Not so long ago, as publishing companies were feeding manuscripts into AI programs to determine if AI was used to write the manuscripts – not surprisingly, in some cases, the AI came up with a “positive for AI” diagnosis, strangely enough often in the case of first-time POC authors – the discourse among writers was how to prepare to defend yourself in case of AI allegations.
“Save your drafts,” the simple response came. Each of the four or five or 10 times you wrote a new draft, each one was proof that it was your hand that crafted the writing.
But what if you don’t draft?
Maybe it’s because of my “this must be written now” practice of writing for newspapers, I don’t draft, at least in the sense of rewriting a stem to stern version of a work several times.
NOTE ADDED AFTER POSTING: I do go over and over everything I write, usually by rereading what I’ve written previously to put myself in the frame of mind to write anew. Does this count as drafting? Dunno.
I do have my outline for my first (and most recently published) novel SEVEN ANGELS, as seen above, dated from June 2019, saved in the SEVEN ANGELS folder on my MacBook Pro.
But is there a more certain, beyond subterfuge, way of proving that a book was written in increments, day by day, for months?
I didn’t realize at the time that I was building proof that I’d written SEVEN ANGELS – really, all my books and even many short stories and nonfiction articles – as I wrote it.
It’s long been my practice to email to myself the latest version of any book as I write another chapter or, on a less productive day, another set of paragraphs. Hell, even new sentences.
In my email, I’ve got the latest version of whatever I’m writing, every day, as I’ve written it.
There’s some added assuredness that could provide a time frame for my writing: social media.
Again, coming from the newspaper business, I’ve always been pretty transparent with my writing. So on Twitter, going as far back as 2009, and more recently Bluesky, I’ll often note on social media what I’ve working on. It’s an incremental timeline, not quite as explicit as the daily email to myself, but pretty close.
Not to mention notes to myself in physical notebooks, which I’ve been using since even before I began writing novels in 2019.
So if the thought of creating a “paper trail” of drafts is intimidating to any writer, I’d suggest emailing yourself your latest version. It’s a good indication that you’ve been working on a project.
It has the added bonus of backing up your work in case your computer decides to jump off a cliff.
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
If you considered our downtowns to once be the gathering places for our cities and towns, then you could consider your local mall to be America’s second gathering place. That’s appropriate, because malls largely killed off downtowns.
Downtowns across the country have staged and are staging something of a comeback. They entered a steep decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s as malls were built and first retailers and then customers moved away from downtowns to the new gathering places, the mall.
In my hometown of Muncie, the mall – Muncie Mall – opened, more or less, in 1970, years later than the first U.S. mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Big department stores left Muncie’s downtown, with Sears being the first anchor store to open at the mall. Downtown was, in a decade or less, pretty hollowed out and storefronts along Walnut Street were left empty or occupied by small businesses and, in one instance, an adult bookstore.
Like a lot of cities and a lot of malls, Muncie and Muncie Mall struggled mightily in the first decade of the 21st century. I was covering business at the time and retailers – some with problems nationally, like Sears – closed their doors.
I was back in Muncie over the weekend and we had to check out the mall, which has been the scene of a lot of demolition work in the past year. The three-screen movie theater, where I spent a lot of time as a young movie fan, was razed. More recently, the wings that had been occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney have been or are being demoed.
The photo above is one I took this weekend and it shows that one empty third of the mall is roped off.
There’s still a few tenants in the mall, most notably Books-A-Million, which supposedly has a five-year lease. Does that mean the rest of the structure will be pulled down around and behind it, or will BAM find a spot elsewhere or leave the city entirely? I don’t know.
If you’re interested in the lifetime of a Midwestern mall, you’ll be interested in the timeline by Robin Gibson in The Star Press newspaper that I’ll link to at the end.
I won’t wax on about what malls meant to us or Muncie Mall meant to me. You can probably find my writing about that elsewhere, including as a chapter of our third true crime book, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS. Our book covers a still-unsolved double killing of two teenagers in 1985 and I included a chapter about Muncie Mall because the mall was a big place for us back then.
