Daniel blogged while Simi burned

For my first California Friday entry, I'll write about some big state news that hit close to home. I live in Simi Valley, where a large brushfire was finally extinguished recently. It was blazing in full force when I tried to drive home. Fortunately only one home was lost (last I heard), and nobody was hurt by the fire (a rock did fall on one fireman's head). The drive home the next day looked pretty cool. It looked to a dork like myself as if orcs had torched a Middle Earth hillside. My housemate said that the firefighting planes were pretty effective. As soon as a bigger, blacker cloud billowed up, a plane would zoom in and drop its payload on it. The libertarian in me would like to think a private plane would have zoomed faster and dropped more stuff. But that's the more churlish part of the libertarian in me.