The week of Thanksgiving, 1954, my grandmother was overcome by natural gas and died. The cause was an ancient water heater that did not have a safety valve. When the pilot flame went out, the gas did not shut off. She and my grandfather were vacationing in Florida, and it was a rental house. The flame went out in the middle of the night. They saved my grandfather, but my grandmother had had other medical issues, and they could not revive her. Whether the gas at that time had a smell added to it, or not, I do not know. It is all odorized today. In pulp and paper mills, we have many gases. Most naturally stink on their own. However, the safe employee must assume they don't all have a smell and that the odorous smell of a stinky one can mask the smell of a far more dangerous one.

Sunday, 24 May 2026, I watched the sporting event of the year that I thoroughly enjoy--the Indianapolis 500. The greatest auto race in the world has succeeded in seriously improving its performance and dramatically improving its safety record. Why can't we do the same? In Paperitalo's publication, PaperMoney, we have a department, "Risks: Fires, Fatalities and Catastrophes." We started this chronicle of such events in 2017. There has been no discernible improvement in the nine years since then.

Here in Atlanta, Georgia, a bunch (pride, brood, covey, ?) of Waymo cars, when without a passenger, have taken to going to a roundabout in a residential neighborhood and continuously circling, leading to congestion for the residents. They are unable to get out of their driveways. Perhaps the software needs an upgrade. Nevertheless, driverless trucks (fork trucks, service trucks, tool boxes, ?) are coming, probably faster than we want to believe.

October of 1973, only four months after I graduated from college, was the first gas crisis. Prior to that, gasoline prices had been steady for a couple of decades. Since that time, we have been in fuel crises nearly continuously. If not in a crisis, it has at least been a daily topic of discussion. Is there a macro learning (s) from just this limited amount of information? I think so...

The US interstate highway system is 70 years old this coming June 29th. In many ways, this has been the most transformative change in the United States culture ever. Heck, I was even inspired to solo drive the 48 contiguous states in less than seven days, which I did in 2005. Small, local businesses and manufacturers were motivated to build larger factories to capitalize on the scale afforded by this highway system. We did so in the pulp and paper industry, at the cost or savings (depending on your point of view) of thousands of jobs.