Day: May 21, 2004

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…