Where to begin?

• The Pixies are back together for a reunion tour, are not apparently tearing each other limb from limb, and are like a breath of fresh air.

• Morrissey has relased a new album (with a sadly ironic cover photograph of himself holding a Tommy gun), You Are the Quarry, of which the Guardian observes acidly, “And who could have guessed that Morrissey’s seventh solo album would open with a hip-hop breakbeat?”

• Prince has a new post-Jehovah’s-Witness-conversion album out called Musicology that is doing well on the charts (for Prince these days, peaking at #3 for 3 weeks is doing amazingly well) and sounds about as weak as instant coffee tastes. The lead single (and title single) is basically Prince rewriting the themes of Stevie Wonder’s 1977 hits “I Wish” and “Sir Duke” and rolling them together into one song, and not doing a very good job of it. (Nobody could touch those songs, though, so I guess you could say that Prince has cojones for trying.)

• Teena Marie has released an album (La Dona) that has debuted in the top ten. She has never had an album in the top ten. The last time she had an album anywhere near the top ten (let alone debut there) was 1984, the winter of “Lover Girl” and “Help Youngblood Get to the Freaky Party.” Unfortunately, the powers that be have decided that it would be cool to tart Teena up on the CD cover to look like Lil’ Kim. It doesn’t work.

• The Cure are touring the United States this summer for, what, the 4378th time, coinciding with the release of their 13th studio album.

Ref Grunt has closed its doors. Long live Refgrunt.com, although its posts appear to be dismayingly intermittent.

There are many cool things about Michigan weather, I’ve discovered. One is that it’s so unpredictable (within reason). Another is the months of snow, which I have to say I’ve missed. And another is that when severe weather happens, it reminds you that Mother Nature really is still in charge, not us puny humans.

That aspect is not always as evident in California, where, although weather is obviously a fact of life, in some regions it’s not as much a fact of life as a publicity brochure selling point. You don’t usually move to Los Angeles unless you have family or friends there, adore (or are obsessed with slaving for) the entertainment industry, have a well-paying job somewhere in that or another LA industry, or, a good enough reason for most people, you’re in dire need of constant great weather with no surprises.

Same goes with the Bay Area, with some slight alterations. Like: you don’t move to SF unless you know something about SF weather first. For example: Weather in SF is not like weather in LA. Not even remotely. Nor, actually, is it like weather across the bay in Marin or Alameda Counties. Not even remotely. Nor, actually, is weather on the west side of the city like weather on the east side. Not even remotely. You can be in the Sunset or the Richmond on any given day and be completely socked in with the most glorious, comforting fog (or, depending on your point of view, the most odious, hateful, depressing fog) and take a bus or drive over to the other end of the city—or even just a walk over to the Haight—and have sunlight galore. Or, you can be in one part of Nob Hill or Telegraph Hill, walk a few blocks, and have wind and chill where a few blocks back there had been warmth. That’s one of the great things about SF, but it can drive you crazy if you’re not prepared for it.

What you get in place of dramatic storms and blusters in California are earthquakes and fires. Which, in its own way, is somewhat scarier, because neither of these is subject to prediction. There are days when you live in certain parts of the state that you utter silent prayers before you get out of bed in the morning that a quake doesn’t hit or a fire doesn’t erupt.

Ambrosia, which is staffed by a bunch of avid, amiable fishing enthusiasts who would probably be much, much happier in Berkeley if it weren’t for the lack of walleye and lake trout, was all abuzz this afternoon about the near-tornado. “You could feel the hair raise on your arms and you could smell the copper in the air,” one of them marveled. The buzz was either about the tornado or the CD on the stereo, which made me feel like I was being cast back to a lazy afternoon in some hippie SF cafe (the cafe would not be in the Haight, where the Dead are now disdained as way too obvious and touristy and you’re more likely to hear Detroit techno or world music, but probably some lonely, underpopulated spot in the Outer Sunset, where the owner is struggling to keep the place open because of the high rent and there’s a bunch of anti-Bush and anti-imperialism flyers on the bulletin board and an aloof tabby cat is sunning herself on the bay window facing the sidewalk) listening to KFOG—because the CD was the Grateful Dead, of course, and, of course, one of the regulars came in and pounded on the counter and excitedly asked what the twenty-minute jam was on the CD. “That is some really long jam! Sounds like Europe ‘72, man! Is it ‘Dark Star’?” “No,” the counter guy replied. “It’s actually San Francisco ‘69, and it’s ‘Morning Dew.’” Somebody will probably write to correct me that the Dead never played “Morning Dew” in 1969.