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
I could lie and say that this date 49 years ago seems like only yesterday, but truthfully it seems like eons ago.
After I woke up this morning, I opened Instagram to see video footage of author Stephen King leaving some book promotion event somewhere and I thought that King, one of my favorite authors of all time and a master of the written word, looked every day of his 79 years. He seemed a little unsteady and walked with a cane.
Funny coincidence, so do I. And King is more than a decade older than me.
If that wasn’t humbling enough, I opened Facebook memories and saw posts from 2017 and 2007, I believe, in which I noted the anniversary of my first published newspaper article from 1977.
Despite the inclination to turn over and go back to sleep at all those reminders of the passage of time, I decided to get up and, among other things, write about the 49th anniversary of my first published article.
That’s a screenshot from newspapers dot com above, and you can tell the gist of the article: friends and fellow students from Cowan High School in Delaware County, Indiana, let me interview them about what they did on a “big night out.” The gist of it was go see a movie, go see a concert, have dinner as well as a few more nefarious activities, like illegally obtaining beer – all of us were three or four years too young to buy carry-out liquor – and drinking and sometimes riding around in the rural countryside, throwing beer bottles at signs.
(I can write about this now that my son is years past the age to be encouraged to do this by my example.)
The article was hugely controversial, and a good indicator of why the less-legal activities were not attributed to anyone on the record: My school system apologized in the school newsletter to the poor students scandalized by the implication that they would do this. Somewhere, in a box somewhere, I not only have a clipping of the article but also a snippet of the apology (not from me, but from school administrators) in the newsletter.
The article came about because I had volunteered to fill in for a friend also on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. She had a ton of studying to do and wouldn’t have time to write the article for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper. (The newspaper regularly published articles written by local high school students, although most were of the “Big school fundraiser next week” variety.) I said I would and that kicked off a newspaper career that didn’t end until I took a buyout in January 2019. It didn’t completely end even then: I wrote freelance for the newspaper for a year or two even after the buyout, covering stories like Covid.
After a newspaper editor called the school guidance office (heh heh) and offered me a regular gig as the paper’s “teen columnist,” I wrote for the Evening Press all through college and for a couple of years after before they offered me a full-time reporting job in 1984. I started on my dad’s birthday, which was appropriate because my parents had never been anything but supportive of me going into writing rather than my original plan, which was to become a lawyer. My tenure at the newspaper continued even after my beloved evening paper merged with the hated morning paper in 1996.
The moral of this is: Kids, stay in school.
No, the moral is that you should take a chance every once in a while, trying something new and daring that might have an unexpected outcome.
You, too, could become a lifelong writer and pass up your chance to practice law and make far, far, far, far, far more than you ever would as a newspaper reporter.
Yeah, that’s the moral of the story.
You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.
I subscribe to two newspapers – three if you count the Washington Post, which I haven’t looked at in a few years – so I can’t tell you the state of the art for various newspaper departments, especially in print. I rarely see the print editions of any newspapers.
I certainly can’t tell you what newspaper obituary sections look like these days. I’d imagine they’re a lot less extensive than they were in the mid-1980s, when I was a young newspaper reporter who, among other things, covered news events, wrote feature stories, wrote about entertainment and, for a couple of years, was the obituary editor of The Muncie Evening Press.
(My thoughts revert to the business of newspaper obituaries today because of a new practice originated by the Baltimore Beat newspaper, which is offering bargain-priced obituaries at prices as low as $5 for a simple online death notice. Link at the bottom of this post.)
Back in the day, newspapers would on some days be inundated with obits. We’d get a dozen or a couple of dozen – you couldn’t plan for those numbers, of course, even if you asked local funeral homes how many obits we could expect from them, because in some cases surviving family members would show up abruptly at the funeral home to make arrangements – and a sudden increase in quantity would mean we’d have to jump the obit page to another page, where it would sometimes crowd out news stories. Sometimes it would jump more than one page. Too many obits was chaos. Frankly, obits were considered chaos by some of us. There was a considerable amount of pressure involved with obituaries, especially for an afternoon paper that published just after noon. We’d rush like madmen all morning to get a newspaper put together, including the obits.
