Stump No Mo'

Sept 17, 2012

More rain tonight, and at one point this evening I drove through it, and saw some vigorous lightning in the sky ahead. Cool air is said to be on its way, a first day of fall to remind us of what's ahead. I don't believe for a moment we'll have two mild winters in a row.

I’m not sure what this machine is called, but a village worker came by last week and used it to grind up the stump of the tree that used to be next to the street in front of my house.

And that was all. The work of the dread emerald ash borer was done.

Rain on Me

Rain! A low rumble of thunder at about 9:30 this evening, then something louder, then buckets of rain, completed with thunder and lightning, the likes of which we haven't seen since early June at least. Since then, it's slacked off, but they say more will come. We need a week's worth or more.

I wouldn't want to live in a desert, even the kind of irrigated deserts we have in the United States, because I'd miss the rain. The overture of gray clouds and distant thunder, the moment the first drops come -- and you either see it, or feel it, or both -- all the sounds the rainfall makes as it comes down hard, the immediate aftermath when the earth smells like rain and the rivulets are on their way (eventually) to the ocean.

When it does happen in the desert, I suppose rain's quite a thrill, but I'd rather have it more regularly. Occasionally people who hear about my Texas upbringing ask me about living in the desert, which I never have. I laugh at the idea and think of the enormous, violent spring storms in South Texas.

July Blows In

One question I asked myself this weekend was, "Haven't there been enough Spiderman movies?" That's because marketing for the latest such movie finally got my attention, for all of a few seconds. My answer is, yes, there have been. I can't take Spiderman seriously anyway, because of lasting first impressions. As far as I'm concerned, Spiderman is pretty much this (which has had a remarkable 23+ million views). Just as Batman is this. .

Today during the early afternoon, the sky darkened as if a thunderstorm were getting ready to hit. The wind picked up and it got even darker. A classic pre-thunderstorm sky. Except that it didn't start raining. Instead, the wind grew stronger. Ann was so worried about a "tornado," she asked me to look out the back door.

It was a wicked wind, all right. A couple of loose items were moving across the back yard and the all the trees within sight were shaking. But I assured her that this wasn't a tornado. I wasn't quite sure that some major tree part wouldn't fall, however.

It was over in about 20 minutes. No rain, just dark clouds and high wind. At about 4, I took Lilly to a bookstore a couple of miles south of where we live. By then, the clouds were mostly gone and the summer heat had returned. Along the way, we discovered that starting about half a mile away, every traffic light along our route was out of order -- making for some tricky eight-lane, four-way stops. Tree branches were scattered in the street in spots, and a handful of trees along the way had been split in half or knocked over, though none directly into the street. Parts of fences were down in places, too. We'd had a wind event.

Small potatoes compared to a real tornado, say, or the storms that pummeled the eastern U.S. on Friday. But enough to remind you that the atmosphere has the potential to knock you around when it feels like it.

Springtime Misc.

Recently I interviewed a fellow at Pure Industrial Real Estate Trust, a company whose portfolio is made up of industrial buildings in Canada (I'm using the commercial real estate definition of "industrial," mainly warehouses and distribution centers). The company's acronym is PIRET. I didn't think anything of it until he told me that its symbol on the Toronto Stock Exchange is AAR.UN.  You know, ARR like a PIRET says, he told me. I got a kick out of that.

I pull up Google News every day and see more stories about the election, mostly horse-race coverage. Do I want to read this? No. The election is six months from now. I know who's running. I might take a passing interest when the Republicans fill their VP position, but other than that, this mess can wait till October.

Lilly and I saw some cool cloud-to-cloud lightning this evening, off to the east, where it must have been raining. She hadn't been aware that lightning could do such a thing. I told her that it could; a meteorological teaching moment. Ball lightning didn't come up, though.

Ann did her state report recently: writing, making a cube with pictures and drawings on it, and doing an oral report with props. She picked Texas as her subject. I was able to supply her with a number of props: postcards of various Texas spots, a plastic bluebonnet, a bag of Fritos, a 21 X 34-inch Texas flag that I hang in my office. She said a classmate held it up while she did her report.