I walked through the connector between the undergraduate and graduate libraries yesterday and today on my way to work. Late yesterday afternoon, an impressive storm was brewing that turned out to be the near-tornado of last night. This afternoon, a similar storm was brewing as I walked through. I stopped to look out the window at it, at the way it rolled and broiled across the sky, the way it made the birds scatter for cover, and got a couple of glares from passing students, as though I were somehow not supposed to stop in the middle of the connector to look out the window, but also got a little conversation out of a passing library worker, or maybe a person visiting from out of town—she was surprised when I told her about the storm last night and expressed the opinion that the one brewing right now looked pretty substantial as well. Five minutes later, I was walking with everyone else in the undergrad library to the basement after an announcement over the PA system that DPS had ordered everyone to take cover until further notice. We all herded down to the windowless basement—everyone in the building, evidently, amounting to about 55 or 60 of us—and waited out the tornado warning.

The students seemed more annoyed and inconvenienced by the enforced confinement than anyone else. The library workers and the visitors stood around and chatted. The students, many wearing shorts and flip-flops, sullenly stomped around the basement, looking aimless and unhappy, as though the weather were some sort of unfair adult imposition. Some of them eventually sat down and started reading or doing work. Others just continued wandering around the perimeter of the basement, as though it were a track.

One of my co-workers recalled a tornado that had hit Ann Arbor 15 or so years ago and downed power in parts of the city for 3 days. One of my SI cohorts came over and said hi and we had a brief and somewhat humorous conversation about the weather, during which it became clear that not only had I never had to “duck and cover” as a kid for any reason, but I still couldn’t keep straight the distinction between a tornado watch and a tornado warning even though Steve has reminded me of the distinction, oh, maybe 50 times. An undergrad wandered over and started chattering about his brother in San Diego and the hellish firestorms they had out there last October. Finally, and anticlimactically, the PA system came back on and the announcer said, with more than a note of tentativeness, “DPS has given the all-clear signal. You can now go back to ….. your various library locations.”

All in all, it was a combination of nervous energy and random conversation that would never have happened without the tornado warning and all of us being forced to spend a half hour in the basement of the library.

Acording to Atlas of Michigan (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1977), which places this paragraph above a path map of an apparently really nasty tornado that hit southeastern Michigan on 12 April 1965:

Tornadoes are usually spawned by an advance of a strong cold front into a mass of warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, the presence of dry air over the frontal zone of middle levels of the atmosphere, and high-speed winds aloft fostered by the jet stream. Such conditions, although they combine relatively infrequently in Michigan, have resulted in some devastating tornadoes in the state.

The atlas is useful for lots of things, though it’s obviously somewhat out of date (its color photograph of a grinning and youthful-looking William Milliken being the most obvious indication). Among its interesting factoids: the Washtenaw County area usually gets its first snowfall of an inch or over between November 22-29 or shortly thereafter, which pretty much jibes with our experience this past autumn.

Before Ann Arbor became Storm Central in the past 48 hours, birds were everywhere. One reader (and someone who knows her avians), Dorothea of the fantastic Caveat Lector, wrote to tell me that the bird I was mystfied about the other day was a yellow-shafted flicker, otherwise known as a Northern flicker, or by its Linnaean designation, Colaptes auratus.

Inevitably, according to North American Bird Folknames and Names (Foster City, CA: Bottlebrush Press, 1996), the flicker has something on the order of 100 other nicknames as well. I’ll just settle on “flicker” and leave it at that.

Some other interesting factoids about the flicker: It’s the only member of the woodpecker order to regularly feed on the ground, perferring ants and beetles (the flicker’s anti-acidic saliva neutralizes the acid defense of the ant). According to Birds of Michigan Field Guide (Cambridge, MN: Adventure Publications, 1999), the flicker “undulates deeply in flight while giving a loud ‘wacka-wacka’ call.” I like that: Wacka wacka! Birds of Washtenaw County, Michigan (University of Michigan Press, 1992), says, in a triumph of understatement, “The Northern flicker is a conspicuous bird.”

The other cool-looking bird I’ve seen recently has got to be a common grackle (Quiscalus quiscula). I say this because it resembles the European starling from a distance, it has an unmistakable glow to its head and neck plumage that sets it apart. The sources differ on the exact color of this glow. The USGS site I linked to above says the plumage is of a “purple and greenish iridescence.” One book said the plumage was blue. Another said black-blue. Who knows? Whatever the color is, it’s incredibly beautiful.

