EF5 Tornados Leave Hidden Victims

June 20, 1957. Fargo, North Dakota. An EF5 tornado.

I was there. I was 3 years old. I have just one memory of the event.

Our whole family, in the basement, sitting under the heaviest table we could find, waiting.

No fear. Because I didn't understand what was happening. All I knew was that mommy was making us all hide under the table.

I came through the day unscathed, physically and emotionally. My scathing came later.

My mother, however, did not come through unscathed. A North Dakota native, she'd seen tornadoes before, but never one this big. After the tornado dissipated she got out and saw the destruction. I believe it changed her, made her fearful of the weather, of losing everything, including her family. Because after that day I have multiple memories of being called inside to seek shelter in the southwest corner of the basement. All false alarms. In those days weather radar wasn't even on the radar, so we were sheltered whenever it got daytime dark and looked like tornado weather.

I was never in another tornado, but all that sheltering changed me.

I began having dreams where I would be trapped outside, quivering in terror, with a tornado coming. Or I'd be at the door trying to get into shelter but be paralyzed, unable to move my legs or unable to move at all. My mother's feelings of helplessness before the might of a storm had migrated wholesale into my little psyche.

Those dreams continued, not nightly but frequently, for decades. I'm sure the nuclear shelter mania of the early '60s helped fuel my own internal terrors, but the object of my terror never varied. Tornado.

Eventually, well into adulthood, the dreams became infrequent and finally stopped.

These days, when I see storm news, people with homes destroyed, families lost, those are not the victims I most empathize with. I think about the near-miss children who are too young to understand, whose parents realize how close they came to being wiped out, and who will become over-cautious and hammer their fears into the young, malleable minds of their kids. Kids who will grow up with fears they do not understand from events they don't remember. Who may, or may not, come to terms with those issues after enough time and maybe enough therapy.

Second-hand terrors, boogie men, impressed even by well-meaning parents, suck.

150 Years From Now, April 10, 2163

A hundred and fifty hears ago was the midpoint of the American Civil War. Nobody knew it at the time, but from my future perspective, looking back 150 years ago, it's easy to say, "Yup. Halfway through." You might, if you are into that sort of thing, check out the book, "April 10, 1863."

What will today be seen as halfway through when peered back at by historians from 2163? There doesn't seem to be a way for us to tell. Even looking into the future like this, there doesn't seem to be a way to then turn around and look back into the past. The half-way point for Kim Jung Un? Who? Some minor tyrant in a little country, from my new perspective that puts today exactly 150 years into the past. In 2163, who but a student of missile crises will remember our present international missile crisis? In 2013, who but a student of the Asian dynasties remembers that about 150 years ago King Cheoljong left no heir and Gojong became final king of the Joseon Dynasty which ended when the Korean Empire was terminated by Japan in 1910?

Not me, that's for sure. I had to look it all up on Wikipedia.

The Quiet after the Crash

There are storms rolling through Shreveport today. Lightning storms. And if there's one thing about lightning, it's thunder. It really takes me back...

A couple years ago thunder struck a 90-foot pine tree near my house during a storm like today's. It boiled a strip of bark right off the trunk, top to bottom. Sap bled out of it for a few weeks, then the whole tree turned brown and started to disintegrate.

I was in the kitchen when the lightning struck. I could see the tree from there, just outside the window. The crack of thunder was so loud I jumped and nearly soiled myself. (I was handling foods that leave stains. What did you think I meant?) After the ka-bang I wondered if I had gone deaf. I didn't hear anything. The rain had not yet begun, so there were no eave droplets to hear. To test my hearing I would have to make my own noise.

I said a few words aloud. Nope, not deaf. The silence was nothing more than the contrast between the loudest thing I'd ever heard and the end of the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

I've never known anybody who keeps cheese in his pocket.

That's what they were saying at work today.

My question is: How would you know? If the cheese is in his pocket you would only know about it if he chose to show you.

Oh, by the way, I DO keep cheese in my pocket. Sliced cheese. It's flat, so it's perfect for transporting in a pocket. And the warmth of your body heats the cheese so it's nice and tasty when you finally eat it. Some days before I make a sandwich I will stick a slice of cheese in each pants pocket. Five minutes later, they're good and warm.

Those damn prime numbers.