But there was more. She wanted some Texas songs. She'd read that "Texas Our Texas" was the state song, so she wanted that on tape to play the class. I didn't tell her how seldom I'd heard it growing up, or the fact that a lot of people — a lot of Texans — think "The Eyes of Texas" is the state song. She wanted two others, and asked me for suggestions, which is a recipe for me suggesting something unusual.

Which I did. I suggested "Galveston," which I hadn't heard in some years. Not really about Texas, though part of the theme, and she took to it, maybe because she'd read about the city in one of her books. It's an example of song that's melodically peppy yet lyrically poignant. Not nearly as many people know the follow-up song, "Dear John, From Galveston," in which the narrator is so upset after receiving the title letter that he takes out an entire nest of Germans or Red Chinese or Viet Cong single-handedly in a berserk fit. Not to worry, he only lost a couple of fingers and some hearing in one ear, and lived out his days quietly as a family man in Houston — he married another girl — working as an appliance, and later car, salesman.

The other song I suggested was "Across the Alley From the Alamo," which doesn't have all that much Texas in it either, except for the essential ingredient of the Alamo, added for euphonious purposes. We played all three songs on YouTube, taping them on one of the tape-using microcassette-recorders I quit using a few years ago in favor of a digital recorder, and she played them for her class. Lo-fi, but passable. If that doesn't count as fair use for educational purposes, I don't know what would. It isn't likely that any of the other kids had ever heard those songs, and maybe the teacher was unfamiliar with them too.

The President is a Sick Man

The President is a Sick Man (Matthew Algeo, 2011) is my kind of book. A crisply written, popular history describing a fairly well-known yet astonishing incident in presidential history, namely Grover Cleveland's cancer and its secret treatment. The book fleshes the story out with plenty of interesting context and detail. Such as the extreme dread cancer posed for those living in the 19th century. Who can doubt it? Cancer is dreadful enough now. Imagine when the diagnosis meant an almost certain lingering death, the kind that Ulysses Grant suffered.

Turns out that President Cleveland had a rarer, much less dangerous kind of tumor in his mouth than former President Grant. But it was dangerous enough. It seems that medical science was just advanced enough in 1893 for Cleveland's doctors to excise the growth without killing the president, but it must have been a near thing.

"It's worth mentioning just a few of the tools that the surgeons would not have had at their disposal, simply because they had not been devised or perfected," writes Alego. "They would have no suction apparatus for draining blood or other fluids from the operative site and no means of artificially resuscitating the patient should his heart stop. There would be no electronic monitors, no ventilators, no laryngoscopes, no endotracheal tubes. Surgery had come a long way since the Civil War -- but still had a long way to go."

And, of course, no blood transfusions or antibiotics. Fortunately for Cleveland, his doctors were fully persuaded of the benefits of sterile surgery, then a fairly new idea. As Algeo put it, "surgery pre-Lister was a gamble that most patients were bound to lose." So Cleveland got vastly better treatment than poor President Garfield did only 12 year earlier, when doctors examining his GSW couldn't be bothered to wash their hands, even though they must have heard of Joseph Lister's ideas by then.

The medical drama's only part of the story, however. Doubly astonishing is the fact that the July 1, 1893, operation -- performed on the yacht Oneida in Long Island Sound, of all places -- was kept a secret until 1917, long after Cleveland had died of another kind of cancer (probably) elsewhere in his body.

Well, not quite a secret. One of the best-known journalists of the day, E.J. Edwards of the Philadelphia Press, found out about the operation and published a major exposé. But in an age when newspapers -- being the cable news of their time -- weren't above completely making things up, Edwards was discredited. Mostly because the president and everyone else on the ship lied like dogs about what had happened. President Cleveland just went fishing for a few days, that's all. Oh, and he had a few teeth pulled on board. And he has a touch of rheumatism. E.J. Edwards is damnable liar! The book's subtitle tells the tale: "Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Glover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth."

Conspiracy buffs, take note. Edwards found out about the operation because one of the doctors involved blabbed about it to a colleague, who then told someone who knew Edwards, who then went to the doctor who'd first blabbed, who then confessed the whole thing to Edwards.

