture. Today, that gimmick has been scorned in third-rate schlock.

Here's the comedian John Mulaney joking about his childhood concept that quicksand was going to be a big threat.

"Biden slips into political quicksand amid Haitian migrant buildup."

A clickbait headline at Politico. 

From the article: 

The White House condemned footage of Border Patrol agents on horseback appearing to use reins to deter Haitian migrants, which drew blowback from the agents themselves. 

In sharply visceral terms, the national Border Patrol union blasted the White House on Tuesday, characterizing it as inept for failing to have a plan in place to deal with the influx of some 15,000 migrants that left agents overwhelmed.... 

“We’re outnumbered by 200 to one. We’re put into a situation where we’re in between people — there’s a propensity for violence when there’s large crowds. We’re expected to control that,” [Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council] said. “We don’t strike anybody. We used the tactic we were trained with — and the White House vilified us.”

It's Buffalo Bill Cody on horseback....

 

I'm reading about him this morning. 

Here's something he said about his wife: "I often feel sorry for her. She is a strange woman but I don't mind her—remember she is my wife—and let it go at that. If she gets cranky, just laugh at it, she can't help it." He tried to divorce her after almost 40 years of marriage. He said that when he was away and she was at their ranch [in North Platte, Nebraska], she would "feed the men too much and talk violently about Cody and his alleged sweethearts ... and that she was seen putting something into his coffee." To deal with her, he said he needed to "get drunk and stay drunk." The judge and the public sided with the wife. 

Here's a nice picture of the couple:

The reason I'm reading about Cody this morning is that I got served an ad for this book:

That's a great cover — whether you find it offensive or not. I decided to read some reviews of it and found "In America, Is Power in the Hands of Too Many 'Mediocre' Men?" in The New York Times.

A hiker in Zion National Park gets trapped in quicksand — and stays trapped for hours in freezing cold water.

WaPo reports.

“Quicksand is not normally a problem at Zion, but it does happen if conditions are right,” said Alyssa Baltrus, a spokeswoman for the park. “We have been unusually wet here this winter. The weather was most likely a contributing factor.”

Despite what Hollywood would have you think, a 2005 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam showed that it is not possible for a person to sink entirely into quicksand, because they are too buoyant.....

“The water was so cold I thought for sure I’d lose my leg because there was no way she was going to be able to get there fast enough to have people come get me out,” [Ryan] Osmun told ABC News.

Osmun was hiking the "Subway" trail and his companion, Jessika McNeill "tripped, landing in quicksand." I'm inferring that the quicksand wasn't part of the trail. This is the Park Service's photograph of where Osmun was rescued, where he got stuck rescuing her:



They had no cell phone service, and as WaPo puts it:

It was like a scene out of an old-fashioned horror movie: two hikers, alone in the frigid wilderness with no cell reception, suddenly stumbled into a pool of quicksand.

No. In old horror movies, the issue of "no cell reception" doesn't come up.

Anyway, the woman hiked for hours to get to the point where she could call for help, and it was hours more until the search-and-rescue team found him, and longer still to complete the rescue.

I'm reading about the Subway Trail here (from the bottom) here (top-down route), and it looks challenging and watery. You need a wilderness pass. For the easier of the 2 hikes, it says, "Strenuous non-technical day hike in a wet canyon with many obstacles."

"Some adventurers have taken to exploring the sometimes dangerous subterranean world in the sewers and tunnels beneath New York."

That's the teaser on the front page right now. Here's the article it refers to. Excerpt:

We inspect our exit point — a manhole in the middle of the road. Will Hunt, a bespectacled 26-year-old who is writing a book about the underground (“The last frontier,” he says, “in an over-mapped, Google-Earthed world.”) will serve as our spotter. Will’s job is to watch for traffic: ascending from the hole, we do not wish to be hit by a car. We are to communicate by walkie-talkie. Will ties a long pink ribbon to the inside of the manhole cover. Dangling downward, this will be our signal we have reached the end....

Filthy, backpacked, smelling of the sewer, we board a rush-hour subway....

The sewer under Greene Street was only four feet high (Erling is 6 foot 3.) It got smaller and smaller, until they were forced on hands and knees, then eventually on their bellies. Crawling through raw sewage. The ceiling was higher on Canal Street, they report, but the floor was caked with so much feces they sank in it like quicksand. They were turned back by an impassable mountain of waste....

Time to hop on the subway again?

Where should the intrepid explorer go when the world is totally over-mapped and Google-Earthed? Where do you go? And why? A rewrite of my favorite quote:

A liberal blogger confronts Barack Obama about gay rights... with tediously grim results.

I'm going to pick apart the transcript from Obama's big meetup with the liberal bloggers. The "Q" is Joe Sudbay of Americablog.

