{"id":690,"date":"2010-09-03T11:08:24","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T16:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auchtoon.2gtech.com\/blog\/?p=690"},"modified":"2010-09-03T11:08:24","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T16:08:24","slug":"cage-fighting-busted-pipelines-and-hand-grenades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/?p=690","title":{"rendered":"Cage Fighting, Busted Pipelines, and Hand Grenades…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, August 28, 2010<\/p>\n

First, to explain the topics covered:<\/p>\n

There was a recent staging of a mixed martial art (MMA) or \u201ccage fight\u201d event here in Grand Rapids, and apparently it was for amateur fighters. And whereas there are regulations and certain safety rules for professional events (like having a doctor on hand), there are none for amateurs. I think that was it. To be perfectly honest, I don\u2019t know exactly what the story is here. When I see MMA, my tendency is to look the other way. Professional, amateur, whatever — it\u2019s all sort of violence porn to me. It hits so high on my \u201cthat\u2019s really stupid\u201d scale, that I cannot generate the energy to learn more.<\/p>\n

You may or may not be aware that this summer Michigan had its own oil spill disaster. A pipeline burst and spilled an enormous amount of oil (not BP enormous, but still quite substantial) into the Kalamazoo River. I\u2019m surprised I didn\u2019t cover this earlier, but with one cartoon a week you can only get to so many topics (even doubling up like I did with this one). Anyway, this story led the Grand Rapids Press to do what good journalists do and investigate further. (I\u2019ll give you a moment now to put down your web browser and go buy a dang subscription!) The Press found there are lots and lots of pipelines that transverse Michigan carrying oil, gasoline, natural gas, chemicals, and other toxic nasties — what sort of plans are in place to monitor and maintain these? Turns out, not a lot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And now for a full disclosure: Credit for the live grenades and minefield line in the third panel should go to Garry Trudeau<\/a>. One of his very early Doonesbury<\/a> cartoons (and one of the first that I read) involved his character BD joining the Army to go fight in Vietnam. Some officers were testing new recruits and requested a volunteer to go retrieve a live hand grenade for a minefield — BD races forward enthusiastically screaming, \u201cI\u2019ll do it! I\u2019ll do it!\u201d Obviously it stuck with me, and I ended up paraphrasing it. Of course I know I’m likely the only person in the world (other than Trudeau) who could detect my “sampling,” but telling you makes me feel a little less skeevy. Hmmm… maybe I can relate to MMA promoters….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in the Grand Rapids Press, August 28, 2010 First, to explain the topics covered: There was a recent staging of a mixed martial art (MMA) or \u201ccage fight\u201d event here in Grand Rapids, and apparently it was for amateur fighters. And whereas there are regulations and certain safety rules for professional events (like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grand-rapids-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/auchtoon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}