WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE? While the whole rest of the country is keeping an eye on Hurricane Florence, towns in the Merrimack River Valley (home of Jack Kerouac as well as my Mom, sister and brother-in-law) are suffering catastrophic natural gas explosions. One dead, dozens injured, scores of homes damaged or destroyed, thousands evacuated or displaced, and I still haven't heard a convincing explanation of exactly what happened, or why, other than it seems to be due to the incompetence of something called the Columbia Gas Company.
This reminds me on an infamous letter written to the Hartford Gas Company back in 1891:
Dear Sirs:
Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed, goddamned fashion of shutting your goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again today.
Haven’t you a telephone?
Ys,
Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
The man had a way with words. . . .
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