Rain Gryphon

So. the election year is finally underway. Trump drove the steamroller in Iowa. I think there's no real doubt that he'll be the candidate.

Vivek Ramaswamy, of whom I had never heard until last year, put in a spirited performance. He was probably my third favourite overall (behind DeSantis), and would have been my second had I judged him electable.

Haley, I predict, will stick it out through South Carolina before she admits that she hasn't a chance. DeSantis I'm not sure about.

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Sunny, but desperately cold here. My car still starts, though, *and* I can refuel it. One can't say the same for the EVs. Apparently there are dead electric cars abandoned at recharger points all over the midwest, since they can't be charged, and in some cases can't even be started, when the weather is too cold. That would be a hell of a thing to find out. You stop to charge, and find you're not getting home tonight.

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The FAA has a DEI program which includes deliberately hiring people of low intelligence, and people with psychological problems. Surely this will make air travel safer for all of us.

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The UN are blithering about how nitrogen asphyxiation may constitute torture. I have to think that constitutes basic intellectual dishonesty on their part - either that or DEI has led them down the same path as the FAA. The reason there are so many nitrogen deaths in industry is that there's absolutely zero discomfort when you're asphyxiated by nitrogen. The carbon dioxide exchange cycle continues as always - there's just no oxygen coming. People topple over unconscious with no warning at all.

If it ever comes to the point that I commit suicide, I'll chose either nitrogen asphyxiation, or else stab myself through the heart, depending on how bloody-minded I happen to be at the time.

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Edit: Remove sentence fragment.

For the past two years, the world has been in the unusual position that during volcanic eruptions, there are actually sufficient quantities of effective, readymade face masks on hand. For all of civilized history prior, people had to improvise cloth masks, with widely varying results.

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Tonga is now in the odd position of needing serious quantities of aid, but trying to avoid letting Covid into the country, which up to this point has been free of it.

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The Fimbulwinter seems to have missed Indiana. It's snowing heavily to the west of us, and it's snowing catastrophically to the east of us. Here, however, we've got a little white dust on the ground, not even enough to cover it.

Woohoo! It actually (barely) hit 90° today! That's perhaps the sixth day all summer. Cool and rainy is nice for the vegetation (the place is surreally green, and needs to be mowed two or three times a week), but one likes some heat in one's summer.

Humonguous wreck in Texas. I can testify from personal experience that Texans cannot drive in bad weather. In 1979, our high school band got invited to perform in the Cotton Bowl. It turned cold (which was annoying - we'd been expecting a warm trip). The day before the game, they took us shopping in this huge, amazing mall. There had been a small ice storm that morning, with a bit of snow on top. We were tooling along in our bus, our driver doing a competent job. We came up to an intersection. There was, of all things, a Texas Ranger's patrol car in front of us. Everyone was like "Whoa! A Texas Ranger!" The Ranger tried to move from a stop, giving it a bit more gas than the traction would bear, and his back wheels just spun on the ice. Instead of backing off, and trying again with a lighter touch, he absolutely floored it. We could hear the tires screeching on the ice from inside the bus. After a few seconds, he burned through the ice, got brief traction (the back en of the car actually bounced when he hit the pavement), and shot into the intersection unable to steer or stop, and hit another car. That was a Texas Ranger, no less. Up to that humiliating debacle, I'd seen them as omnicompetent badasses.

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The officer also noticed Holbrook was covered in what appeared to be pizza sauce. Srsly. One of our fine local boys.

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So, it took 18 hours to restore electrical service. I'm one of the fortunate ones at that, as there are still many without, and crews still working. Right now, 675 still out of a total of 4844 initially affected. 42 total incidents of damage to the electrical grid.

I'd not want that to happen every day, but as a once in a while thing, it's kind of an adventure. I used the garden tractor to haul the big limbs back to the brushpile, then got the small ones by hand, and spent much of the day raking up leaves and twigs. Ironically, the place looks much neater now than it did before the storm. One gains a certain feeling of moral superiority as well. People in farm towns don't wait for the authorities to come help them, so all up and down the road, people were out with tractors and chainsaws cleaning up.

I still can't get over the fact that nothing hit the house or the cars. The majority of the limbs seem to have come from the maple by the driveway, and the cars were parked between that tree and the house. The limbs had to have gone almost straight up. I don't see any other way for that to have worked. They were on the other side of the house, and no damage at all to windows, siding (those old-style fireproof shakes that break if you look at them wrong), or roof. There are two blown down areas in the hayfield, one that's roughly circular and not too large, and a bigger quarter-circle on the edge. If that's part of a circle, then about half would have been on the road and across, and the rest in my yard. I do think it had to have been a micro-burst. I do recall hearing a sustained blast of wind last night that made all the windows rattle. I suppose that was it.