The president was able to pull off the deception for a number of reasons, but probably most of all because he made a remarkable recovery, and was able to wear a vulcanized rubber prosthetic jaw so lifelike that no one noticed it. (A fact I remember learning in high school U.S. history class from a fine teacher, Mrs. Collins. It amazed me then, and still does.)

Also, to be fair to President Cleveland, he was certain that maintaining secrecy was the right thing to do, since news of his cancer -- about the worst health problem he could have, and still be alive -- would have made the Panic of 1893 even worse, and it was bad enough as it was, idling countless workers and bringing much commerce to a halt. He made a political calculation, too. Being perceived as ill with cancer would have hurt his chances of persuading Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a cause dear to Cleveland, who was a gold-standard man. It's hard to imagine now the passion of the 1890s political quarrel between goldbugs and silverites, but some of it comes through in the book. It was the polarizing issue of the time, a collision of vested interests.

Cleveland got lucky, too, in that questions about his health were pushed off the front pages by a couple of large hurricanes that hit the United States in the late summer of 1893. One Category 2 storm hit New York City, and among other damage, destroyed an entire barrier island off Long Island. Another storm hit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, an estimated Category 3 that probably killed a few thousand people and made tens of thousands more homeless.

The story of the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893 is a fascinating aside in Algeo's book for a number of reasons, such as the fact that such a tremendous storm, on par with Katrina, has been completely forgotten (as has the 1900 storm that nearly destroyed Galveston or even the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938). It's also worth noting that neither the states nor the federal government provided much relief to the victims of the hurricane, partly because most of them were Gullah subsistence farmers, and partly because the Cleveland administration didn't believe disaster relief was within the purview of the federal government. Federal disaster relief is a 20th-century idea and, as far as I'm concerned, an important bit of progress since the Gilded Age, no matter what Ayn Rand-inspired jackasses tell us in our time.

The President is a Sick Man has a happy ending of sorts, in that in 1917 one of the surviving doctors, William Williams Keen, a dean of American medicine, wanted to tell the world what had happened. Cleveland's widow (the remarried Francis Cleveland Preston) agreed to it, so Dr. Keen published a long article about the operation in The Saturday Evening Post. Newspaperman E.J. Edwards was elderly at the time, but still alive, so he lived to see his vindication.

Bastrop State Park

I was unhappy to learn over Labor Day weekend that much of Bastrop State Park has burned to the ground. The park is in Bastrop County, Texas, not far southeast of Austin. It isn't a large park, a little shy of 6,000 acres, but it is distinctive for its loblolly pines -- a patch of piney-green East Texas dropped into Central Texas.

I've been there more recently, but my fondest memories of Bastrop are of two camping trips to the park with high school friends in the spring and summer of 1979. If I pause for a moment, I can picture the campsite, the fire we tended late into the night, the sloping ground nearby blanketed by pine needles and rich in pine cones -- which we spent time throwing at each other. I can hear the voices of my friends, but not quite what we said during our many and varied conversations (we had no electronic entertainment, and were better for it). I can almost smell the pines, but I'd need to visit a stand of loblollies for the memory to return with any olfactory gusto.

Over the weekend, wildfires encouraged by the windy leftover of Hurricane Lee ravaged the drought-dried Bastrop SP and, unfortunately, hundreds of homes in the vicinity. I understand that loblolly pines grow back quickly, but still. It's a damned shame.

I am Never Forget the Day I First Meet the Great Lobachevsky

Huge thunderstorm on the horizon during mid-morning today, the dark and ominous kind. Then it mostly bypassed us here in the northwestern suburbs and slapped other suburbs. But as the current headline at the Tribune Weather Center asserts, "Heat & humidity set the stage for storms this morning and a heavy rain event tonight." So we'll get another chance. Nothing like a heavy rain event to perk one up.

If I haven't learned something new, it's been a wasted day. Luckily, something new doesn't mean something insanely difficult or arcane, like the Krasovskii-Lasalle principle, even though that has its own Facebook page. Still, the thought of arcane mathematics naturally leads to this, which is a discussion of the analytic and algebraic topology of local Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds.

