Hurricane Katrina is all over the news every day.  During the first few weeks, there was a common thread that appeared as people tired to locate or receive information about friends or loved ones.  You would see people on the news trying to get the spotlight in hopes of locating others.  The terror that runs through a person's mind when they do not know where their loved one are at or if they are even alive.

The thought that comes to my mind is that there needs to be a national system setup that will be a virtual posting wall to allow those in the emergency to let everyone know where they are and how they are doing.  This would take very little financially to implement, but would be a great help to those in an emergence.

To implement this system, they government needs to design a simple web site allowing posts from those in the emergency.  Every emergency agency should have access to this site to provide postings for those that they helping. 

For an example, emergency agencies at the Superdome should have had access to this system if even via satellite phone (access anywhere).  Then they could have had those that were there post a message on the system of who they are, their present condition and immediate plans.  The posted information would be categorized by name, phone number and address of the victim. Friends and loved ones could search the site for them by any of those categories and find the latest information. 

For a system such as this to work, it would have to be heavily publicized and the government is in a place to handle this.  Everyone would have to know, where to go to post your information and that friends and loved ones should check the first, before they do anything else.  Could save time and resources in such a national emergency, in addition to keeping families together!

I was a greatly disappointed in this new series.  The story started out pretty good but then fell into the same old "series" story line of trying to track down people.  Very similar to the Sci-Fi   series "The 4400", which had a strong start but by the time the premiere was over, it ended up just like all the others, the same old hunt and run story line.

All this reminds me of the old Doris Day movie "The thrill of it all".  The company she worked with to promote their products produced a weekly TV show.  It appears that the show was lame and had almost the same story every week with the same actors, only in different clothing and time settings.  One week it might be Germany back in WWII and then the next might be a western.  The producers said no one would notice the same story, but in the movie, the children did.  Well, it seems Hollywood has the same plan, they just have a large pool of stories to repeat.

The first thing in Threshold that blew any form of realism in the story was when they boarded and searched the navy ship after they believe aliens were involved. No biohazard suit, nothing but gas masks with skin exposed.  Doubt they would be that stupid in real life.

Next thing is when they decided to blow up a ship, which could scatter any contaminates that might spread.  In the real world I would image it would be all about containment.

This kind of thing carried on throughout the entire show.  Even at the end when they were planning to release the people who appeared to be drawn by the sound. In the real world, they would have at least quarantined them for a while until they could figure out what was going on.  Actually, they probably would have pushed a contamination story to the public and isolated everyone they could that had any contact.

Another point that bothered me, it appears that they never informed the president of the country at any time.  Seems that would have happened prior to them making contact with any possible alien life forms.

While all this might be trivial, it just destroys my ability to be pulled into the story.  Of course, as with the show "The 4400", I will not bother watching this any further.  I sure wish Hollywood some day would get a creative brain and get back to producing decent entertainment.