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Back in 2002 a Boy Scout troop out of the BSA Great Salt Lake Council inadvertently started the East Fork fire with damaged/destroyed 14,000 acres. By all accounts it was an accident and the source of the fire was from a campfire that had been doused with water and buried as is usually the recommended procedure for ensuring a fire is out. Now fast forward 5 years to yesterday where it was announced that the BSA Great Salt Lake Council and the State of Utah have reached a settlement. For this I applaud them rather than dragging on another 5 or 10 years in pointless court battles they have finally finished it. What I do take great exception to is one of the terms of the settlement…

The state originally sued for $606,424 to recoup the costs the state incurred in fighting the fire. The settlement terms that I have been able to drudge up so far from local newspapers and the radio are for the most part a very good compromise. The terms that have been announced are as follows: the Greater Salt Lake Council will pay approximately $300,000 to the state, oversee the planting of 9,000 seedlings(not sure if it is only in East Fork or in general), develop specific training for troop leaders and videos/training for the scouts themselves and last the Great Salt Lake council admits no wrong doing for the fire. That last one is the one that I have to take issue with, the fact that the Great Salt Lake Council will not admit any wrong doing goes against the very ideals of the Boy scouts. Unfortunately, the Boy Scouts of America are not acting any better. According to the Deseret News article There is still a pending lawsuit between the BSA and the federal government for $13 million that they spent fighting the fire. Besides not admitting any fault of their own as far as I have seen the BSA has also filed a lawsuit that claims the “unknown Scouts, on their own free time” started a different campfire that then spread and started the 2002 East Fork Fire.

Now I am an Eagle Scout and today I am now ashamed of the organization from which I earned that rank. From both the Mission Statement and the Vision statement the BSA currently has on it’s website two lines that essentially repeat each other which would imply that it is important to them. “The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.” from the Mission statement and “Instill in young people lifetime values and develop in them ethical characte as expressed in the Scout Oath and Law” from the Vision Statement. With all of their concern with instilling ethical and moral values in the scouts by not admitting any wrong-doing, they have shown their true colors. In my opinion they have lost their own moral compass by looking after their own ass instead of doing what is right and leading by example. One final note before I sign off on this post, Yes I know that if they do publicly and on the record admit liability it is possible for them to open themselves to other liability claims, but by denying it entirely they cannot profess to be setting a good example for the scouts that they are trying to teach these same values to.

This afternoon on my way back to the office from lunch I got a semi-frantic call from my mom. Now I am used to daily and sometimes hourly(Hi Mom! You know I am just kidding….right?) and can even be accused of doing it to her(like when she drives to St George, I like to know that she got there alright). Today, however, she called because the speakerphone on her cell phone, one of my old ones, got turned on. It’s a button on the on an odd area of the phone that if you hold it, it turns the speakerphone both on and off. Of course I am speaking retrospectively and I haven’t used that phone for about a year and change, i think. So just imagine about 10 minutes of randomly trying to tell someone to try different things, when you can’t see what they are doing and they can’t tell you how they did it in the first place. I eventually told her I would have to look in the manual and call her back with the correct instructions.

Now when she originally called she told me she had two things to talk to me about. Having dispatched the first I asked what the second was, assuming of course that it related to cell phone or computer related help. Not this time, apparently my mom went to the gym for a little while and when she came out she couldn’t find her car. She walked over to where she thought she parked and didn’t see it. So she walked around most of the parking lot looking for her missing car with no luck. Just as she was about to call the police she decided to walk back to where her car used to be and she noticed that the car was similar. It had was the same color, make and model. It also had the same pattern of dirt/soot that you always recognize is your car after a snowstorm and inside it had the same stuff that she had left in the car when she went to the gym in the first place.

Now this is an odd turn of events, because the car didn’t have the right license plates. So she used to remote to unlock the car and……IT WORKED! Apparently someone had switched her license plates with their own, thinking that no one would notice immediately. Unfortunately for them a long time ago my mom had another car that was Champagne colored and, it seems, nearly every other person in the state had one too. So instead of looking for your car it became more important to find the your license plate in a sea of Champagne colored cars. Getting back to the original story now, I asked my mom if she had checked some of the other cars too see if it was some kind of prank. Maybe someone rowdy teenagers had decided it would be a funny prank to play musical chairs with everyone’s plates. I struck out and she wasn’t able to find her plates. So to the bastard who decided that he didn’t want to renew his license plates, deal with his emmissions or needed to get rid of plates of a stolen car or something. I have a message for you:

I took pictures during a cruise to the Caribbean last year with my family and it has taken me until now to finally post them. So enjoy the show!