Contests and aimless ramblings

If your dream is to be the Official Voice of Sparky the Fire Dog, now is the chance of a lifetime. Sparky celebrates his 60th birthday on March 18, 2011, and to mark the occasion, the NFPA is hosting a contest to be the voice of our favourite famous fire dog. Any firefighter or employee of a fire department can enter by making a video of his or her best Sparky impersonation. For more information and details about entering, click here.

Baskin and Robbins is also hosting a competition to become the firefighter face of the 2012 Baskin Robbins CFFF campaign, with a chance to win free ice cream for a year for you and your crew. To enter, send a photo of yourself, or a firefighter that you nominate to:
baskinrobbins@elevatorinc.com. The contest rules and forms (which you must use to enter) were emailed to me, and I can't seem to find them on any web page, but you can learn more about the contest at the Baskin and Robbins site, and at last year's CFFF site. If you are interested in entering, and don't have the forms, send me an email and I'll forward them to you. The deadline is February 25.

Hydrant Girl made it to the top 5 for Best Canadian Blog over at the 2011 Weblog Awards. If you want to help her win, click here, then click on the word Canadian on the left side. You have to cast two other votes as well, and reply to the verification email they send you.

Graham from Atikokan posted a facebook video showing what happens when you throw boiling water into the air at -30. Graham's video is for his facebook friends only, but I found a similar video on Youtube. No, it's not a contest, just a cool thing to do.



No wonder it's so tough to fight fires in those temperatures. The water vaporizes before it ever reaches the fire.

Speaking of firefighting (this is supposed to be a firefighter blog after all) the Chinese have come up with a jet propelled master stream. I could see infinite uses for this in Upsala . . . for about 30 seconds until our pumper and tanker ran out of water.

I was going to rant and rave about the challenges facing volunteer firefighters, but it's much more fun to ramble aimlessly about various and sundry unrelated topics.