This is an amusing story that I wanted to share, but I didn't want to clutter up the thread where it came up. So here we are.
Many years ago, perhaps back in the '50s, somebody decided that he wanted to build a restaurant in Pasadena, California. But even then, land in Pasadena wasn't the cheapest. The one place he was somehow able to buy cheap land was in the middle of the Eaton Canyon Wash.
For those unfamiliar with what a canyon wash is, it's where all the rain from a canyon drains on those rare occasions when there's rain to drain. Eaton Canyon is a rather large canyon adjacent to Altadena and Pasadena where I went hiking a fair amount as a child. Their visitors' center used to have a stuffed passenger pigeon, before it burned to the ground in the mid '90s during a brush fire. Most years, the canyon wash doesn't see that much flooding, though there's always at least some. But in any year with severe rainstorms, what you get isn't so much flooding as flooding with extra boulders. So any building put up in the wash itself gets pretty well destroyed.
The guy collected on his insurance and rebuilt. Still in the canyon wash. Amazingly, the same thing happened again. According to what I was told as a child, he tried to rebuild a third time. Still in the canyon wash. Not even Lloyd's of London would insure him, because the guy met the non-technical definition of insanity, not actually said by Einstein--"doing the same thing while expecting a different result."
