Rain Gryphon

It is catastrophically cold here, some -10°F, with windchill around -30°F. loganberrybunny would enjoy it for the sheer weatheriness of the experience, I'm sure, but I've had enough already. I just popped outside to start the car and let it run until the temperature gauge climbed up into the normal zone. I've parked it with its butt facing into the wind. Hopefully that will be good enough to let it start when needed tomorrow.

Edit: -9°F air tempature, and -34°F windchill, per the National Weather Service. I've been in worse, but not by much.

The second day of the heat wave culminated in this memorably violent storm on Friday the 29th, which took down a lot of the above-ground power distribution system. After that, it was very hot and quiet the next few days. The storm was impressive - one of the strongest I've ever seen. I was out in my car because I wanted to see it, else a sign that fell on my parking space would have smashed my car, and perhaps me, had I come home at the regular time.

It was a great storm, if you like that kind of thing. Just before it hit, this huge gust of wind blew up clouds of dust that darkened the sky. That lasted only a few seconds before the rain came, but it looked like pictures from the 1930s. I could see people running in a panic, caught in the dust, before the rain came and blotted them from sight.

The rain was torrential. It was dark as night at 5 in the afternoon. The streets started flooding within two or three minutes. The wind was making my car bounce up and down. I left the street and got into a parking lot, and the water started coming there too, so I went to the higher part of the lot, and found a back way where I could leave for higher ground. By then it was almost over - it only lasted ten minutes or so. Trees were blown over, signs were blown ever, little bits of debris were everywhere.

On the way home, I saw a guy in a truck who'd had a power cable fall across the cab. The driver was unharmed, but afraid to get out until the electric company came. I think the line was dead, actually, but that had to be scary for him. We have big storms here, but this one was special. All around my neighborhood were these shreds of heavy red plastic cloth. I'm guessing someone's heavy tent got blown to bits. I found somebody's underwear in our parking lot, probably lost laundry that had been drying.

At the height of the storm, the news guy on the radio said "This just in! If you had a trampoline in your back yard, you don't now!", which broke me up.

I stood the first few days after the storm in my dark apartment. I had my battery fans rigged up, plus Saturday, Sunday and Monday ended with storms just at dusk, so it cooled off for the night. Tuesday we had brief rain during the day, and then it shot up over 100F, which turned the rain to steam. I'd had as much as I could take at that point - modern apartments aren't designed to passively circulate the air like older ones were. I skipped out and spent the rest of the blackout in a hotel that had power.

AEP had been estimating that they'd not have power restored here until Sunday night, but they actually got it back some time Wednesday. There were linemen's trucks here from as far away as Mississippi, helping repair the damage. By the time I found out, I was paid up through Friday at my hotel (I'd suspected AEP's estimate was conservative, but not that conservative) and just stayed the rest of my time there, returning to throw everything out of the refrigerator Wednesday night.

It was an adventure, and oddly fun. Power is apparently restored to all of Columbus proper as of last night, but the eastern reaches of the city (Newark and Cambridge) as well as Athens, Gallipolis and Point Pleasant (southeast Ohio) are still dark, and may be for several days yet.

All in all, a remarkable experience, and one I'm glad to have had, but one I'll hope not to repeat.

So, Space.com popped up the headline "Project Orion to Follow Apollo to the Moon". I almost had heart failure. Sadly, the reality isn't quite what I anticipated. Still, for ten or so seconds, I thought I was actually going to see an Orion. Those were ten very good seconds :D

*****

There was this golden window of opportunity in the postwar period, where projects on an absolutely titanic scale could have been undertaken. We could have flown cities into space, melted the polar ice caps, irrigated the deserts, and generally rebuilt the world for our convenience, and the solar system after that. Then we got diverted into that stupid war in Vietnam, and by the time that was over, the mindset had changed, and no-one wanted to do anything except conduct endless discussions about expenses and what might go wrong. The old aggressive mindset will probably come again someday, but I doubt I'll live to see it.

*****

Our one-hipped guy seems to be doing well in that French race. We should make him ride a unicycle or something, to even things up.

*****

When my uncle Billy was in the Navy, back in the late 50s, he was assigned to the Sixth (Mediterranean) Fleet when they went to Lebanon to prop up whoever was the local dictator then, in the wake of the Iraqi revolution. He used to talk a lot about Beirut. He was of the opinion that Beirut and San Francisco were the two most beautiful cities on earth. Beirut's also where he saw a man set afire with a Molotov cocktail for being of the wrong religion, which was something that stayed with him.

He never said so in so many words, but the impression I picked up from him of Lebanon was that it was a beautiful country, with the potential to be one of the world's richer and happier lands, were the populace not a bunch of frothing psychos. When they started their civil war in the early 70s, he was saddened, but not surprised.

I've been to San Francisco, and it's hard to believe that was built by humans. It's a magnificent city, like a model. It seems more to have been put there than to have been built. Beirut, on the other hoof, has been pretty much converted to rubble over the past 30 years or so. Not much left to see there now, I'm sure.