At the time, newspapers did not get paid for obituaries. That changed maybe 10 or 15 years ago, when newspaper advertising departments, rather than newsrooms, started handling obits and funeral homes, which had almost certainly always passed along the “cost” of a newspaper obituary to survivors, made an obit a line item in the total funeral bill.
But back then, newspapers didn’t charge for obits and considered it a public service. As such, obits were considered news articles and were subject to editing for accuracy. For instance, if someone’s obit claimed the deceased person had been president of the United States and they had not actually been POTUS, we’d cut that reference.
During the couple of years I was obit editor, that task fell to me, a 20-something who’d rather have been writing important or at least entertaining newspaper stories. That’s why they paid me the big bucks: A few years ago I saw a record of my Social Security-eligible earnings over the decades and it indicated that one of those first couple of years when I was doing obits I was paid about $14,000 in annual pay. Google tells me that would be a salary of about $45,000 today, but it was enough money even then to persuade me to shut up and do the job.
My couple of years editing obits were made much worse than they might have been by the top executive at the local newspaper, who was a horrible bully. He did have knowledge of the local community and issued style sheets listing the correct names of local factories. Without those, I would never have known the correct name of the local business we all referred to as Frank’s Foundry was The Frank Foundry. But for all the usefulness of his knowledge and his style sheets, we all had to put up with someone who was horribly abusive to the staff, including the top editors.
I still vividly remember how much we all dreaded the time around 1 p.m. each day, when our afternoon newspaper was published and all of us – who had seen proofs of pages but it was hard to catch every error – waited for this top executive, up in his office, to look through the fresh newspaper, find an error and call down to the newsroom and rage about how stupid and incompetent we all were. (That’s not an exaggeration.) I’ll never forget one day when he found a typo in a story – not one of my obits, luckily, that day – and made each of three editors get on the phone with him and correctly spell some common word that had been misspelled in a typo. Like “please” or “elephant” or something.
Being obit editor was not fun and I was happy when, within a few years, I was given an actual beat, county government, to cover. Writing about elected officials who lied and wasted our tax dollars was less stressful than editing obits.
Doing obits for a couple of years was a genuine education in humanity and human behavior. Nothing – nothing – brings out the worst traits in people as readily as the death of a family member. This was most obvious when a family that had been torn apart by some feud or falling out was then hit by the death of a parent or adult child. The family members who were making funeral arrangements – and paying the funeral home for them – would simply leave out an estranged family member. All of a sudden, the family had only two children, as the black sheep offspring was forgotten.
At the time, when obits were considered news stories and not paid advertisements, I hated this. It meant that the obit was not an accurate historical record because children or estranged parents were omitted. But we couldn’t accept the word of a person who called and said, “Hey, I was left out of my mom’s obituary.” What if the call had been a hoax? We had to refer them to the funeral home that supplied the information and tell them that if the funeral home verified them to us, we’d run the obituary again.
Dealing with the funeral homes was usually fine but sometimes odd. The funeral directors were usually under enormous pressure from the families – especially in times of split families – and they didn’t always treat obit editors very well.
On the flip side, the funeral homes were, like a lot of businesses, in the holiday practice of distributing gifts. More than a few times, I was the recipient of a bottle of whiskey (I’d usually pass it along to an editor at the newspaper since beer and vodka were my poison).
The former obit editors at the paper would laughingly recall the year that one funeral home gifted the newspaper – and presumably others in the community – with something other than booze: a jar of pickles.
Given the preserving/embalming nature of the funeral business, the gifts of pickles were mostly regifted to people who didn’t know they came from a mortuary, I’m told.
Here’s the link to the Baltimore Beat story about bargain-basement obits:
I’ll say this at the top: I’m not an anti-porn crusader.
