Colorado is fully on fire. A number of devastating blazes are currently raging across the state in various stages of non-containment. Governor John Hickenlooper is already calling this "the worst fire season in the history of Colorado."
Deputies in Spring Valley, California thought they'd found their suspect when they surrounded a house and ordered its inhabitants out. But the man they were looking for — an armed gunman who had robbed a medical marijuana delivery service — wasn't there. Instead, the deputies interrupted a family having dinner.
HIV levels! Generic Lipitor! Arsenic grandmothers! Low B12! Stressed parents! Hospital food! Fire surgery! Foster drugs! And Europeans are a bunch of nasty motherfuckers! It's your Friday Health Watch, where we watch your health—to death!
At least 19 fire companies from Long Island have responded to a blaze at the Pavilion and LaFountaine buildings on Fire Island Pines, the social hub of the legendary gay beach community. The fire began around 9:15 p.m. The complex was sold in 2010 to FIP Ventures, and encompasses the Pavilion nightclub, the Blue Whale and Bay Bar restaurants, the Hotel Ciel, a grocery store and gym. Word from the scene is that firefighters have the blaze under control, and that it hasn't spread to any residences or rental properties. No cause has yet been determined. We'll have more on this story as it develops. [Photo credit: The Fire Island Pines Historical Preservation Society/Facebook]
This glowing fireball is not the coming of Harold Camping's apocalypse but the aftermath of a collision between a tanker carrying 8,500 gallons of gas and a minivan, which took place on the New Jersey Turnpike last night. Citizen journalist @MelissaJoann was there and filmed what she saw; this image is a still from her crazy-looking video.
Community college student Marc Bechtol says he was pulled out of class and then banned from campus all because he disparaged his school's stupid branded debit cards on his Facebook. Marc Bechtol deserves a failing grade in Campus Brand Ambassadorship 101, otherwise known as An Introduction to Selling Out.
Australopithecus sediba! Wildfire science! Real jetpacks! Persuasion methods! Solar properties Petrified forest! Heavenly metals! Anger cooperation! And Hummingbird mating techniques that drive lady hummingbirds bazonga! It's your Thursday Health Watch, where we watch your health—voodoo, doo doo, woo hoo!
Proud residents of the 46th Worst State in America, California, got a little full of themselves yesterday after the devastating East Coast earthquake and the reactions that followed. Well, a train car carrying 29,000 gallons of propane burst into flames yesterday in Lincoln and now some 4,800 homes have been evacuated. Overreact much? Jeez.
Think you can escape the heat by going swimming? Think again! Following a "catastrophic fire that shut down one of the city's largest sewage treatment plants," New York City is awash in poop. Millions of gallons of untreated sewage poured into the Hudson and Harlem Rivers this week, tainting beaches as far as Brooklyn and Staten Island. Basically, New York is a big, hot Port-a-Potty today. A festering cauldron of fecal matter. A fetid puddle of poo. [NYT, image via Flickr]
A Virginia man accidentally set his house on fire while trying to cremate Thor, his dead Rottweiler, in his backyard.
A flaming "rum-and-banana concoction" went wild at a Florida restaurant yesterday, maiming four people with first- and second-degree burns. Coincidentally, one of the chefs was recently certified as a firefighter, so he saved everyone.
[Pro-Mubarak forces (reportedly hired by Egypt's president to cause chaos) clash with anti-government protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square. At least three died and 639 were injured during Wednesday's surprisingly violent protests. Photo via AP]