Instead, I learned that the Indian rupee has a relatively new symbol, adopted only last year. I didn't know that before, and don't have any fonts for it, so interested parties will have to look here. Not bad. Looks like a municipal rail symbol -- Mumbai Metro, maybe, which is now under construction. But it makes a decent currency symbol as well.

The Record Downpour

Late last week Mary Hikade of Grand Rapids, Mich., died. I only met her once, at the wedding of my nephew Sam and his wife Emily, but she seemed like a kind and gracious lady. She was Emily's mother, passing away at only 63. Her obituary in the Grand Rapids Press is here. RIP, Mrs. Hikade.

It's been dry for weeks around here, but as if they'd been scheduled in advance, big storms came Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, following roughly the same pattern. Late in the evening, far-off lightning. Then the low rumbling of thunder. After midnight, loud thunder and lightning and some rain, how much depending on the day. Saturday, it turned out, set a record rainfall for the Chicago area on a single day, as measured at O'Hare: 6.86 inches, with all of that falling in the wee hours.

The last time it rained nearly that much, in 2008, we got this. There wasn't that kind of accumulation this time in our immediate area, but some other parts of metro Chicago got too much of a soaking, I hear.

A Neptunian Year

The heat's still on here at my little corner of the Earth, but not as much as in Texas, sources tell me. We're lucky that we didn't lose power Monday morning when a fast-moving storm blew through, as many thousands in metro Chicago did. The storm woke me up around dawn, but didn't seem all that vicious. Guess that was a mistake on my part. My head's pretty foggy in those circumstances.

Wired UK reported that today marks 164.79 years since the discovery of Neptune by Johann Gottfried Galle and Heinrich Louis d'Arrest in 1846. Interesting because 164.79 Earth years is the orbital period of Neptune.

I'm not energetic enough to figure out the exact day when that maligned planet Pluto will mark one Plutoian year since Clyde Tombaugh discovered it, but I know it will be sometime around the year 2178 (1930 + 248). Maybe by then mankind will have that pesky "what's a planet?" question all sorted out.

Summer Storms & Space Alien Pollen

A terrific storm blew through our corner of the world between 7 and 8 o'clock yesterday evening, featuring high winds and the unnerving waaaaaa of the municipal tornado siren. I was sure we were going to lose power but we didn't. Yet reportedly some 239,000 households not too far away did.

The Herald News reported this weather-related oddity today: "The storms even damaged a pollen-catching machine atop Gottlieb Memorial Hospital in Melrose Park that provides the Midwest’s official daily allergy count, according to the hospital. A doctor had to manually reshape the blades of the pollen-catching machine to put it back in working order, just in time to measure Wednesday’s high mold count."

How Gottlieb Memorial received the honor of being the allergy-measuring nexus for the entire Midwest, and why a doctor on staff would know enough about the machine to "manually reshape" the blades, I couldn't say. Doesn't mean I can't speculate, though. Maybe he's an allergist and the machine's his pet project. Anyway, picture the scene: his lab coat whipping to and fro in the high winds, the doc climbs to the perch on the roof where the machine, blades banging uselessly, needs his attention. With minutes to spare, he wrestles with the blades and puts them in working order, just in time for the computers at the NWS to read the data.

Yes, that's very cinematic. Could be a subplot of some movie: a doc devoted to his allergy-counting duties, so much that it causes domestic friction with a wife or lover who's feeling neglected. As second-fiddle to a pollen-catching machine, who wouldn't feel that way? But the doc's dedication helps the hero save a busload of school children -- or the entire tri-state area -- or the USA -- or all of mankind, why not -- when he detects invading space alien pollen.

Fire & Wind

Besides the manmade items at the Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary detailed yesterday, there was also evidence of human intervention in the landscape. Such as acres of grassland, burned.

It's intentional burning, of course. It's well established that many ecosystems need a regular burn to stay healthy, and Spring Valley management burns different patches every year. This year we noticed that some of the land next to the Schaumburg Road parking lot had also been torched, right up to the asphalt.

There was also plenty of evidence of wind destruction. Maybe this tree cracked and fell during the blizzard in early February or because of the big blow last October.

But it's not really destruction. The fallen tree is merely on the way to becoming food for other creatures.