*****

We've had a lot of heat here of late. I spent last weekend helping tend my mother's lawn and garden. The fellow who lives across the road from her had been doing that, but this spring his wife ran off with the town drunk, so he's been terribly depressed and not doing anything at all. Mom's place was turning into a meadow. I got the grass cut, and the shrubberies trimmed back, and now it looks much better. I had to move in slow motion the whole time, since it was in the mid 90s, with humidity and no breeze. The house is going to need painting at some reasonably near time as well. We also bought and installed two little hose huts, one for the back and one for the front. They're neat little structures that your garden hose and nozzles store inside of.

*****

Dexter's wife running off with the town drunk is just bizarre. What one usually hears of is someone running off with a handsome young rakehell who then becomes the town drunk. It's like she decided to save the trouble, and go right for the end result.

*****

For people who've never actually lived in a small town, "town drunk" is considered in the light of an avocation. You need one for society to operate properly, just like you need a star athlete or a busybody.

That's what I always found most objectionable about small towns, was the way in which they tend to enforce social roles. You can play one of a limited number of roles. If you try to act outside the scope of your role, it's largely ignored - everyone knows you, and you get recognition only for doing what's expected of you. If a role becomes open - say the town busybody dies - the concensus will settle on the most likely candidate, and begin to push her towards the expected role.

Cities aren't like that. You constantly meet people that you've never seen before, and will never see again. You have the opportunity to constantly reinvent yourself, and in the process find the persona that's most comfortable for you. MUCKs serve a lot of the same function, in terms of allowing people to experiment with different personae.

*****

Das Beeb has a photo series of El Mayon erupting. What's amazing to me is that every single picture, day and night, shows a nuee ardente in progress. The two schoolgirls are just wandering along ignoring that, like it happens constantly.

Haley Barbour compared Biloxi to Hiroshima this morning. I'd been thinking that myself. From a distance the whole place has that 'swept clean' look to it that Hiroshima did. I watched a long helicopter tour of the area tonight on MSNBC that was being relayed from a local station.

There's strange stuff too like a pair of highway overpasses in New Orleans with cars parked on top and people standing around. I'd guess they were out driving when the levees broke, and that looked like the only good place. They're sitting there now in the midst of the flood, up on top of this lonely stretch of elevated road that now goes nowhere. I'm reminded of Cows in a flood, standing on the only dry patch, just waiting.

*****

The Red Cross is advertising for blood donations. I can't imagine there'll be much need for blood. People either drowned or they didn't.

*****

It's still raining here, although beginning to slack off. The wind came out of the south pretty strongly for a while this afternoon.

Something fun I can do with Flaster: If I pet him until his eyes are half-shut, then put the tip of my finger against his nosepad, his eyes slowly get wider and wider, until he suddenly jerks backward and shakes his head.

*****

Some years back I had a brief brush with infamy by meeting the cousin of the original "stupid with a flare gun" who burned down Frank Zappa's concert hall in Montreux. We're going to have to assume that 'Smoke on the Water' isn't a rock standard in Argentina.

*****

Tonight at the gas station I saw what I'm pretty sure was a Mayfly. Apart from the snowstorm and accompanying week of cold weather, it's been a very pleasant winter. Even so, this is remarkable.

*****

And now I've had a LiveJournal for a year :)

American Electric got our service restored around 1pm today. My Reindeer hat's off to them. They've had crews out 24 hours a day since this began. One could wish that the city of Columbus would show equal enterprise in dealing with the snow.

There were almost 300K without service at the height of the outage. The whole experience was actually rather relaxing, in an odd way. Last night when I got home the whole neighborhood was dark, except for the street lights (which have their own circuit). I wandered around outside taking pictures of the ice in the moonlight and lamplight. After that I lit my Christmas candles, then played with Flaster for a while. Finally we went to bed (a warm Cat's a good thing to have when the heat's out) and I laid in the dark listening to the radio, sipping cheap vodka and eating Cheez-Its. An extended blackout's like a vacation, in an odd way. You can't really do anything useful, so there's no guilt in just lying about the place and finding what pleasure you can.

By some strange mechanism that I don't pretend to understand, my water heater continued to function throughout the episode. Granted, it runs on gas, but I'd have thought some small amount of electricity was necessary to run the thermostat and valves. Evidently not. I need to learn more about how those work.

*****

I feel compensated in some minor fashion for having missed the Second East Coast Blackout back in 2002. I was so disgusted by that - it started in Akron, just a few miles from where I'd been living until only a few months earlier. The first big one in 1965 fascinated me, and I was bitterly disappointed to miss the repeat. I'd much rather be in a memorable blackout in the summer, where the electricity's out for hundreds of miles all around, but this is better than nothing.

*****

Babs apparently saw a transformer arc over and explode from the ice. I'm guessing that was the two flashes I saw when this started. Somewhere I've got some little blobs of copper from when a pole mounted transformer on a feeder line near our house exploded for no readily discernable reason many years ago.