This upsets me.

The first 22 primes:
2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 31 37
41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71 73 79

Sums of the first primes.
They seem to follow a rule that
they alternate between a sum that
is a prime number, or a sum that
is one less than a prime number.

Then it all falls apart at 19.

PRIME 2+3= 5
PRIME-1 2+3+5= 10= 11-1
PRIME 2+3+5+7= 17
PRIME-1 2+3+5+7+11= 28= 29-1
PRIME 2+3+5+7+11+13= 41
PRIME-1 2+3+5+7+11+13+17= 58= 59-1
7 X 11 2+3+5+7+11+13+17+19= 77

Love will keep us together.

This month Vanda celebrates the 35th anniversary of the Captain and Tennille spending a full month at number one on the Billboard charts. Having once seen them who can forget the sappy performances, Captain at piano and Tennille vamping out the lyrics in the most M.O.R. way possible. Vanda remembers seeing the C & T on stupid TV variety hours. Was 1975 when the Sonny and Cher show was on? Who can remember so long ago? Where's Google when you need him?

Made Up News Viraling Out Of Control

You can't blog what you can't articulate.
If Thomas Jefferson had been born with horns, America would be an entirely different country.
They found the remains of Amelia Earhart in Kiribati. Confirmed with DNA analysis against her preserved appendix. Dr. Lorenzo Rosselo confirms that there is a 99.7% chance that these are the actual bones of the aviatrix, few though they be, having been scattered by the scavenging crabs of Nikumaroro.

Makes me sneeze. Makes me gag. Fills my nose up with snotty ooze.

It's yellow-green pollen week once again in the Arklatex. Thousands of dozens of sufferers just like me are fighting with mucosa illuminated by invading pollen, particularly the yellow-green stuff "they" claim comes from the conifers.
Years ago I used to spend the first part of April in the desert to avoid this very thing. I fear this year 'tis Benadryl again.

Andromeda Galaxy to Strike Earth

If you've been watching the Discover Channel, and who hasn't?, you know as well as I do that the end of the world will be when the next 6-mile asteroid slams into it.

So science needs to get off its big fat duff and start pushing asteroids away. Long live man!, right?

But wait! You can push asteroids out of our path until doomsday, but what's the point? The Andromeda Galaxy (M13 to anyone with a Celestron) is on a collision course. The astronomers KNOW this; It WILL hit the Milky Way; We live in the Milky Way; We will be extinctified!

So science needs to get off its big fat duff and start pushing GALAXIES away. If i may metaphor biologically... Picking off an occasional biting ant doesn't do you a bit of good if when you're done an elephant sits on your head.

LW Pestering me about Twitter

She stands there asking, Do you Twitter? Do you Facebook?
I answer no, but I blog.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I just got a business communication filled with u for you. What's next? Resumes? It's high time to take our revenge on those whose instant messagings have wrought depredations on our lovely languages. Everything is shortened, homonymophied, abbreviated, uncapitalized. enuf alredy! if u wont spel rite i wnt ethr. Let letters become words. Let elisions become enlongenations. Let the phonetic substitutions begin!

Oscar Mike Golf this is fun! Uniform can't stop once Uniform get started. Where's my India phone? I've got to India Mike my Baker Foxtrot Foxtrot right away!

Arguing about Rolling Rs

I'm sitting here with Peter and we are arguing about rolling Rs. I say they do. He says they don't. I gave him the practice sentence: Rapido corren los carros del ferrocarril. Naturally applying all the appropriate rolls for the r-r rs.
He still doubts. Foolish boy.

From Speech Therapy--Or What?

I remember a sentence from my youth in the 60s. I had thought it was something my parents said for fun, like "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood." Now I'm not so sure. It may be something I had to say in speech therapy to correct my lisp, though my lisp was for R not for S. Here it is:

Theopold Theopolis thrust three thousand thorny thistles through the thick of his thumb.

It must be important. Why would I remember it this long if it wasn't. But I don't find any references to it on the Web. Is it possible that this piece of our culture has avoided rampant webification? Or maybe it was just something my parents made up. Is it possible?