I think pornography is, on its own, a perilous thing for some people to consume. I think there can be enormous harm done to people, particularly women, who appear in it and are exploited for it. That being said, online porn, like any kind of sex work, can be financially beneficial to women, especially if they control every step of the process and make money from it.
But I think you could say – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me or follows me on social media – I am an anti-hypocrisy crusader.
And yes, for my own little hypocrisy declaration, I am on social media, including Instagram and Facebook. I think the latter, much like modern-day Twitter, has done a lot to spread lies and disinformation that have ultimately hurt this country and our democracy. I’m on social media to promote my work and the work of friends (although the effectiveness of social media has never been great).
Having issued all those disclaimers, I’ll say that I was surprised recently to notice that Instagram in particular (and fellow Meta platform Facebook also; I don’t know about Threads) is running ads that include hardcore sex footage.
I’m not talking about the “I’ll be your AI girlfriend” ads that run on those platforms. Those are insulting (“I’ll never say no,” all those pretty pixel princesses coo) to everyone concerned but they’re not what I’m talking about here today.
I’m talking about explicit ads, usually popping up between Instagram stories, that are marketing something, I’m not quite sure what (I know that advertising fails if you don’t remember what product the ad is advertising) but this is a “click this link” medium, not a “hop on your Schwinn and pedal down to the corner sin store and ask for it by name” medium. And I didn’t click on any embedded links. So I’m not quite sure what they’re advertising. Pornhub or something? Dunno.
The screenshot at the top of this piece I have heavily cropped so you can’t see the bottom of the screen and its graphic depiction of oral sex. As for the top half, is that actress Sydney Sweeney? I wonder if she’s aware she’s used in porn ads?
But the fact that IG in particular is running ads with graphic sexual content when it bans that content among its users is hypocritical to say the least.
One account I know, for a genuinely legit artist and model, has to blur out her nipples in photos she posts. Yet IG users could conceivably see, after they see one of her IG stories, completely explicit sexual activity.
Even after seeing repeated examples of these ads – and yes, I’ve forever broken my algorithm in doing this research – I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. But I found a couple of news articles from 2025 that reported about the graphic ads, including a piece from Le Monde. “Thousands of pornographic ads go unmoderated on Facebook and Instagram” is the headline. (I’m not linking because most of the article is behind a paywall, but a cursory search found it.)
I’m very explicitly NOT calling for action or any kind of boycott of Meta social media platforms, especially Instagram and Facebook, that are running these ads. But I think people should know that Meta has two sets of standards: one for its users, who must toe the line over content, and one for its advertisers, who can follow an “anything goes” practice.
What’s the moral of the story? A friend of mine who has in the past placed ads on Instagram for legitimate, mainstream brands notes that the Meta platforms have been painstakingly trivial in their criteria for and criticism of said ads.
So I guess the bar is lower when it comes to the many, many dollars that can be made.
(And yes, you’re welcome for injecting that 1975 Van McCoy earworm into your brain.)
Every day, I see dudes in our apartment complex walking through the parking lot and down the hill to the busy commercial street below. They’re wearing knit shirts with restaurant logos and I’m assuming they’re going to work in the kitchens of said eateries.
In these hotter-than-the-hinges-on-the-gates-of-hell summer days, they’re walking to work, maybe because they don’t have cars and, luckily, there are so many places to eat nearby.
Increasingly, they’re turning out for work every day at some risk: getting swept up by state-sanctioned kidnappers.
Whatever the risks and whatever the meager rewards – nobody working in a restaurant kitchen is making more than minimum wage – they’re hustling every day.
They’re an echo of their parents and, honestly, my parents. My dad worked for 30 years in an auto parts factory. The days were hot and dirty and noisy; he was half-deaf by the time he retired. And when he retired, he ran pay-to-fish ponds down the hill and behind our house. Once a week he drove to another city, his old Chevy pickup with a waterproofed wooden tank that he built on the back, to pick up catfish and bluegill to stock the ponds. He’d owned and ran an apartment house years before I was born and sharpened saws after he retired.