2,100 Miles of Hyperbole

I came across an online slideshow today called "A New American Tradition: Snowstorm Hyperbole." My own favorite cited headline is the "Storm for 2100 Miles." Still, it was hard not to be a little hyperbolic about the recent blizzard.

Look at it -- as geosynchronous satellite did two days ago. How blasé do you have to be to be unimpressed by such a kick-ass storm?

Of course, it wasn't enough to receive nearly two feet of snow at a single blast. Afterwards, the temps slid into the cellar. When I got up this morning, various sources put the outside temperature at -8 F. or so (zero at O'Hare, where the record-keeping is done). By afternoon, we'd gained about 20 degrees, which is cold enough by my reckoning.

School was canceled again today, partly due to the chill, but also (I think) because it was only supposed to be a half-day anyway, with parent-teacher meetings slated for the other half. They too have been canceled.

Such is February in these parts. Whatever hyperbole spawned by the storm is now part of the event. The snow has been (mostly) pushed out of the way, and that's that, until the air warms up a little and all these water ice crystals continue on their way to the Mississippi River. Hope that process is nice and slow.

Buried

We were in the bull's-eye of the Big Blow of '11. I suspect the NWS isn't calling it that; maybe just a "significant wintertime weather event." But blow it did. Constant heavy snow and strong winds roared through from before sunset yesterday until sometime this morning, when it devolved into light snow and light winds, leaving behind more snow than I've ever seen at our present house, and almost as much as in 1999, when we lived in west suburban Westmont.

News reports say 20.2 inches of snow this time, compared with 21.6 inches in 1999. The number-one recorded total for snowfall in Chicago remains January 26-27, 1967, at 23 inches. I wasn't around for that one, but for all I know that was the same weather event that made it snow heavily that one time when I lived in Denton, Texas, as a small child. "Heavily" in that context being two or three inches.

This is a view from our front door this morning. Only a few minutes earlier, someone had whizzed by on a snowmobile going down the street, which was mostly still buried.

We heard a little thunder snow at about 9 last night, but it wasn't much more than a few rumblings. I woke up at 3 in the morning for no particular reason and took the opportunity to peer out of the upstairs bathroom window. Everything looked exactly the same as six hours before -- that is, as if a giant feather pillow had been torn open and the contents filled the air, blown around by one of those industrial-sized fans. It wasn't until late morning today that the clouds cleared away and the sun, absent many days now, made an appearance.

The wind had left behind all kinds of odd-pattern drifts. The north and east sides of my house hardly had any snowy buildup, while the south -- and I assume west, but I haven't been over there -- caught drifts higher than my waist. This is what my back door looked like before I shoveled a path to it from the garage.

The problem was that my shovel was just outside the back door, which was impossible to open more than an inch or two. Or at least the shovel I usually use for snow. There was another one, a little shorter and a little less useful, in the garage. So I went outside by the front door and made my way along the northern and eastern edges of my house to the driveway, part of which was partly clear because of the odd winds. A three-foot drift ten feet wide and ten feet long blocked the garage door, but I was able to edge my way around the car we park outside -- its north- and east-facing sides provided a path, too -- and make it into the garage. Shorter shovel in hand, I cleared a shovel-sized path across the driveway drift, passed the backyard gate, dug to the deck and then reached to the back door to fetch the longer shovel.

That was as slow-going as it sounds. It was the longest time it's ever taken me simply to go from my front door to my garage to my back door. But at least I didn't get stuck somewhere in my car, such as on Lake Shore Drive.

The Frosty Tempest

Sure enough, at about 3 this afternoon, after a light snow last night and an entirely gray day with more light snow, the blizzard let loose: high winds, the air full of snow, low visibility. The girls were all home by just after 3, and Yuriko by 4:30.

Also during the afternoon, the school district sent out an e-mail canceling school tomorrow. Then it followed that up with a robo-call to make sure we got the message.

The blizzard blows even now. There might be two feet of snow on the ground before it's done. But we'll get through in some comfort, provided ComEd keeps the juice flowing. If not, we'll get through in some discomfort. And what if the electricity failed as I was posting to Blogger? Would I be cut off in mid--

No, it doesn't work that way, any more than someone would chisel Argghhh on the wall as he was dying.