Q ... do you think that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is unconstitutional?

That's exactly what I would ask him. You may remember my dissecting his MTV townhall last week and showing you how evasive he was about that.

THE PRESIDENT: It’s not a simple yes or no question, because I’m not sitting on the Supreme Court. And I’ve got to be careful, as President of the United States, to make sure that when I’m making pronouncements about laws that Congress passed I don’t do so just off the top of my head.

See? Infuriating. He's the President. He took an oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" — "to the best of [his] ability." He won the Presidency in part because of his high achievement at Harvard Law School. He accepted responsibility for the U.S. military. His administration is fighting to defend DADT in courts. This issue didn't pop up yesterday, so his answer couldn't possibly be "just off the top of [his] head. He sure as hell better have an answer to the question. This preamble to his answer is therefore either a lie or an outrage.

I think that -- but here’s what I can say. 

Thanks for revealing that you know you are withholding what you really think.

I think “don’t ask, don’t tell” is wrong. I think it doesn’t serve our national security, which is why I want it overturned. I think that the best way to overturn it is for Congress to act. In theory, we should be able to get 60 votes out of the Senate. The House has already passed it. And I’ve gotten the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to say that they think this policy needs to be overturned -- something that’s unprecedented.

That's his canned answer, which was also served up at the MTV townhall. It's completely nonresponsive to the question. 

And so my hope and expectation is, is that we get this law passed. It is not just harmful to the brave men and women who are serving, and in some cases have been discharged unjustly, but it doesn’t serve our interests -- and I speak as Commander-in-Chief on that issue.

If you really believe it is that harmful and unjust, then how do you resist the conclusion, under the case law, that it is unconstitutional? Even at the level of minimal scrutiny, what is the rational basis for this law? You are saying — in so many words — that there is no rational basis, so why do you not conclude that it is unconstitutional? Are you lying when you intone your criticism of DADT, or are you lying when you purport to adhere to the sort of constitutional analysis that is done by the kind of people you nominate to be on the Supreme Court?

Are you trying to say you'd have joined Justice Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v. Texas? Here's Scalia: "What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new 'constitutional right' by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that 'later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,'; and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best." Hello? That's what Obama is saying about Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Back to the transcript:

Let me go to the larger issue, though, Joe, about disillusionment and disappointment.

Oh, yes! The larger issue is how people feel about Barack Obama. Constitutional rights just aren't that large compared to the grand question of Me. And apparently Joe doesn't have the nerve to stop the President and point out that there has been no answer to the question. The President has called him by name and wants to talk about his feelings.

I guess my attitude is that we have been as vocal, as supportive of the LGBT community as any President in history....

But no other President directly inspired the hopes of gay people and won big support with promises like you did. You're not even saying that you're better than all those other Presidents, only that none of them were any better. Your support for "the LGBT community" is as good as George Washington's. Thanks a lot.

On “don’t ask, don’t tell,” I have been as systematic and methodical in trying to move that agenda forward as I could be given my legal constraints, given that Congress had explicitly passed a law designed to tie my hands on the issue.

Admit it: You love having your hands tied like that. Because you're fighting against a legal decision that deemed DADT unconstitutional! The rope of legislation was untied, and here you are begging for other judges to tie you back up again. Don't ask me to believe you don't love the bondage.

And so, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think that the disillusionment is justified.

I'll be honest with you... Speaking of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. That's a "tell." He's lying. "I’ll be honest with you" means I'm about to lie to you.

Now, I say that as somebody who appreciates that the LGBT community very legitimately feels these issues in very personal terms. So it’s not my place to counsel patience. One of my favorite pieces of literature is “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” and Dr. King had to battle people counseling patience and time. And he rightly said that time is neutral. And things don’t automatically get better unless people push to try to get things better.

Speaking of time, he's really trying to run the clock out on this interview. He's also, I imagine, ashamed of what he finds himself needing to say. He wants to identify with King, but he knows he's on the wrong side of King when he asks gay people to wait longer. Obama sounds like an old man rifling through his memories for something relevant to say. He calls “Letter from Birmingham Jail" "[o]ne of my favorite pieces of literature" — as if it's all about him and people who are waiting for their rights to be recognized are fascinated by what pleasure reading he enjoys. Under the circumstances of this conversation, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is or should be nagging at his conscience. ("Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of ... injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.")

So I don’t begrudge the LGBT community pushing...

Begrudge! That he would even think of that word suggests these people are annoying him!

... but the flip side of it is that this notion somehow that this administration has been a source of disappointment to the LGBT community, as opposed to a stalwart ally of the LGBT community, I think is wrong.

The short answer to Sudbay's original answer was: Don't Ask.