Okay, Yankees, when the sky turns as dark and ugly GREEN as it did at 2:30 this afternoon, that means you’ve got yourself a tornado somewhere VERY. CLOSE. BY. This means get in the cellar, fool, ‘fore you get sucked up like Helen Hunt’s daddy in that Twister movie.

But the sirens didn’t even sound today. Meanwhile, just a block away, the mayhem you see in the pictures above happened; one of the beautiful, tall and stately pine trees toppled over during the swirling green blowby. Fortunately, somebody with sense at the UM libraries herded everybody including Frank into the basement for awhile, so he was okay.

Now, I’m sorry to be such a Nervous Nellie. But my Okie heritage … well, it’s just hardwired in my genes.

I remember the aftermath of the tornado that hit Duncan 22-Feb-75, killing a woman. Some cousins were living in a trailer house temporarily next door to my great-aunt’s house. The twister hit and they barely escaped as the trailer whirled into the air … only to be beaten to a pulp by hail as they hightailed it for my great-aunt’s cellar. We saw them the next day; they looked like they had been beaten with two-by-fours.

Still, Michigan storms seem to be pretty dang benign by Okie standards, so I’m not diving into the hole yet. I’m actually greatly enjoying the show. For the last seven years in San Francisco, the most exciting weather feature was, well, nothing really. This is more like home.

And yes, the Beagle slept through this afternoon’s storm (and the one going on right now too). With the sky so dark and green, I strongly requested that he come downstairs with me, poised to hit the basement. He woke up briefly, gave me an extremely dirty look as if to say, ‘This ain’t no storm. Why, in Texas, it’d just be a lil’ ol’ rain shower, son! Chill out …’

Good advice.

[BTW: USAToday has more on ‘Going Green’]

The title of a paper given by MIT meterology professor and chaos theorist Edward Lorenz at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Washington DC on 29 December 1979:

Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?

From Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (1900):

The time’s come: there’s a terrific thunderstorm advancing upon us, a mighty storm is coming to freshen us up ….

And, last but certainly not least, the inimitable Dorothy Parker (from “Fair Weather” in Sunset Gun [1928]):

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

We had a ‘possible-tornado-producing’ storm last night with blowing sirens and one-inch hail and minor flooding in Ypsi and a house burned after a lightning strike. It was all higgledy-piggledy for awhile around midnight.

The native Californian was in denial about it all for at least a few minutes, lying in bed as the sirens blew before getting up, while the (somewhat) native Okie opened the window to get a better listen and then got into some shoes and grabbed flashlights and prepared to hit the basement.

We Okies don’t mess with tornadoes; when the sirens blow, that usually means bidness and bidness means getting into the cellar and tying the kids down with the rope so they don’t get all sucked out the door.

The frustrating thing about being up here with Yankees who don’t understand tornadoes is the absolute dearth of information. You know, call me weird, but once warning sirens blow I like to have as much information as possible … such as, what’s about to descend from on high, where’s it coming from and when, things like that. There’s a write-up in today’s AA News (Motto: ‘Absolutely Still the World’s Worst Website’), but, ya know, I kinda like to know where the tornado is BEFORE it blows me away, not reading about it 12 hours later.

I slam my ancestral state where I lived for 20 years often about its politics and general cluelessness, but on weather forecasting and information, it has no peer anywhere in the world. Even in that god-awful movie Twister, starring that actress that Frank likens to broken glass being scraped across a chalkboard, the only realistic parts were those starring Oklahoma’s TV weathermen, such as the legendary Gary England of KWTV 9, Oklahoma City.

Gary has been the Storm King of Oklahoma since God was a boy; he’s chased tornadoes and been the target of a few as well, including the May 1999 F-5 monster that ripped up the city. Now THERE’S weather information; channel 9 (and others) have equipment so sophisticated that it can tell you what city block the tornado will be at at what time. Heck, not even United Airlines can tell you when their planes will arrive with as much accuracy.

And so, last night with the sirens blowing and local radio playing the BBC and Dr. Laura as if cricket match scores in Pakistan and Fascist FunDumbMentalist ranting were more important than the wall cloud bearing down on a city of 110,000, I missed, for awhile, Oklahoma, I must admit.

As for the beagle, well, he’s a Texas beagle (loathe I am to admit it); he was born in a double-wide trailer house in Kemp, TX, and thunderstorms make him yawn. During the storm, I had to entice him with treats to get him to come downstairs in reasonable proximity to the basement in case things began to look dicey. Thunder, lightning, wind, hail, floods … these things don’t phase Bayley. But try to clip his nails … now, THAT’S scary.