My mom’s story was similar, and I tell some of it in my upcoming novel GHOST SHOW. She and her sisters gathered wild-growing plants near their little town in Tennessee – the place that inspired the town in my novel SEVEN ANGELS – to sell to reps of pharmaceutical companies. They collected the plants in burlap sacks and sold them, at the end of the day, for pennies.
My mom ran our 20-acre farm for those 30 years my dad worked in the factory. She cleaned houses and factories, a job I helped with before I started working in the newspaper business.
I have only a portion of the hard work, the sheer hustle, of my parents. Or those guys walking to work in a hot kitchen every day.
And I’m acutely aware of that.
“I need to work more and work longer hours if I’m gonna write all these books,” I said the other day.
“You know, you can take downtime,” the reply came.
And I do take down time. Too much of it. I need to work harder and smarter. I need to hustle.
As I write this, Word – a needy little bitch if ever there was one – is notifying me once again that I should update. Nevermind that I see these pleas when I’ve opened Word on my Macbook Pro and I’m trying to get some work done so no, I don’t plan on updating now.
Not to mention the number of times Google Chrome asks me to update.
I wouldn’t mind the updates if I thought they’d have a good outcome. But too often lately it seems like companies update their products – I’m not even talking about just tech products here – based on bad design.
Example: I had to buy a new Mr. Coffee coffeemaker recently when our old one – about seven years old – began leaking water I’d poured in. I got a new one because I didn’t relish the idea of getting electrocuted before I’d had my coffee.
So I picked out the basic model, which seemed to be the same 12-cup coffeemaker as I’d had and began using it. Immediately I noticed that the water level indicator is tucked away on the side, presumably to make the coffeemaker more narrow and more sleek. (Nevermind that I could only find it in black, which might hide coffee stains better than white but is harder to tell how much water you’ve poured in.) If I want to double-check how much water I’ve poured in, because of the place Mr. Coffee is tucked away in our tiny kitchen, I have to pull it forward on the counter and turn it to peer at it.
More annoying is a recent upgrade to my iphone – I bet you wondered wtf I was going to get to that – changed the way you can turn off notifications like the alarm indicator you see above.
In the past, the phone has offered a single button to tap to end an alarm or notification. Now you have to slide the notification.
No one at Apple thought about how hard this was to do with one hand. I can’t any longer turn off a notification casually with a single tap. Now I have to hold my phone in one hand and “swipe” with the other.
This change seemed to occur right about the time Apple introduced liquid glass, its “unified visual theme for the graphical user interfaces.”
Yes, by all means, you techboy schmucks, make apps and labels on your products transparent and harder to see.
You’d think someone could get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars – maybe millions in stock – to advise these companies on how not to piss off their low-vision or low-dexterity or low-mobility users?
I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I wasn’t writing.
Talking about that possibility with family members in town for a visit yesterday, one of them wondered what I’d be doing if I hadn’t kept writing when I took a buyout from the newspaper business seven years ago. I went on to write three novels, a couple more true crime books, 73 or 74 pieces for CrimeReads, 55 for another site, eight or 10 for another (now defunct) site, a few for a couple of other sites … plus dozens of press releases, short stories and more.
What would I do if I wasn’t writing?
Well, reading, of course. That’s been the oldest constant in my life (other than breathing and eating), from the Marvel Comics a friend gave me in the 1960s to books and stories aimed at young people.
But I can’t imagine a life without writing.
It seems to me that writing is not only the dominant optional privilege in my life but it could be the privilege that anyone can enjoy.
(This thought goes hand in hand with my belief that ir you write, you”re a writer, regardless if you are published or even disseminated in any way.)
The fundamental act of writing changed me. Decades of news writing made me think better and all the qualities that go with it, especially the ability to look at a circumstance critically.
I don’t think I’m a great writer. I think I am, at best, a clever writer and a sympathetic writer. Sometimes. Writing helps make me that.