A Perfect Commute

It's not often you come across a perfect commute. There's always a tailgater/lanechanger/slowpoke driving stupid or road conditions less than ideal, be it rain, be it snow, be they oil drops dripping from a supercharged Chevy Nova. Not today. Today the commute was perfect in its every moment. Despite the morning chill and dew, my windows were not severely fogged. The line to get onto the freeway was only one car long - mine. The merge was easy because the traffic was spaced out, and I'm not using slang. All the way into town traffic was swimming. It slowed a little on the narrow bridge, but the slowdown didn't result in madman lane changes. Very uncharacteristic. The merge back onto the byways downtown was wide open. The last two blocks to the parking lot I couldn't see another car, and not because I was blinded; because the roads were bereft of automobile traffic (There WERE six pedestrians, but they weren't walking in the traffic lanes.) And (This part is not unusual, because I park in the most inconveniently located lot) I had no trouble finding a parking space.

If I'd been playing Strauss waltzes on the car stereo instead of listening to Bob and Dave cut up about The Balloon Boy it would all have seemed like a dreamy dance.

"... all this stuff will be moved. You would be right about that..."

Fractured cell phone conversations. I walk half a mile through the downtown area every morning and afternoon, bracketing my workday with a constitutional. Almost every day there is at least one person declaiming loudly into a cell phone or earpiece/mic. (Sure beats the old days when there'd be at least one person declaiming loudly into the air or at other pedestrians [ME!].) Sometimes the cell conversations are happening in a language I don't understand. I recognize it as a dialect of English, but the flow of words and their pronunciation don't carry meaning for me. Those are the days I ask myself just exactly how out of touch with common parlance I am becoming. Today wasn't one of those days. I understood every word.

Headlines with no text under them is just bad blogging

Flat stomach, White teeth, Good hair. And a nice personality.

Not very likely. The gall bladder attacks make my stomach swell out like a big beachball made of swinehide. The GERD has de-enameled my teeth, and no amount of soaking or scrubbing is going to make my yellow-brown dentin as bright white as a TV star's. And the male pattern baldness that runs rampant in my family pretty much prevents good hair days. Especially with that big mangy patch on the left side above the ear.

Good thing I've got the physique of a Devil's Island escapee after seven years of degenerative muscle disease and the personality of your average Schizoid or I'd have nothing going for me.

What happens if you drink a quart of concrete?

Hard soles save a lot of elevator rides.

I ride the elevator many times every day. When I hear approaching footsteps that seem to be rushing or accelerating, I presume they are hurrying to catch the elevator, so pump the open-door button until they get there. If they happened to be wearing soft-soled shoes, I'd never hear them coming. Think of the energy savings this ride-sharing is achieving. I've reduced my carbon signature so much that now I spend my weekends roaming the state forests with my chain saw, lopping branches and felling things willy-nilly.
Does that make me a bad person?

Blogger Is Too Spam Smart

A moment ago I tried to quote a spam-message in my blog in order to make witty MST3K-style commentary about it.

Blogger blocked the posting.

Now, I appreciate anti-spam policies as much as the next recipient of endless spam come-ons. But when the policies start preventing you from even talking about the spam, well, that strikes me as taking it one iteration too far.

But what the heck, Blogger is a free service and for my money they're entitled to set up any rules and filters they want.

Come to think of it, this gives me an easy way to find out whether any particular email is spam. Just automatically forward all my mail to my blog. Any mail that doesn't show up was a spam message Google already knows about. Only ---- how many times can I post known spam messages before Blogger concludes I, myself, am a spammer? I know now that it is more than one. But is it less than two? I don't even dare to find out.

A Math Puzzle

Given there is a word T that completes all these equations:
3x4=T
4x5=T
8+4=T
T-8=T
then .... Where are you?

Answer:
Princeton, Louisiana, where the value that is T is pronounced twe'h or twe'eh, twe'h being the lesser and twe'eh being the greater. They both sound the same to my old Yankee ears, except twe'eh has a hint of nasality at the apostrophe which you don't hear in "twe'h." A nod and a wink, no doubt, to the missing N.

At least that's the way it sounds to me, and I am known for my twe'eh-twe'eh hearing. This morning my breakfast cost me "si' dollah an' twe'h cen." I still wouldn't know for sure how much that was, except I got thirteen dollars and eighty-eight cents back from the twe'eh I paid with.

Corollary:
Any culture where one number is a homonym of another number deserves its low standardized test scores.