*****

I ended up listening to the George Noorey Show on the radio last night. It's one of those shows that I keep intending to listen to more, but don't. He invites an entertaining miscellany of eccentrics, cranks and outright lunatics to expound their theories. Last night he had a pleasant old man who beleived that the earth (and all planets, come to that) is hollow, with a tiny sun in the centre and openings at either pole. This was a widespread belief among the marginally educated in the 1820s, and was popularized (if not actually invented) by a fellow from Ohio, who wrote books and gave lectures on the topic. I wasn't aware that anyone still held to it. It's one of those things that sounds vaguely plausible until you start trying to do the calculations. It'd make a neat RP world though.

At any rate, he seemed of average intelligence, well-spoken, and obviously sincere. Sadly, most of the phone-in callers sounded like they were off their medications.

*****

This morning I hit the Meijer's store before they closed for Christmas. It was weird. They were apparently in the process of losing electrical service while I was there. The overhead halogens were burning that weird dark purple, the incandescents were orangeish, and the fluorescents were strobing. Finally it all went out. A minute later the power started ebbing and flowing in cycles of roughly thirty seconds. You'd hear this deep hum as all the compressors kicked in, and the incandescents started to brighten, then it's all fade away again to darkness and silence. It made some of the shoppers obviously nervous. It gets to people when the machines stop. For myself, I couldn't help but think of what I've read about the 'Titanic', as the generators failed.

The unexpected thing (for me, at least) was that the Christmas music kept right on blaring away, and the hydraulic doors continued to operate. The cash registers had their own power too, but that wasn't so much of a shocker. I suppose the doors and sound system might be considered safety systems, and so have backup power.

*****

I called my mother earlier, and the weather is awful there too. She's in the Lake Effect belt. I'm going to go home for New Year's instead of Christmas, we decided. It's not worth getting stuck out in the middle of nowhere, which I've come close to before up there during lesser storms. She's cancelling her trip to my aunt Linda's too, and just staying home with the Cat from Hell.

As for me, I'll finally have achance to get some substantial work done on the Skiltaire suit.

*****

I'll be watching 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' tonight. It seems peculiarly appropriate.

So, I turned on the TV this morning, and lo and behold they were showing some ancient movie about the Indianapolis 500. It turned out to be the very end of the 'The Crowd Roars', which I've never yet managed to see :P In general I'm not a great fan of automobile racing movies, because they invariably get the details wrong, but this one I'd like to see, just because it was made in 1932. For whatever reason, I've long been in love with two-seat Depression racers, and this film's full of 'em.

One of the reasons I love old movies is the ability to see the past as it appeared to the people living it. This was made when 120mph was impressive, and the two-seat reworks from 1930 and '31 looked sleek and racy. That somehow comes across in the camerwork and direction - a 'period piece' movie about the 1930s never looks like a 'modern' movie from the 1930s.

It was pretty obviously shot on location at the Speedway. The release date is 1932, but I'm guessing it was made in the autumn of 1930. The trees are bare, and Billy Arnold is driving (I'm pretty sure) a car that he destroyed during the 1931 race, still carrying his 1930 number. The backstretch is all brick, and you can see plainly how uneven it is. The cars actually bounce around on it - it's one thing to read about it, and another to watch it happening. They slide in the turns, like sprint cars. You get to see the old backstretch footbridge, the old pits, and how open the front straight looked back then, before they turned it into the 'canyon'. You get to see the manual lap counters on the pagoda in operation. This was Ye Olde Dayes :)

Most of the race sequences are staged, but impressively so, with eight or ten cars dicing it out at what look like actual racing speeds, which really shouldn't have been a problem considering all the drivers that they had in the film. They intersperse occasional scenes from the 1930 and 1931 Five Hundreds, but the only real continuity problems these cause is the trees - they're leafy in those scenes, and bare in others. They've been careful (with one brief exception) to use only footage from the Depression rules races, which had radically different cars than what had been in use during the 1920s. This pleases me - one of my chief gripes is when, e.g., the stock footage rocket in an SF movie changes to about four different types during the course of the launch. None of that here.

The IMDB promises an incredible bounty of 1930s race drivers, but I got in too late, and saw only Billy Arnold, driving the car that he won the 1930 500 in. I covet this movie, but it's not out on DVD or tape :( I need to watch my TV schedules more zealously, I suppose.

*****

The weather has turned cool. It's a nice change. It was getting to the point where I was going to give in and turn on the air conditioner if the weather didn't break soon. Flaster was quite playful today, storming around the place like a maniac.

*****

Nabisco Cheese Nips are now indistinguishable from Sunshine Cheez-Its. They've abandoned their former cigar shape, and become flat squares. That depresses me, for some reason. They used to be two distinct products. When I was a child, it was derigeur to refer to Cheese Nips as Cheese Japs, the result of too many old B&W war movies.

*****

It seems that OSU has the 11th largest stadium in the world, capable of holding 103,801 drunken rioters. Joy.