Q So I have another gay question. (Laughter.)

THE PRESIDENT: It’s okay, man. (Laughter.)

I am resisting typing curse words here. Look at Sudbay abasing himself. Now these rights he must care about are reduced to jocose "gay questions." Something to laugh at. There indeed was a time, and it was not too long ago, that the idea of gay rights itself seemed funny to people. And Sudbay allows himself to get pushed back toward that place. The President treats the remark as if it were an apology. He says "It's okay, man." Man. See? He's a cool guy. He's taming Sudbay.

Q And this one is on the issue of marriage. Since you’ve become President, a lot has changed. More states have passed marriage equality laws. This summer a federal judge declared DOMA unconstitutional in two different cases. A judge in San Francisco declared Prop 8 was unconstitutional. And I know during the campaign you often said you thought marriage was the union between a man and a woman, and there -- like I said, when you look at public opinion polling, it’s heading in the right direction. We’ve actually got Republicans like Ted Olson and even Ken Mehlman on our side now. So I just really want to know what is your position on same-sex marriage?

Another good question. Sudbay came prepared. Let's see if he lets Obama push him back again.

THE PRESIDENT: Joe, I do not intend to make big news sitting here with the five of you, as wonderful as you guys are. (Laughter.) But I’ll say this --

Q I just want to say, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you this question.

THE PRESIDENT: Of course.

Q People in our community are really desperate to know.

Oh, don't beg, Joe. Don't apologize.

THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s a fair question to ask. 

That's big of him.

I think that -- I am a strong supporter of civil unions. As you say, I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage.

Check out those weird plurals: understandings of the traditional definitions. That's another tell. He is lying, I presume. His opposition to same-sex marriage is, quite simply and obviously, politically expedient. It is impossible for me to believe that Obama, coming from his academic background, is hung-up on the traditional definition — or "definitions" — of marriage. He's posing as a seeker of truth, slowly coming round.

But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. 

Attitudes? I thought he was into traditional definitions.

And I think that it is an issue that I wrestle with and think about because I have a whole host of friends who are in gay partnerships. I have staff members who are in committed, monogamous relationships, who are raising children, who are wonderful parents.

So is he saying that previously he had an attitude that was antagonistic to gay people and by extensive social contact with gay people, he came around to perceiving them as fully human? I just don't believe that. And if I did, I would think less of him.

And I care about them deeply. 

You know, your position on the rights of others should not depend on whether they are your friends. That's not the way law works. People have rights whether you care about them or not. And rights don't spring into existence because you care about the people who want them.

And so while I’m not prepared to reverse myself here, sitting in the Roosevelt Room at 3:30 in the afternoon, I think it’s fair to say that it’s something that I think a lot about. That’s probably the best you’ll do out of me today. (Laughter.)

Laughter. Oh, it's so lovely sitting with the President in the Roosevelt Room. Something that I think a lot about. Men have thought more clearly in jail.

Later, the conversation comes back to DADT, and the President intimates that he will try to push its repeal during the lame duck session of Congress. He makes an effort to shift the blame to the Republicans, especially John McCain, and he indicates that it will be a problem getting the votes for cloture. (He loves that problem, I'll bet. It's so helpful to appear to want to act and have your hands tied.)

He wonders why the Log Cabin Republican are pursuing their court case, when they could instead try to get a few Republican Senators to vote for repeal. He says he doesn't "understand the logic of" using the courts when you could go to Congress, but of course he does. People conceive of their equality in terms of their individual rights — which don't depend on the support of political majorities and supermajorities. As a Harvard-trained lawyer and sometime law professor, he knows that. He knows why people go to courts. I don't buy his understanding of the logic. Or should I say his understandings of the logics?

Bears! Quicksand!

A little info about two things you might be worrying about in your spare time:

1. Quicksand:

The force needed to pull out a person immersed in quicksand is about the same needed to lift a car.... The trick for escaping is to slowly wiggle the feet and legs, allowing water to flow in. People float in quicksand so it is also impossible to sink all the way in, but quicksand usually forms at river estuaries, so a captive could drown at high tide.

Quicksand, like lava, is a big kid fear, for some reason.

2. Bears:

Attacks can generally be divided into two groups: predatory and defensive. Each calls for a different strategy.

Black and grizzly bears are capable of both types of attack. Those involving grizzlies tend to be defensive, when the animal feels threatened, according to Stephen Herrero, a bear expert at the University of Calgary and the author of "Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance." Playing dead then lets the bear know you're not a threat and can cause it to back off.

Black bears usually flee from humans, but when they do attack the motive tends to be predatory, and playing dead doesn't work. Neither does running away, since bears are much faster than humans.

Oh, so you have to understand the bear's feelings?