Blizzard! (Soon)

Jolly good fun ahead for the first of February, says the National Weather Service. All caps as usual, copied from the 3:20 pm bulletin for Cook County (and a lot of other places): THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN CHICAGO HAS ISSUED A BLIZZARD WARNING... WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM CST TUESDAY TO 3 PM CST WEDNESDAY.

SNOW ACCUMULATIONS IN EXCESS OF A FOOT ARE EXPECTED OVER MUCH OF THE AREA FROM TUESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.... WHITE-OUT CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED AT TIMES TUESDAY NIGHT AS VERY HEAVY SNOW AND STRONG WINDS RESULT IN BLIZZARD CONDITIONS. SNOWFALL RATES OF AT LEAST 2 TO 3 INCHES PER HOUR ARE POSSIBLE...

Guess it's our turn, then. Heavy snow has been slapping most of the rest of the North, and some of the South, all winter, but not so much here. In fact we'd slipped into a late-February-like winter stasis lately, with snow cover but mostly sedate air.

The weekend might have been a better time for such a blow, as far as most people are concerned, but I'm glad it didn't hit yesterday, when Ann had her birthday party. This was the rush to open presents.

As usual at my daughters' birthday parties, I learned about corners of the toy industry I didn't know existed, and yesterday was no different. One of the girls brought Ann a Lalaloopsie™ doll, a creation of MGA Entertainment. Turns out they were the It doll of the 2010 Xmas season. I missed hearing about them completely, and that's to my youngest daughter's credit. She didn't ask me for one.

Back in November, blogger Julie Ryan Evans wrote, "There are reports that the doll that typically retails for $24.99 is already being sold on eBay for $150." A price that caters to the more-money-than-sense demographic, which is large if not overwhelming in size. Now that Christmas is over, of course, the stores are probably full of the things again.

Tangled String Theory

Today is probably the last warmish of the year. Nearly 70° F. in places, though overcast all day. A strong thunderstorm blew through at about 4 pm, inspiring the bonus sound effect of the city's tornado siren: waaaaaaaa. Turned out rare November tornadoes had been spotted in southeastern Wisconsin and not-too-far-away Illinois. Guess that's close enough to trigger the siren here.

Sunday was also November gray, but October or even September warm and not rainy, so I strung Christmas lights on one of the bushes in the front yard. I'm not going to light them until December 1 or later -- I'm funny that way -- but at least I won't have to deal with stringing them when it's freezing outside. One year the prospect of freezing fingers delayed stringing the lights quite a while. Until the next year, in fact.

Compared with some other houses on the block, I'm just making a token effort: two strings on one bush. Some years back, I don't remember when, I gave up on stringing lights any place reachable by ladder, which cuts down on the display. We used to have a small plastic snowman with a small light bulb in his thorax (the middle sphere) but I'm not sure where he is now. An interdimensional matter sink -- a small one -- probably opened up somewhere out in the garage, and that got him.

There's an Andy Rooney-like commentary possible in my experience with untangling the light strings. Or any string-like item I ever encounter: garden hose, electric extension cords, package string, thread, yarn, and so on. Namely, whenever I handle one, it instantly tangles itself in hard-to-fathom ways. Jumps at the chance to tangle. Tangles as if it weren't inanimate, but alive and with an urge to tangle as strong as a primate's urge for nooky.

Years ago I had the opportunity to visit a tall ship, an Indian Navy training vessel, of all things. I noticed to my amazement that none of the rigging or other lines were tangled. If it had been my ship, an impossible mess of tangled rope would have hung from the highest spar to the main deck.

The Great October Blow of 2010

More wind today. High gusts most of the day under a blue October sky. The top of my grill, a couple of plastic chairs and dozens of small branches were in motion in my back yard at various times this afternoon. Yuriko's office, some miles away in another suburb, lost power after 3 pm, and she came home early.

This storm was a record-breaking event, too, at least in terms of barometric pressure, something I wouldn't have thought of until I read about it. WGN weather guru Tom Skilling, who compared this storm to the great Armistice Day Storm of 1940 and the Edmund Fitzgerald Storm of 1975, wrote on the station's web site yesterday that "Chicago also broke its October low pressure this morning when the barometer at O'Hare International Airport fell to 28.99 inches at 7:12 a.m. The city's old October pressure record was 29.11 inches established on three occasions, most recently in 1959."

