Today is “the first anniversary of the Griffith Park Fire” and so city officials are honoring the firefighters for their work. Which seems to me a little pretentious.

Los Angeles Southern California is a fire-prone area. Fire is part of the natural life cycle of the plants in this area. Although the Griffith Park fire in 2007 was an important one to me since I live lo these two miles from it, I don’t think it was an especially bad one. Malibu, San Diego, and other places get much worse pretty often. Especially when you consider that no one lives in Griffith Park (no one we care about, certainly, and fires are generally only cared about based on their ability to kill people or *shock* damage houses that we built too close to the forest!). So it seems like an empty gesture to “celebrate” the anniversary of this particular fire.

However, celebrating firefighters is something I can get behind. They’re hot, dedicated to the community, and put themselves into harm’s way. We already have Secretary’s Administrative Professionals’ Day, and we could probably better survive (in SoCal) without secretaries administrative professionals than we could without firefighters. So I propose that we have a National (or at least State) Firefighters’ Day!