And the best thing about writing is that you can do it at very little cost. Of course, thinking about writing is writing, in my opinion, and I’ve got this (aging) MacBook that lets me put together words.
But really, if I didn’t have that tool, i could write in a notebook or even scraps of paper.
Writing isn’t precious. Writing doesn’t care how much money you can afford to write.
For me, writing is in some ways the most consistent thread in my life. In many ways, it’s the most satisfying, but it’s certainly the longest-running and the one that feels among the most important.
It’s crazy how much time we spend – okay, how much time I spend – on social media. And even crazier is how influential social media is in our lives. It’s fractured in many ways from what it used to be and while I’m on most of the social platforms, I spend more time on BlueSky than anywhere.
This is, however, a story about two platforms from the detested Meta stable of social media, Facebook and Instagram.
I really don’t like the Meta platforms and I like their owner even less. But they’re where the eyeballs are, unfortunately. Facebook still drives far more traffic to newspaper sites, for example, than any other platform. Many, many times more.
Two examples from my recent postings prove that the platforms have a long reach.
I follow the actress Sarah Herrman on Instagram. She’s funny and posts videos not especially related to her film work, which included the recent film “Chili Finger,” but posts videos of her attempts at baking and cooking. Those videos often feature, off-screen, her mother, who appears to have an acerbic wit.
In a recent video, Herrman tells her mother that she received two requests from followers for pictures of her feet.
“Only two?” her mother replied, with a tinge of “you can do better than that” in her voice.
In the comments, I quoted her mother in a two-word-and-two-word only comment: “Only two?”
So far, 4,296 people have “liked” my comment.
Crazy.
More recently, I found copies from the mid-1970s of the “Star Trek Log” books, in which author Alan Dean Foster adapted the “Star Trek” animated series into short story and novella form.
I posted my picture on the Facebook page “Vintage Paperback Books.” It was my first post, so it’s not like I’m a favorite of the page’s followers.
But those vintage “Star Trek” fans are fans of the books, apparently. As of right now, since Saturday the post has accumulated 503 likes.
Again, crazy.
Those are examples of social media’s reach. There are other, better, more important and relevant examples.
If I’m ever swept away by a tornado, you can blame the authorities in Tennessee.
I appreciate that I can get notifications on my phone. They’re often helpful. I just wish I could choose when I want them to be helpful.
Notifications – letting us know we’ve got a text message or a new email or if bad weather is on the way or a public figure has kicked the bucket – are a way of life for many of us now, and I’m not going to disable all my notifications – which are called “push alerts” by many newspapers, or just a “push” – because they can be useful.
These thoughts are occasioned by a couple of obnoxious instances of push alerts or notifications in the past couple of days, some of these of the health app variety. Yes, thank you, phone, for letting me know my trend in walking has changed lately. Did you happen to notice how rainy it was? And yes, thank you, other health app, for waking me up in the middle of the night to let me know of something that might otherwise have let me croak deep in peaceful slumber.
Part of my hate for pushes is that I’m obsessive enough to not only swipe them off my screen but actually go to my email inbox to delete the email that generated the push or, gasp, read it and even possibly respond.
(Don’t think we don’t understand that the Push Alert Industrial Complex is conspiring with our phone manufacturers to ensure we spend more time on our devices. It’s true. I read about it on the internet.)
Anyway, I’ve gradually over time changed my phone settings to end most push alerts from the authorities, who seem to abuse the tool.
The final push alert that broke the camel’s back was one recently that alerted me of a fatal shooting in Memphis, which is five hours and 47 minutes from me. Needless to say, this 2 or 3 a.m. push alert was not from a news outlet. It was from a state-run agency. I won’t comment on why this push was sent out but not why other fatal shootings are not sent out. You can guess.
So here I am, because the state insists on alerting me to things happening six hours away, perhaps expecting me to run down to the street at 3 a.m. and scan passing vehicles for the suspect, without any means of being woken in case of forest fire or flood or tornado or hurricane.