Somewhere, an atmospheric pressure nerd is excited. Somebody, somewhere has to be an air pressure nerd, for whom that 0.12-inch new record is like watching an Olympian shave a whopping 0.1 seconds off a world record. At least I hope so. Human variety should be a tent large enough to include all kinds of oddball passions.

Walkman of Yore

From beginning to end, today was the definition of blustery. After everyone else was asleep last night, I cracked open the window closest to my bed for a few minutes to hear the muffled roar. I got an earful. For all the bluster, no major tree limbs or sections of my back yard fence came down. Rain followed in the morning, then cold air pushed through. Majestic clouds raced across the sky in the early afternoon. Also, my empty garbage cans raced down the street.

I read today that the Walkman was dead, as in no longer produced. But that turned out to be in Japan only. Walkmen (-mans?) apparently are still being made in China for other markets, including the United States. Still, hearing about the putative end of the Walkman was like hearing about the death of a celebrity you hadn't realized was still alive.

I remember their introduction in this country. In the spring of 1980, it seemed that countless Walkmen, where there were none before, suddenly attached themselves to the ears of Vanderbilt students walking on campus. Young curmudgeon that I was, I considered them the height of frivolity (and I wasn't alone). I don't feel strongly one way or the other about personal stereos these days, but I never owned one. Still, I have a soft spot for cassette tapes, even now.

Inception

A two-week-plus dry spell came to an end on Friday night and Saturday morning, with all kinds of lightning and rumbling thunder and inches of rain. Our patch of the suburbs didn't fare too badly, but some Chicagoland spots got as much as eight inches, complete with blackouts and floods. Rain is pleasant to fall to sleep to, but not so pleasant when you wake up a few hours later to hear that it's still raining hard. That's the kind of thing that makes you (me) get out of bed and check to strategically located drains near the house.

Before the rains on Friday, it was hot. Even though we have an air conditioner, we ducked out of the heat by going to the movies. It was about 20 degrees cooler in there. How often did that ever actually happen, even in the days when air conditioning was a selling point for movie theaters?

At the same multiplex, the kids in our family saw Despicable Me and the adults saw Inception, since both were starting at roughly the same time. About the former, I have no opinion, except that no matter what the producers did, they couldn't outdo Toy Story 3, so I didn't want to bother with it. Lilly and Ann seemed entertained by it afterward, so that counts for something.

As for Inception, it was high-quality entertainment, a combination of science fiction and action, with some elements of a heist movie or maybe Mission Impossible. Within its own context the story more-or-less made sense, which isn't something a lot of action movies manage to do. As far as I could tell, there weren't any SUV-sized holes in the plot, once you accepted the Leonardo DiCaprio-can-slip into-your-dreams premise, which isn't a particularly new SF idea.

I did wonder about a few things, though. Much of the movie took place in dreamscapes of various complexities, which is reasonable enough, considering the story. But the continuity is too good within the dreamscapes -- the continuity is like in a movie, not in a dream, which are well known for their major lapses in continuity (mine tend to be that way, anyway). Some of the movie's effects are remarkable, a good use of CGI, and some have dream-like elements, but even at four dream floors down in "limbo," you get movie narrative.

I can overlook that. Since it's a mainstream movie, it has to be that way. If the director had tried to add dashes of Un Chien Andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon and Eraserhead to the goings-on, the thing would have flown off the rails. Inception's complicated enough as it is, and in a way I'm surprised it's attracted as large an audience as it has, since you have to pay attention if you want to follow the story. Then again, besides all the science fiction elements, it's got plenty of chases and explosions and gunplay to satisfy adolescent movie-goers.

Oddly enough, the point that bothered me most was the notion that a Japanese industrialist could make one casual call and get unspecified federal (or state, it isn't clear) authorities in the United States to quash an outstanding arrest warrant or maybe a murder indictment (it's isn't clear), on his say-so -- in the waking world, not in a dream state (unless all the movie is a dream, something no scriptwriter has ever thought of). Money talks, of course, but not quite like that. Who did he speak to, exactly, to achieve that outcome? I don't think Akio Toyoda's going to try that maneuver anytime soon.

