Those Indiana Boys, Pt III

Words fail me. I suppose in some sense he might be considered a one-man crime wave, although that generally connotes some sort of overall criminal goal and systematic attempts to reach it. This guy's goals and plans, such as they were, seem to have been randomly chosen, if energetically pursued, and never extended beyond the next few minutes. He's entertaining to read about in the same way that "Beavis and Butthead" is entertaining to watch. My hat is off to him for actually swimming the river in January to escape the police. The ploy might have been more effective were it not open parkland on the other side, with a bridge about a hundred feet away so the police can drive across while you swim.

In Another Land

Ah, the French... They're completely insane, but manage somehow to be endearing at times nonetheless.

*****

PHIVOLCS is calling "scream like a little girl and run away" for Taal. Fox has photos of the impressive ash column, with lots of lightning, so you can tell what kind of turbulence must be going on in there. The fine cauliflower-like structure of the cloud persists a long way up the column before finally starting to smooth out into larger billows. The fine structure shows that the fragments in the column are still outgassing under pressure so that the turbulence remains high, whch in turn gives an idea of how much pressure there is to begin with. I'm darkly amused by the line "Those evacuating on Sunday said they fled the area quickly".

Taal itself is just cartoonishly dangerous-looking anyway, a tiny little irregular island in the middle of an enormous caldera lake. The island itself is made up crater piled upon crater, with a smallish caldera of its own. The big caldera in which the island sits has scallops cut out of the shoreline - it appears to be literally a caldera formed of numerous, overlapping calderae.