Others were not so lucky. A house a few miles up the road had a big tree fall on it (from west to east, so just wind) and smash it. Lots of roof damage in town, and many trees fallen over, some onto houses and cars. I saw a policeman comforting a huge man in his 20s who was crying, so worse day for him than I. That all seems to be on the north side, just a mile or so south of us, across a couple fields. One tall, square old house (it looks 1850s) with a sheet-zinc roof had the sheet metal curled upward from the edge of the roof all around the house, so that wasn't ordinary wind.

Interesting, busy day.

It's so cold they've stopped running the trains. Apparently they fear that the rails have contracted to the point where the weight of the train will cause the fasteners to break.

And, the cold has stayed the postman from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

I don't recall either of those ever happening before.

Windchill overnight here got to -46°F, instead of the -50°F predicted.

Cold morning, and the birds are pecking away at the high-calorie cakes. You get one group that hang on the feeder pecking, and a second group who wait below to snatch up pieces that have fallen off. I need to see about getting pictures.

Air raid sirens are blowing, but the box seems to be to the south of here, just like yesterday. It looks absolutely deathish outside, with a yellow sky, and that weird, diffuse light.

It's difficult to see how anyone would expect children to prosper when they are saddled with deliberately hateful names. If that's really part of the 'traditional culture of Zambia' (and not, say, the translator entertaining himself at the gullible white lady's expense), then it's a pathological culture.

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Amritsar is going to have a museum about the Partition. I'd love to visit that, but probably never shall. That's one of the great upheavals that blighted the 20th century, yet for all that, it's remarkably difficult to find good English-language histories of it.

One of the things that has always stuck in my mind is a film clip, probably originally from a newsreel, that I saw as a child. There was a train, pulling out from a station, absolutely crusted over with people, hanging out the windows, clambering on top of the cars, terrified that they'd be left behind. People were falling between the train and platform, almost certainly to be crushed, but others immediately took their places to try to climb on to the cars.

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We had a tornado go by last night. I heard it, but didn't see anything, and it didn't touch down. NWS reports today:

03/26/17 0734 PM
FUNNEL CLOUD
LOCATION: HILLIARD, OH (FRANKLIN COUNTY)
SOURCE: TRAINED SPOTTER
REMARKS: TRAINED SPOTTER LOOKING WEST OF HILLIARD IDENTIFIED FUNNEL CLOUD

so that's uncomfortably close, but probably not the same one. Ours came by to the south (which Hilliard is to the south of us) but it was about 8:05, too late for it to have been the same funnel.

This happened, inconveniently enough, while the NWS radar was broken:

464
NOUS61 KILN 271349
FTMILN
Message Date: Mar 27 2017 15:14:29

THE KILN RADAR WILL REMAIN DOWN THROUGH AT LEAST MIDDAY TUESDAY 3/28. ADDITIONAL
PARTS ARE NEEDED FOR REPAIR.

I was asleep, and my phone started ringing and popped up the alert message ("NWS Tornado warning. A tornado is approaching you. Take shelter IMMEDIATELY") and of course went to the radar page to try and estimate if I thought it would hit us, only to find that it was down. So then I got dressed in haste, if not actual panic, and went outside and stood ten feet or so above ground, on a sheltered platform over a sunken walkway where I planned to go to ground if need be. I wanted to see it. A tornado bearing down on one isn't something everyone gets to see, and, of course, not everyone who gets to see it lives to relish the memory. I stood there about ten minutes, wondering if this was a dud, and then the rain increased instantly, from heavy to torrential, and then a few seconds later I heard a rushing sound to the south, like a waterfall. It was directional. It moved west to east, and was over and gone in a few seconds. The wind that had been from the west/southwest turned uncertain and stuttery, and blew for a bit from the southeast, before resuming its normal course. Almost immediately, the wind and rain lessened.

So, had that been a touchdown, and headed for me, I'd have had no time to go to ground. I would have had an excellent view, though. I was crying after it was over, not so much from fear as just from the emotional tension of having waited for ten minutes or so and then having had it actually happen.

It's generally safe to allow me to go outside without supervision, but with some things I really can be a dumbass.

You usually don't expect a tornado alert this early in the year, and certainly not at 3am.

Edit: National Weather Service sez: "At 248 AM EST, a confirmed tornado was located near Greenfield, moving east at 50 mph. [...] Radar shows tornado debris in the air." So, there's an exciting beginning to the month.