No matter, Inception's a cracking good yarn.

Retreat From the Warehouse Store

Much excitement at a northwest suburban Chicago warehouse store on Friday afternoon at about 3. On the way to the store, the radio told us about a fast-moving thunderstorm headed toward our part of the world. Sure enough, dark clouds roiled off to the northwest, where most of our weather comes from. But they seemed fairly far away. Maybe some rain would cool things down, since it had been a clear, sticky, fairly hot day up until then.

I bought ice cream for Ann (Lilly was at a friend's house) at the break-even, keep-the-customer-here food court while her mother collected items in the large shopping cart. She ate the ice cream, I helped. Her mother joined us just as Ann finished, leaving the shopping cart on the other side of the checkout lines, because there was an item she wanted my comment on before she put it in the basket. "First, wait here," I said. "I need to look at the weather."

A warehouse store effectively isolates you from all kinds of weather. Except, I thought, tornadoes. A tornado might invite itself in and re-arrange the thousands of items every which way, many on top of hapless customers. But how much warning would you have? Would store management have any clue and sound some kind of alarm?

Tornadoes were on my mind because I overheard people in the storm talking about a tornado warning. Had they heard right? I went out the exit and eyed the vast expanse of ink-dark clouds now bearing down on us. They looked evil all right. I could imagine those clouds spawning destructive winds.

I returned by way of the entrance, where you have to show your membership card. A curly-headed college kid at his summer job was inspecting cards at the entrance. "Is there some kind of evacuation plan for this store?" I asked him. "You know, in case of a tornado?"

From the look on his face, I might has well have asked him, "What do we do if zombies attack?"

"Sure. We have a plan," he said.

"Do you have a basement to go to?"

"We don't have a basement. We'd go stand under the plastic pool floats over there."

"Whatever you say," I said, walking away, meaning, Whatever you say, wiseass. I don't want to be near you in a disaster.

When I got back to the food court, I said, "A bad storm is coming. Let's go home." By which I meant, let's check out and go home. A few seconds later, the lights in the warehouse store flickered, and then part of them went out. A few seconds after that, almost all of the lights went out, though some emergency illumination kicked in.

"Let's go home," I said. This time I meant, now, right away. Forget the merchandise. Yuriko readily agreed, so we went outside into a strong wind. The rain wasn't heavy, but it was going to be soon. In the 30 seconds or so it took us to get to the car, the rain did become heavy.

I decided it was better to be mobile than idle in a large parking lot, so we drove to a not-too-crowded side street nearby instead of one of the arterial roads. It was slow going, so thick was the water flapping on the windshield. Huge puddles gathered at the edge of the road and trees beside the road were dancing in the wind. Lightning flashed at a good pace, but not as vigorously as I've seen before.

Eventually, we had to turn on Roselle Road, a major street, passing by a small tree near the intersection of that road and Remington Road that had been split by the wind. The rain lessened, but traffic gridlocked. A fire truck and some cops roared by in full emergency mode. I figured that some cars had hit each other, but no: in the parking lot of a strip center near the vast intersection of Roselle Road and Hubbard Road was an SUV, among other vehicles. A lamppost was sprawled on top of it. It looked like the lamppost wasn't merely blown over, but detached from its mooring and then blown over.

So we were visited by bursts of fierce wind. A lot like the wicked storm of August 23, 2007, but in the end, not as intense (though some windows popped out of the Sears Tower). No tornadoes were spotted. A TV weatherman later explained that we'd had a wind storm, but not the kind that usually births tornadoes, so the loose talk of tornadoes I heard at the warehouse store was just that. Still, we didn't regret our skedaddle from there.

The storm cooled things down, but that wasn't the end of violent weather for the day. Late in the evening, another storm blew through, not nearly as windy, but featuring plenty of thunder and lightning. At about 10, as I relaxed with a book, the power went off. We pretty much decided that meant bedtime. At about 2 a.m. Saturday, the TV came on to announce that electricity was moving through the house again.